William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist. Archibald Henry Grimké
their benevolence for the negro, but who made not the slightest exertion afterward to carry out their good wishes. "They will pen a paragraph, perhaps an article, or so—and then—the subject is exhausted!" It was not so with his young friend, the Bennington editor. He saw that "argument and useful exertion on the subject of African emancipation can never be exhausted until the system of slavery itself be totally annihilated." He was faithful among the faithless found by Lundy. To reassure his doubting leader, Garrison took upon himself publicly a vow of perpetual consecration to the slave. "Before God and our country," he declares, "we give our pledge that the liberation of the enslaved Africans shall always be uppermost in our pursuits. The people of New England are interested in this matter, and they must be aroused from their lethargy as by a trumpet-call. They shall not quietly slumber while we have the management of a press, or strength to hold a pen." The question of slavery had at length obtained the ascendency over all other questions in his regard. And when Lundy perceived this he set out from Baltimore to Bennington to invite Garrison to join hands with him in his emancipation movement at Baltimore. He performed the long journey on foot, with staff in hand in true apostolic fashion. The two men of God met among the mountains of Vermont, and when the elder returned from the heights the younger had resolved to follow him to the vales where men needed his help, the utmost which he could give them. He agreed to join his friend in Baltimore and there edit with him his little paper with the grand name (The Genius of Universal Emancipation), devoted to preaching the gospel of the gradual abolishment of American slavery. Garrison was to take the position of managing editor, and Lundy to look after the subscription list. The younger to be resident, the elder itinerant partner in the publication of the paper. Garrison closed his relations with the Journal of the Times, March 27, 1829, and delivered his valedictory to its readers. This valedictory strikes with stern hammer-stroke the subject of his thoughts. "Hereafter," it reads, "the editorial charge of this paper will devolve on another person. I am invited to occupy a broader field, and to engage in a higher enterprise; that field embraces the whole country—that enterprise is in behalf of the slave population."
"To my apprehension, the subject of slavery involves interests of greater moment to our welfare as a republic, and demands a more prudent and minute investigation than any other which has come before the American people since the Revolutionary struggle—than all others which now occupy their attention. No body of men on the face of the earth deserve their charities, and prayers, and united assistance so much as the slaves of this country; and yet they are almost entirely neglected. It is true many a cheek burns with shame in view of our national inconsistency, and many a heart bleeds for the miserable African. It is true examples of disinterested benevolence and individual sacrifices are numerous, particularly in the Southern States; but no systematic, vigorous, and successful measures have been made to overthrow this fabric of oppression. I trust in God that I may be the humble instrument of breaking at least one chain, and restoring one captive to liberty; it will amply repay a life of severe toil." The causes of temperance and peace came in also for an earnest parting word, but they had clearly declined to a place of secondary importance in the writer's regard. To be more exact, they had not really declined, but the slavery question had risen in his mind above both. They were great questions, but it was the question—had become his cause.
Lundy, after his visit to Garrison at Bennington, started on a trip to Hayti with twelve emancipated slaves, whom he had undertaken to colonize there. Garrison awaited in Boston the return of his partner to Baltimore. The former, meanwhile, was out of employment, and sorely in need of money. Never had he been favored with a surplusage of the root of all evil. He was deficient in the money-getting and money-saving instinct. Such was plainly not his vocation, and so it happened that wherever he turned, he and poverty walked arm in arm, and the interrogatory, "wherewithal shall I be fed and clothed on the morrow?" was never satisfactorily answered until the morrow arrived. This led him at times into no little embarrassment and difficulty. But since he was always willing to work at the case, and to send his "pride on a pilgrimage to Mecca," the embarrassment was not protracted, nor did the difficulty prove insuperable.
The Congregational societies of Boston invited him in June to deliver before them a Fourth of July address in the interest of the Colonization Society. The exercises took place in Park Street Church. Ten days before this event he was called upon to pay a bill of four dollars for failure to appear at the May muster. Refusing to do so, he was thereupon summoned to come into the Police Court on the glorious Fourth to show cause why he ought not to pay the amercement. He was in a quandary. He did not owe the money, but as he could not be in two places at the same time, and, inasmuch as he wanted very much to deliver his address before the Congregational Societies, and did not at all long to make the acquaintance of his honor, the Police Court Judge, he determined to pay the fine. But, alack and alas! he had "not a farthing" with which to discharge him from his embarrassment. Fortunately, if he wanted money he did not want friends. And one of these, Jacob Horton, of Newburyport, who had married his "old friend and playmate, Harriet Farnham," came to his rescue with the requisite amount.
On the day and place appointed Garrison appeared before the Congregational Societies with an address, to the like of which, it is safe to say, they had never before listened. It was the Fourth of July, but the orator was in no holiday humor. There was not, in a single sentence of the oration the slightest endeavor to be playful with his audience. It was rather an eruption of human suffering, and of the humanity of one man to man. What the Boston clergy saw that afternoon, in the pulpit of Park Street Church, was the vision of a soul on fire. Garrison burned and blazed as the sun that July afternoon burned and blazed in the city's streets. None without escaped the scorching rays of the latter, none within was able to shun the fervid heat of the former. Those of my readers who have watched the effects of the summer's sun on a track of sandy land and have noted how, about midday, the heat seems to rise in sparkling particles and exhalations out of the hot, surcharged surface, can form some notion of the moral fervor and passion of this Fourth of July address, delivered more than sixty years ago, in Boston. Through all the pores of it, over all the length and breadth of it, there went up bright, burning particles from the sunlit sympathy and humanity of the young reformer.
In beginning, he animadverted, among other things, on the spread of intemperance, of political corruption, on the profligacy of the press, and, amid them all, the self-complacency and boastfulness of the national spirit, as if it bore a charmed life.
"But," he continued, "there is another evil which, if we had to contend against nothing else, should make us quake for the issue. It is a gangrene preying upon our vitals—an earthquake rumbling under our feet—a mine accumulating material for a national catastrophe. It should make this a day of fasting and prayer, not of boisterous merriment and idle pageantry—a day of great lamentation, not of congratulatory joy. It should spike every cannon, and haul down every banner. Our garb should be sack-cloth—our heads bowed in the dust—our supplications for the pardon and assistance of Heaven.
"Sirs, I am not come to tell you that slavery is a curse, debasing in its effects, cruel in its operations, fatal in its continuance. The day and the occasion require no such revelation. I do not claim the discovery as my own, that 'all men are born equal,' and that among their inalienable rights are 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' Were I addressing any other than a free and Christian assembly, the enforcement of this truth might be pertinent. Neither do I intend to analyze the horrors of slavery for your inspection, nor to freeze your blood with authentic recitals of savage cruelty. Nor will time allow me to explore even a furlong of that immense wilderness of suffering which remains unsubdued in our land. I take it for granted that the existence of these evils is acknowledged, if not rightly understood. My object is to define and enforce our duty, as Christians and philanthropists."
This was, by way of exordium, the powerful skirmish line of the address. Assuming the existence of the evil, he advanced boldly to his theme, viz., the duty of abolishing it. To this end he laid down four propositions, as a skillful general plants his cannon on the heights overlooking and commanding his enemies' works. The first, broadly stated, asserted the kinship of the slave to the free population of the republic. They were men; they were natives of the country; they were in dire need. They were ignorant, degraded, morally and socially. They were the heathen at home, whose claims far outranked those in foreign lands; they were higher than those of the "Turks or Chinese, for they have