William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist. Archibald Henry Grimké
broadcast a true account of his trial, showing how the liberty of the press had been violated in the case. He did not doubt that it would astonish Europe if it were known there "that an American citizen lies incarcerated in prison, for having denounced slavery and its abettors in his own country." The fact created no little astonishment in America. Slavery became distinctly connected for the first time with abridgments of the freedom of the press, and the right of free speech. And the cause of the slave became involved with the Constitutional liberties of the republic. In punishing Garrison, the Abolitionist, the rights of Garrison the white freeman were trampled on. And white freemen in the North, who cared nothing for Abolitionism, but a great deal for their right to speak and write freely, resented the outrage. This fact was the most important consequence, which flowed from the trial and imprisonment of the young editor of The Genius of Universal Emancipation. "As the news of my imprisonment became extensively known," he wrote, "and the merits of the case understood, not a mail rolled into the city but it brought me consolatary letters from individuals hitherto unknown to me, and periodicals of all kinds from every section of the Union (not even excepting the South), all uniting to give me a triumphant acquittal—all severely reprehending the conduct of Mr. Todd—and all regarding my trial as a mockery of justice." This unexpected result was one of those accidents of history, which "have laws as fixed as planets have."
The prosecution and imprisonment of Garrison was without doubt designed to terrorize him into silence on the subject of slavery. But his persecutors had reckoned without a knowledge of their victim. Garrison had the martyr's temperament and invincibility of purpose. His earnestness burned the more intensely with the growth of opposition and peril. Within "gloomy walls close pent," he warbled gay as a bird of a freedom which tyrants could not touch, nor bolts confine:
"No chains can bind it, and no cell enclose,
Swifter than light, it flies from pole to pole,
And in a flash from earth to heaven it goes!"
or with deep, stern gladness sang he to "The Guiltless Prisoner" how:
"A martyr's crown is richer than a king's!
Think it an honor with thy Lord to bleed,
And glory 'midst intensest sufferings;
Though beat—imprisoned—put to open shame
Time shall embalm and magnify thy name."
"Is it supposed by Judge Brice," the guiltless prisoner wrote from his cell, "that his frowns can intimidate me, or his sentence stifle my voice on the subject of African oppression? He does not know me. So long as a good Providence gives me strength and intellect, I will not cease to declare that the existence of slavery in this country is a foul reproach to the American name; nor will I hesitate to proclaim the guilt of kidnappers, slave abettors, or slaveowners, wheresoever they may reside, or however high they may be exalted. I am only in the alphabet of my task; time shall perfect a useful work. It is my shame that I have done so little for the people of color; yea, before God, I feel humbled that my feelings are so cold, and my language so weak. A few white victims must be sacrificed to open the eyes of this nation, and to show the tyranny of our laws. I expect and am willing to be persecuted, imprisoned, and bound for advocating African rights; and I should deserve to be a slave myself if I shrunk from that duty or danger." The story of the trial of William Lloyd Garrison, from which the above brave words are taken, fell into the hands of that noble man and munificent merchant, Arthur Tappan, of New York. From the reading of it he rose "with that deep feeling of abhorrence of slavery and its abettors which every one must feel who is capable of appreciating the blessings of liberty," and thereupon notified Lundy to draw upon him for one hundred dollars if that amount would give the young editor his liberty. The fine and costs of court were accordingly paid and just forty-nine days after entering Baltimore jail a prisoner, Garrison recovered his freedom. The civil action of Todd against him was still pending. Nothing daunted Garrison went North two days after his discharge to obtain certain evidence deemed important by his counsel to his defence. He took with him an open letter from Lundy looking to the renewal of the weekly Genius under their joint control. Prior to Garrison's trial the paper had fallen into great stress for want of money. Lundy and he had made a division of their labors, the latter doing the editorial and office work, while the former traveled from place to place soliciting subscriptions and collecting generally the sinews of war. But the experiment was not successful from a business standpoint. For as Garrison playfully observed subsequently: "Where friend Lundy could get one new subscriber, I could knock a dozen off, and I did so. It was the old experiment of the frog in the well, that went two feet up and fell three feet back, at every jump." Where the income of the paper did not exceed fifty dollars in four months and the weekly expenditure amounted to at least that sum, the financial failure of the enterprise was inevitable. This unhappy event did actually occur six weeks before the junior editor went to jail; and the partnership was formally dissolved in the issue of the Genius of March 5, 1830. But when Arthur Tappan made his generous offer of a hundred dollars to effect Garrison's release, he made at the same time an offer of an equal amount to aid the editors in reëstablishing the Genius. This proposition led to hopes on the part of the two friends to a renewal of their partnership in the cause of emancipation. And so Garrison's visit to the North was taken advantage of to test the disposition of Northern philanthropy to support such a paper. But what he found was a sad lack of interest in the slave. Everywhere he went he encountered what appeared to him to be the most monstrous indifference and apathy on the subject. The prejudices of the free States seemed to him stronger than were those of the South. Instead of receiving aid and encouragement to continue the good work of himself and coadjutor, and for the doing of which he had served a term of seven weeks in prison, men, even his best friends sought to influence him to give it up, and to persuade him to forsake the slave, and to turn his time and talents to safer and more profitable enterprises nearer home. He was informed by these worldly wise men and Job's counselors that his "scheme was visionary, fanatical, unattainable." "Why should he make himself," they argued, "an exile from home and all that he held dear on earth, and sojourn in a strange land, among enemies whose hearts were dead to every noble sentiment?" Ah! he himself confessed that all were against his return to Baltimore. But his love of the slave was stronger than the strength of the temptation. He put all these selfish objections behind him. As he has recorded the result of this experience: "Opposition served only to increase my ardor, and confirm my purpose." Strange and incomprehensible to his fellows is the man who prefers "persecution, reproach, and poverty" with duty, to worldly ease and honor and riches without it. When a man appears in society who is not controlled by motives which usually govern the conduct of other men he becomes at first an object of pity, then of contempt, and, lastly, of hate. Garrison we may be sure at the end of this visit had made rapid transit from the first to the second of these stages in the esteem of his generation.
His experience was not all of this deplorable kind. He left Baltimore without the money required to pay his way North, depending literally upon the good God to provide for him the necessary means to complete his journey. And such help was more than once providentially afforded the young apostle of liberty. At New York, when he did not know how he was to go farther for want of means, he met a Mr. Samuel Leggett who gave him a pass on the "splendid steamboat President." It seems that this friend in his need had read with indignation the story of his trial. The bread which he had scattered from his prison on the waters of public sentiment had thus returned to him after many days in the timely assistance of a sympathetic soul. And then, again, when he was in Boston in sore distress for a little money, suddenly, beautifully, the desire of his heart was satisfied. But let him tell the incident in his own touching way. His face was turned toward Baltimore: "But how was I to return?" he asks. "I had not a dollar in my pocket, and my time was expired. No one understood my circumstances. I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow. My friends were prodigal of pity, but of nothing else. In the extremity of my uneasiness, I went to the Boston post-office, and found a letter from my friend Lundy, inclosing a draft for $100 from a stranger and as a remuneration for my poor inefficient services in behalf of the slaves!" The munificent stranger was Ebenezer Dole, of Hallowell, Maine. Money thus acquired was a sacred trust to this child of Providence. "After deducting the expenses of traveling," he goes on to say, "the remainder of the above-named sum was applied in discharging a few