Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
a spiritual child of the Old Testament, a modern Puritan on whom had
fallen the mantle of the Prophets. New England Calvinism never bred so
Puritan a soul. Hebraism was in his marrow--its noble austerity, its
consuming passion. He daily walked with righteousness and communed
with conscience. He carried God’s scales into the market place. He
would not accept his law of men. Constitutions and statutes were vain
and foolish pronouncements to him if he judged them to be contrary to
the divine enactments. He counted property in negroes and cotton as
nothing when weighed in the balance of justice. A human soul, whether
in black skin or white, was of far greater worth in his eyes than all
the warring kingdoms of this world. As fully as John Humphrey Noyes he
reëmbodied the root-and-branch righteousness of English Commonwealth
times. Others might lash the sins of his generation with whips; he
would scourge them with nettles and scorpions. He would raise such a
clamor about men’s ears that the drowsiest must awake. He would light
such a fire in the slave market of America that the evil thing should
be consumed as stubble in the white flame of righteousness.
Such primitive Hebraism, quite evidently, is calculated to make
troublesome citizens who are certain to get themselves heartily
disliked by those who approve of the world as it is. Any invasion of
the devil’s realms will create an uproar, for the devil is prompt
to defend his own. Righteousness may prophesy in the gates, but the
buying and selling of the poor goes on as usual. Amongst comfortable
folk conscience is rarely at home when justice knocks at the door;
it is gone a-visiting, or is busy, or is waiting upon Caesar, or is
gone forth to pray. Comfortable folk do not like clamor, even from
the prophets, and are content to leave justice to God with the hope
that He will not disturb business. If the tithes are duly paid, it is
a mean and censorious God that will ask how the money was got. Hence
comfortable folk, north as well as south, did not like Garrison; and
not liking him they were zealous to damn him. He was made out to be
a bogy man, busily engaged in stirring up Nat Turner insurrections,
inciting peaceful and contented slaves to discontent, flouting the
Constitution and seeking to disrupt the Union. His righteousness was so
great a stumbling-block that he was held to be an atheist by eminent
formalists who knew of righteousness only by hearsay, and learned
of God only from report. It was reckoned to him a major sin that he
forgot his manners, for must not the Lord’s work be carried on in
seemly fashion, and the money-changers be scourged from the temple
politely? “The first movement here at the North, was a rank onset
and explosion,” said the eminent Dr. Bushnell. “The first sin of this
organization was a sin of ill manners. They did not go to work like
Christian gentlemen.... The great convention which met at Philadelphia
drew up a declaration of their sentiments ... by which they willfully
and boorishly cast off the whole South from them” (Garrison, _William
Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. II, p. 132, Note). What could be done with
a fellow who insisted that the devil is rarely put in a quake by
courteous treatment, and who had never learned that the Hebrew prophets
bore themselves like Christian gentlemen? That he spoke with plebeian
directness was unquestionably true.
These are your men of “caution,” and “prudence,” and
“judiciousness” [he exclaimed in a speech at Philadelphia, May 14,
1838]. Sir, I have learned to hate those words. Whenever we attempt
to imitate our great Exemplar, and press the truth of God, in all
its plainness, upon the conscience, why, we are very imprudent;
because, forsooth, a great excitement will ensue. Sir, slavery will
not be overthrown without excitement, a most tremendous excitement.
(_Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 215. Note.)
If clerical gentlemen disliked Garrison, gentlemen of State Street
disliked him much more heartily, and being the responsible custodians
of law and order, they upheld existing institutions in their own way.
Your Tory is always a Fascist at heart, and the Boston Tories naturally
adopted the principle of direct action. Unpleasant things happened
to Garrison in consequence. He was denounced at a most respectable
meeting in Faneuil Hall, “at which Washington was cheered for being
a slave-holder.” He was mobbed in his print-shop by “gentlemen of
property and standing from all parts of the city,” and was thrown into
jail by a timid mayor to save his life. Not since the days of Tom Paine
had such unmeasured vituperation been poured out on the head of an
American. It would seem that it was a perilous business to defend the
downtrodden or to remind church-members of the injunction “to undo the
heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free.” When conscience throws
down the gauntlet to economics it is certain to get some hard knocks.
It is ill-trained for a rough and tumble contest; its scruples will
not permit it to hit below the belt. But the Tory suffers no handicap
of scruple and plants his blows where he can. On the occasion of an
Abolition convention announced to be held within the shadows of Wall
Street, Bennett’s _New York Herald_ exemplified the sweetness and
light of the commercial mind in such pronouncements as this:
What business have all the religious lunatics of the free states
to gather in this commercial city for purposes which, if carried
into effect, would ruin and destroy its prosperity?... Public
opinion should be regulated. These abolitionists should not be
allowed to misrepresent New York.... When free discussion does not
promote the public good, it has no more right to exist than a bad
government that is dangerous and oppressive to the common weal.
It should be overthrown. On the question of the usefulness to the
public of the packed, organized meetings of these abolitionists,
socialists, Sabbath-breakers, and anarchists, there can be but
one result arrived at by prudence and patriotism. They are
dangerous assemblies--calculated for mischief, and reasonable
in their character and purposes.... That half-a-dozen madmen
should manufacture opinion for the whole community, is not to be
tolerated. (_Ibid._, Vol. III, pp. 283-284.)
In consequence of which appeals to “prudence and patriotism” the
meeting was broken up, public opinion was judiciously regulated,
and the Bible and Constitution vindicated by a Bowery mob under the
leadership of a ward-heeler. It was from the impact of such ruthless
opposition that Garrison’s strategy took form; and it was direct and
uncompromising and outspoken--as sternly logical as Calhoun’s. There
were no shades in his thinking but only black and white, righteousness
and sin. Expediency was not in his vocabulary. He was as narrow as he
was intense. The catholic intellectual interests of the times touched
him but little. Transcendentalism lay quite outside his world of
thought. He was a religious soul rather than a speculative intellect,
and he measured all things by the principles of primitive Christianity.
As a young man he preferred the Calvinism of Lyman Beecher to the
Unitarianism of Channing, but later he came to perceive the intimate
relation between the major premises of Unitarianism and his social
ideals. It is idle to seek a political philosopher in a Hebrew
moralist. His somewhat naïve political conceptions were an amalgam of
French equalitarianism and Yankee perfectionism. The Declaration of
Independence was his one political textbook, in the light of which
he judged Congressional enactments and interpreted the Constitution.
With Channing he assumed an ethical sanction for natural rights, and
this assumption conducted straight to the doctrine of the higher law.
As early as 1830 his conscience was prepared to appeal from laws and
statutes to ethics, on the principle that “that which is not just is
not law.” By 1837 he had accepted the philosophy of spiritual anarchism
as set forth in the new gospel of perfectionism, and from this flowed
naturally the doctrines of Nullification and disunion.
With amazing frankness Garrison published his views to friends and
enemies, bringing all the hornets of conservatism about his ears. A
furious discussion arose within the Abolition ranks on the question of
loyalty to the political state, and the scandal of Garrison’s Fifth
Monarchy doctrine spread far. What that doctrine was he was at great
pains to make clear. Writing to Henry C. Wright on the Quaker doctrine
of non-resistance, he insisted on the sinfulness of all force whether
in a private or public capacity, and then asserted:
Human governments will remain in violent existence as long as men
are resolved not to bear the cross of Christ, and to be crucified
unto the world. But in the Kingdom of God’s dear Son, holiness and
love are the only magistracy. It has no swords, for they are beaten
into ploughshares--no spears, for they are changed into pruning
hooks--no military academy, for the saints cannot learn war any
more--no gibbet, for life is regarded as inviolate--no chains,
for all are free. And that kingdom is to be established upon the
earth, for the time is predicted when the kingdoms of this world
will become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. (Garrison,
_William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. II, p. 149.)
From such premises he deduced the conclusion that government is a cross
that God permits men to endure as punishment for their sins. When they
shall voluntarily quit their sins political government will cease.
Human governments “are the results of human disobedience to the
requirements of heaven; and they are better than anarchy just as a
hailstorm is preferable to an earthquake, or the small-pox to the
Asiatic cholera.” From the silence of the Bible as to the _form_ of
such governments, he inferred not that each might claim a divine
sanction, “but that the kingdom which Christ has established on
earth is ultimately to swallow up or radically to subvert all other
kingdoms.”... “Shall we, _as Christians_, applaud and do homage
to human government? or shall we not rather lay the axe at the
root of the tree, and attempt to destroy both cause and effect
together?” Foolish are the speculations about the best form of
human government: “What is government but the express image of the
moral character of a people?” (_Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 150-151.)
This is of course undiluted perfectionism, in which Garrison was
the most ardent of believers. Prosaic political theory had lost all
significance for him; he had got himself drunk on the new wine and was
in no mood to listen to the counsels of expediency. Like John Humphrey
Noyes he declared war upon the existing political state. He voluntarily
disfranchised himself. He raised the banner of “disloyalty” in the
_Liberator_, and summoned the Abolitionists to separate themselves
from the unclean government that protected the sin of slavery. That
the Constitution recognized the hateful system was sufficient proof to
Garrison that the Constitution itself was unclean. Let it be consumed
by its own iniquity. In 1843 he began an uncompromising attack upon
it by nailing to the masthead of the _Liberator_ his famous phrase,
“A Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell,” to which he soon
added the words, “No Union with Slaveholders.” He broke with many of
his oldest friends, with Whittier and Gerrit Smith and James Birney,
assailing them bitterly for meddling with third-party movements in
the hope of curing the evil by political action. There followed,
in consequence, a whirlwind and tempest of debate that brought a
disastrous schism upon the Abolition movement. Cries of disloyalty and