Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
sedition filled all ears; but Garrison was indifferent to the storms
that gathered about his head. He would go forward though he went alone.
With every advance of the slave power his hatred of the Constitution,
under cover of which its advances were made, grew more bitter. He
outran southern fire eaters in advocacy of Nullification and secession.
It became his daily work to undo the labors of Webster and bring the
fundamental law into common contempt. The doctrine of no compromise
with sin made no account of the complexities of social problems--the
immediate, root-and-branch eradication of slavery or immediate
dissolution of the Union, were his alternatives. “We dissolved the
Union by a handsome vote, after a warm debate,” wrote Edmund Quincy
in 1843; “the question was ... wrapped up by Garrison in some of his
favorite Old Testament Hebraisms by way of vehicle, as the apothecaries
say” (_ibid._, Vol. III, p. 88).
It was at a Fourth of July meeting, following the Anthony Burns affair
of 1854, that Garrison made use of the striking appeal that attests his
extraordinary boldness and skill as an agitator. After contrasting the
principles of the Declaration of Independence and the present state of
the Republic, he went on:
He should now proceed to perform an action which would be the
testimony of his own soul, to all present, of the estimation in
which he held the pro-slavery laws and deeds of the nation.
Producing a copy of the _Fugitive Slave Law_, he set fire to it,
and burnt it to ashes. Using an old and well-known phrase, he said,
“And let all the people say, Amen”; and a unanimous cheer and shout
of “Amen” burst from the vast audience. In like manner Mr. Garrison
burned the decision of Edward G. Loring in the case of Anthony
Burns ... the multitude ratifying the fiery immolation with shouts
of applause. Then, holding up the U. S. Constitution, he branded it
as the source and parent of all the other atrocities,--“a covenant
with death and agreement with hell”--and consumed it to ashes on
the spot, exclaiming, “So perish all compromises with tyranny!
and let all the people say, Amen!” A tremendous shout of “Amen”
went up to heaven in ratification of the deed, mingled with a few
hisses and wrathful exclamations from some who were evidently in a
rowdyish state of mind, but who were at once cowed by the popular
feeling. (_Ibid._, Vol. III, p. 412.)
In such fashion did this disciple of the gospel of peace carry the
war into Macedonia. The law of conscience had come into collision
with the law of the land, and he followed conscience. For Garrison
majority votes held no mandate. He had come to regard the political
state as the mother of all mischiefs; for behind this thing of shreds
and patches he saw unscrupulous politicians whose profession was the
deceiving of simple minds, befogging moral issues with their myths and
cults--their appeals to patriotism and the Constitution--and bringing
the law of God into contempt. It was the spiritual bondage of the North
that held the negro in slavery, Garrison had come to believe, and to
free the conscience of the North was the great duty devolving upon the
Abolitionists. With his intense single-mindedness he saw no other duty,
and in doing that duty he would use no other weapon than the sword of
the spirit. It is fortunate, perhaps, that the prophet knows so little
of the resourcefulness of the market place on which he pronounces
judgment, or his zeal might suffer abatement. Slavery was not destroyed
by the conscience of Massachusetts, but by the economics of free
labor. The free-soilers were more dangerous to it for they fought with
material weapons; and old John Brown of Ossawatomie, more Hebraic even
than Garrison, was a sterner realist, who took care to load his Sharp’s
rifle while girding on the sword of the spirit. From the prophet to
the soldier is but a step, from the sword of the spirit to musket and
ball, from conscience to the Emancipation Proclamation. Single-minded
men--the Garrisons and John Browns--marshaling the discontent of
their generation, sometimes do succeed in removing mountains; but
unfortunately they leave a great scar, and the débris litters the
whole countryside. Other mountains may even arise from the waste of
the leveling. After the Emancipation Proclamation came the Fourteenth
Amendment, and out of that came the triumphant gospel of “due process
of law.” The devil understands the ways of the world too well to become
discouraged at a temporary set-back, for if righteousness succeed in
breaking the bonds that bind a generation, he knows that the market
place carries an ample stock of new cords to replace those that are
broken.
II • John G. Whittier • Puritan Quaker
If Garrison was the flintiest character amongst the militant
Abolitionists, Whittier was certainly the gentlest. Among many lovable
men he was perhaps the most lovable. Bred in a faith that had never
been dominant in New England, he escaped the induration that was the
price the New England conscience paid for its hard dogma. No thick
shell of Calvinism incrusted for him the soul of humanitarian religion.
In the Society of Friends righteousness was not daily twisted into
unloveliness, nor the beauty of holiness forgotten; and in consequence,
it was easier for him than for his Calvinist neighbors to fashion his
life upon the principles of the New Testament, and set Christ above the
Prophets.
Whittier’s family escaped many temptations by following quiet paths to
their own ends. Prosperity had never wooed the Massachusetts Quakers
away from the simple life, as it had done with so many Philadelphia
Friends, but a narrow domestic economy and social non-conformity
had nourished their religion of peace and good will. Long before
Channing discovered the religion of love in the teachings of French
humanitarianism, the early Quakers had found that primitive gospel in
the byways of Carolinian England, and had brought it to the new world.
There they had borne testimony in their daily lives to the excellence
of Christian fellowship, and there they had suffered the reproaches
and the blows of bigoted conformists. Their faith had been tried in
the fires of persecution, and the Society of Friends had justified
its use of that most excellent of sectarian names. In the sincerity
of their equalitarian fellowship the Quakers were the friends of
humanity, of the poor and the outcast of this world. Their religion
was of the week-day as well as the Sabbath. With its mystical doctrine
of the inner light--of the Holy Spirit that speaks directly to the
soul without the intermediation of priest or church--it unconsciously
spread the doctrine of democracy in an autocratic world. It interpreted
literally the principle that members of the Christian fellowship are
equals in the sight of God and in each other’s eyes--that on earth
there is neither high nor low but a common brotherhood in Christ.
It quietly set aside the pretentions of priestly hierarchies, and
substituted the principle that religion is a matter that lies with the
individual and God. Naturally a “hireling ministry” could not look
with favor on such doctrine, and the sharp hostility it aroused in
theocratic New England, sprang from the realization that the ideals
of the Quaker fellowship were dangerous to the ideals of a priestly
theocracy. The autocratic rulers of Massachusetts Bay could see little
good in the democracy of the Friends.
As became a Quietist, the master passion of Whittier’s life was
ethical. He was neither a transcendental nor a Utopian visionary, but a
primitive Christian, an apostle of good will and a friend of justice.
Sprung from a long line of New England yeomen, wholly of the soil,
simple in wants, quietly independent, he was the last lineal expression
in our literature of the primitive faith, the last authentic echo of
the spiritual democracy of the seventeenth century. A thorough Yankee
in character, the Yankee never dominated him. As a young man, to be
sure, he temporized with his Quakerism and dreamed fond dreams of
worldly ambition. The stirrings of youthful romance awakened the desire
to be a Byronic poet, and a Yankee knack with politics led him to
meddle with the hope of representing his district in Congress. He was
hand-in-glove with the time-serving Caleb Cushing, and the temptations
of political intrigue almost led to his backsliding; but he soon put
the devil behind him and gave security for his better behavior by
coming out for the cause of Abolitionism. That was the end of his hopes
of political preferment, and the more surely to burn his bridges he
published in 1833, at his own cost, a little Abolition tract entitled
_Justice and Expediency_, which was reissued by Lewis Tappan in a great
edition and scattered broadcast. The same year he attended as delegate
the National Anti-Slavery Convention at Philadelphia, and subscribed
his name to its pronouncement. Thenceforth for over thirty years he
gave his best strength to the cause, writing abundantly in prose and
verse, serving as editor of Abolition publications, and suffering the
unpleasant experiences common to the group, at one time being hunted by
a mob and stoned.
This deliberate alignment with an unpopular cause, this calm response
to the summons of conscience, was the fruit of his Quaker training.
It was no new experience for the Quaker to dissent. The Whittier
family had been Come-outers for generations, sacrificing material
well-being for their faith, and he had grown up in dissent. The long
struggle for democratic freedom in Massachusetts was a familiar story
to him. The record had come down by word of mouth and stories of
early persecutions were fireside tales in the Whittier household. His
ancestors had lived in the hard old Puritan theocracy, and yet detached
from it; and this detachment had rendered them shrewdly critical and
sensitive to injustice. With their quiet dissent from what the Quaker
conscience regarded as unrighteous, and their practical nullification
of unjust authority, Whittier was in full sympathy. His intimate
knowledge of early Massachusetts history had taught him certain things
which official historians had overlooked, the chief of which was that
dissent had been the ally and friend of freedom in New England. From
his youth up he had been a loving student of the old annals, of those
intimate narratives that preserve the voice and manner of the past;
and as he discovered how often persecution had left its stain on the
record, he was drawn to consider the superstitious aberrations of a
people supposedly devout. In middle life he gathered up in _Leaves from
Margaret Smith’s Journal of Massachusetts Bay, 1678-79_, materials that
he had long been collecting, and which, interpreted by a sympathetic
imagination, provides a surprisingly vivid account of life in New
England in the second generation.
All in all, it is Whittier’s most notable achievement in prose. Pieced
together out of old records, it is authentic as the yellow documents
from which it was drawn. The soft light of romance lies upon its
pages, sobered by historical fact and tempered by creative sympathy.
Loving yet critical, quite devastating at times in its implications,
it is an amazingly intimate narrative. The mind of Puritan New England
is uncovered in these unpretentious pages, and it does not show to
advantage. There was many a knot and seam in the old Puritan life,
much that was mean and ugly woven into the honest web. The Puritan
proneness to Quaker-baiting--aggravated to be sure by the ill manners
of the Ranters; their vulgar credulity that encouraged witch-hunting;
their callous treatment of the Indian and negro; their hardness of
nature that made them grasping and censorious: such knots and seams