Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
such deep resentment. Southern steel, striking the flinty Yankee
character, threw off sparks that would fire whatever combustible stuff
lay near; and such combustible stuff was provided in plenty by the
Utopian enthusiasts who gathered in conventions, each with a plan
of universal reform in his waistcoat pocket. Little conflagrations
were started in many an obscure Yankee soul, and the noise of the
crackling spread over New England, to the anger of the South and the
vast concern of respectable Boston merchants. Sooner or later Abolition
sentiment was bound to make a tremendous stir amongst the children of
Puritanism; and when that time came it was bound to arouse tremendous
antagonism amongst the sons of Yankees. The dominant commercial
group would not tolerate a movement that was certain to alienate its
southern customers. A mighty collision between the conscience and the
self-interest of New England was inevitable; and in that collision of
flinty characters, arguments were likely to be countered with blows.
The New England Abolitionists, men and women, were an extraordinarily
interesting group. They were good fighters, outspoken and tenacious of
opinion, unsparing in attack, refusing to be browbeaten, resilient
and tough as seasoned hickory. In them the Yankee Tory met his match;
against them coercion and intimidation, all the usual Tory weapons,
failed as earlier they had failed with the primitive Quakers. They
were daily charged with being social incendiaries. The commercial
newspapers thundered against them as atheists, Sabbath-breakers,
socialists, anarchists; the absurdest myths were given circulation;
the public mind was skillfully poisoned against them. Yet as a matter
of sober historical fact, they were the kindliest of men, with
generous sympathies and disinterested motives. No blackguard was ever
an Abolitionist--no ward-heeler, or mob-inciter, or purse-patriot;
all such convenient tools of power were found amongst the baiters
and mobsters in the commercial opposition. John Brown was the only
direct-action Abolitionist and what befell him is well known among men.
There was no money to be made, no place of honor or power to be got by
espousing Abolitionism, but only self-sacrifice and social ostracism.
Ambitious men, self-seekers, went with the dispensers of social
favors. It was the remnant in Israel that gathered to the cause, few
in numbers but the best New England had. And what an excellent company
they were: Garrison, Samuel J. May, Edmund Quincy, Jonathan Sewall,
Theodore Parker, Lydia Maria Child, Mrs. Chapman, Wendell Phillips,
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Whittier, Henry Ward Beecher, Sumner,
Maria White and the young Lowell--such a fighting phalanx as the New
England conscience had never before mustered, nor has since. To them
were gathered heroic souls from other states: Arthur and Lewis Tappan
and Gerrit Smith from New York, James Birney from Kentucky, Lucretia
Mott from Philadelphia, the Grimké sisters from South Carolina. Harriet
Martineau, who knew the group intimately, has left on record her
judgment of them: “A just survey of the whole world can leave little
doubt,” she wrote in 1838, “that the abolitionists of the United States
are the greatest people now living and moving in it” (Carpenter, _John
Greenleaf Whittier_, p. 107). They gave New England and the country no
peace. From their persistent agitation came the Emigrant Aid Society,
Sharp’s rifles, and the bloody struggle in Kansas; and from it came the
temporary overwhelming of the Tory minority in Massachusetts. For a few
brief years New England threw off the stifling grip of the commercial
mind and was the home of American humanitarianism.
Footnotes
[448] See T. W. Higginson, _Old Cambridge_, p. 149.
[449] See Garrison, _William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. I, Chapter VI. The
court held that it was libelous to seek to bring into disrepute an
action that was legal.
[450] Quoted by S. E. Morison in _Harrison Grey Otis_, Vol. II, p. 263.
[451] This was an outgrowth of the anti-slavery movement and emerged
from the conservative opposition to women’s appearing on the abolition
platform. The reply of the Quakeress, Angelina Grimké, to Elizabeth
Beecher’s _Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with reference to the
Duty of American Females_, in 1837, marks the definite beginning of the
movement. See Garrison, _William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. II, pp. 133-134.
[452] Written by Garrison; see _ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 230-234.
[453] See the essay on Thoreau.
Chapter IV • Certain Militants
I • William Lloyd Garrison
The flintiest character amongst the New England militants, curiously
enough, was the son of an immigrant family, brought to Newburyport
and abandoned by a shiftless father. William Lloyd Garrison was not
an offspring of generations of New England Puritanism, but a waif
thrown by chance on the bleak shores of Massachusetts, and left to
shift pretty much for himself. Born in Newburyport, half English and
half Irish, with a heritage that promised ill, he was disciplined in
the sternest of schools. His capable Irish mother had a bitter time
providing for her three fatherless children, and the son suffered
the privation and found the help that were the mixed portion of the
destitute of old New England. Like Horace Greeley he ate the bread of
poverty and grew strong on it. There was iron in his nature, and the
narrow means that drove his father to drink and desertion, that sent
his brother adrift, that broke his mother and killed his sister, only
strengthened his will and toughened his fiber. As a lad he was put to
the cobbler’s bench to learn the trade that Whittier was learning at
Haverhill; later he was apprenticed to a carpenter and cabinetmaker. In
both trades he was unhappy, and it was not till a freak of fate turned
him over to a friendly printer that he found himself. For seven years
he stuck to his case, and at the end of the apprenticeship he was not
only a first-rate practical printer, but with some little knowledge of
books and master of a vigorous and serviceable prose style. With the
amazing capacity for self-training so characteristic of the Yankee, he
had picked up a sort of education and was ready to do whatever work in
the world should come to hand.
Chance threw in his way the job of village editor, and inclination
plunged him into politics. His political opinions, which he embraced
more ardently than intelligently, were faithful reflections of current
Massachusetts partisanship. He was quite ignorant of political
principles and the economics that determined political parties, and
with unconscious naïveté he espoused the cause of Boston commercialism.
He was a dogmatic, unquestioning Whig. Clay was his idol, General
Jackson his abomination; and his first political speech was in support
of Harrison Gray Otis, the discredited boss of the old Federalist
machine. But this was only a vagary of youthful hero worship.
Enthusiasm for reform was already setting up a ferment in his ardent
soul and preparing him for quite other alliances. The unhappy fate of
his father was a lesson that he took home, and he interested himself
in the temperance movement then just getting under way, serving for
a time as editor of a small temperance paper. Shortly thereafter he
stumbled upon his life work. Benjamin Lundy, a homespun hero of the
Society of Friends, had long been publishing intermittently his _Genius
of Universal Emancipation_, and in the itinerant work of begging
support he fell in with Garrison. The two discovered kindred interests
and they entered into a compact to go forth together to fight the
dragon of slavery. They sought out the den of the beast in Baltimore
and delivered their blows lustily; with the result that Garrison was
indicted by the grand jury for printing the name of a Newburyport
merchant who was picking up some honest dollars in the coastwise slave
traffic, and spent seven weeks in jail. On his release he returned
to Boston to replenish a lean purse, and January 1, 1831, he issued
the first number of _The Liberator_, a little paper that was to make
a mighty stir in the world during a long period of hand-to-mouth
existence.
Never was there a more foolhardy venture, judged by the wisdom of this
world. With no following, no weapon but a borrowed font of type in
a mean little print-shop, no money or credit, he flung his defiance
at the entrenched enemy with the courage of uncalculating youth. A
prospectus issued in the fall of 1830 thus set forth the purpose of the
venture:
I shall assume, as self-evident truths, that the liberty of a
people is a gift of God and nature:--That liberty consists in an
independency upon the will of another:--That by the name of slave
we understand a man who can neither dispose of his person or goods,
but enjoys all at the will of his master:--That no man can have a
right over others, unless it be by them granted to him.... That
that which is not just is not law; and that which is not law,
ought not to be in force:--That he who oppugns the public liberty,
overthrows his own.... That there is no safety where there is no
strength, no strength without union, no union without justice, no
justice where faith and truth are wanting:--That the right to be
free is a truth planted in the hearts of men, and acknowledged so
to be by all that have hearkened to the voice of nature.... _Vide
Algernon Sidney’s Discourses on Government--the Declaration of
American Independence--the Constitutions and Bills of Rights of the
several States, etc., etc._ (_Life of William Lloyd Garrison, by
his Children._ Vol. I, p. 200.)
This pronouncement was amplified in the salutatory address in the first
number, as follows:
Assenting to the “self-evident truth” maintained in the American
Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, and
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights--among
which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” I shall
strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave
population.... I am aware that many object to the severity of my
language; but is there not cause for severity? I _will_ be as
harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject,
I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation ...
urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am
in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not
retreat a single inch--+AND I WILL BE HEARD+. (_Ibid._, Vol. I, pp.
224-225.)
The young man just turned twenty-six who thus marked out the path
he was to follow for thirty-five years was an extraordinarily
single-minded and rugged character. His like has too rarely appeared in
America. Arrogant, dictatorial, intolerant, he might be, as his warmest
friends admitted; but it is a foolish judgment that will dismiss him
thus. Unyielding as granite, sheer Yankee will driven by a passionate
energy, he was born for hazardous leadership. He was a man utterly
unacquainted with fear. Lied about daily, threatened, bullied, charged
with every sin in the Decalogue and every crime on the statute-book, he
could not be coerced nor intimidated nor turned aside from his purpose.
An ascetic who cared nothing for ease or preferment; a pacifist who
fought only with the sword of the spirit; a stern moralist prophesying
wrath upon a nation of mockers, and pronouncing doom upon a people
that had forgotten God, he was an agitator fashioned after the ancient
Hebraic pattern. The stature of such a man cannot be measured by
conventional standards. Outwardly a somewhat prosaic Baptist, deeply
religious and in his younger days bigotedly orthodox, he was in reality