Men of Our Times. Or, Leading Patriots of the Day

But what can circumscribe my mind?

To chain the winds attempt as well!'
'Confine me as a prisoner – but bind me not as a slave.
Punish me as a criminal – but hold me not as a chattel.
Torture me as a man – but drive me not like a beast.
Doubt my sanity – but acknowledge my immortality.'

In the course of the forenoon, after passing through the mockery of an examination, for form's sake, before Judge Whitman, I was released from prison; but, at the earnest solicitation of the city authorities, in order to tranquilize the public mind, I deemed it proper to leave the city for a few days, accompanied by my wife, whose situation was such as to awaken the strongest solicitude for her life."

At this distance of time it is difficult to conceive of such scenes as occurring in Boston. They are to be accounted for by two things. First, the intense keenness of the instincts of the Slaveholding power in the United States, in discriminating from afar what the results of the Anti-Slavery discussion would be, and the real power which was arising in the apparently feeble body of the Abolitionists; and second, the thousand ties of politics, trade, blood relationship, friendship and religion that interlaced the South with the North, and made the North for many years a tool of southern dictators and a mere reflection of southern sympathies. There was scarcely a thing in northern society that was not interwoven and intertwisted with southern society. Northern schools and colleges were full of southern scholars – northern teachers were all the while seeking places on southern plantations. The great political bodies had each its southern wing, every religious denomination had its southern members and southern interests. Every kind of trade and industrial calling had its southern outlet. The ship builders of Maine went to Charleston for their cargoes. Plantations were fitted out at the North, by every kind of trade. Our mercantile world was truly and in fact one firm with the South and felt any disturbance to them as virtually as the South itself.

Hence Garrison's instinctive feeling that the battle was to be fought in the North, where as yet there was a free press and the right of free speech.

It was not long before the South perceived that if free inquiry and free discussion were going to be allowed in Massachusetts, it would be all over with them, and like men who were brought up always to have their own way and had but to command to be obeyed, several southern states sent immediate and earnest communications to the Massachusetts Legislature, requesting the General Court to enact laws making it penal for the citizens of Massachusetts to form abolition societies or print and publish abolition sentiments.

The Governor of Massachusetts, in his message to the Legislature at this time, expressed his belief that the abolitionists were guilty of an offence punishable by common law.

This part of the Governor's message, together with the resolutions from the Legislatures of slaveholding states, was referred to a committee of five.

The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society addressed a memorial to this committee, praying to be permitted to appear before them and show that they had done nothing but what they had a perfect constitutional right to do by the laws of Massachusetts.

On the Fourth and Eighth of March, 1836, these memorable interviews took place at the state house, in the chamber of the representatives.

A committee of some of the leading abolitionists attended – Mr. I. May, Mr. E. Gray Loring, Mr. Sewell, Dr. Follen, of Harvard College, and Mr. Garrison. Dr. Channing also met with them as an expression of sympathy and to mark his sense of the vitally important nature of the transactions to the rights of personal liberty in Massachusetts.

The meeting was attended by many spectators, and the abolitionists had opportunity to defend their course and conduct.

Mr. Garrison's speech at this time is one of the most energetic and characteristic of his utterances. After alluding to the duty of all men to plead for the rights of the dumb and the oppressed, he then went on to say:

"Mr. Chairman, there is one aspect of this great question which has not yet been presented to the committee. The liberties of the people of the free States are identified with those of the slave population. If it were not so, there would be no hope, in my breast, of the peaceful deliverance of the latter class from their bondage. Our liberties are bound together by a ligament as vital as that which unites the Siamese twins. The blow which cuts them asunder, will inevitably destroy them both. Let the freedom of speech and of the press be abridged or destroyed, and the nation itself will be in bondage; let it remain untrammelled, and southern slavery must speedily come to an end." The chairman of the committee however insulted the abolitionists, refused them a fair hearing, and substantially turned them out of the Legislature, to protest at their leisure. The Legislature however did not pass the laws demanded by the South.

Miss Martineau, who visited Boston in those days, described feelingly what she justly called the martyr age in America.

The abolitionists in Boston at this time, were ostracized from genteel society. Rank and fashion cut them in the street, and crossed out their names from visiting lists. Whoever joined them must expect as a matter of course to give up what was called in Boston, good society.

Their houses were constantly threatened by anonymous letters, nor was the threat a vain one.

One of the most accomplished women of Boston, whose genius and beauty and fine manners won her a distinguished position afterwards in European society, lives to remember now, how her house was fired while she was still an invalid in her chamber with an infant daughter only three weeks old, and how she was obliged to sit by an open window to get air for herself and infant, from the smoke that filled the house after the fire had been discovered and brought under.

Now there were in the whole North, thousands of people who thought slavery a wrong, an inhumanity, and who wished with a greater or less degree of ardor that it might cease from the earth. But all these people were associated for some purpose social, moral or religious, with people at the South, who were in a state of feverish combativeness on this subject, who were accustomed to command from their cradles, impatient of contradiction, and violent in their passions; and in every way and form, and every branch of life in state and church, the demand was stringent and imperative: "You shall not say that slavery is wrong – you shall not agitate that question or discuss it at all, and you shall join with us to discountenance and put down all who endeavor to agitate the public mind. If you don't we won't have any thing to do with you or your purposes or schemes."

This was the language which kept the whole North boiling like a pot for years. On the one hand, the force of conscience and humanity, and on the other, the passionate determined resistance of the South operating through northern men, who, though disliking slavery yet had their various purposes to carry, for which they needed the help of the South.

So even the religious societies felt that their great moral and religious work was so important that they must yield a little, in order to gain the help of southern Christians. The Tract Society struck out from English reprints every line and sentence which might be supposed to reprove slavery; the Sunday School Union followed suit. The various religious bodies, embarrassed by their southern wings, spent their time in every annual meeting in ingenious skirmishing, in which the main body sought to keep the peace between the active minority of abolitionists, and the irritated, determined, dictatorial southern brethren, whose sentiments were exactly expressed by Dr. Plummer, of Virginia:

"If abolitionists will set the world in a blaze, it is but fair that they should receive the first warming at the fire. Let them understand that they will be caught if they come among us, and they will take good heed to keep out of our way; there is not one among them that has any idea of shedding his blood for his cause."

The ministers of the slaveholding region were driven on by the unsparing, uncompromising slave-owners, and were the most high-handed defenders of the system. Northern religious bodies, in order to carry on their purposes in union with the South, were obliged to make constant concessions at which their conscience revolted. The Methodist church, in 1840, passed a law forbidding their colored members to give testimony in church trials in slave States. The debates on this question are worth looking back to now, as they give a dramatic reality to the great driving, pushing process which was then going on in favor of slavery.

A trembling brother, after voting for this astounding prohibition, which took away the last hope of even a hearing in Christ's church for the poor hunted slave – rose the day after he had helped pass it, and humbly and plaintively tried to get it taken back.

He said that the resolution "was introduced under peculiar circumstances, during considerable excitement, and he went for it as a peace offering to the South, without sufficiently reflecting upon the precise import of its phraseology, but after a little deliberation he was sorry! He was convinced that if the resolution remained on the journal, it would be disastrous to the whole Northern church."

Dr. A. J. Few, of Georgia, arose, and it is instructive to see how resolute men, who have made up their minds, and know exactly what they mean to do, despise timid men, who are divided between policy and conscience. Dr. Few said:

"Look at it! What do you declare to us, in taking this course! Why, simply, as much as to say, 'We cannot sustain you in the condition which you cannot avoid! We cannot sustain you in the necessary conditions of slaveholding; one of its necessary conditions being the rejection of negro testimony!' If it is not sinful to hold slaves, under all circumstances, it is not sinful to hold them in the only condition, and under the only circumstances in which they can be held. The rejection of negro testimony is one of the necessary circumstances under which slaveholding can exist; indeed, it is utterly impossible for it to exist without it; therefore it is not sinful to hold slaves in the condition and under the circumstances in which they are held at the South, inasmuch as they can be held under no other circumstances. * * * If you believe that slaveholding is necessarily sinful, come out with the abolitionists, and honestly say so. If you believe that slaveholding is necessarily sinful, you believe we are necessarily sinners; and if so, come out and honestly declare it, and let us leave you. * * * We want to know distinctly, precisely and honestly the position which you take. We cannot be tampered with by you any longer. We have had enough of it. We are tired of your sickly sympathies. * * * If you are not opposed to the principles which it involves, unite with us, like honest men, and go home, and boldly meet the consequences."

From this it appears that the Southern slaveocracy was not only a very united, determined body, but also remarkably logical as to the necessary ways and means which were essential to the support of their system, and that not only they were prepared to go the whole length themselves, but they meant to have nothing to do with any one who would not go the whole length with them.

The result of this one victory was to split the Methodist church in two. Mr. Peck was right in supposing that there was yet enough conscience in the Northern Methodists to feel the impossibility of holding a book of discipline which called slavery "the sum of all villainies," and yet keeping union with those who were making it the first object of life to uphold it. Some such crisis of conscience, always brought on by the slave-driving, dictatorial, determined and logical South, in time rent asunder all the principal denominations into a northern and southern wing. For however they might have been disposed towards the policy of non-intervention, the South never allowed them to stand long on that ground. They must not only cease to remonstrate against slavery, but help them by consenting to positive laws and measures in its defence. So great was the power of this dictatorial spirit, that when the New School Presbyterian church had broken off from the great body of southern churches, who went with the Old School, yet the one or two synods who were left among them extorted from the whole body the decree that "masters ought not to be disciplined for selling slaves without their consent, even when fellow members of the same churches with themselves."

Now this history of what went on in the church of America – for the church, meaning by it all the religious denominations, did embody as a general fact, the whole religious and moral force of the country, shows more strongly than anything else what was likely to be going on in bodies that did not profess any moral character or considerations. If this was the state to which the dictation of the southern slavepower had driven the church, what was to be hoped of the political world and the world of trade?

Mr. Garrison looked over this dark field, and saw the battle – for there was a battle all over the land – a battle in which the truth and the right were being steadily, daily and everywhere beaten. The church and the world seemed to be vieing with each other who could retreat fastest before their victorious masters, and every day some new right of humanity was thrown down for the pursuing army to worry and tear – just as retreating fugitives throw back a lamb or a dog to stop a pack of hungry wolves.

Garrison saw at once that the root of all this defeat and disaster was the desire of UNION with slaveholders, and forthwith he unfurled his banner and sounded his trumpet to the watchword, NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS.

Immediately the Constitution of the United States was brought up before him. Does not the constitution form a union with slaveholders? Has it not express compromises designed to protect slave property? Is not the basis of representation throughout all the southern states made on three-fifths of a slave population? Now Mr. Garrison, what do you say to that?

"What I say," said Garrison, "is, that slavery is a sin against God and man, and if the constitution of the United States does agree to defend and protect it, it is a sinful league, and it is a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell," and out came the Liberator with the solemn curses of the old prophets at its head, and the Garrisonian abolitionists organized themselves on the principle that they would hold no union with slaveholders in church or in state, they would belong to no religious or secular body which did not treat slavery as a sin against God, and they would lift up their testimony against every person, party or denomination in church or in state that made any concession to the slaveholding power, for the sake of accomplishing any purpose whatsoever.

Here we see the whole scope of subject-matter for the Liberator, and for all the lectures and speeches from the platforms of the Garrisonian abolition societies for years and years. For as there was scarcely a thing in society in those days that was not the joint work of the North and the South, and as the South never made a concession, of course there was through all the various ramifications of political, social and religious life, a continued series of concessions on the part of the North. These concessions were always, everywhere unsparingly discussed, reproved and denounced by the Garrisonians, and so there was controversy constantly and everywhere.

The ministry of New England, from the days of President Edwards, had adopted a peculiar and pungent style of preaching immediate repentance of sin. They repudiated all half efforts, insensible approaches, dream-like floatings toward right, and narrowed the question of individual responsibility down to the present moment, and urged repentance on the spot as the duty of all. Garrison had received his early education in this school, and he drove his preaching of immediate repentance for the sin of slavery, his requirements for an instant clearing of the soul from all complicity with it, with the solemnity of an old Puritan. He had the whole language of the Old Testament at his tongue's end, and a text from the old prophets ready like an arrow on a bow-string, to shoot into every loop-hole of the concessions and compromises that were constantly going on. He reproved without fear or favor, ministers, elders, Christians, statesmen, governors, authors, and denounced the whole church as contaminated by the sanction and support it gave to the accursed thing.

He was denounced in turn by the church as an infidel and an opposer of religion, but he persisted in hurling right and left the stern denunciations of the Old Testament: "When thou sawest a thief, thou consentedst with him – thou hast been partaker with adulterers," and he declared that the visible union of church and state with an organization which practiced systematic robbery on four millions of human beings, and made legal marriage among them an impossibility, was in the very highest sense consenting with thieves, and being made partakers with adultery.

There is not the least doubt that the course of entire separation from slaveholders in church and state, would have been a perfect and efficient stop to the evil, could it have been compassed. Could we once imagine a state of things in which every man and woman in the United States who admitted that slavery was an injustice, should come to the point of refusing all fellowship or connection with it, either in church or state, or in any of the traffic or intercourse of life, we should imagine a state in which there would have been immediately a majority which could have revised the constitution of the United States, and cast out the offensive clauses, as has since been done.

But measures so stringent and thorough, supposed an education of the public conscience which had not yet taken place, and the Garrisonian Abolitionists therefore were always a small minority, extremely unfashionable and every where spoken against. Small as they were, they were the indispensables of the great conflict – its very heart. Garrison and his band of coadjutors formed a steady force which acted night and day with unvarying consistency. While everybody else in the United States had something else to conserve, some side issues to make, some other point to carry, Garrison and his band had but one thing to say – that American slavery is a sin; but one thing to do – to preach immediate repentance and forsaking of sin. They withdrew from every organization which could in any way be supposed to tolerate or hold communion with it, and walked alone, a small, but always active and powerful body. They represented the pure, abstract form of every principle as near as it is possible for it to be represented by human frailty. Free speech, free inquiry and freedom of conscience found perfect expression in their meetings, and the Liberator was the one paper in which any honest, well-meaning person might print any conscientious opinion, however contrary to those generally received in society. Of course it became the channel for much crude thought, for much startling and strange expression; and its circulation was confined almost entirely to the small party whose opinions it expressed. A large portion of the Liberator was every week devoted to extracts cut from southern papers, giving a vivid picture of the barbaric state of society, produced by slavery. Here, without note or comment, came the accounts clipped from different southern papers, of the assaults, frays and murders daily perpetrated by white men on each other in a land where violence was ever above law. There were, too, the advertisements of slave auctions and runaway negroes; of blood-hounds kept for human hunting; while in a weekly corner called the "Refuge of Oppression," all the violent doctrines of the most rabid slave holders found every week a faithful reproduction in their own language. For an exact picture of the image and body of the most extreme form of southern slave holding and its results on society, the Liberator was as perfect a moral daguerreotype as could be produced.

A solemn instance of the terrible sequence of Divine retribution has been presented to this generation which will not soon be forgotten. All this disgusting, harrowing, dreadful record of cruelty, crime and oppression which the Liberator went on, year after year, in vain holding up to the inspection of the North, as being perpetrated within the bounds of slaveholding society, was shrunk from as too dreadful and disgusting to be contemplated.

"We do not wish to have our feelings harrowed; we do not wish to be appalled and disgusted with records of cruelty and crime," was the almost universal voice of good society at the North, as they went steadily on, compromising with and yielding to the exactions of a barbarous oligarchy. God so ordered it in return, that the cup of trembling which had so long been drunk by the slave alone, should be put into the hands of thousands of the sons and daughters of the free North. Thousands of them were starved, tortured, insulted, hunted by dogs, separated from home and friends, and left to linger out a cruel death in life, through the barbarity of those very slaveholders, with whose sins we had connived, with whose cruelties practiced on the helpless negroes we had refused to interfere. So awful a lesson of the justice of a living God we trust will never be forgotten. If every northern man and woman had from the very first been as careful in regarding the rights of the slave, as determined to hold no fellowship with evil as Garrison, the solution of our great national question might have been a far more peaceful one.

In the days of the great conflict, Mr. Garrison was accused of being in a bad spirit, of the utterance of violent, angry and abusive language. A very mistaken idea of his personal character, in fact, went abroad in the world.

In his personal intercourse he is peculiarly bland and urbane, one of the few men capable of conducting an argument on the most interesting subject without the slightest apparent excitement of voice or manner, allowing his adversary every polite advantage and admitting all his just statements with perfect fairness. It is said that a fiery young southerner once fell into a discussion on slavery with him when he was travelling incog., on board a steamboat. Garrison quite won his heart by the fairness and courtesy with which he discussed the subject, and brought him to admissions which the frank southerner in a good humor was quite willing to make. On parting he said to him, "If that Garrison there in Boston were only like you, we should be more ready to listen to him."

A great deal of this amiability doubtless is owing to the singular steadiness and healthiness of Garrison's nervous system. In this he was one of the most peculiarly constituted men, in whom nature ever combined traits expressly for a great work. All his personal habits are those of a methodical unexcitable man, and not in the least like the hurry and enthusiasm of a fanatic. He is methodical, systematic and precise in all his arrangements, neat and careful in respect to the minutest trifle.

His handwriting is always of the finished completeness of a writing master, and in the most vehement denunciations, not a letter was ever misplaced or a comma or exclamation point, omitted. Every thing he ever wrote was perfected for the press as it left his pen. Such habits as these speak a composed and equable nervous system. In fact, Garrison's nerves never knew what it was to shiver and vibrate either with irritation or with fear. He is gifted with the most perfect imperturbable cheerfulness, which no outward discomposure seems to have any power to shake.

His politely bowing to the furious Boston mob before descending to put himself in their hands, is a very characteristic thing, and during all the tossings and tumults of the hour that followed, Garrison was probably the serenest person that ever had his clothes torn off his back for expressing his opinions.

That language in the Liberator which looked to the world as if it must have been uttered in a passion, because it was so far above the usual earnestness of expression on such subjects, was in his case the result of a deliberate system.

Garrison said that the world blinded conscience and made false issues with itself by the habitual calling of things by the wrong names; that there was no kind of vice which might not be disguised under a polite phrase. Theft might be spoken of as an ingenious transfer of property – adultery as a form of the elective affinity, and so on, but that all such phraseology had an immoral tendency.