William Lloyd Garrison

WHEN in 1882 a forgotten early settler of the town of Cambridge, Mass., was recalled from oblivion by a descendant, and his statue was placed in the public park, President Eliot, of Harvard College, thus moralized the occasion in a brief speech : “ It is good to leave behind sturdy and thrifty descendants to transmit one’s name and recall one’s memory through long generations.” It is also good for a reformer, spending most of his life in opposition to all that gives popularity and ease, when he turns out to have left a phalanx of sturdy and thrifty sons, able to transmit his fame through a biography; especially when the work is, as in the present case, well done. The two volumes now before us ¹ cover about half of Garrison’s career, and are elaborated to the utmost detail — many will think to an excessive amount of detail — in all directions ; while their admirable paper, type, and binding, and their singular freedom from even typographical errors, seem only a symbol of the intellectual thoroughness that has directed their preparation. There is in the book no Jesuitism, no equivocation ; it might well hear the motto of the old Antislavery Standard, “ Without concealment, without compromise.” The sons believe too completely and absolutely in their father to keep anything back. To say that it is a judicial work would be to misplace it in literature. The biography of a father by sons can rarely possess that quality, and had better not affect it ; it is in this case the statement of counsel, but of counsel so entirely truthful and so sure of their own case that, however much they may err, they will never be found withholding anything through unfair motives. The book often swerves very widely, in our judgment, from the results to which a really judicial summary would lead us; hut it is better that it should so swerve than that the authors should vary from the method to which their inherited temperament and their traditional convictions alike lead them. As the Spanish proverb says that no man Can at the same time ring the bells and walk in the procession, so it is fortunate that no man can at the same time be a son and a Rhadamanthus.

This admirable tone of treatment, with the importance of the theme, secures for the book, or at least for many parts of it, that attractiveness which is the first essential of a biography, — for if nobody will read your work, why write it ? It is pleasant to see, moreover, how much that is agreeable is flung, without difficulty, around the picture of Garrison : his cheerfulness, his buoyancy, his bonhomie, his love of poetry, his facetiousness. He seems to have habitually cheered himself by sonnets, as Abraham Lincoln did by anecdotes ; while we find here only a few examples of those little puns which were essential to his conversation, and which at first appeared to the stranger as inappropriate as if one should track a lion to his lair, and find him refreshing himself with peppermints. It is delicious, too, to find the great iconoclast in early youth attending a certain church expressly to see the beautiful Miss Emily Marshall ; and to discover him, when imprisoned at Baltimore, to have beguiled the time by writing a mock-heroic poem of many stanzas to a certain young lady ; and above all to find that Mrs. Hemans was, for a long period of years, his favorite poet. To begin with Mrs. Hemans and end with the Liberator was to reverse the Scriptural proverb, and to extract strength from sweetness.

The great personal qualities of Mr. Garrison and his essential leadership in the antislavery enterprise are now generally conceded. There was such an almost unique felicity in his living to see the final completion of his work, there is such rare poetic justice in the approach to a coincidence between the fiftieth anniversary of the great mob and the erection of a statue to its victim, that one hardly feels disposed to dwell on these matters now. The highest tribute to the reformer’s merit lies in recognizing the completeness of his work. “ Si monumentum quæris, circumspice.” The point to which the world will look with most interest in this work is the exhibition of the man Garrison, including especially the portrayal of those limitations which in a certain degree created friction in his work and left his memory a little blurred. In this respect his biographers have given the actual facts with a merciless precision which can hardly be called meritorious, because it seems never to have crossed their minds that any jury could draw from the admitted facts any conclusion different from their own. Be this as it may, we have for the first time a complete picture, not merely of the qualities from which Garrison derived his power, but of those which in his reformatory life constituted his obstacles. His biographers give from his own words a long series of self-revelations, which not only account for the triumphs of his life, but for its antagonisms and its troubles. It is a curious study, all the more because we have constantly to turn away from the representations of the advocates, and to revert to the evidence they themselves have placed before us. The occasional contrast between these two things—the fact and its interpretation — makes the book an actual psychological study. There hardly exists in biographical literature so complete and unvaried a transfer of thoughts, convictions, and point of view from one generation to its successor.

Garrison had the painful experience, almost unique among great reformers, of gradually detaching from his side a large part of the ablest and most devoted of his early adherents; their place being often supplied, no doubt, by younger men, who devoted themselves to him with almost absolute idolatry. The list of those whom he thus detached includes some who are still living in honor among us, and who need no special encomium to reinstate them in our memories, such as Whittier, Sewall, and Elizur Wright. It includes Benjamin Lundy, whom Garrison properly called “ the pioneer,” and William Goodell, whom Garrison described as “a much older and a better soldier” than himself. It includes Arthur Tappan, who paid Garison’s fine at Baltimore ; Lewis Tappan, whose house in New York was sacked by a mob; James G. Birney, who emancipated his own slaves; and Amos A. Phelps, who defended Garrison against that Clerical Appeal which made a great noise in its day, and is in this book painfully resuscitated from oblivion. All these men were led by degrees into antagonism to Garrison ; it was a permanent division, and embittered the whole antislavery movement. For this alienation on their part Garrison had no mercy: it was always attributed simply to “a mighty sectarian conspiracy,” or a “ jealous and envious spirit; nor do his sons regard it for an instant in any other light than as a “jealousy of his early, consistent and effective advocacy of the antislavery cause,” or “ merely a sectarian reaction against the moral leadership of Mr. Garrison.” Posterity, less easily satisfied, quite disposed to honor Garrison, but by no means inclined to give him exclusive laurels, will wish to investigate farther, and this book gives ample opportunity.

The main charges against Garrison were three : (1) of egotism and a domineering spirit, (2) of excessive and indiscriminating harshness, and (3) of a willingness to embarrass the antislavery movement by visionary and chimerical projects. These were the charges : we confess that we looked to the present biography to refute and banish them forever, but find, with some surprise, that it reinforces and establishes them all. Whatever Garrison may have been, under the mellowing influences of later years, we have in this book the unmistakable proof that in his early life all these faults and drawbacks belonged to him, at least in some measure. Let us consider them in detail.

The first charge against him was of manifesting that quality which the pioneer Benjamin Lundy called “arrogance,” and the other pioneer, William Goodell, depicted in his article, How to Make a Pope. “ You exalt yourself too much,” wrote the plain-spoken Elizur Wright. “ I pray to God that you may be brought to repent of it.” Lewis Tappan at about the same time wrote, “ You speak of ‘ sedition ’ and ‘ chastising ’ Messrs. Fitch, Towne, and Woodbury : I do not like such language.” The most fearless and formidable of all these indictments, because the gentlest and most unwilling, was that of Sarah Grimké. Speaking of the course pursued by Garrison and his immediate circle toward her and her sister, she says, “ They wanted us to live out Wm. Lloyd Garrison, not the convictions of our own souls; entirely unaware that they were exhibiting, in the high places of moral reform, the genuine spirit of slave-holding by wishing to curtail the sacred privilege of conscience. . . . His [Garrison’s] spirit of intolerance towards those who did not draw in his traces, and his adulation of those who surrendered themselves to his guidance, have always been exceedingly repulsive to me, — weaknesses which marred the beauty and symmetry of his character, and prevented its symmetrical development; but nevertheless I know the stern principle which is the basis of his action. He is Garrison, and nobody else, and all I ask is that he would let others be themselves.” (The Sisters Grimké, page 220.)

This last extract is not given in the book now under consideration ; but there are plenty of illustrations to be found in it. One of the most striking, and one which will suffice for all, is to be seen in the very first words drawn from Garrison by the publication of Channing’s Essay on Slavery. At the time of writing, he had not read the book, though he had seen some extracts from it; hut he knew that the most influential clergyman in Boston had committed himself at last on the side of liberty, whatever the precise form of that committal might be. What was his first impulse ? A devout outpouring of gratitude to God that the slave had found one new ally, however inadequate, in a high post of influence ? Not at all. It seems almost past belief that his first thought, as exhibited by his sons, was for himself, or, at most, for his immediate associates. (The italics are our own.)

“ Well, it is announced that the great Dr. Charming has published his thoughts upon the subject of slavery! Of course we must now all fall back and 'hide our diminished heads.' The book I will not condemn until I peruse it; but I do not believe it is superior, either in argument or eloquence, to many of our own publications.” (II. 57.)

Volumes of specifications by Lundy, or Goodell, or Tappan, or Wright, or Sarah Grimké, could not so effectually have sustained their charges as these words of the great abolitionist himself. Can any one imagine Clarkson as writing in this way about a new convert to West India emancipation, or Cobden in connection with the English corn-laws, or Helen Jackson with the American Indians? On the very day when Garrison was thus writing, Ellis Gray Loring, of whom the present biographers justly say that no Boston abolitionist was ‘‘more trusted for judgment and integrity,” called Channing’s essay, after reading it, “ a splendid testimony to the truth,” and “ the most elaborate work on the philosophy of antislavery ” that he had seen. But its author had censured the severer language of the abolitionists, and that, apparently, would have been enough, had there been no other possible ground of criticism. When Garrison came at last to review the work, he said of it, “ Its sole excellencies are its moral plagiarisms from the writings of abolitionists,”— the italics being his own,—as if he and his immediate friends had taken out a patent in the line of human sympathy, and any infringement was a crime. He pronounced the book " utterly destitute of any redeeming, reforming power,” “calumnious,contradictory, and unsound.” This is the review that was written, the sons say, in “ no spirit of jealousy ; ” and so completely do they accept, after an interval of fifty years, their father’s attitude that from this time forward Dr. Channing is hardly mentioned in the book without some distinct slur; and they even recur to that utter misapprehension which could find no solution for his cautious temperament but that of vulgar “ timidity,” an explanation long ago seen and set aside by a woman as heroic as Garrison, one whose sacrifices were greater and whose services to the antislavery movement only less than his, — Lydia Maria Child.

“ At first I thought him,” she writes, “ timid and even slightly time-serving; but I soon discovered that I formed this estimate from ignorance of his character. I learned that it was justice to all, not popularity for himself, which made him so cautious. He constantly grew upon my regard, until I came to regard him as the wisest as well as the gentlest apostle of humanity.” (Channing’s Memoirs, III. 154.)

The second complaint against Garrison was that of excessive harshness of language. Here again it is plain that the charge in its most permanent form does not rest on the testimony of enemies, but of friends. We find Harriet Martineau herself saying, “ I do not pretend to like or to approve the tone of Garrison’s pointed censures. I could not use such language myself toward any class of offenders, nor can I sympathize in its use by others.” This was not said in her first book on America, but in her second more deliberate one; and when we consider the kind of language that Miss Martineau found herself able to use, this disclaimer becomes very forcible.

We find a society formed by Henry Ware in the futile hope of influencing Garrison’s alleged harshness ; and this society included Dr. Follen, whose antislavery action cost him his Harvard professorship, and William Henry Channing, whose whole life was a record of fearless fidelity to abolitionism. But after all, the conclusive evidence is given by Garrison’s own sons. It is impossible to read their book and not see with what facility harsh language came to Garrison’s lips from his very boyhood, without reference to the antislavery movement. It was a part of that stern school of old-fashioned Calvinism in which he was trained. “ The least of sins is infinite,” says the Roman Catholic poet, Faber ; and this was the early attitude of Garrison’s mind. At twenty-three he wrote, “It is impossible to estimate the depravity and wickedness of those who at the present day reject the gospel of Jesus Christ,” meaning, apparently, those who held the very views that he himself lived to hold. A little later, editing in Vermont what had hitherto been a party paper, he wrote of those who supposed that it was still to be such, “ The blockheads who have had the desperate temerity to propagate this falsehood.” These are but specimens. Now, when a young man begins with such questionable extravagance of epithet in matters of religion and politics, is it to be supposed that, when he is called upon to cope with an institution which even the milder Wesley called “ the sum of all villanies,” he will suddenly develop the habit of absolute justice ? “ I will be harsh as truth,” he said. Was he never any harsher?

That there was such a thing possible as undue harshness in speaking of individual slave-holders the abolitionists themselves were compelled sometimes to admit. When Charles Remond, the eloquent colored orator, called George Washington a villain, Wendell Phillips replied, “ Charles, the epithet is infelicitous.” Yet if, as was constantly assumed by Garrison, the whole moral sin of slave-holding rested on the head of every individual participant, it is difficult to see why the epithet was not admirably appropriate. The point of doubt is whether it did so rest; but if it did Remond was right. Such extreme statements were not always thus rebuked. When a slave-holder was once speaking in an antislavery convention, he was flatly contradicted by Stephen Foster, who was perhaps, next to Garrison, the hardest hitter among the abolitionists. “Do you think I would lie?” retorted the slave-holder. “ Why not ? ” said Foster. “ I know you steal.” This Draconian inflexibility, finding the least of sins worthy of death, and having no higher penalty for the greatest, was a very common code upon the antislavery platform. It was a part of its power, but it brought also a certain weakness, as being really based upon an untruth. It was not true that each individual slave-holder had the whole weight of the national sin upon him, for the simple reason that a collective sin is the accumulated work of successive generations, and it is unjust to hold any single person responsible for all. Indeed, as a general rule, men are better than their laws.

Nothing in Dr. Charming’s book, except his criticisms of the abolitionists, so roused Garrison’s wrath as the admission that there might be slave-holders who “deserved great praise,” because they opposed slavery, while retaining their own slaves. But surely the time has come when the most ardent abolitionist may recognize that there might have been many such men. Compare this statement of Channing’s with one of Garrison’s, as given by his biographers. He wrote, for instance, thus : —

“ For myself, I hold no fellowship with slave-owners. I will not make a truce with them even for a single hour.

I blush for them as countrymen, — I know that they are not Christians; and the higher they raise their professions of patriotism or piety, the stronger is my detestation of their hypocrisy. They are dishonest and cruel, — and God and the angels and devils and the universe know that they are without excuse.”(I 205.)

“ Without excuse ! ” Set aside all the facts of heredity, of environment, of early association, of ignorance, of all that makes excuse in thoughtful minds for sin. Let us take the precise facts of the relation between master and slave, as it presented itself in multitudes of cases, even to a slave-holder whose eyes had been opened. In all the great States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, a slave-holder was absolutely prohibited from emancipating his slaves, except by authority of the legislature specially granted in each case, — a permission often utterly impossible to obtain. In one of these States, Mississippi, it was farther required that this legislative act should be for some meritorious action or public service on the part of the individual slave ; and the same condition was made in North Carolina, with the substitution of the county court for the legislature. In every one of these States, the slave-owner, had he been Garrison himself, was as powerless to free his slaves without the concurrence of the community as he would have been to swim the Atlantic with those slaves on his back ; and yet these men were " without excuse.” Even in the Northern slave States, where manumission was easier, it was sometimes accompanied, as in Virginia, with the provision that the freed slaves should be removed from the State within a certain time, or, in default of that, sold at auction, — a provision almost as hopelessly prohibitory as the more direct obstacles. In the mortgaged and deeply indebted plantations of Virginia, the most enlightened slave-holder rarely had the means of removing his slaves to any distance from the plantation, and how then was he to get them beyond the borders of the State? — to say nothing of the question what he was to do with them when thus removed. The more we dwell on this complicated situation, the more impressed we become with the vast wrong of the institution and of its avowed propagandists; while the more charitable we become towards those exceptional slave-holders who had opened their eyes to its evils, yet found themselves bound hand and foot. All these facts were as well known to Garrison as to us, because the book which is our authority for these statements (Stroud’s Slave Laws, pages 146-51) was familiar to the abolitionists, and was often cited in evidence. We might almost suppose that Garrison, through severe theological nurture and long habit, had impaired the power to measure the weight of his own language. How hard he found it to be wholly consistent in his personal applications is plain from the fact that the very newspaper in which the above tremendous invective appeared was also devoted to “a dignified support of Henry Clay and the American system.”

The third fault habitually found with Garrison by his critics was that of mingling the antislavery movement with alien elements which threatened to destroy its unity and concentration. Out of this grew what the present biographers call “ the great schism ” between “ old organization ” and “ new organization.” This occupies the greater part of the second volume, and will be found, we cannot help suspecting, about as interesting to the younger race of readers as a history of the division between Unitarians and Trinitarians in Massachusetts, or that between Taylorism and Tylerism in Connecticut. Such readers will even find it hard not to apply to the whole affair that phrase “ liliputian proceedings,” which the biographers employ for something else. (II. 177.) But here, as elsewhere, even the details are worth reading, were it only to see by the plain frankness of the sons how much foundation there was for all this complaint. The common impression that the great division in the antislavery ranks began with Garrison’s defense of women’s participation is here thoroughly set aside. That question aggravated, but did not create, the contest. It began, as this book shows, with an editorial by Garrison in the Liberator, distinctly indicating his change of views on the Sabbath question, — a matter in regard to which he had before been conservative. It was a position naturally offensive to that large number of abolitionists who were strongly evangelical men, and yet who were relied on for the pecuniary support of the Liberator. But the division did not come to a crisis until the great reformer had reached a phase of opinion—of vagary, as the uncharitable would call it — which came near utterly swamping and subordinating his antislavery action itself. It would scarcely be believed, were it not here announced in his own words, that there was a time when Garrison had serious thoughts of making the cause of the slave utterly subordinate to a vast and cloudy scheme of millennial reform, with which he was originally inoculated, as his sons expressly admit, by a man (John Humphrey Noyes) whose subsequent unsavory career as founder of the Oneida Community is well known. This is Garrison’s statement of his own position (August 28, 1837) : —

“I feel somewhat at a loss to know what to do,— whether to go into all the principles of holy reform, and make the abolition cause subordinate, or whether still to persevere in the one beaten track, as hitherto. Circumstances hereafter must determine this matter.” (II. 160.)

In accordance with this he printed in the Liberator, with his own full indorsement, a long manifesto by Noyes, passages of which read like some of the wildest speculations of the English zealots under the Commonwealth ; and this at a time when the Liberator was sustained at the cost of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society.

Now if Garrison himself recognized this divided allegiance in his own mind, who could expect his allies to be blind to it ? Elizur Wright wrote, “ I look upon your notions of government and religious perfectionism as downright fanaticism, — as harmless as they are absurd. I would not care a pin’s head if they were preached to all Christendom ; for it is not in the human mind (except in a peculiar and, as I think, diseased state) to believe them.” Then he points out that the real danger involved is “ a bottomless pit of distrust between you and the abolitionists. . . . Let the government alone till, Such as it is, all are equally protected by it, and after that you may work your will upon it, for all me. But if this cannot be done, why, come out plainly, and say you have left the old track and are started on a new one, such as it is, and save us from the miserable business of making disclaimers.” Such straightforward remonstrances were not, perhaps, wholly in vain, for Garrison dropped, or thought he dropped, the scheme of giving himself primarily to these vaster projects, whose expressed basis was “ the overthrow of the nations.” (II. 147.) But he did not really abandon them, — he did not put them out of sight in the Liberator; and yet he denounced unsparingly, thenceforward, those who had thus helped to save him from the malign influence that had threatened to find him an easy prey. Noyes, soon after this, disappears from the record, but “ the hand of Noyes,” as the biographers in another place call it, was visible in the ultimate organization of the Non-Resistance Society, although, in the manifesto of the latter, the original cloudiness of phraseology was a good deal condensed. Enough, however, remained to make it plain that the Liberator was thenceforward to be conducted on an essentially no-government platform, and that all its course, in respect to voting and voters, was to be determined by this position.

All this was clearly within Garrison’s right, after the Liberator had, at the original suggestion of Whittier, ceased to be sustained by any society. The wrong began when Garrison and his friends claimed not merely that he should control his own organ, but that there should be no other. To an outside observer, nothing could seem plainer than that, if the voting abolitionists found themselves constantly attacked and vilified in the Liberator, they had at least the right to establish a paper of their own ; but when they presumed to do this, in the Massachusetts Abolitionist, they were met with epithets of which “ plot ” and “intrigue” were among the mildest. We do not see how any reader can read that part of these volumes relating to the establishment of this rival antislavery journal without seeing that Garrison and his immediate friends virtually assumed the right of dictatorship over the whole agitation, and ruled that it should be carried on through a non-resistant organ, or not at all. It shows the extraordinary personal power of Mr. Garrison that he was able to exercise this benevolent despotism so long ; but, unfortunately, the longer it remained, the greater the acrimony on both sides after the spell was broken. This bitterness was exceedingly apparent, for instance, in Mrs. Chapman’s memoir of Harriet Martineau ; and it colors every expression of opinion on the part of Mr. Garrison’s biographers.

The authors of this memoir express the opinion, in their final paragraph, that those who have read their narrative of the great division in the antislavery ranks “ must conclude ” that Garrison had no choice but to oppose the political abolitionists. It is an assumption worthy, in its unflinching frankness, of the sons of a father who never was haunted by a doubt as to receiving the final approval of all right-thinking persons in everything he did. Our own opinion is that many readers of this book, perhaps the majority, will draw just the opposite inferences, on many points, from both the father and the sons. They will conclude that William Lloyd Garrison was one of the strongest men of his time, —perhaps the very strongest, — and that he may, very possibly, have influenced American history more profoundly than Lincoln or Grant; but they will also thank his biographers for revealing, even unconsciously, the faults that made him human, les défauts de ses qualités. To conceal them would have been an injustice to the other men among the early abolitionists, who, while admiring his splendid heroism, sometimes found him a hard man to work with. There is every reason to believe that he mellowed with time, and that his younger admirers saw less of these drawbacks than the earlier ones. Yet it is certain that these faults not only embarrassed his immediate work, but prevented him from exercising that foresight as to means which he showed eminently as to ends. He never faltered in his belief that slavery would fall; thus far his prediction was unerring. But there is no evidence that he ever foresaw that the two immediate instrumentalities by which it was destined to fall were the very two against which he had been so long contending, — the ballot-box and war. The most bigoted conservative did not exceed Garrison in his utter refusal to recognize the humble beginnings of that triumphant political organization which ultimately grew and expanded, under varying names, until it carried Abraham Lincoln into the presidency. It was not merely that Garrison detested and distrusted this movement, as organized by men who had revolted from his immediate leadership, but he convinced himself that it was contemptible and even ludicrous. When an antislavery candidate was first nominated for the presidency, he called it “folly, presumption, almost unequaled infatuation,” and if he ever varied from this attitude of contempt it was to “ denounce it,” in his own words, “as the worst form of proslavery.” All this visibly makes no impression upon his sons, but it must impress the impartial reader. In estimating the infallibility of an oracle, we must consider also the unfulfilled prophecies.

But it is impossible to close this first installment of these memoirs without feeling that Garrison kept higher laws than he broke, that he did the work of a man of iron in an iron age ; so that even those who recognized his faults may well have joined, as they did join, in the chorus of affectionate congratulation that attended his closing days. As for his fame, it is secure ; and all the securer for our knowing, more definitely than before, the limitations of his foresight and the drawbacks of his temperament. It is a striking fact that, in the rapidly expanding Valhalla of contemporary statues in Boston, only two — those of Webster and Everett — commemorate those who stood for the party of defense in the great antislavery conflict; while all the rest—Lincoln, Sumner, Andrew, Mann, Harriet Martineau, and, prospectively, Garrison, Parker, and Shaw — represent the party of attack. It is the verdict of time, confirming in bronze and marble the great words of Emerson : “ What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries ! ”