To Mrs. Anna M. Day, who has been a mother to my little girl, and a sister to me, this book is gratefully and affectionately dedicated, by the Author.

The author of this volume desires by way of preface to say just two things:--firstly, that it is his earnest hope that this record of a hero may be an aid to brave and true living in the Republic, so that the problems knocking at its door for solution may find the heads, the hands, and the hearts equal to the performance of the duties imposed by them upon the men and women of this generation. William Lloyd Garrison was brave and true. Bravery and truth were the secret of his marvelous career and achievements. May his countrymen and countrywomen imitate his example and be brave and true, not alone in emergent moments, but in everyday things as well.

So much for the author's firstly, now for his secondly, which is to acknowledge his large indebtedness in the preparation of this book to that storehouse of anti-slavery material, the story of the life of William Lloyd Garrison by his children. Out of its garnered riches he has filled his sack.

William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, December 10, 1805. Forty years before, Daniel Palmer, his great-grandfather, emigrated from Massachusetts and settled with three sons and a daughter on the St. John River, in Nova Scotia. The daughter's name was Mary, and it was she who was to be the future grandmother of our hero. One of the neighbors of Daniel Palmer was Joseph Garrison, who was probably an Englishman. He was certainly a bachelor. The Acadian solitude of five hundred acres and Mary Palmer's charms proved too much for the susceptible heart of Joseph Garrison. He wooed and won her, and on his thirtieth birthday she became his wife. The bride herself was but twenty-three, a woman of resources and of presence of mind, as she needed to be in that primitive settlement. Children and cares came apace to the young wife, and we may be sure confined her more and more closely to her house. But in the midst of a fast-increasing family and of multiplying cares a day's outing did occasionally come to the busy housewife, when she would go down the river to spend it at her father's farm. Once, ten years after her marriage, she had a narrow escape on one of those rare days. She had started in a boat with her youngest child, Abijah, and a lad who worked in her household. It was spring and the St. John was not yet clear of ice.i Higher up the river the ice broke that morning and came floating down with the current. The boat in which Mary Garrison and her baby rode was overtaken by the fragments and wrecked. The mother with her child sought refuge on a piece of ice and was driven shoreward. Wrapping Abijah in all the clothes she could spare she threw him ashore. She and the lad followed by the aid of an overhanging willow bough. The baby was unharmed, for she had thrown him into a snow-bank. But the perils of the river gave place to the perils of the woods. In them Mary Garrison wandered with her infant, who was no less a personage than the father of William Lloyd Garrison, until at length she found the hut of a friendly Indian, who took her in and entertained her with his best words and deeds, and the next morning conducted her safely to her father's.

The Palmers were a hardy, liberty-loving race of farmers, and Joseph Garrison was a man of unusual force and independence of character. The life which these early settlers lived was a life lived partly on the land and partly on the river. They were equally at home with scythe or oar. Amid such terraqueous conditions it was natural enough that the children should develop a passion for the sea. Like ducks many of them took to the water and became sailors. Abijah was a sailor. The amphibious habits of boyhood gave to his manhood a restless, roving character. Like the element which he loved he was in constant motion. He was a man of gifts both of mind and body. There was besides a strain of romance and adventure in his blood. By nature and his seafaring life he probably craved strong excitement. This craving was in part appeased no doubt by travel and drink. He took to the sea and he took to the cup. But he was more than a creature of appetites, he was a man of sentiment. Being a man of sentiment what should he do but fall in love. The woman who inspired his love was no ordinary woman, but a genuine Acadian beauty. She was a splendid specimen of womankind. Tall she was, graceful and admirably proportioned. Never before had Abijah in all his wanderings seen a creature of such charms of person. Her face matched the attractions of her form and her mind matched the beauty of her face. She possessed a nature almost Puritanic in its abhorrence of sin, and in the strength of its moral convictions. She feared to do wrong more than she feared any man. With this supremacy of the moral sense there went along singular firmness of purpose and independence of character. When a mere slip of a girl she was called upon to choose between regard for her religious convictions and regard for her family. It happened in this wise. Fanny Lloyd's parents were Episcopalians, who were inclined to view with contempt fellow-Christians of the Baptist persuasion. To have a child of theirs identify herself with this despised sect was one of those crosses which they could not and would not bear. But Fanny had in a fit of girlish frolic entered one of the meetings of these low-caste Christians. What she heard changed the current of her life. She knew thenceforth that God was no respecter of persons, and that the crucified Nazarene looked not upon the splendor of ceremonies but upon the thoughts of the heart of His disciples. Here in a barn, amid vulgar folk, and uncouth, dim surroundings, He had appeared, He, her Lord and Master. He had touched her with that white unspeakable appeal. The laughter died upon the fair girlish face and prayer issued from the beautiful lips. If vulgar folk, the despised Baptists, were good enough for the Christ, were they not good enough for her? Among them she had felt His consecrating touch and among them she determined to devote herself to Him. Her parents commanded and threatened but Fanny Lloyd was bent on obeying the heavenly voice of duty rather than father and mother. They had threatened that if she allowed herself to be baptised they would turn her out of doors. Fanny was baptised and her parents made good the threat. Their home was no longer her home. She had the courage of her convictionability to suffer for a belief.

Such was the woman who subsequently became the wife of Abijah Garrison, and the mother of one of the greatest moral heroes of the century. Abijah followed the sea, and she for several years with an increasing family followed Abijah. First from one place and then another she glided after him in her early married life. He loved her and his little ones but the love of travel and change was strong within him. He was ever restless and changeful. During one of his roving fits he emigrated with his family from Nova Scotia to the United States. It was in the spring of 1805 that he and they landed in Newburyport. The following December his wife presented him with a boy, whom they called William Lloyd Garrison. Three years afterward Abijah deserted his wife and children. Of the causes which led to this act nothing is now known. Soon after his arrival in Newburyport he had found employment. He made several voyages as sailing-master in 1805-8 from that port. He was apparently during these years successful after the manner of his craft. But he was not a man to remain long in one place. What was the immediate occasion of his strange behavior we can only conjecture. Possibly an increasing love for liquor had led to domestic differences, which his pleasure-loving nature would not brook. Certain it was that he was not like his wife. He was not a man in whom the moral sense was uppermost. He was governed by impulse and she by fixed moral and religious principles. He drank and she abhorred the habit. She tried first moral suasion to induce him to abandon the habit, and once, in a moment of wifely and motherly indignation, she broke up one of his drinking parties in her house by trying the efficacy of a little physical suasion. She turned the company out of doors and smashed the bottles of liquor. This was not the kind of woman whom Abijah cared to live with as a wife. He was not the sort of man whom the most romantic love could attach to the apron-strings of any woman. And in the matter of his cup he probably saw that this was what he would be obliged to do as the condition of domestic peace. The condition he rejected and, rejecting it, rejected and cast-off his wife and family and the legal and moral responsibilities of husband and father.

Bitter days now followed and Fanny Garrison became acquainted with grief and want. She had the mouths of three children to fill — the youngest an infant at her breast. The battle of this brokenhearted woman for their daily bread was as heroic as it was pathetic. She still lived in the little house on

There is a moment in the life of every serious soul, when things, which were before unseen and unheard in the world around him become visible and audible. This startling moment comes to some sooner, to others later, but to all, who are not totally given up to the service of self, at sometime surely. From that moment a change passes over such an one, for more and more he hears mysterious voices, and clearer and more clear he sees apparitional forms floating up from the depths above which he kneels. Whence come they, what mean they? He leans over the abyss, and lo! the sounds to which he hearkens are the voices of human weeping and the forms at which he gazes are the apparitions of human woe; they beckon to him, and the voices beseech him in multitudinous accent and heart-break : Come over, come down, oh! friend and brother, and help us. Then he straightway puts away the things and the thoughts of the past and girding himself with the things, and the thoughts of the divine ought and the almighty must, he goes over and down to the rescue.

Such an epochal first moment came to William Lloyd Garrison in the streets of Boston. Amid the hard struggle for bread he heard the abysmal voices, saw the gaunt forms of misery. He was a constant witness of the ravages of the demon of drink-saw how strong men succumbed, and weak ones turned to brutes in its clutch. And were they not his brothers, the strong men and the weak ones alike? And how could he, their keeper, see them desperately beset and not fly to their help? Ah! he could not and did not walk by on the other side, but, stripling though he was, rushed to do battle with the giant vice, which was slaying the souls and the bodies of his fellow citizens. Rum during the three first decades of the present century was, like death, no respecter of persons, entering with equal freedom the homes of the rich, and the hovels of the poor. It was in universal demand by all classes and conditions of men. No occasion was esteemed too sacred for its presence and use. It was an honored guest at a wedding, a christening, or a funeral. The minister whose hands were laid in baptismal blessing on babes, or raised in the holy sacrament of love over brides, lifted also the glass; and the selfsame lips which had spoken the last words over the dead, drank and made merry presently afterward among the decanters on the sideboard. It mattered not for what the building was intended-whether for church, school, or parsonage, rum was the grand master of ceremonies, the indispensable celebrant at the various stages of its completion. The party who dug the parson out after a snow-storm, verily got their reward, a sort of prelibation of the visionary sweets of that land, flowing not, according to the Jewish notion, with milk and honey, but according to the revised version of Yankeedom, with milk and rum. Rum was, forsooth, a very decent devil, if judged by the exalted character of the company it kept. It stood high on the rungs of the social ladder and pulled and pushed men from it by thousands to wretchedness and ruin. So flagrant and universal was the drinking customs of Boston then that dealers offered on the commons during holidays, without let or hindrance, the drunkard's glass to the crowds thronging by extemporized booths and bars. Shocking as was the excesses of this period nothing comparatively was heard on the subject of intemperance — it was seldom a theme for the essayist — the newspapers scarcely acknowledged its existence, excepting occasionally in connection with some catastrophes or crimes — the Christian and patriot, while they perceived its ravages, formed no plans for its overthrow-and it did not occur to any that a paper devoted mainly to its suppression, might be made a direct and successful engine in the great work of reform. Private expostulations and individual confessions were indeed sometimes made; but no systematic efforts were adopted to give precision to the views or a bias to the sentiments of the people. Such was the state of public morals and the state of public sentiment up to the year 1826, when there occurred a change. This change was brought about chiefly through the instrumentality of a Baptist city missionary, the Rev. William Collier. His labors among the poor of Boston had doubtless revealed to him the bestial character of intemperance, and the necessity of doing something to check and put an end to the havoc it was working. With this design he established the National Philanthropist in Boston, March 4, 1826. The editor was one of Garrison's earliest acquaintances in the city. Garrison went after awhile to board with him, and still later entered the office of the Philanthropist as a type-setter. The printer of the paper, Nathaniel H. White and young Garrison, occupied the same room at Mr. Collier's. And so almost before our hero was aware, he had launched his bark upon the sea of the temperance reform. Presently, when the founder of the paper retired, it seemed the most natural thing in the world, that the young journey, man printer, with his editorial experience and ability, should succeed him as editor. His room-mate, White, bought the Philanthropist, and in April 1828, formally installed Garrison into its editorship. Into this new work he carried all his moral earnestness and enthusiasm of purpose. The paper grew under his hand in size, typographical appearance, and in editorial force and capacity. It was a wide-awake sentinel on the wall of society; and week after week its columns bristled and flashed with apposite facts, telling arguments, shrewd suggestions, cogent appeals to the community to destroy the accursed thing. No better education could he have had as the preparation for his life work. He began to understand then the strength of deep-seated public evils, to acquaint himself with the methods and instruments with which to attack them. The Philanthropist was a sort of forerunner, so far as the training in intelligent and effective agitation was concerned, of the Genius of Universal Emancipation and of the Liberator. One cannot read his sketch of the progress made by the temperance reform, from which I have already quoted, and published by him in the Philanthropist in April, 1828, without being struck by the strong similitude of the temperance to the anti-slavery movement in their beginnings. When this paper was first proposed, the young temperance editor records, it met with a repulsion which would have utterly discouraged a less zealous and persevering man than our predecessor. The moralist looked on doubtfully — the whole community esteemed the enterprise desperate. Mountains of prejudice, overtopping the Alps, were to be beaten down to a level-strong interest, connected by a thousand links, severed-new habits formed; Every house, and almost every individual, in a greater or less degree, reclaimed. Derision and contumely were busy in crushing this sublime project in its birth-coldness and apathy encompassed it on every side-but our predecessor, nevertheless, went boldly forward with a giant's strength and more than a giant's heart-conscious of difficulties and perils, though not disheartened, armed with the weapons of truth-full of meekness, yet certain of a splendid victory-and relying on the promises of God for the issue. What an inestimable object-lesson to Garrison was the example of this good man going forth singlehanded to do battle with one of the greatest evils of the age! It was not numerical strength, but the faith of one earnest soul that is able in the world of ideas and human passions to remove mountains out of the way of the onward march of mankind. This truth, we may be sure, sunk many fathoms deep into the mind of the young moralist. And no wonder. For the results of two years agitation and seed sowing were of the most astonishing character. The change which has taken place in public sentiment, he continues, is indeed remarkable . . . incorporated as intemperance was, and still is, into our very existence as a people . . A regenerating spirit is everywhere seen; a strong impulse to action has been given, which, beginning in the breasts of a few individuals, and then affecting villages, and cities, and finally whole States, has rolled onward triumphantly through the remotest sections of the republic. As union and example are the levers adopted to remove this gigantic vice, temperance societies have been rapidly multiplied, many on the principle of entire abstinence, and others making it a duty to abstain from encouraging the distillation and consumption of spirituous liquors. Expressions of the deep abhorrence and sympathy which are felt in regard to the awful prevalence of drunkenness are constantly emanating from legislative bodies down to various religious conventions, medical associations, grand juries, etc., etc. But nothing has more clearly evinced the strength of this excitement than the general interest taken in this subject by the conductors of the press. From Maine to the Mississippi, and as far as printing has penetrated-even among the Cherokee Indians-but one sentiment seems to pervade the public papers, viz., the .necessity of strenuous exertion for the suppression of intemperance. Such a demonstration of the tremendous power of a single righteous soul for good, we may be sure, exerted upon Garrison lasting influences. What a revelation it was also of the transcendent part which the press was capable of playing in the revolution of popular sentiment upon moral questions; and of the supreme service of organization as a factor in reformatory movements. The seeds sowed were faith in the convictions of one man against the opinions, the prejudices, and the practices of the multitude; and knowledge of and skill in the use of the instruments by which the individual conscience may be made to correct and renovate the moral sense of a nation. But there was another seed corn dropped at this time in his mind, and that is the immense utility of woman in the work of regenerating society. She it is who feels even more than man the effects of social vices and sins, and to her the moral reformer should strenuously appeal for aid. And this, with the instinct of genius, Garrison did in the temperance reform, nearly seventy years ago. His editorials in the Philanthropist in the year 1828 on Female influence may be said to be the courier avant of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of to-day, as they were certainly the precursors of the female anti-slavery societies of a few years later.

But now, without his knowing it, a stranger from a distant city entered Boston with a message, which was to change the whole purpose of the young editor's life. It was Benjamin Lundy, the indefatigable friend of the Southern slave, the man who carried within his breast the whole menagerie of Southern slavery. He was fresh from the city which held the dust of Fanny Garrison, who had once written to her boy in Newburyport, how the good God had cared for her in the person of a colored woman. Yes, she had written: The ladies are all kind to me, and I have a colored woman that waits on me, that is so kind no one can tell how kind she is; and although a slave to man, yet a free-born soul, by the grace of God. Her name is Henny, and should I never see you again, and you should come where she is, remember her, for your poor mother's sake. And now, without his dreaming of it, this devoted Samaritan in black, who, perhaps, had long ago joined her dear friend in the grave, was coming to that very boy, now grown to manhood, to claim for her race what the mother had asked for her, the kind slave-woman. Not one of all those little ones of the nation but who had a home in the manymansioned heart of Lundy. He had been an eye and ear witness of the barbarism of slavery. My heart, he sobbed, was deeply grieved at the gross abomination; I heard the wail of the captive; I felt his pang of distress, and the iron entered my soul. With apostolic faith and zeal he had for a decade been striving to free the captive, and to tie up his bruised spirit. Sadly, but with a great love, he had gone about the country on his self-imposed task. To do this work he had given up the business of a saddler, in which he had prospered, had sacrificed his possessions, and renounced the ease that comes with wealth; had courted unheard — of hardships, and wedded himself for better and worse to poverty and unremitting endeavor. Nothing did he esteem too dear to relinquish for the slave. Neither wife nor children did he withhold. Neither the summer's heat nor the winter's cold was able to daunt him or turn him from his object. Though diminutive and delicate of body, no distance or difficulty of travel was ever able to deter him from doing what his humanity had bidden him do. From place to place, through nineteen States, he had traveled, sowing as he went the seeds of his holy purpose, and watering them with his life's blood. Not Livingstone nor Stanley on the dark continent exceeded in sheer physical exertion 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,

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.

Some time in August, 1829, Garrison landed in Baltimore, and began with Lundy the editorship of The Genius of Universal Emancipation. Radical as the Park Street Church address was, it had, nevertheless, ceased to represent in one essential matter his anti slavery convictions and principles. The moral impetus and ground-swell of the address had carried him beyond the position where its first flood of feeling had for the moment left him. During the composition of the address he was transported with grief and indignation at the monstrous wrong which slavery did the slaves and the nation. He had not thought out for himself any means to rid both of the curse. The white heat of the address destroyed for the instant all capacity for such thinking. Who can be amazed, temperate, and furious — in a moment? No man. The expedition of his violent love outran the pauser reason He had accepted the colonization scheme as an instrument for removing the evil, and called on all good citizens to assist in establishing auxiliary colonization societies in every State, county, and town ; and implored their direct and liberal patronage to the parent society. He had not apparently, so much as dreamed of any other than gradual emancipation. The emancipation of all the slaves of this generation is most assuredly out of the question, he said; the fabric which now towers above the Alps, must be taken away brick by brick, and foot by foot, till it is reduced so low that it may be overturned without burying the nation in its ruins. Years may elapse before the completion of of the achievement; generations of blacks may go down to the grave, manacled and lacerated, without a hope for their children. He was on the Fourth of July a firm and earnest believer in the equity and efficacy of gradualism. But after that day, and some time before nis departure for Baltimore, he began to think on this subject. The more he thought the less did gradualism seem defensible on moral grounds. John Wesley had said that slavery was the sum of all villainies ; it was indeed the sin of sins, and as such ought to be abandoned not gradually but immediately. Slave-holding was sin and slaveholders were sinners. The sin and sinner should both be denounced as such and the latter called to instant repentance, and the duty of making immediate restitution of the stolen liberties of their slaves. This was the tone ministers of religion held everywhere toward sin and sinners, and this should be the tone held by the preachers of Abolition toward slavery, and slaveholders. To admit the principle of gradualism was for Abolition to emasculate itself of its most virile quality. Garrison, consequently rejected gradualism as a weapon, and took up instead the great and quickening doctrine of immediatism. Lundy did not know of this change in the convictions of his coadjutor until his arrival in Baltimore. Then Garrison frankly unburdened himself and declared his decision to conduct his campaign against the national iniquity along the lines of immediate and unconditional emancipation. The two on this new radicalism did not see eye to eye. But Lundy with sententious shrewdness and liberality suggested to the young radical: Thee may put thy initials to thy articles and I will put my initials to mine, and each will bear his own burden. And the arrangement pleased the young radical, for it enabled him to free his soul of the necessity which was then sitting heavily upon it. The precise state of his mind in respect of the question at this juncture in its history and in his own is made plain enough in his salutatory address in The Genius of Universal Emancipation. The vow made in Bennington ten months before to devote his life to philanthrophy, and the dedication of himself made six months afterward to the extirpation of American slavery, he solemnly renews and reseals in Baltimore. He does not hate intemperance and warless, but slavery more, and those, therefore, he formally relegates thenceforth to a place of secondary importance in the endeavors of the future. It is obvious that the colonization scheme has no strong hold upon his intelligence. He does not conceal his respect for it as an instrument of freedom, but he puts no high value on its utility. It may pluck a few leaves, he remarks, from the Bohon Upas, but can neither extract its roots nor destroy its withering properties. Viewed as an auxiliary, it deserves encouragement; but as a remedy it is altogether inadequate. But this was not all. As a remedy, colonization was not only altogether inadequate, its influence was indirectly pernicious, in that it lulled the popular mind into a belief that the monster has received his mortal wound. He perceived that this resultant indifference and apathy operated to the advantage of slavery, and to the injury of freedom. Small, therefore, as was the good which the Colonization Society was able to achieve, it was mixed with no little ill. Although Garrison has not yet begun to think on the.subject, to examine into the motives and purposes of the society, it does not take a prophet to foresee that some day he will. He had already arrived at conclusions in respect of the rights of the colored people to choose their own dwelling place, and against the iniquity of their expatriation, which cut directly at the roots of the colonization scheme. Later the pro-slavery character of the society will be wholly revealed to him. But truth in the breast of a reformer as of others must needs follow the great law of moral growth, first the blade, then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear. It is enough that he has made the tremendous step from gradual to immediate and unconditional emancipation on the soil.

At this period he tested the disposition of slaveholders to manumit their slaves. The Colonization Society had given it out that there was no little desire on the part of many masters to set their slaves free. All that was wanted for a practical domonstation in this direction was the assurance of free transportation out of the country for the emancipated slaves. Lundy had made arrangement for the transportation of fifty slaves to Hayti and their settlement in that country. So he and Garrison advertised this fact in the Genius, but they waited in vain fora favorable response from the Southstanding the following humane inducement which this advertisement offered: the price of passage will be advanced, and everything furnished of which they may stand in need, until they shall have time to prepare their houses and set in to work. No master was moved to take advantage of the opportunity. This was discouraging to the believers in the efficacy of colonization as a potent anti-slavery instrument. But Garrison was no such believer. With unerring moral instinct he had from the start placed his reliance on nothing but the eternal principles of justice for the speedy overthrow of slavery.

He obtained at this period an intimate personal knowledge of the free colored people. He saw that they were not essentially unlike other races-that there was nothing morally or intellectually peculiar about them, and that the evil or the good which they manifested was the common property of mankind in similar circumstances. He forthwith became their brave defender against the common slanders of the times. There is a prevalent disposition among all classes to traduce the habits and morals of our free blacks, he remarked in the Genius. The most scandalous exaggerations in regard to their condition are circulated by a thousand mischievous tongues, and no reproach seems to them too deep or unmerited. Vile and malignant indeed is this practice, and culpable are they who follow it. We do not pretend to say that crime, intemperance, and suffering, to a considerable extent, cannot be found among the free blacks; but we do assert that they are as moral, peaceable, and industrious as that class of the whites who are, like them, in indigent circumstances-and far less intemperate than the great body of foreign immigrants who infest and corrupt our shores. This idea of the natural equality of the races he presented in the Genius a few weeks before with Darwinian breadth in the following admirable sentences: I deny the postulate that God has made, by an irreversible decree, or any inherent qualities, one portion of the human race superior to another. No matter how many breeds are amalgamated-no matter how many shades of color intervene between tribes or nations give them the same chances to improve, and a fair start at the same time, and the result will be equally brilliant, equally productive, equally grand.

At the same time that he was making active, personal acquaintance with the free colored people, he was making actual personal acquaintance with the barbarism of slavery also. The distinct application of a whip, and the shrieks of anguish of the slave, his residence in Baltimore had taught him was nothing uncommon in that city. Such an instance had come to him while in the street where the office of the Genius was located. It was what was occuring at almost all hours of the day and in almost all parts of the town. He had not been in Baltimore a month when he saw a specimen of the brutality of slavery on the person of a negro, who had been mercilessly flogged. On his back were thirty-seven gashes made with a cowskin, while on his head were many bruises besides. It was a Sunday morning, fresh from his terrible punishment, that the poor fellow had found the editors of the Genius, who, with the compassion of brothers, took him in, dressed his wounds, and cared for him for two days. Such an experience was no new horror to Lundy, but it was doubtless Garrison's first lesson in that line, and it sank many fathoms deep into his heart.

Maryland was one of the slave-breeding States and Baltimore a slave emporium. There was enacted the whole business of slavery as a commercial enterprise. Here the human chattels were brought and here warehoused in jails and other places of storage and detention. Here they were put up at public auction, and knocked down to the highest bidder, and from here they were shipped to New Orleans, the great distributing center for such merchandise. He heard what Lundy had years before heard, the wail of captive mothers and fathers, wives, husbands and children, torn from each other; like Lundy, he felt their pang of distress ; and the iron entered his soul. He could not hold his peace in the midst of such abominations, but boldly exposed and denounced them. His indignation grew hot when he saw that Northern vessels were largely engaged in the coastwise slave-trade; and when, to his amazement, he learned that the ship Francis, owned by Francis Todd, a Newburyport merchant, had sailed for New Orleans with a gang of seventy-five slaves, his indignation burst into blaze. He blazoned the act and the name of Francis Todd in the Genius, and did verily what he had resolved to do, viz., to cover with thick infamy all who were concerned in this nefarious business, the captain as well as the owner of the ill-freighted ship. He did literally point at these men the finger of scorn. Every device known to the printer's art for concentrating the reader's attention upon particular words and sentences, Garrison made skillful use of in his articles — from the deep damnation of the heavy black capitals in which he printed the name Francis Todd, to the small caps in which appeared the words, sentenced to solitary confinement for life, and which he flanked with two terrible indices. But the articles did not need such embellishment. They were red hot branding irons without them. One can almost smell the odor of burning flesh as he reads the words:

It is no worse to fit out piratical cruisers or to engage in the foreign slave-trade, than to pursue a similar trade along our coast; and the men who have the wickedness to participate therein, for the purpose of keeping up wealth should be sentenced to solitary confinement for life; they are the enemies of their own species — highway robbers, and murderers; and their final doom will be, unless they speedily repent, to occupy the lowest depths of perdition. I know that our laws make a distinction in this matter. I know that the man who is allowed to freight his vessel with slaves at home, for a distant market, would be thought worthy of death if he should take a similar freight on the coast of Africa; but I know, too, that this distinction is absurd, and at war with the common sense of mankind, and that God and good men regard it with abhorrence.

I recollect that it was always a mystery in Newburyport how Mr. Todd contrived to make profitable voyages to New Orleans and other places, when other merchants, with as fair an opportunity to make money, and sending to the same ports at the same time invariably made fewer successful speculations. The mystery seems to be unravelled. Any man can gather up riches if he does not care by what means they are obtained.

A copy of the Genius, containing this article Garrison sent to the owner of the ship Francis. What followed made it immediately manifest that the branding irons of the reformer had burned home with scarifying effect. Mr. Todd's answer to the strictures was a suit at law against the editors of the Genius for five thousand dollars in damages. But this was not all. The Grand Jury for Baltimore indicted them for publishing a gross and malicious libel against Francis Todd and Nicholas Brown. This was at the February Term, 1830. On the first day of March following, Garrison was tried. He was ably and eloquently defended by Charles Mitchell, a young lawyer of the Baltimore Bar. But the prejudice of judge and jury rendered the verdict of guilty a foregone conclusion. April 17, 1830, the Court imposed a penalty of fifty dollars and costs, which, with the fine amounted in all to nearly one hundred dollars. The fine and costs Garrison could not pay, and he was therefore committed to jail as a common malefactor. His confinement lasted seven weeks. He did not languish during this period. His head and hands were in fact hardly ever more active than during the term of his imprisonment. Shut out by Maryland justice from work without the jail, he found and did that which needed to be done within high walls and huge. He was an extraordinary prisoner and was treated with extraordinary consideration by the Warden. He proved himself a genuine evangel to the prisoners, visiting them in their cells, cheering them by his bouyant and benevolent words, giving them what he had, a brother's sympathy, which to these illfated ones, was more than gold or silver. He indited for such of them as he deemed deserving, letters and petitions to the Governor praying their pardon; and he had the great satisfaction of seeing many of his efforts in this regard crowned with success.

But more than this his imprisonment afforded him an opportunity for a closer acquaintance with the barbarism of slavery than he could possibly have made had he lived otherwise in Baltimore. A Southern jail was not only the place of detention of offenders against social justice, but of slaves waiting for the next market-day, of recaptured fugitives waiting for their owners to reclaim them. Here they were huddled and caged, pitiful and despairing in their misery. Such scenes sickened the young reformer every day. God had opened to him the darkest chapter in the book of the negroes' wrongs. Here is a page from that black volume of oppression and cruelty, the record of which he has preserved in the following graphic narrative:

During my late incarceration in Baltimore prison, four men came to obtain a runaway slave. He was brought out of his cell to confront his master, but pretended not to know himdid not know that he had ever seen him before-could not recollect his name. Of course the master was exceedingly irritated. Don't you remember, said he, when I gave you not long since thirty-nine lashes under the apple-tree? Another time when I gave you a sound flogging in the barn? Another time when you was scourged for giving me the lie, by saying that the horse was in a good condition? Yes, replied the slave, whose memory was thus quickened, I do recollect. You have beaten me cruelly without cause; you have not given me enough to eat and drink; and I don't want to go back again. I wish you to sell me to another master. I had rather even go to Georgia than to return home!

I'll let you know, you villain, said the master, that my wishes and not yours, are to be consulted. I'll learn you how to run away again.

The other men advised him to take the black home, and cut him up in inch pieces for his impudence, obstinacy, and desertion-swearing tremendously all the while. The slave was ordered back to his cell. Then ensued the following colloquy between Garrison and the master:

G.-Sir, what right have you to that poor creature?

M.-My father left him to me.

G.-Suppose your father had broken into a bank and stolen ten thousand dollars, and safely bequeathed that as a legacy; could you conscientiously keep the money? For myself, I had rather rob any bank to an indefinite amount than kidnap a fellow-being, or hold him in bondage; the sin would be less injurious to society, and less sinful in the sight of God.

M.-Perhaps you would like to buy the slave and give him his liberty?

G.-Sir, I am a poor man; and were I ever so opulent, it would be necessary, on your part, to make out a clear title to the services of the slave before I could conscientiously make a bargaina

M.-Well, sir, I can prove from the Bible that slavery is right.

G.-Ah! that is a precious book — the rule of conduct. I have always supposed that its spirit was directly opposed to everything in the shape of fraud and oppression. However, sir, I should be glad to hear your text.

M. (hesitatingly)--Ham — Noah's curse, you know.

G. (hastily)-Oh, sir, you build on a very slender foundation. Granting even-what remains to be proved — that the Africans are the descendants of Ham, Noah's curse was a prediction of future servitude, and not an injunction to oppress. Pray, sir, is it a careful desire to fulfill the Scriptures, or to make money, that induces you to hold your fellow-men in bondage?

M. (excitedly)-Why, sir, do you really think that the slaves are beings like ourselves?-that is, I mean do you believe that they possess the same faculties and capacities as the whites?

G. (energetically)-Certainly, sir, I do not know that there is any moral or intellectual quality in the curl of the hair, or the color of the skin. I cannot conceive why a black man may not as reasonably object to my color, as I to his. Sir, it is not a black face that I detest, but a black heart-and I find it very often under a white skin.

M. (derisively)-Well, sir, how should you like to see a black man President of the United States?

G. (severely)-As to that, sir, I am a true Republican, and bow to the will of the majority. If the people prefer a black President, I should cheerfully submit; and if he be qualified for the station, may peradventure give him my vote.

M. (triumphantly)-How should you like to have a black man marry your daughter?

G. (making a home thrust and an end of the dia logue)--I am not married — I have no daughter. Sir, I am not familiar with your practices; but allow me to say, that slaveholders generally should be the last persons to affect fastidiousness on that point; for they seem to be enamored with amalgamation,

Garrison's pen was particularly busy during the term of his imprisonment. He paid his respects to the State's Attorney who prosecuted him, to the judge who condemned him, and to Francis Todd, the owner of the ship Francis. He prepared and scattered 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. Toddand 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:

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 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 reestablishing 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 coadiutor, 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 be 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 $ioo 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 of the debts incurred by the unproductiveness of the Genius.

Garrison returned to Baltimore, but he did not tarry long in that slave-ruled city. Todd's suit against him was tried after his departure, and the jury soothed the Newburyport merchant's wounded pride with a verdict for a thousand dollars. He never attempted, however, to enforce the payment of the same being content probably with the vindication, which his legal victory gave him.

Before the reformer left Baltimore he had definitely abandoned the plans looking to a revival of his interest in the Genius. He determined instead to publish a sheet devoted to the abolition of slavery under his sole management and control. This paper he proposed to call the Public Liberator, and to issue from

The providential man was not yet twenty-five. In personal appearance he was quite the reverse of his friend Lundy. Garrison was gifted with a body that matched his mind, strong, straight, sound in every part, and proportioned in every member. As he stood he was much above the medium height. His dark hair had already partially left the crown of the high dome-shaped head. His forehead combined height with breadth, which, taken in connection with the brown eyes covered with the now habitual glasses, lent to his countenance a striking air of moral serenity and elevation. Force, firmness, no ordinary self-reliance and courage found masterly expression in the rest of the face. There was through the whole physical man a nice blending of strength and delicacy of structure. The impression of fineness and finish was perhaps mainly owing to the woman-like purity and freshness of skin and color, which overspread the virile lines and features of the face from brow to chin. What one saw in that face was the quality of justice made flesh, good-will to men personified.

This characterization of the reformer's countenance may be considered absurd by some readers. But absurd it is not. People who had read his stern denunciations of slave-holding and slaveholders, and who had formed their image of the man from his hard language and their own prejudices could not recognize the original when they met him. His manner was peculiarly winning and attractive, and in personal intercourse almost instantly disarmed hostility. The even gentleness of his rich voice, his unfailing courtesy and good temper, his quick eye for harmless pleasantries, his hearty laugh, the Quakerlike calmness, deliberateness, and meekness, with which he would meet objections and argue the righteousness of his cause, his sweet reasonableness and companionableness were in strange contrast to popular misconceptions and caricatures of him. No one needed to be persuaded, who had once conversed with him, that there was no hatred or vindictiveness in his severities of language toward slaveholders. That he was no Jacobin, no enemy of society, was perceived the moment one looked into his grave, kind face, or caught the warm accents of his pacific tones, or listened to the sedate intensity, and humanity of his discourses on the enormity of American slavery as they fell from him in conversations between man and man. Here is a case in point, a typical incident in the life of the reformer; it occurred, it is true, when he was twenty-seven, but it might have occurred at twenty-five quite as well; it is narrated by Samuel J. May in his recollections of the antislavery conflict: On his way from New York to Philadelphia with Garrison, Mr. May fell into a discussion with a pro-slavery passenger on the vexed question of the day. There was the common proslavery reasoning, which May answered as well as he was able. Presently Mr. Garrison drew near the disputants, whereupon May took the opportunity to shift the anti-slavery burden of the contention to his leader's shoulders. All of his most radical and unpopular Abolition doctrines Garrison immediately proceeded to expound to his opponent. After a long conversation, says Mr. May, which attracted as many as could get within hearing, the gentleman said, courteously : I have been much interested, sir, in what you have said, and in the exceedingly frank and temperate manner in which you have treated the subject. If all Abolitionists were like you, there would be much less opposition to your enterprise. But, sir, depend upon it, that hair-brained, reckless, violent fanatic, Garrison, will damage, if he does not shipwreck, any cause. Stepping forward, I replied, Allow me, sir, to introduce you to Mr. Garrison, of whom you entertain so bad an opinion. The gentleman you have been talking with is he.

Or take Harriet Martineau's first impressions on seeing him. His aspect put to flight in an instant what prejudices his slanderers had raised in me. I was wholly taken by surprise. It was a countenance glowing with health, and wholly expressive of purity, animation and gentleness. I did not wonder at the citizen who, seeing a print of Garrison at a shop window without a name to it, went in and bought it, and framed it as the most saintlike of countenances.

The appearance of such a man on the stage of our history as a nation, at this hour, was providential. His coming was in the fulness of time. A rapid review of events anterior to the advent of Garrison will serve to place this matter more clearly before the general reader. To begin, then, at the beginning we have two ships off the American coast, the one casting anchor in Plymouth harbor, the other discharging its cargo at Jamestown. They were both freighted with human souls. But how different! Despotism landed at Jamestown, democracy at Plymouth. Here in the germ was the Southern idea, slave labor, slave institutions; and here also was the Northern idea, free labor, free institutions. Once planted they grew, each seed idea multiplying after its kind. In course of time there arose on one side an industrial system in which the plantation principle, race-rule and race-slavery, were organic centers; and, on the other, a social system in which the principle of popular power and government, the town meeting, and the common school were the ganglia of social expansion. Contrary ideas beget naturally enough contrary interests and institutions. So it is no matter for surprise that the local interests and institutions of the thirteen revolted colonies lacked homogeneity and identity. What was calculated to promote the general welfare of the Northern one, it was quite possible might work a totally opposite result in the Southern. For, indeed, while there were slaves in them all, the slave system had taken root in Southern soil only; and while on the other hand the spirit of freedom was existent in each, free labor had rooted itself in Northern ground solely.

As the war of the Revolution was an uprising against arbitrary power, and for the establishment of political liberty, it pushed easily into the foreground the larger subject of human rights. Most of the leading actors felt the inconsistency of keeping some men in bondage, when they were fighting to rid themselves of a tyranny which, in comparison to the other, was a state of honorable freedom. Their humanity condemned African slavery, and they earnestly desired its extinction. The Declaration of Independence proves to how high a level the tide of freedom rose in the colonies. The grand truths by it proclaimed the signers of that instrument did not restrict in their application to some men to the exclusion of other men. They wrote All men, and they meant exactly what they wrote. Too simply honest and great they were to mean less than their solemn and deliberate words.

On political as well as on moral grounds they desired emancipation. But there was a difficulty which at the time proved insuperable. The nation-making principle, the idea of country, was just emerging out of the nebulous civil conditions and relations of the ante-Revolutionary epoch. There was no existent central authority to reach the evil within the States except the local governments of the States respectively. And States in revolt against the central authority of the mother country would hardly be disposed to divest themselves of any part of their newly asserted right to govern themselves for the purpose of conferring the same upon any other political body. To each State, then, the question was necessarily left for settlement.

The war, during its continuance, absorbed the united resources and energies of the people and their leaders. The anti-slavery movement made accordingly but small progress. Reforms thrive only when they get a hearing. Public attention is the food on which they thrive. But precious little of this food was the Abolition cause able to snatch in those bitter years. It could not grow. It remained in the gristle --hardly more than a sentiment. But the sentiment was a seed, the promise and potency of kindlier times. With the close of the long struggle other questions arose; got the people's ears; fixed the attention of the leaders. Scant notice could emancipation extort from men who had to repair the ravages of an exhausting war, reconstruct shattered fortunes, restore civil sociciety in parts tumbling into ruinous disorder. The instinct of self-preservation was altogether too masterful for the moral starveling. It succumbed to circumstances, content to obtain an occasional sermon, an annual address, a few scattered societies to keep a human glow in the bosom of the infant Confederacy.

The Confederation failed. The formation of a more perfect union was demanded and undertaken. This transcendent task straightway thrust into the background every other enterprise and interest. The feeble activity of the freedom-making principle was checked, for the time being, by the energy of the nation-making power. They were not antagonistic forces-only in the natural order of things, the earliest stages in the evolution of the former had to come after the first steps were taken in the development of the latter. Before there could start a general movement against American slavery there must needs be an American nation. An American nation was, in the year 1787, in process of successful development. With the adoption of the Constitution, the national principle entered on a period of marvelous expansion and activity.

Let it not, however, be hastily concluded that freedom meanwhile was in total eclipse, that the antislavery sentiment was absolutely without influence. For it unquestionably inspired the Ordinance of 1787. The Northwest Territory, out of which were subsequently organized the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, was thereby, forever secured to the Northern idea, and free labor. Supplementary to this grand act was the Constitutional prohibition of the African slave-trade after the year 1808. Together they were intended to discourage the growth of slavery — the first by restricting its territorial extension, the second, by arresting its numerical increase. And without doubt they would have placed the evil in the way of ultimate extinction had other and far reaching causes not intervened to produce adverse social and political conditions.

The first of these causes, in point of time, were certain labor-saving inventions in England, which vastly enhanced the demand for raw cotton. Arkwright's invention of the spinning machine about twenty years prior to the adoption of the Constitution, perfected by the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves, and the mule of Crompton, turned Lancashire, the historian Green says, into a hive of industry. The then rapid demand for cotton operated in time as a stimulus to its production in America. Increased productivity raised the value of slave property and slave soil. But the slow and tedious hand method of separating the fiber of the cotton bulb from the seed greatly limited the ability of the Cotton States to meet and satisfy the fast growing demand of the

English manufacturers, until Eli Whitney, in 1793, by an ingenious invention solved the problem of supply for these States. The cotton gin was not long in proving itself the other half — the other hand of the spinning machine.

From that year the slave interests of the South rose in market value, and its industrial system assumed unexpected importance in the economic world. The increased production of cotton led directly to increased demand for slave labor and slave soil. The increased demand for slave labor the Constitutional provision relating to the African slave trade operated in part to satisfy. The increased demand for slave soil was likewise satisfied by the cession to the United States by Georgia and North Carolina of the Southwest Territory, with provisos practically securing it to slavery. Out of this new national territory were subsequently carved the slave States of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Slave soil unlike free soil, is incapable of sustaining a dense population. Slave labor calls for large spaces within which to multiply and prosper. The purchase of Louisiana and the acquisition of Florida met this agrarian necessity on the part of the South. Immense, unsettled areas thus fell to the lot of the slave system at the crisis of its material expansion and prosperity. The domestic slave-trade under the impetus of settling these vast regions according to the plantation principle, became an enormous and spreading industry. The crop of slaves was not less profitable than the crop of cotton. A Southern white man had but to buy a score of slaves and a few hundred acres to get rich beyond the dreams of avarice. So at least calculated the average Southern man.

This revival of slavery disappointed the humane expectation of its decline and ultimate extinction entertained by the founders of the republic. It built up instead a growing and formidable slave class, and interest in the Union. With the rise of giant slave interests, there followed the rise of a power devoted to their encouragement and protection.

Three far-reaching concessions the slave States obtained in the convention of 1787, viz., the right to import slaves from Africa until 1808; the rendition of fugitive slaves escaping into the free States, and the three-fifths slave representation clause of the Constitution-all of which added vastly to the security and value of this species of property, and as a consequence contributed to the slave revival.

The equality of the States in the upper branch of the National Legislature, taken in connection with the right of the slave States to count five slaves as three freemen in the apportionment of representatives to the lower House of Congress, gave the Southern section an almost immediate ascendency in the Federal Government. To the South was thus opened by an unexpected combination of circumstances a wide avenue for the acquisition of fabulous wealth. and to Southern public men an incomparable arena for the exercise of political abilities and leadership. An institution, which thus ministered to two of the strongest passions of mankind-avarice and ambition — was certain to excite the most intense attachment. Its safety naturally, therefore, became among the slave class an object of prime importance. Southern jealousy in this regard ultimated inevitably in Southern narrowness, Southern sectionalism, which early manifested themselves in the exclusion from lead in national affairs of Northern public men, reputed to be unfriendly to slavery. Webster as late as 1830, protested warmly against this intolerance. Like begets like. And the proscribing of anti-sl very politicians by the South, created in turn not a little sectional feeling at the North, and helped to stimulate there a consciousness of sectional differences, of antagonism of interests between the two halves of the Union.

Discontent with the original basis of the Union, which had given the South its political coign of vantage, broke out first in New England. The occasion, though not the cause, of this discontent was, perhaps, the downfall of the Federal party, whose stronghold was in the East. The commercial and industrial crisis brought on by the embargo, and which beggared, on the authority of Webster, thousands of families and hundreds of thousands of individuals fanned this Eastern dissatisfaction into almost open disaffection towards a government dominated by Southern influence, and directed by Southern statesmanship. To the preponderance of this Southern element in national legislation New England traced her misfortunes. She was opposed to the War of 1812, but was overruled to her hurt by the South. In these circumstances New England went for correcting the inequalities of the original basis of the Union, which gave to the South its undue preponderance in shaping national laws and policies. This was the purpose of the Hartford Convention, which proposed the abrogation of the slave representation clause of the Constitution, and the imposition of a check upon the admission of new States into the Union. The second proposition did not say new slave States, but new slave States was, nevertheless, intended by the Convention. Here in point of time and magnitude, was the first distinct collision of the two sets of ideas and interests of the Republic.

Following the Treaty of Ghent other and imperious questions engaged the public attention-questions of the tariff, of finance, internal improvements, national defence, a new navy, forts and fortifications. Hard times, too, engrossed an enormous share of this attention. The immediate needs and problems of the hour pushed into the background all less pressing ones. The slavery question amidst the clamor and babel of emergent and material interests, lost something of its sectional heat and character. But its fires were not extinguished, only banked as events were speedily to reveal.

The application of Missouri for admission into the Union as a slave State four years after the Hartford Convention blew to a blaze the covered embers of strife between the sections. The North was violently agitated. For the admission of a new slave State meant two more slave votes in the Senate, and an increase on the old inequitable basis of slave representation in the lower House of Congress. It meant to the Northern section indefinite Southern ascendency, prolonged Southern lead in national legislation. All the smouldering passions of the earlier period, of embargo, and non-intercourse, and the war of 1812, flamed suddenly and fiercely in the heart of the free States.

The length and bitterness of that controversy excited the gravest apprehensions for the stability of the Union. The dread of disunion led to mutual concessions, to the Missouri Compromise. The slaveholding section got its immediate claim allowed, and the free States secured the erection of a line to the north of which slavery was forever prohibited. And besides this, the admission of Maine was supposed to neutralize whatever political advantages, which would accrue to the South from the admission of Missouri as a slave State. Both sections were content, and the slavery question was thought to be permanently settled. With this final disposition of an ugly problem, the peace and permanence of the Union were viewed universally as fixed facts. Still, considering the gravity of the case, a little precaution would not go amiss. The slavery question had shaken men's faith in the durability of the republic. It was therefore adjudged a highly dangerous subject. The political physicians with one accord prescribed on the ounce-of-prevention principle, quiet, silence, and oblivion, to be administered in large and increasing doses to both sections. Mum was the word, and mum the country solemnly and suddenly became from Maine to Georgia. But, alas! beneath the ashes of this Missouri business, deep below the unnatural silence and quiet, inextinguishable fires were burning and working again to the surface of politics. In such circumstances a fresh outbreak of old animosities must occur as soon as the subterranean heat should reach the point of highest combustibility in the federal system. The tariff proved to be that point of highest combustibility.

Alexander Hamilton inaugurated the policy of giving governmental aid to infant manufactures. The wisdom of diversifying the industries of the young nation was acquiesced in by the leading statesmen of both sections. Beset as the republic then was by international forces hostile to democratic institutions, it was natural enough that the great men who presided over its early years should seek by Federal legislation to render it, as speedily and completely as possible, industrially self-dependent and selfsupporting. The war of 1812 enforced anew upon the attention of statesmen the importance of industrial independence. The war debt, together with certain governmental enterprises and expenditures growing out of the war, was largely, if not wholly, responsible for the tariff of 1816. This act dates the rise of our American system of protection. It is curious to note that Southern men were the leaders of this new departure in the national fiscal policy. Calhoun, Clay, and Lowndes were the guiding spirits of that period of industrial ferment and activity. They little dreamt what economic evils were to fall in consequence upon the South. That section was not slow to feel the unequal action of the protective principle. The character of its labor incapacitated the South from dividing the benefits of the new revenue policy with its free rival. The South of necessity was restricted to a single industry, the tillage of the earth. Slave labor did not possess the intelligence, the skill, the patience, the mechanical versatility to embark successfully in manufacturing enterprises. Free labor monopolised the protected industries, and Northern capital caught all the golden showers of fiscal legislation. What the South needed, from an economic point of view, was unrestricted access to the markets of the world for her products, and the freest competition of the world in her own markets. The limitations imposed upon the slave States by their industrial system was in itself a tremendous handicap in their struggle for an advantageous place in the New World of the nineteenth century; in their struggle with their free sisters for political leadership in the Union. But with the development of the protective principle those States fell into sore financial distress, were ground between the upper millstone of the protective system and the nether millstone of their own industrial system. Prosperity and plenty did presently disappear from that section and settled in the North. In 1828 Benton drew this dark picture of the state of the South:

In place of wealth, a universal pressure for money was felt; not enough for common expenses; the price of all property down; the country drooping and languishing; towns and cities decaying, and the frugal habits of the people pushed to the verge of universal self-denial for the preservation of their family estates.

He did not hesitate to charge to Federal legislation the responsibility for all this poverty and distress, for he proceeds to remark that:

Under this legislation the exports of the South have been made the basis of the Federal revenue. The twenty odd millions annually levied upon imported goods are deducted out of the price of their cotton, rice, and tobacco, either in the diminished prices which they receive for those staples in foreign ports, or in the increased price which they pay for the articles they have to consume at home.

A suffering people are not apt to reason clearly or justly on the causes which have brought them to indigence. They feel their wretchedness and reach out for a victim. And the law-making power usually happens to be that victim. As the distress of the South increased, the belief that Federal legislation was responsible for it increased likewise. The spread and deepening of this conviction in the Southern States precipitated among them an ominous crisis in their attachment to the Union. Nullification and an embittered sectionalism was the hateful legacy bequeathed to the republic by the tariff controversy. It left the South in a hyper-sensitive state in all matters relating to her domestic interests. It left the North in a hyper-sensitive condition on all matters touching the peace and stability of the Union. The silence and oblivion policy on the subject of slavery was renewed with tenfold intensity. Ulysses-like the free States bound themselves, their right of free speech, and their freedom of the press on this subject, for fear of the Siren voices which came thrilling on every breeze from the South. Quiet was the word, and quiet the leaders in Church and State sought to enforce upon the people, to the end that the vision of States dissevered, discordant, belligerent, of a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched it may be, in fraternal blood, might not come to pass for their glorious Union.

The increasing friction and heat between the sections during twenty-five years, had effected every portion of the Federal system, and created conditions favorable to a violent explosion. Sectional differences of a political and industrial complexion, forty years had sufficed to develop. Sectional differences of a moral and social character forty years had also sufficed to generate. To kindle all those differences, all that mass of combustible feelings and forces into a general conflagration a spark only was wanted. And out of the glowing humanity of one man the spark was suddenly struck.

It is curious to note that in the year 1829, the very year in which William Lloyd Garrison landed in Baltimore, and began the editorship of The Genius of Universal Emancizpation, the American Convention, or national assembly of the old State societies for the abolition of slavery, fell into desuetude. It was as if Providence was clearing the debris of an old dispensation out of the way of the new one which his prophet was beginning to herald, as if guarding against all possibility of having the new wine, then soon to be pressed from the moral vintage of the nation, put into old bottles. The Hour for a new movement against slavery had come, and with its arrival the Man to hail it had also come.

Other men had spoken and written against slavery, and labored for the freedom of the slave before Garrison had thought upon the subject at all.

After leaving Baltimore, Garrison clung pathetically to the belief that, if he told what he had seen of the barbarism of slavery to the North, he would be certain to enlist the sympathy and aid of its leaders, political and ecclesiastical, in the cause of emancipation. The sequel to his efforts in this regard proved that he was never more mistaken in his life. He addressed letters to men like Webster, Jeremiah Mason, Lyman Beecher, and Dr. Channing, holding up to their view the tremendous iniquity of the land, and begging them, ere it should be too late, to interpose their great power in the Church and State, to save our country from the terrible calamities which the sin of slavery was bringing upon us. But there is no evidence that this appeal produced the feeblest ripple in the lives of the two first; and upon the two last it was equally barren of result. Dr. Channing, indeed, did not take the trouble to hear any one of the three lectures of the young philanthropist. Dr. Beecher, however, was at the pains to be present at the first lecture given at Julien Hall. But he betrayed no real interest in the subject. He had no time to devote to anti-slvavery, had, in fine, too many irons in the fire already. To this impotent apology of the great preacher of immediatism in his dealing

(I o) with all kinds of sin, except the sin of slave-holding, for not espousing the cause of the slave, Mr. Garrison made his famous retort:

Then you had better let all your irons burn than neglect your duty to the slave.

What more did this poor and friendless man, with his one idea and his harsh language, know of duties and dangers than Daniel Webster, who was busy saving the Union; than Lyman Beecher, who was not less busy saving souls; or than Dr. Channing, who was quite as busy saving liberalism in matters of religion? What folly and presumption it must have seemed to these mighty men this attempt of Garrison to impress upon them a proper sense of their obligations to their country.

Your zeal, said Dr. Beecher to him, with unlimited condescension of tone-your zeal is commendable, but you are misguided. If you will give up your fanatical notions and be guided by us (the clergy) we will make you the Wilberforce of America.

And so what was the young man, burning up with his one idea, to do in presence of such a failure to win these men to the leadership of the anti-slavery movement? He could not hold his peace; his message he was compelled to deliver in the ears of the nation whether its leaders would hear or forbear. Perhaps the common people would hearken to what the wise and powerful had rejected. At any rate they should hear what was resting upon his soul with the weight of a great woe, the force of a supreme command. But how was he, penniless and friendless, to roll from his bosom the burden which was crushing it; to pause long enough in the battle for bread to fight the battle of the slave? Ah, if he had money! but no money did he have, not a dollar in his pocket! Oh, if he had rich friends who would dedicate their riches to the preaching of the gospel of freedom! but alas! rich friends there were none. Oh, if he could cry to the Church for help in this hour of his need! but it was slowly dawning on him that not from the Church would help come to his cause; for a grievous thing had happened to the Church. The slave gorgon sat staring from the pews, and turning the pulpits to stone, turning also to stone the hearts of the people.

Undismayed by the difficulties which were closing in around him, Garrison resolutely set himself to accomplish his purpose touching the establishment of a weekly paper devoted to the abolition of slavery. He had promised in his Prospectus to issue the first number of the Public Liberator as soon as subscriptions thereto may authorize the attempt. But had he waited for the fulfillment of this condition, the experiment could never have been tried. When subscribers did not come in, the paper, he determined should go forth all the same. But there are some things in the publication of a paper which no man can dispense with, which indispensable somethings are: types, a press, an office, and an assistant. All these requisites were wanting to the man whose sole possession seemed an indomitable will, a faith in himself, and in the righteousness of his cause, which nothing could shake, nor disappointment nor difficulty, however great, was able to daunt or deter. To such an unconquerable will, to such an invincible faith obstacles vanish; the impossible becomes the attainable. As Garrison burned to be about his work, help came to him from a man quite as penniless and friendless as himself. The man was Isaac Knapp, an old companion of his in Newburyport, who had also worked with him in the office of the Genius, in Baltimore. He was a practical printer, and was precisely the sort of assistant that the young reformer needed at this juncture in the execution of his purpose; a man like himself acquainted with poverty, and of unlimited capacity for the endurance of unlimited hardships. Together they worked out the financial problems which blocked the way to the publication of the paper. The partners took an office in Merchants' Hall building, then standing on the corner of

Archimedes with his lever desired a place to stand that he might move the world of matter. Garrison with his paper, having found a place for his feet, demonstrated speedily his ability to push from its solid base the world of mind. His plan was very simple, viz., to reveal slavery as it then existed in its naked enormity, to the conscience of the North,to be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. And so, week after week, he packed in the columns of the Liberator facts, the most damning facts, against slaveholders, their cruelty and tyranny. He painted the woes of the slaves as if he, too, had been a slave. For the first time the masters found a man who rebuked them as not before had they been rebuked. Others may have equivocated, but this man called things by their proper names, a spade, a spade, and sin, sin. Others may have contented themselves with denunciations of the sins and with excuses for the sinner, as a creature of circumstances, the victim of ancestral transgressions, but this man offered no excuses for the slave-holding sinner. Him and his sin he denounced in language, which the Eternal puts only into the mouths of His prophets. It was, as he had said, On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. The strength and resources of his mother-tongue seemed to him wholly

(I I 8) inadequate for his needs, to express the transcendent wickedness of slave-holding. All the harsh, the stern, the terrible and tremendous energies of the English speech he drew upon, and launched at slaveholders. Amid all of this excess of the enthusiast there was the method of a calculating mind. He aimed to kindle a conflagration because he had icebergs to melt. The public shall not be imposed upon, he replied to one of his critics, and men and things shall be called by their right names. I retract nothing, I blot out nothing. My language is exactly such as suits me; it will displease many, I know ; to displease them is my intention. He was philosopher enough to see that he could reach the national conscience only by exciting the national anger. It was not popular rage, which he feared but popular apathy. If he could goad the people to anger on the subject of slavery he would soon be rid of their apathy. And so week after week he piled every sort of combustible material, which he was able to collect on board the Liberator and lighting it all, sent the fiery messenger blazing among the icebergs of the Union. Slaveholders were robbers, murderers, oppressors; they were guilty of all the sins of the decalogue, were in a word the chief of sinners. At the same moment that the reformer denied their right of property in the slave, he attacked their character also, held them up in their relation of masters to the reprobation of the nation and of mankind as monsters of injustice and inhumanity. The tone which he held toward them, steadily, without shadow of change, was the tone of a righteous man toward the workers of iniquity. The indifference, the apathy, the pro-slavery sympathy and prejudice of the free States rendered the people of the North hardly less culpable. They were working iniquity with the people of the South. This was the long, sharp goad, which the young editor thrust in between the bars of the Union and stirred the guilty sections to quick and savage outbursts of temper against him and the bitter truths which he preached. Almost directly the proofs came to him that he was heard at the South and at the North alike. Angry growls reached his ears in the first month of the publication of the Liberator from some heartless New England editors in denunciation of his violent and intemperate attacks on slaveholders. The Journal, published at Louisville, Kentucky, and edited by George D. Prentice, declared that, some of his opinions with regard to slavery in the United States are no better than lunacy. The American Spectator published at the seat of the National Government, had hoped that the good sense of the late talented and persecuted junior editor of the Genius, would erelong withdraw him even from the side of the Abolitionists. And from farther South the growl which the reformer heard was unmistakably ferocious. It was from the State of South Carolina and the Camden Journal, which pronounced the Liberator a scandalous and incendiary budget of sedition. These were the beginning of the chorus of curses, which soon were to sing their serpent songs about his head. Profane and abusive letters from irate slaveholders and their Northern sympathisers began to pour into the sanctum of the editor. Within a few months after the first issue of the Liberator the whole aspect of the world without had changed toward him. Foes are on my right hand, and on my left, he reported to some friends. The tongue of detraction is busy against me. I have no communion with the world — the world none with me. The timid, the lukewarm, the base, affect to believe that my brains are disordered, and my words the ravings of a maniac. Even many of my friends — they who have grown up with me from my childhood — are transformed into scoffers and enemies. The apathy of the press, and the apathy of the people were putting forth signs that the long winter of the land was passing away.

To a colored man belongs the high honor of having been the courier avant of the slavery agitation. This man was David Walker, who lived in Boston, and who published in 1829 a religio-political discussion of the status of the negroes of the United States in four articles. The wretchedness of the blacks in consequence of slavery he depicted in dark and bitter language. Theodore Parker, many years afterward, said that the negro was deficient in vengeance, the lowest form of justice. Walker's appeal evinced no deficiency in this respect in its author. The pamphlet found its way South, and was the cause of no little commotion among the master-class. It was looked upon as an instigation to servile insurrection. The Appeal was proscribed, and a price put upon the head of the author. Garrison deprecated the sanguinary character of the book. For he himself was the very reverse of Walker. Garrison was a full believer in the literal doctrine of non-resistance as enunciated by Jesus. He abhorred all war, and physical collisions of every description, as wicked and inhuman. He sang to the slave; Not by the sword shall your deliverance be; Not by the shedding of your master's blood, Not by rebellion-or foul treachery, Upspringing suddenly, like swelling flood; Revenge and rapine ne'er did bring forth good. God's time is best!-nor will it long delay; Even now your barren cause begins to bud, And glorious shall the fruit be!-watch and pray, For lo! the kindling dawn that ushers in the day.

He considered Walker's appeal a most injudicious publication, yet warranted by the creed of an independent people. He saw in our Fourth-of-July demonstrations, in our glorification of force as an instrument for achieving liberty, a constant incentive to the slaves to go and do likewise. If it was right for the men of 1776 to rise in rebellion against their mother-country, it surely could not be wrong were the slaves to revolt against their oppressors, and strike for their freedom. It certainly did not lie in the mouth of a people, who apotheosized force, to condemn them. What was sauce for the white man's goose was sauce for the black man's gander.

The South could not distinguish between this sort of reasoning, and an express and positive appeal to the slaves to cut the throats of their masters. The contents of the Liberator were quite as likely to produce a slave insurrection as was Walker's appeal, if the paper was allowed to circulate freely among the slave population. It was, in fact, more dangerous to the lives and interests of slaveholders by virtue of the pictorial representation of the barbarism and abomination of the peculiar institution, introduced as a feature of the Liberator in its seventeenth number, in the shape of a slave auction, where the slaves are chattels, and classed with horses and other cattle, and where the tortures of the whipping-post are in vigorous operation. Here was a message, which every slave, however ignorant and illiterate could read. His instinct would tell him, wherever he saw the pictured horror, that a friend, not an enemy, had drawn it, but for what purpose? What was the secret meaning, which he was to extract from a portrayal of his woes at once so real and terrible. Was it to be a man, to seize the knife, the torch, to slay and burn his way to the rights and estate of a man? Garrison had put no such bloody import into the cut. It was designed not to appeal to the passions of the slaves, but to the conscience of the North. But the South did not so read it, was incapable, in fact, of so reading it. What it saw was a shockingly realistic representation of the wrongs of the slaves, the immediate and inevitable effect of which upon the slaves would be to incite them to sedition, to acts of revenge. Living as the slaveholders were over mines of powder and dynamite, it is not to be marveled at that the first flash of danger filled them with apprehension and terror. The awful memories of San Domingo flamed red and dreadful against the dark background of every Southern plantation and slave community. In the belly of the Liberator's picture were many San Domingos. Extreme fear is the beginning of madness; it is, indeed, a kind of madness. The South was suddenly plunged into a state of extreme fear toward which the Liberator and Walker's appeal were hurrying it, by one of those strange accidents or coincidences of history.

This extraordinary circumstance was the slave insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, in the month of August, 1831. The leader of the uprising was the now famous Nat Turner. Brooding over the wrongs of his race for several years, he conceived that he was the divinely appointed agent to redress them. He was cast in the mould of those rude heroes, who spring out of the sides of oppression as isolated trees will sometimes grow out of clefts in a mountain. With his yearning to deliver his people, there mingled not a little religious frenzy and superstition. Getting his command from Heaven to arise against the masters, he awaited the sign from this same source of the moment for beginning the work of destruction. It came at last and on the night of August 21st; he and his confederates made a beginning by massacring first his own master, Mr. Joseph Travis, and his entire family. Turner's policy was remorseless enough. It was to spare no member of the white race, whether man, woman, or child, the very infant at the mother's breast was doomed to the knife, until he was able to collect such an assured force as would secure the success of the enterprise. This purpose was executed with terrible severity and exactness. All that night the work of extermination went on as the slave leader and his followers passed like fate from house to house, and plantation to plantation, leaving a wide swathe of death in their track. Terror filled the night, terror filled the State, the most abject terror clutched the bravest hearts. The panic was pitiable, horrible. James McDowell, one of the leaders of the Old Dominion, gave voice to the awful memories and sensations of that night, in the great antislavery debate, which broke out in the Virginia Legislature, during the winter afterward. One of the legislators, joined to his idol, and who now, that the peril had passed, laughed at the uprising as a petty affair. McDowell retorted-Was that a petty affair, which erected a peaceful and confiding portion of the State into a military camp, which outlawed from pity the unfortunate beings whose brothers had offended; which barred every door, penetrated every bosom with fear or suspicion, which so banished every sense of security from every man's dwelling, that let but a hoof or horn break upon the silence of the night, and an aching throb would be driven to the heart? The husband would look to his weapon, and the mother would shudder and weep upon her cradle. Was it the fear of Nat Turner and his deluded, drunken handful of followers which produced such effects? Was it this that induced distant counties, where the very name of Southampton was strange, to arm and equip for a struggle? No, sir, it was the suspicion eternally attached to the slave himself, --a suspicion that a Nat Turner might be in every family, that the same bloody deed might be acted over at any time and in any place, that the materials for it were spread through the land, and were always ready for a like explosion.

Sixty-one whites and more than a hundred blacks perished in this catastrophe. The news produced a profound sensation in the Union. Garrison himself, as he records, was horror-struck at the tidings. Eight months before he had in a strain of prophecy penetrated the future and caught a glimpse of just such an appalling tragedy:

After the Southampton insurrection the slavery agitation increased apace, and the Liberator and its editor became instantly objects of dangerous notoriety in it. The eyes of the country were irresistibly drawn to them. They were at the bottom of the uprising, they were instigating the slaves to similar outbreaks. The savage growlings of a storm came thrilling on every breeze from the South, and wrathful mutterings against the agitator and his paper grew thenceforth more distinct and threatening throughout the free States. October 15, 1831, Garrison records in the Liberator that he is constantly receiving from the slave States letters filled with the most diabolical threats and indecent language. In the same month Georgetown, S. C., in a panic made it unlawful for a free colored person to take the Liberator from the post-office. In the same month the Charleston Mercury announced that gentlemen of the first respectability at Columbia had offered a reward of fifteen hundred dollars for the arrest and conviction of any white person circulating the Liberator, Walker's pamphlet, or any other publication of seditious tendency. In Georgia the same symptoms of fright were exhibited. In the same month the grand jury at Raleigh, N. C., indicted William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp for circulating the Liberator in that county. It was even confidently expected that a requisition would be made by the Executive of the State upon the Governor of Massachusetts for their arrest, when they would be tried under a law, which made their action felony. Whipping and imprisonment for the first offence, and death, without benefit of clergy, for the second. Governor Floyd said in his message to the Virginia Legislature in December that there was good cause to suspect that the plans of the Southampton massacre were designed and matured by unrestrained fanatics in some of the neighboring States. Governor Hamilton sent to the South Carolina Legislature in the same month an excited message on the situation. He was in entire accord with the Virginia Executive as to the primary and potent agencies which led to the slave uprising in Virginia. They were incendiary newspapers and other publications put forth in the nonslave-holding States, and freely circulated within the limits of Virginia. As specimens of incendiary newspapers and other publications, put forth in the non-slave-holding States, the South Carolina official sent along with his message, copies of the Liberator and of Mr. Garrison's address to the Free people of color, for the enlightenment of the members of the Legislature. But it remained for Georgia to cap the climax of madness when her Legislature resolved: That the sum of five thousand dollars be, and the same is hereby appropriated, to be paid to any person or persons who shall arrest, bring to trial and prosecute to conviction, under the laws of this State, the editor or publisher of a certain paper called theLiberator, published in the town of Boston and State of Massachusetts; or who shall arrest and bring to trial and prosecute to conviction, under the laws of this State, any other person or persons who shall utter, publish, or circulate within the limits of this State said paper called the Liberator, or any other paper, circular, pamphlet, letter, or address of a seditious character. This extraordinary resolve was signed Dec. 26, 1831, by Wilson Lumpkin, Governor. The whole South was in a state of terror. In its insane fright it would have made short shrift of the editor of the Liberator, had he by accident, force, or fraud have fallen into the clutches of its laws. The Georgia reward of five thousand dollars was as Mr. Garrison put it, a bribe to kidnappers. The Southern method of dealing with the agitation within the slave States was violent and effective. There could be no agitation after the agitators were abolished. And the Southern method was to abolish the agitators.

The suppression of Abolitionism within the slave States was no difficult matter, but its suppression at the North was a problem of a wholly different nature, as the South was not long in finding out. It would not understand why its violent treatment of the disease within its jurisdiction could not be prescribed as a remedy by the non-slave-holding half of the Union within its borders. And so the South began to call loudly and fiercely for the suppression of a movement calculated to incite the slaves to insubordination and rebellion. This demand of the South had its influence at the North. Such newspapers as the National Intelligencer, and the Boston Courier suggested amendments to the laws whereby the publication of incendiary writings in the free States might be prohibited. The latter journal allowed that under the criminal code of Massachusetts every man has a right to advocate Abolition, or conspiracy, or murder; for he may do all these without breaking our laws, although in any Southern State public justice and public safety would require his punishment.

But, the editor goes on to remark, if we have no laws upon the subject, it is because the exigency was not anticipated . . . Penal statutes against treasonable and seditious publications are necessary in all communities. We have them for our own protection ; if they should include provisions for the protection of our neighbors it would be no additional encroachment upon the liberty of the press. The Governors of Virginia and Georgia remonstrated with Harrison Gray Otis, who was Mayor of Boston in the memorable year of 1831, against an incendiary newspaper published in Boston, and, as they alleged, thrown broadcast among their plantations, inciting to insurrection and its horrid results. As a lawyer Mayor Otis, however, perceived the intrinsic, if not insuperable obstacles to legislative enactments made to prevent crimes from being consummated beyond the local jurisdiction. But the South was not seeking a legal opinion as to what it could or could not do. It demanded, legal or illegal,that Garrison and the Liberator be suppressed. To the Boston mayor the excitement over the editor and his paper seemed like much ado about nothing The cause appeared to his supercilious mind altogether inadequate to the effect. And so he set to work to reduce the panic by exposing the vulgarity and insignificance of the object, which produced it. That he might give the Southern bugaboo its quietus, he directed one of his deputies to inquire into a publication, of which no member of the city government, nor any person, of his honor's acquaintance, had ever heard. The result of this inquiry Mayor Otis reported to the Southern functionaries.

Some time afterward, he wrote, it was reported to me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colors.

With this bare bodkin Harrison Gray Otis thought to puncture the Southern panic. But the slaveholders had correcter notions of the nature and tendency of the Abolition enterprise than had the Boston mayor. They had a strange, an obstinate presentiment of disaster from the first instant that the Liberator loomed upon their horizon. It was a battery whose guns, unless silenced, would play havoc with Southern interests and the slave system; ergo, the paper must be suppressed; ergo, its editor must be silenced or destroyed. And so when Otis, from his serene height, assured them of his belief that the new fanaticism had not made, nor was likely to make, proselytes among the respectable classes of our people, they continued to listen to their fears, and to cry the louder for the suppression of the incendiary newspaper published in Boston.

The editor of that paper never flinched before the storm of malignity which was gathering about his head. He pursued the even tenor of his way, laboring at the case more than fourteen hours every day, except Sundays, upon the paper, renewing, week after week, his assaults upon the citadel of the great iniquity, giving no quarter to slave-holding sinners, but carrying aloft the banner of immediate and Uncon-Ditional Emancipation. Otis had looked to numbers and respectability as his political barometer and cue; but when, after diligent search with official microscopes, he failed to observe the presence of either in connection with this new fanaticism, wise man that he was, he turned over and renewed his slumbers on the edge of a volcano whose ominous rumbling the Southern heart had heard and interpreted aright. He was too near to catch the true import of the detonations of those subterranean forces which were sounding, week after week, in the columns of the Liberator. They seemed trivial, harmless, contemptible, like the toy artillery of children bombarding Fort Independence. Garrison's moral earnestness and enthusiasm seemed to the Boston mayor like the impotent rage of a man nursing memories of personal injuries suffered at the South.

If there was panic in the South, there was none in the office of the Liberator. Unterrified by the commotion which his composing-stick was producing near and far, he laughed to scorn the abuse and threats of his enemies. When the news of the reward of the State of Georgia for the abduction of his person reached him, he did not quail, great as was his peril, but boldly replied:

Of one thing we are sure: all Southern threats and rewards will be insufficient to deter us from pursuing the work of emancipation. As citizens of the United States we know our rights and dare maintain them. We have committed no crime, but are expending our health, comfort, and means for the salvation of our country, and for the interests and security of infatuated slaveholders, as well as for the relief of the poor slaves.

Archimedes with his lever had moved the world. Archimedes in a small chamber, unfurnitured and mean, had set a world of pro-slavery passions and prejudices spinning away into space: Such earnest natures are the fiery pith, The compact nucleus, 'round which systems grow; Mass after mass becomes inspired therewith, And whirls impregnate with the central glow.

Help came but slowly to the reformer. With a single instrument he had stirred the nation, as no other man had done, on the slavery question. He had thrown the South into widespread excitement, and thawed the apathy of the North into widespread attention. He had won an almost instant hearing for his cause. But he knew that this was not enough. Effective as he had shown the weapon of the press to be, it alone was unequal to the conduct of prolonged agitation. And prolonged agitation Garrison clearly apprehended was to be the price of abolition. Back of him and the Liberator he needed an organized force, coadjutors like Aaron and Hur to hold up his arms during the mighty conflict on which he had now entered with the slave interests of the country. Those interests were organized, and because they were organized they were powerful. The sentiment of freedom he determined to organize and to render it thereby invincible. To organized wrong he designed to oppose organized right, confident that organized right would prevail in the end. He had knowledge of the utility of temperance societies in advancing the cause of sobriety among the people. He had learned from Lundy how much he had relied upon the union of men as anti-slavery helps. Garrison determined to summon to his side the powerful agency of an anti-slavery society devoted to immediate and unconditional emancipation. He had already made converts; he had already a small following. At Julien Hall, on the occasion of his first lecture on the subject of slavery, he had secured three remarkable men to the movement, viz., Rev. Samuel J. May, then a young Unitarian minister, Samuel E. Sewall, a young member of the Bar, and A. Bronson Alcott, a sage even in his early manhood. They had all promised him aid and comfort in the great task which he had undertaken. A little later two others, quite as remarkable as those first three were drawn to the reformer's side, and abetted him in the treason to iniquity, which he was prosecuting through the columns of the Liberator with unrivaled zeal and devotion. These disciples were Ellis Grey Loring and David Lee Child. They were a goodly company, were these five conspirators, men of intellect and conscience, of high family and social connections, of brilliant attainments and splendid promises for the future. To this number must be added a sixth, Oliver Johnson, who was at the time editing The Christian Soldier, disciple of Garrison then, and ever after his devoted friend. The early promises of this noble half dozen friends of the slave were more than fulfilled in after years. Often to the dingy room under the eaves in Merchants' Hall they climbed to carry aid and comfort to one poor, unlearned young man, and to sit at his feet in this cradle-room of the new movement. It was there in communion with the young master that suggestions looking to the formation of an anti-slavery society, were doubtless first thrown out.

It was not all clear sailing for the editor of the Liberator even with such choice spirits. They did not always carry aid and comfort to him, but differences of opinions sometimes as well. He did not sugar-coat enough the bitter truth which he was telling to the nation. Some of them would have preferred The Safety Lamp to the Liberator as a title less likely to offend the prejudices of many good people. Some again objected to the pictorial heading of the paper as an altogether unwise proceeding, and positively mischievous. He had the same experience when the formation of an Abolition society was under consideration. He was confronted with this benevolent aversion to giving offence by calling things by their right names. But much as he desired to have his friends and followers organized for associated action, where a principle was at stake he was with them as with slavery itself absolutely inflexible and uncompromising. He was for organizing on the principle of immediate emancipation. A few deemed that ground too radical and revolutionary, and were for ranging themselves under the banner of Gradualism, thinking to draw to their ranks a class of people, who would be repelled by Immediatism. But Garrison was unyielding, refused to budge an inch to conciliate friend or foe — not even such stanch supporters as were Sewall and Loring, who supplied him again and again with money needed to continue the publication of the Liberator. No, he was right and they were wrong, and they, not he, ought accordingly to yield. The contention between the leader and his disciples was not what was expedient, but what was right. It was on the part of the leader the assertion of a vital principle, and on this ground he was pledged against retreat. The mountain could not go to Mahomet, therefore Mahomet must needs go to the mountain. Garrison could not abandon his position, wherefore in due time Loring, Child, and Sewall surrendered theirs. Finely has Lowell expressed this righteous stubborness, and steadfastness to principle in three stanzas of his poem entitled, The day of small things, and which have such an obvious lesson for our own times that I shall venture to quote them in this place: The day of small thingsWho is it will not dare himself to trust? Who is it hath not strength to stand alone? Who is it thwarts and bilks the inward must? He and his works, like sand from earth are blown. Men of a thousand shifts and wiles look here! See one straightforward conscience put in pawn To win a world! See the obedient sphere By bravery's simple gravitation drawn! Shall we not heed the lesson taught of old, And by the Present's lips repeated still, In our own single manhood to be bold, Fortressed in conscience and impregnable will?

The history of the making of this first society is an interesting story. There were four meetings in all before it was found possible to complete the work of its organization. These meetings extended over a space of nearly three months, so obstinate were a minority against committing the proposed society to the principle of immediate emancipation. The very name which was to be given to the association provoked debate and disagreement. Some were for christening it Philo-African, while Garrison would no such milk-and-water title, but one which expressed distinctly and graphically the real character of the organization, viz., New England Anti-slavery Society. He would sail under no false or neutral colors, but beneath the red flag of open and determined hostility to slavery. It should be a sign which no one could possibly mistake. The first meeting was held at the office of Samuel E. Sewall, November 13, 1831. At the third meeting, convened New Year's evening of 1832, which was the first anniversary of the publication of the Liberator, the work of organization was finished, with a single important exception, viz., the adoption of the preamble to the constitution. The character of the preamble would fix the character of the society. Therefore that which was properly first was made to come last. The fourth meeting took place on the night of January 6th in the African Baptist Church on what was then Belknap but now known as

Garrison's Abolitionism was of the most radical character. It went the whole length of the humanity of the colored race, and all that that implied. They were, the meanest members, whether bond or free, his brothers and his sisters. From the first he regarded them as bone of his bQne and blood of his blood, as children with him of a common father. Poor and enslaved and despised to be sure, wronged by all men, and contemned by all men, but for that very reason they were deserving of his most devoted love and labor. He never looked down upon them as wanting in any essential respect the manhood which was his. They were men and as such entitled to immediate emancipation. They were besides entitled to equality of civil and political rights in the republic, entitled to equality and fraternity in the church, equality and fraternity at the North, equality and fraternity always and everywhere. This is what he preached, this is what he practiced. In not a single particular was he ever found separating himself from his brother in black, saying to him thus far but no farther. He never drew the line in public or private between him and the people whose cause was his cause — not even socially. He went into their homes and was in all things one with them. He forgot that he was white, forgot that they were black, forgot the pride of race, forgot the stigma of race too in the tie of human kinship which bound him to them. If he had what they did not possess, the rights of a man, the civil and political position of a man in the State, the equality of a brother in the church, it could not make him feel better than they, it filled him instead with a righteous sense of wrong, a passionate sympathy, a supreme desire and determination to make his own rights the measure of theirs.

I lose sight of your present situation, he said in his address before Free People of Color, and look at it only in futurity. I imagine myself surrounded by educated men of color, the Websters, and Clays, and Hamiltons, and Dwights, and Edwardses of the day. I listen to their voice as judges and representatives, and rulers of the people — the whole people. This glowing vision was not the handiwork of a rhetorician writing with an eye to its effect upon his hearers. The ardent hope of the reformer was rather the father of the golden dream.

This practical recognition of the negro as a man and a brother was the exact opposite of the treatment which was his terrible lot in the country. Never in all history was there a race more shamefully oppressed by a dominant race than were the blacks by the whites of America. Held as slaves in the South, they were stamped as social outcasts at the North. There was no one, however mean or vicious, who if he possessed a white skin, was not treated more humanely than were they. In the most enlightened of the free States they were discriminated against by public laws and proscribed by public opinion. They were in a word pariahs of the republic. They were shut out from all the common rights, and privileges and opportunities enjoyed by the lowest of the favored race. They were denied equality in the public school. The principle of popular education had no application to a class which was not of the people, a class which the common sentiment of a Christian nation had placed at the zero point of political values, and meant to keep forever at that point. Entrance to the trades were barred to the blacks. What did they want with such things where there was no white trash so forgetful of his superiority as to consent to work by their side. Nowhere were they allowed the same traveling accommodations as white men, and they were everywhere excluded from public inns. Neither wealth nor refinement was able to procure them admission into other than Jim Crow cars. If heart-sick at the outrages by every one heaped upon them they turned for consolation to the house of God, even there the spirit of proscription and caste prejudice met them, and pointed to the negro pew where they sat corraled from the congregation as if they had no equal share in the salvation which the pulpit preached. Everywhere the white man had the right of way, even on the highway to heaven! And in no place was the negro made to feel the prejudice against his color more gallingly than in churches arrogating the name of Christian. He had no rights on earth, he had none in trying to get into the bosom of the founder of Christianity, which the white sinners or saints were bound to respect. Even the liberty-loving Quakers of Philadelphia were not above the use of the negro seat in their meetings. Somehow they discerned that there was a great gulf separating in this life at least the white from the black believer. That God had made of one blood all nations of men, St. Paul had taught, but the American church had with one accord in practice drawn the line at the poor despised colored man. He was excluded from ecclesiastical equality, for he was different from other men for whom Christ died. The Bible declared that man was made but a little lower than the angels; the American people in their State and Church supplemented this sentiment by acts which plainly said that the negro was made but a little above the brute creation.

Here are instances of the length to which the prejudice against color carried the churches in those early years of the anti-slavery movement:

In 1830, a colored man, through a business transaction with a lessee of one of the pews in Park Street Church, came into possession of it. Thinking to make the best use of his opportunity to obtain religious instruction for himself and family from this fountain of orthodoxy, the black pew-holder betook him, one Sunday, to Brimstone corner. But he was never permitted to repeat the visit. Brimstone corner could not stand him another Lord's day, and thereupon promptly expelled him and his family out of its midst. The good deacons displayed their capacity for shielding their flock from consorting with niggers, by availing themselves of a technicality to relet the pew to a member who was not cursed with a dark skin. On another Lord's day, in another stronghold of Boston Christianity, Oliver Johnson ran the battery of indignant frowns of a large number of the congregation for daring to take a fellow-Christian with a skin not colored like his own into his pew, to listen to Dr. Beecher. The good people of the old Baptist meeting-house, at Hartford, Conn., had evidently no intention of disturbing the heavenly calm of their religious devotions by so much as a thought of believers with black faces; for by boarding up the negro pews in front and leaving only peep-holes for their occupants, they secured themselves from a sight of the obnoxious creatures, while Jehovah, who is no respecter of persons, was in His holy place. Incredible as it may seem, a church in the town of Stoughton, Mass., to rid itself of even a semblance of Christian fellowship and equality with a colored member, did actually cut the floor from under the colored member's pew!

These cruel and anti-Christian distinctions in the churches affected Garrison in the most painful manner. He says:

I never can look up to these wretched retreats for my colored brethren without feeling my soul overwhelmed with emotions of shame, indignation, and sorrow.

He had such an intimate acquaintance with members of this despised caste in Boston and Philadelphia, and other cities, and appreciated so deeply their intrinsic worth and excellence, as men and brethren, that he felt their insults and injuries as if they were done to himself. He knew that beneath many a dark skin he had found real ladies and gentlemen, and he knew how sharper than a serpent's tooth to them was the American prejudice against their color. In 1832, just after a visit to Philadelphia, where he was the guest of Robert Purvis, and had seen much of the Fortens, he wrote a friend:

I wish you had been with me in Philadelphia to see what I saw, to hear what I heard, and to experience what I felt in associating with many colored families. There are colored men and women, young men and young ladies, in that city, who have few superiors in refinement, in moral worth, and in all that makes the human character worthy of admiration and praise.

Strange to say, notwithstanding all their merits and advancement, the free people of color received nothing but disparagement and contempt from eminent divines like Dr. Leonard W. Bacon and the emissaries of the Colonization Society. They were the most abandoned wretches on the face of the earth ; they were all that is vile, loathsome, and dangerous ; they were more degraded and miserable than the slaves, and ad infinitum through the whole gamut of falsehood and traduction. It was human for the American people to hate a class whom they had so deeply wronged, and altogether human for them to justify their atrocious treatment by blackening before the world the reputation of the said class. That this was actually done is the best of all proofs of the moral depravity of the nation which slavery had wrought.

Garrison's vindication of the free people of color in Exeter Hall, London, on July 13, 1833, from this sort of detraction and villification is of historic value:

Sir,

There was an earnest desire on the part of the free people of color to raise the level of their class in the Union. At a convention held by them in Philadelphia, in 1831, they resolved upon a measure calculated to make up, to some extent, the deprivations which their children were suffering by being excluded from the higher schools of learning in the land. So they determined to establish a college on the manuallabor system for the education of colored youth. They appealed for aid to their benevolent friends, and fixed upon New Haven as the place to build their institution. Arthur Tappan, with customary beneficence, purchased several acres of land, in the southerly part of the city, and made arrangements for the erection of a suitable building, and furnishing it with needful supplies, in a way to do honor to the city and country.

The school, however, was never established owing to the violent hostility of the citizens, who with the Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council resolved in public meeting to resist the establishment of the proposed college in this place by every lawful means.

The free people of color were derided because of their ignorance by their persecutors, but when they and their friends proposed a plan to reduce that ignorance, their persecutors bitterly opposed its execution. New Haven piety and philanthropy, as embodied in the Colonization Society, were not bent on the education of this class but on its emigration to the coast of Africa solely. In such sorry contradictions and cruelties did American prejudice against color involve American Christianity and humanity.

This outrage was perpetrated in 1831. Two years afterward Connecticut enacted altogether the most shameful crime in her history. There lived in the year 1833, in the town of Canterbury, in that State, an accomplished young Quaker woman, named Prudence Crandall. Besides a superior education, she possessed the highest character. And this was well; for she was the principal of the Female Boarding School located in that town. The institution was, in 1833, at the beginning of its third year, and in a flourishing condition. While pursuing her vocation of a teacher, Miss Crandall made the acquaintance of the Liberator through a nice colored girl, who was at service in the school. Abhorring slavery from childhood, it is no wonder that the earnestness of the Liberator exerted an immediate and lasting influence upon the sympathies of the young principal. The more she read and the more she thought upon the subject the more aroused she became to the wrongs of which her race was guilty to the colored people. She, too, would lend them a helping hand in their need. Presently there came to her a colored girl who was thirsting for an education such as the Canterbury Boarding School for young ladies was dispensing to white girls. This was Miss Crandall's opportunity to do something for the colored people, and she admitted the girl to her classes. But she had no sooner done so than there were angry objections to the girl's remaining.

The wife of an Episcopal clergyman who lived in the village, Miss Crandall records, told me that if I continued that colored girl in my school it would not be sustained.

She heroically refused to turn the colored pupil out of the school, and thereby caused a most extraordinary exhibition of Connecticut chivalry and Christianity.

Seeing how matters stood with her in these circumstances, Prudence Crandall conceived the remarkable purpose of devoting her school to the education of colored girls exclusively. She did not know whether her idea was practicable, and so in her perplexity she turned for counsel to the editor of the Liberator. She went to Boston for this purpose, and there, at the old Marlboroa Hotel, on

William Lloyd Garrison's return from his English mission was signalized by two closely related events, viz., the formation of the New York City Anti-Slavery Society, and the appearance of the first of a succession of anti-slavery mobs in the North. The news of his British successes had preceded him, and prepared for him a warm reception on the part of his pro-slavery countrymen. For had he not with malice prepense put down the most glorious of Christian enterprises, and rebuked his own country in the house of strangers as recreant to freedom? And when O'Connell in Exeter Hall pointed the finger of scorn at America and made her a by-word and a hissing in the ears of Englishmen, was it not at a meeting got up to further the designs of this misguided young gentlemen who has just returned from England whither he has recently been for the sole purpose as it would seem [to the Commercial Advertiser] of traducing the people and institutions of his own country. Had he not caught up and echoed back the hissing thunder of the great Irish orator : Shame on the American Slaveholders! Base wretches should we shout in chorus-base wretches, how dare you profane the temple of national freedom, the sacred fane of Republican rites, with the presence and the sufferings of human beings in chains and slavery!

The noise of these treasons on a foreign shore, deafening the sound of the westerly wave, and riding against the blast as thunder goes, to borrow O'Connell's graphic and grandiose phrases, had reached the country in advance of Mr. Garrison. The national sensitiveness was naturally enough stung to the quick. Here is a pestilent fellow who is not content with disturbing the peace of the Union with his new fanaticism, but must needs presume to make the dear Union odious before the world as well. And his return, what is it to be but the signal for increased agitation on the slavery question. The conquering hero comes and his fanatical followers salute him forthwith with a new anti-slavery society, which means a fresh instrument in his hands to stir up strife between the North and the South. Are we tamely to look on, and see this most dangerous species of fanaticism extending itself through society? shrieked on the morning of Mr. Garrison's arrival in New York Harbor, the malignant editor of the Courier and Enquirer.

The pro-slavery and lawless elements of the city were not slow to take the cue given by metropolitan papers, and to do the duty of patriots upon their country's enemies. Arthur Tappen and his antislavery associates outwitted these patriotic gentlemen, who attended in a body at Clinton Hall on the evening of October 2, 1833, to perform the aforesaid duty of patriots, while the objects of their attention were convened at Chatham Street Chapel and organizing their new fanaticism. The mob flew wide of its mark a second time, for when later in the evening it began a serenade more expressive than musical before the entrance to the little chapel on

Mr. Garrison, in a private letter to a friend under date of September 12, 1834, summarises the doings of the preceding twelve months of his life, and makes mention of a fact which lends peculiar interest to that time: It has been the most eventful year, he remarks, in my history. I have been the occasion of many uproars, and a continual disturber of the public peace. As soon as I landed I turned the city of New York upside down. Five thousand people turned out to see me tarred and feathered, but were disappointed. There was also a small hubbub in Boston on my arrival. The excitement passed away, but invective and calumny still followed me. By dint of some industry and much persuasion, I succeeded in inducing the Abolitionists in New York to join our little band in Boston, in calling a national convention at Philadelphia. We met, and such a body of men, for zeal, firmness, integrity, benevolence, and moral greatness, the world has rarely seen in a single assembly. Inscribed upon a declaration which it was my exalted privilege to write, their names can perish only with the knowledge of the history of our times. A National Anti-Slavery Society was formed, which astonished the country by its novelty, and awed it by its boldness. In five months its first annual meeting was held in the identical city in which, only seven antecedent months, Abolitionists were in peril of their lives. In ability, interest, and solemnity it took precedence of all the great religious celebrations which took place at the same time. During the same month, a New England anti-slavery convention was held in Boston, and so judicious were its measures, so eloquent its appeals, so unequivocal its resolutions, that it at once gave shape and character to the antislavery cause in this section of the Union. In the midst of all these mighty movements, I have wooed a fair ladye, and won her, have thrown aside celebacy, and jumped body and soul into matrimony, have sunk the character of bachelor in that of husband, have settled down into domestic quietude, and repudiated all my roving desires, and have found that which I have long been yearning to find, a home, a wife, and a beautiful retreat from a turbulent city.

Garrison does not exaggerate the importance of the initiatives and achievements of the year, or the part played by him in its history. His activity was indeed phenomenal, and the service rendered by him to the reform, was unrivaled. He was in incessant motion, originating, directing, inspiring the agitation in all portions of the North. What strikes one strongly in studying the pioneer is his sleeplessness, his indefatigableness, his persistency in pursuit of his object. Others may rest after a labor, may have done one, two, or three distinct tasks, but between Garrison's acts there is no hiatus, each follows each, and is joined to all like links in a chain. He never closed his eyes, nor folded his arms, but went forward from work to work with the consecutiveness of a law of nature.

But amid labors so strenuous and uninterrupted the leader found opportunity to woo and win a fair ladye. She was a daughter of a veteran Abolitionist, George Benson, of Brooklyn, Conn., who with his sons George W. and Henry E. Benson, were among the stanchest of the reformer's followers and supporters. The young wife, before her marriage, was not less devoted to the cause than they. She was in closest sympathy with her husband's anti-slavery interests and purposes. Never had husband found wife better fitted to his needs, and the needs of his life work. So that it might be truly said that Garrison even when he went a-wooing forgot not his cause and that when he took a wife, he made at the same time a grand contribution to its ultimate triumph.

How did Helen Eliza Garrison serve the great cause? One who knew shall tell. He has told it in his own unequaled way. That home, he says, was a great help. Her husband's word and pen scattered his purpose far and wide; but the comrades that his ideas brought to his side her welcome melted into friends. No matter how various and discordant they were in many things — no matter how much there was to bear and overlook-her patience and her thanks for their sympathy in the great idea were always sufficient for the work also. . . . In that group of remarkable men and women which the anti-slavery movement drew together, she had her own niche-which no one else could have filled so perfectly or unconsciously as she did. . . . She forgot, omitted nothing. How much we all owe her! These were words spoken by a friend, whose name will appear later on in this story; words spoken by him at the close of her beautiful life, as she lay dead in her coffin.

And here is another account of her written by the husband on the first anniversary of their marriage: I did not marry her, he confides to her brother George, expecting that she would assume a prominent station in the anti-slavery cause, but for domestic quietude and happiness. So completely absorbed am I in that cause, that it was undoubtedly wise in me to select as a partner one who, while her benevolent feelings were in union with mine, was less immediately and entirely connected with it. I knew she was naturally diffident, and distrustful of her own ability to do all that her heart might prompt. She is one of those who prefer to toil unseen — to give by stealth-and to sacrifice in seclusion. By her unwearied attention to my wants, her sympathetic regards, her perfect equanimity of mind, and her sweet and endearing manners; she is no trifling support to Abolitionism, inasmuch as she lightens my labors, and enables me to find exquisite delight in the family circle, as an offset to public adversity.

And here is a lovely bit of self-revelation made to her betrothed several months before they were wedded. I am aware of the responsibility that will devolve upon me, she writes, and how much my example will be copied among that class you have so long labored to elevate and enlighten. I have been considering how the colored people think of dress, and how much of their profits are expended for useless ornaments that foolishly tend to make a show and parade. As much stress will, of course, be laid on Garrison's wife by that class, it behooves me to be very circumspect in all things, when called upon to fill so important a station.

The marriage occurred September 4, 1834, and the next day the pair set up housekeeping in Freedom's Cottage, on

A wild-cat-like creature was abroad. To it the Abolitionists were to be thrown. It was to destroy Garrison, make an end of Thompson, and suppress between its enormous jaws the grandest moral movement of the century. Besides doing up this modest little programme, the beast, O wonderful to say, was also to crown its performances by saving the Union. Rejoicing in the possession of such a conservative institution, the politicians, the press, and public opinion uncaged the monster, while from secure seats they watched the frightful scenes of fury and destruction enacted by it in the national arena.

These scenes began in the summer of 1834, and in the city of New York. They were ushered in by the breaking up of an anti-slavery celebration on the Fourth of July by the clack and roar of several hundred young rowdies, gathered for the purpose. Their success but whetted the appetite of the spirit of mischief for other ventures against the Abolitionists. As a consequence New York was in a more or less disturbed state from the fourth to the ninth of the month. The press of the city, with but a single exception (The Evening Post) meanwhile goaded the populace on by false and inflammatory representations touching the negroes and their friends, to the rioting which began in earnest on the evening of the ninth. That night a mob attacked Lewis Tappan's house on