William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist. Archibald Henry Grimké
and endurance the labors of this wonderful man. He belongs in the category of great explorers, only the irresistible passion and purpose, which pushed him forward, had humanity, not geography, as their goal. Where, in the lives of either Stanley or Livingstone do we find a record of more astonishing activity and achievement than what is contained in these sentences, written by Garrison of Lundy, in the winter of 1828? "Within a few months he has traveled about twenty-four hundred miles, of which upwards of nineteen hundred were performed on foot! during which time he has held nearly fifty public meetings. Rivers and mountains vanish in his path; midnight finds him wending his solitary way over an unfrequented road; the sun is anticipated in his rising. Never was moral sublimity of character better illustrated." Such was the marvelous man, whose visit to Boston, in the month of March, of the year 1828, dates the beginning of a new epoch in the history of America. The event of that year was not the "Bill of Abominations," great as was the national excitement which it produced; nor was it yet the then impending political struggle between Jackson and Adams, but the unnoticed meeting of Lundy and Garrison. Great historic movements are born not in the whirlwinds, the earthquakes, and the pomps of human splendor and power, but in the agonies and enthusiasms of grand, heroic spirits. Up to this time Garrison had had, as the religious revivalist would say, no "realizing sense" of the enormity of slave-holding. Occasionally an utterance had dropped from his pen which indicated that his heart was right on the subject, but which evinced no more than the ordinary opposition to its existence, nor any profound convictions as to his own or the nation's duty in regard to its extinction. His first reference to the question appeared in connection with a notice made by him in the Free Press of a spirited poem, entitled "Africa," in which the authoress sings of:
"The wild and mingling groans of writhing millions,
Calling for vengeance on my guilty land."
He commended the verses "to all those who wish to cherish female genius, and whose best feelings are enlisted in the cause of the poor oppressed sons of Africa." He was evidently impressed, but the impression belonged to the ordinary, transitory sort. His next recorded utterance on the subject was also in the Free Press. It was made in relation with some just and admirable strictures on the regulation Fourth of July oration, with its "ceaseless apostrophes to liberty, and fierce denunciations of tyranny." Such a tone was false and mischievous—the occasion was for other and graver matter. "There is one theme," he declares, "which should be dwelt upon, till our whole country is free from the curse—it is slavery." The emphasis and energy of the rebuke and exhortation lifts this second allusion to slavery, quite outside of merely ordinary occurrences. It was not an ordinary personal occurrence for it served to reveal in its lightning-like flash the glow and glare of a conscience taking fire. The fire slumbered until a few weeks before Lundy entered Boston, when there were again the glow and glare of a moral sense in the first stages of ignition on the enormity of slave institutions. The act of South Carolina in making it illegal to teach a colored person to read and write struck this spark from his pen: "There is something unspeakably pitiable and alarming," he writes in the Philanthropist, "in the state of that society where it is deemed necessary, for self-preservation, to seal up the mind and debase the intellect of man to brutal incapacity. … Truly the alternatives of oppression are terrible. But this state of things cannot always last, nor ignorance alone shield us from destruction." His interest in the question was clearly growing. But it was still in the gristle of sentiment waiting to be transmuted into the bone and muscle of a definite and determined purpose, when first he met Lundy. This meeting of the two men, was to Garrison what the fourth call of God was to Samuel, the Hebrew lad, who afterward became a prophet. As the three previous calls of God and the conversations with Eli had prepared the Jewish boy to receive and understand the next summons of Jehovah, so had Garrison's former experience and education made him ready for the divine message when uttered in his ears by Lundy. All the sense of truth and the passion for righteousness of the young man replied to the voice, "Here am I." The hardening process of growth became immediately manifest in him. Whereas before there was sentimental opposition to slavery, there began then an opposition, active and practical. When Lundy convened many of the ministers of the city to expose to them the barbarism of slavery, Garrison sat in the room, and as Lundy himself records, "expressed his approbation of my doctrines." The young reformer must needs stand up and make public profession of his new faith and of his agreement with the anti-slavery principles of the older. But it was altogether different with the assembled ministers. Lundy, as was his wont on such occasions, desired and urged the formation of an anti-slavery society, but these sons of Eli of that generation were not willing to offend their slave-holding brethren in the South. Eyes they had, but they refused to see; ears, which they stopped to the cry of the slave breaking in anguish and appeal from the lips of this modern man of God. Garrison, eleven years later, after the lips, which were eloquent then with their great sorrow, were speechless in the grave, told the story of that ministers' meeting. And here is the story:
"He (Lundy) might as well have urged the stones in the streets to cry out in behalf of the perishing captives. Oh, the moral cowardice, the chilling apathy, the criminal unbelief, the cruel skepticism, that were revealed on that memorable occasion! My soul was on fire then, as it is now, in view of such a development. Every soul in the room was heartily opposed to slavery, but, it would terribly alarm and enrage the South to know that an anti-slavery society existed in Boston. But it would do harm rather than good openly to agitate the subject. But perhaps a select committee might be formed, to be called by some name that would neither give offence, nor excite suspicion as to its real design! One or two only were for bold and decisive action; but as they had neither station nor influence, and did not rank among the wise and prudent, their opinion did not weigh very heavily, and the project was finally abandoned. Poor Lundy! that meeting was a damper to his feelings." There is no doubt that Garrison was one of the very few present, who "were for bold and decisive action" against the iniquity. The grief and disappointment of his brave friend touched his heart with a brother's affection and pity. The worldly wisdom and lukewarmness of the clergy kindled a righteous indignation within his freedom-loving soul. This was his first bitter lesson from the clergy. There were, alas, many and bitterer experiences to follow, but of them he little recked at the time. As this nineteenth-century prophet mused upon the horrible thing the fires of a life purpose burned within him. And oftener thenceforth we catch glimpses of the glow and glare of a soul bursting into flame. The editorials in the Philanthropist, which swiftly followed Lundy's visit, began to throw off more heat as the revolving wheels of an electrical machine throw off sparks. The evil that there was in the world, under which, wherever he turned, he saw his brother man staggering and bleeding, was no longer what it had been, a vague and shadowy apparition, but rather a terrible and tremendous reality against which he must go forth to fight the fight of a lifetime. And so he girded him with his life purpose and flung his moral earnestness against the triple-headed curse of intemperance, slavery, and war. A mighty human love had begun to flow inward and over him. And as the tide steadily rose it swallowed and drowned all the egoism of self and race in the altruism of an all-embracing humanity. When an apprentice in the office of the Newburyport Herald, and writing on the subject of South American affairs he grew hot over the wrongs suffered by American vessels at Valparaiso and Lima. He was for finishing "with cannon what cannot be done in a conciliatory and equitable manner, where justice demands such proceedings." This was at seventeen when he was a boy with the thoughts of a boy. Six years later he is a man who has looked upon the sorrows of men. His old boy-world is far behind him, and the ever-present sufferings of his kind are in front of him. War now is no longer glorious, for it adds immeasurably to the sum of human misery. War ought to be abolished with intemperance and slavery. And this duty he began to utter in the ears of his country. "The brightest traits in the American character will derive their luster, not from the laurels picked from the field of blood, not from the magnitude of our navy and the success of our arms," he proclaimed, "but from our exertions to banish war from the earth, to stay the ravages of intemperance among all that is beautiful and fair, to unfetter those who have been enthralled by chains, which we have forged, and to spread the light of knowledge and religious liberty, wherever darkness and superstition reign. … The struggle is full of sublimity, the conquest embraces the world." Lundy himself did not fully appreciate the immense gain, which his cause had made in the conversion of Garrison into an active friend of the slave. Not at once certainly. Later he knew. The discovery of a kindred spirit in