X William Lloyd Garrison 1805–1879
My country is the world; my countrymen are all mankind.
William Lloyd Garrison was the man who more than any one else helped to abolish slavery. He was what we call a Pioneer—or one who leads the way—because, though some people had hoped for the gradual freedom of the negroes, and a few had worked for it, Garrison was the first to ask for their immediate freedom and to set to work to make this question the most living and important one of the day. For he believed that if a thing is wrong in itself it should not exist another hour. Garrison was born at Newburyport, Mass., December 10, 1805. Like Thoreau and Hans Andersen, he was of humble birth and had a very hard childhood. His mother had been deserted by his father, and he was obliged to earn money to help her keep the home together. So as quite a small boy he went about peddling apples, and later worked at shoemaking and cabinet-making and other trades; he hated them all, and on one occasion ran away to sea. There was no time for learning from books, and he had practically no schooling. But when he was thirteen he became apprenticed to the printers’ business in the office of the Newburyport Herald, and to this work he took like a duck to water. He showed peculiar skill at printing, and also a great gift for writing. He wrote and sent articles to different papers and he read a great deal. He liked romantic books, the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the poems of Byron particularly. He wrote poetry himself which is considered good. His mother had always warned her son against being an author, as she believed the lot of all literary men was to die of starvation in a garret. Nevertheless, Garrison seemed cut out for an editor or writer. He was left alone in the world when he was eighteen, for his mother died and his only brother, a bad lot, had disappeared. His apprenticeship with the printer ended when he was twenty-one. At this time he was a very taking and charming young man, with a refined, sensitive, clean-shaven face, and always well dressed; pleasant, mildly ambitious, and social, enjoying parties and going to church regularly, he conformed outwardly to what the world thinks is the right and proper thing. But there was more in William Lloyd Garrison than met the eye. His friends, who had complete trust in him, now lent him money to start a newspaper of his own. He called it the Newburyport Free Press, and became the editor and proprietor of it, and wrote, too, most of the articles. But the views in them were much too independent to please the ordinary person, and it failed.
Garrison had always had a strong tendency to question authority—he was not going to take anybody’s word for a thing without thinking it all out for himself—as a boy he had taken up the cause of liberty wherever it had arisen and had been greatly moved by the struggles of the Greeks to throw off Turkish tyranny. But now again he was a printer in search of work, and after hard times he became the editor of a temperance paper, The National Philanthropist, in Boston, and then again the proprietor of a newspaper called The Journal of the Times. Once more he showed himself to be very much ahead of people in moral matters. In a number of this paper he wrote a forcible article on a law which had been passed in one of the States of America against teaching the blacks to read and write. He said how pitiable it was to seal up the mind and intellect of man to brutal incapacity.
“This state of things,” he declared with vehemence, “must come to an end.” The article drew the attention to him of a much older man—Benjamin Lundy—an excellent Quaker who had for some years past been agitating against slavery, and he now got into touch with Garrison. Garrison was deeply moved by Lundy’s preaching, and equally disgusted with the attitude of the clergy, to whom Lundy appealed in vain.
It was almost impossible to get a church or a school for an anti-slavery meeting, and when they did succeed, on one occasion, the meeting was broken up by a clergyman who denounced the agitation against slavery as dangerous. “The moral cowardice, the chilling apathy, the criminal unbelief and cruel skepticism that were revealed,” says Garrison on that occasion, “filled me with rage,” and from that time he ceased to go to church.
Garrison was asked now by Lundy to become editor with him of a paper called The Genius of Universal Emancipation, whose object was to suppress drink and to free the negro. Garrison joined him. He wrote most of the articles and Lundy did the lecturing. The articles were very clear and forcible. “For ourselves,” the paper declared, “we are resolved to agitate this subject to the utmost; nothing but death shall prevent us from denouncing a crime which has no parallel in human depravity.” Garrison worked hard: he got subscribers to the paper and managed to start a petition against slavery, which was signed by over two thousand people, and was presented to Congress. The answer came back that agitation would make the slaves restless and difficult to manage, and would put ideas into their heads when they might be comparatively happy and contented.
You can imagine the scorn Garrison felt for his Government. What else could he feel about a Government which boasted of itself as a democratic Government, which desired all people to have equal opportunities, rich or poor, and which, while sitting in the Capitol could see every day the manacled slave driven past the door to market? Custom, as it so often does, had blunted the sensibilities of these Senators: they remained untouched and unmoved. It needed a young, fresh, open mind like that of Garrison to show them the way. He was only twenty-six, but he saw clearly what much older men did not see, that in the long run the moral point of view is the only point of view, that right or justice is the only thing to work for, and all other issues are of no account at all. But it does not, perhaps, seem to us now a very wonderful thing that Garrison should have been so shocked and horrified at what he saw and heard about slavery. What strikes us as incredible now is that there were many thousands of people, and quite humane, kind people too, who defended it. It was the custom of the country and part of the Constitution. Many people didn’t trouble to reason about it; indeed, they believed that were slavery abolished the country would be ruined—they would have no cotton, no corn, no tobacco, because there would be no laborers to till the soil or to harvest the crops. The black men and women did the work for nothing. But so short-sighted and stupid were commercial people generally, that they could not see that slavery, besides being a moral wrong, was also a mistake economically. In the long run it was more expensive, because the work was less well done; an intelligent person who takes some interest in his work will do it very much better than one hardly removed from the animals.
One Sunday in Baltimore, Garrison was visited by a slave who had just been whipped with a cowhide, and whose back was bleeding from twenty-seven gashes, while his head was terribly bruised. He had not loaded a wagon to his master’s liking, and this was his punishment. Garrison could hear as he passed down the street the sound of whips and cries of agony. There seemed no mercy or justice anywhere, and his country’s barbarity made Garrison’s cheeks burn with shame.
How did such a state of things arise, one may ask; how did these black men and women come to be living in such numbers on American soil? It happened in this way: the English in the past, having conquered lands in different parts of the world, needed men to work and develop these lands. They were mostly wild and uncultivated. The British, the Spaniards, and the Portuguese were chiefly responsible for the slave trade. Prince Henry the Navigator, a Portuguese, had been the first to bring negroes into Europe in the fifteenth century, capturing them on his exploring expeditions round the coast of Africa. Sir John Hawkins was the first Englishman to engage in the traffic, and in the seventeenth century the slave trade was mostly in English hands. England made a very good business of supplying slaves to the Spanish settlements, and imported also a huge cargo of negroes to Virginia for tobacco planting, and this was the beginning of slavery in America.
This hunting of human beings to make them slaves was more barbarous than anything the negroes themselves could have imagined. These wretched black men, having been captured, their huts destroyed and whole villages burnt, were placed on ships which brought them to our colonies, to the West Indies and Jamaica; so packed and overloaded were these ships and the poor negroes were so ill-treated that many died on the way; out of a hundred only fifty would be any good for work. This was one of the prices paid for what is called expansion and having colonies. When the English came to know the real nature of this dreadful business, all the best opinion was against it; but the Quakers were the first to take any practical action against the slave trade, which they did as early as the seventeenth century, both in America and England, by turning out of their society all who should be engaged in it. Gradually the British did away with slavery in their colonies, and it was finally abolished in 1833, when Lord Grey was Prime Minister; but the honor of being the first to abolish it lies not with England but with Denmark, who forbade it in its possessions at the end of the eighteenth century. Several countries followed the example of England after she had put down slavery so far as it concerned herself, but the United States was the last to fall in.
Garrison in his campaign against slavery was not going to tolerate any half-measures; if a thing was a sin, then it should not exist another day: it was real anguish to have to think of the sufferings of these poor people, and he could not rest or be happy for a moment so long as injustice and such a barbarous state of things existed. Therefore, the immediate freedom of the negro was the only thing to strive and live for. Here he and Lundy disagreed—not as to the evil of slavery, but on the question of the best way to put an end to it. Lundy was not so extreme as Garrison. His view was that the negro should gradually be set free and sent to colonize in another country. Garrison asked for his immediate freedom on American soil. His attitude made the slave-owners very angry, and also filled them with alarm: they had heard a good deal of talk about freeing the negro in the future, but never had the demand been made for his immediate release. So Garrison now broke his partnership with Lundy and started on his campaign alone. For a so-called libel on a slave trader he was sent to prison, and being unable to pay the fine, he was forty-nine days in jail, until he was released by Arthur Tappan, of New York, a famous Quaker philanthropist and abolitionist, who paid his fine for him. Garrison was no martyr, but his anger was aroused against the slave-owners and he felt more desperately keen about his cause than ever. Once more he looked to the churches to support him, and again they failed him. In Boston they closed their doors against him, and it was a society of free-thinkers who finally gave Garrison a hall to lecture in, and some who heard him there were moved to join him and assist in his campaign.
Never did a man have more uphill work in trying to move these people out of their sloth and indifference. He visited all the principal people in Boston and urged them to think; he implored the clergy to turn to Christianity and bring it into practice. Coldheartedness and utter contempt of the negro he met with everywhere. He was disheartened but undefeated; his hatred of injustice, his loathing of cruelty, his pity, all these feelings carried him on.
In order to further his views he set up a paper of his own in Boston. He had no money nor a single subscriber, but he found a sympathetic partner, and these two printed their own paper, their only helper being a negro boy. It was called The Liberator, and its motto was “My country is the world; my countrymen are all mankind.” By this he meant that he worked for the good of the whole world, not only for that portion of it to which he himself belonged, for only by treating men of other countries as your friends and brothers will you have progress, peace, and true prosperity at home.
In the first number of The Liberator, Garrison had a manifesto, or address, to the public, the words of which became the whole spirit of his life. He declared that he would work for and think of nothing else but the freedom of the slave, and ended up with the words, “I am in earnest: I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard.” This address was signed by twelve men, all poor, but after they had met together one evening for the purpose of signing the address they stepped out into the starry night with glad hearts and an object to live for. This address of Garrison’s lost him many subscribers, because it went too far and was thought too extreme, but gradually it gained him influence and power. It was the seed of many anti-slavery societies, and it started other newspapers working with the same objects. The Liberator was destined to contain President Lincoln’s declaration of emancipation.
An anti-slavery society had been started in England, supported by the great and courageous clergyman Wilberforce, who had been for years working against slavery and had helped to bring it to an end in the British possessions. Garrison was asked to go over and speak to the English society, which he did, and was received with great enthusiasm. The English were very much impressed by Garrison’s sincerity and the burning enthusiasm that lay under his quiet and modest manner. He was not the sort of man they imagined an American agitator to be. He was, of course, very greatly encouraged, but on his return to America hard times awaited him, because he had stated in England that the United States was a sham so long as it allowed the present state of things to exist. A meeting in New York to start an anti-slavery league was broken up and the hall emptied by a furious mob. Another mob also besieged and tried to destroy the offices of The Liberator at Boston. There was great excitement everywhere: Garrison’s work had begun to tell. Disagreeable though violent opposition is, it is often the first step toward being heard. Now, Garrison undoubtedly criticized his country; he found fault with it, and used very strong language about the slave-owners. The commonly held view is that any criticism of one’s country is treacherous, mischievous, and unpatriotic, but Garrison said:
I speak the truth, painful, humiliating, and terrible as it is, and because I am bold and faithful to do so, am I to be branded as the calumniator and enemy of my country? If to suffer sin upon my brother be to hate him in my heart, then to suffer sin upon my country would be an evidence not of my love but hatred of her; it is because my affection for her is intense and paramount to all selfish considerations that I do not parley with her crime. I know that she can neither be truly happy nor prosperous while she continues to manacle every sixth child born on her soil.
Who, then, one may ask, is the true patriot? He who has before his eyes a high ideal for his country, who wishes it to be the best, the most civilized and the most prosperous, its people educated, far-seeing, and humane; who does not shut his eyes to his country’s faults and to the mistakes of its governments, but who strives to help as he would help a friend to remedy his faults—to show people how things might be better and how to set about improving them? Or is the patriot the man who in the face of monstrous evils cries “It is God’s will,” or “My country, right or wrong”? Where should we be now were it not for the men who obeyed their own consciences rather than the commands of the State? When we think that burning people at the stake for their religious beliefs, hanging them for sheep-stealing, putting women to death for petty thefts, or working small children in mines were considered right, when we remember that these inhuman laws were regarded by the patriot of the time as the will of God, and the people who wished to see them altered as disloyal to their rulers, we may be a little less bitter against the reformer of the present day: the man who sees that there are still many unjust laws and conditions even in his own country, and who has the courage to say so.
Garrison, however, found now enough support to start what was known as “The American Anti-slavery Society.” He called together a meeting for the purpose at Philadelphia, when he made a striking declaration of his beliefs. He spoke the most moving and inspiring words about the state of the slaves and the rights of liberty. He announced what their work would be: to organize anti-slavery societies everywhere, to hold meetings unceasingly, to circulate literature, to spare no efforts whatever to bring the nation, as he expressed it, “to a speedy repentance.”
Now began what has been called “the martyr age” in America, and the most active period of Garrison’s life. He and his followers held meetings night and day, and mobs of rough and brutal men were sent by their opponents to break them up. Anti-slavery people were in danger of their lives; they were mobbed wherever they were known, and their houses burnt or ruined. Halls where meetings were to be held were destroyed. A young divinity student was flogged publicly for having anti-slavery literature in his bag. Another lost his life defending a friend against the ruffians who attacked him. In the South, men even suspected of favoring the abolition of slaves were lynched, and judges were all in favor of slavery, and treated the anti-slavery people as vagabonds. Garrison on one occasion had his clothes torn off him and was dragged through the streets with a rope round his body. He was rescued from a raging crowd by the mayor of the town, who saw no way of protecting him but by putting him in prison. On the wall of his cell Garrison wrote: “William L. Garrison was put into this cell on Wednesday afternoon, October 21, 1835, to save him from the violence of a respectable and influential mob who sought to destroy him for preaching the abominable and dangerous doctrine that all men are created equal and that all oppression is odious in the sight of God.” A merchant on one occasion spoke in public to the abolitionists. “It is not a matter of principle with us,” he said; “it is a business necessity; we cannot afford to let you succeed; we do not mean to allow you to succeed; we mean to put you down by fair means if we can, by foul means if we must.” Garrison said that Government and the heads of commerce were the forces that really kept slavery going; it could not, he felt, be the will of the people when they began to think and to understand what the real nature of slavery was. It was the business of his life to show them, and he devoted all his energies, all his power of eloquence and persuasion, to move the people, to appeal to their reason and sense of justice and compassion. He sought to abolish slavery by moral means alone; he did not attempt political means, such as asking Congress to use its power. He worked only in the Northern States, for the South was practically united in its convictions. He found strong opposition in the North, too, for there were many Northern people who looked upon the Constitution as sacred, and because the principle of slavery was incorporated in it, regarded all opposition to slavery as disloyalty to the State.
Garrison was undoubtedly helped by the Fugitive Slave Law. It is often the case that things get worse before they get better. This cruel law was a case in point. It was this: that those slaves who had escaped from the Southern States and were living in Canada or the North, some of them well off, useful, and happy, were to be hunted down and brought back to slavery; those who housed them and helped them in any way to escape would also be fined or imprisoned. The result of this new law was to rouse the people’s feeling for liberty and to touch their hearts. When they saw the wretched fugitives driven along the streets in chains great feeling was shown. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was inspired by incidents resulting from the Fugitive Slave Law. Though written in an old-fashioned way, with a good deal of religious talk, it is a moving and sincere book, by a writer whose heart was full of pity and indignation. It touched many hearts, including those of the clergy, and stirred people to action. It had perhaps more influence than any book with a purpose that has ever been written.
The people of the North suffered great humiliation at this period, for nothing could save them from lending their troops and using all their forces to help in slave catching, for it was the law of their Constitution. John Brown also, in connection with this law, appeared rather violently upon the scene. Most people have heard of him; many have heard of him who do not know anything about W. L. Garrison. He became a hero and a martyr by being hanged as a rebel, and the song written about him, “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on,” became a sort of “Marseillaise” of the North, and has undoubtedly helped to keep his memory alive. John Brown had been for some time a keen anti-slavery agitator, and when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed he carried out a scheme of his own for helping to hide and establish fugitives in a stronghold he had built in the mountains of Virginia. For an armed raid which he made into that State with slaves, in which he captured an arsenal, he was brought up on the charge of high treason and hanged.
Garrison thought John Brown courageous and disinterested, but he also thought the raid wild and useless; but then Garrison’s views of war and bloodshed were very different from John Brown’s. One thing he did see was the wonderful change that thirty years of fighting against slavery had brought about in the tremendous outburst of sympathy for Brown, for great indignation was shown and felt at his fate.
Up to this time it would have been almost impossible for a President to be chosen who was not loyal to slavery. But times had changed, and Garrison, if he had not been entirely responsible, had been the principal cause of the change in people’s views; the sympathies of Lincoln, who was a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, were known—he was against slavery, and he was elected by the North, for the hearts of the people had been moved.
Garrison for the first time saw the results of his life’s work, and it is more than some reformers have done. In the election of Lincoln as President he could see, though still a long way off, an end to his labors, to the long and weary battle he had fought. But much suffering and anguish was to be gone through before anything could be accomplished. Lincoln was elected by the Northern States, and the South, furious, declared themselves independent of the Government and the Union, and forming a Government of their own, called themselves “The Confederate States of America.” Civil war started, and never was a war more passionately felt on both sides. It was not a war of Governments, or a war merely to decide whether the South should be united to the North, but it involved a living question of right or wrong between those who believed in slavery and those who did not. The people knew what they were fighting about, which is more often the case in civil war than in wars between nations planned by their Governments. Garrison had been a man of peace. He hated war and preached against it, yet he saw that the conflict could not be stopped. It had been taken out of his hands. Slavery must be overthrown, and, hateful though it was to him, blood, it seemed, must be spilt.
Every American knows the story of that struggle. The war began in 1861 and lasted four years, ending in a victory for the North, though the South fought desperately and gained much sympathy by their bravery. As the struggle went on the hatred of slavery grew, and before it ended many slaves were set free. Various States were asked to free their slaves, and those who did not were held to be in rebellion against the State. The total abolition of slavery by an amendment of the Constitution did not come about till the close of the war in 1865.
Garrison tells of visiting a camp of twelve hundred slaves just liberated. He called upon them to give cheers for freedom, and to his astonishment they were silent: the poor things did not know how to cheer.
It may be asked how Garrison set the slaves free, for he had not the power to do so. He had done so by preparing the ground, by educating the people, rousing them from their selfishness and awakening in them a moral sense. His efforts were rewarded by the election of Lincoln, who as President had the power to complete and to crown the work that Garrison had done.
To the truly great man it is the triumph of his cause, and not personal success, that will make him glad and thankful. Garrison’s contemporaries fully realized how he had been the chief cause in bringing about the emancipation of the slaves. Those who have lived since may have forgotten, and the great figure of Lincoln stands out as the man who before all others brought an infamous system to an end.
Garrison’s work was done, and he retired into private life. He had not been spoilt by publicity; he never really cared for a life of excitement; he was extraordinarily modest and had no personal ambition at all. Though most of his life he had been abused and slandered, it had never made him bitter; he remained happy, serene, and good-tempered in himself, and kept his warm affections to the end of his life. His domestic life, too, was very happy, and he was devoted to his wife and children. He died when he was seventy-three, at Boston, quite peacefully, his wife having died three years before him.
Garrison had his faults, if faults they could be called. He was too easily taken in—he had perhaps too open a mind, and at one time got into the hands of some rather shady people, who led him to take up spiritualism, quack medicines, phrenology, homeopathy, and so on. He was always hoping that any one of these things might possibly help to improve the conditions of mankind. But some of his fads, as they were then called, have become the beliefs of a great many people in the world. The supporters of The Liberator were annoyed with Garrison for preaching in his paper against capital punishment, against governments and the Church, and in favor of votes for women and temperance. They did not see why they should have to believe in these things because they believed in the freeing of the negro. But Garrison’s beliefs were the result of his experience and circumstances. He hated governments because his Government had built up its Constitution on slavery; he despised the Church because it upheld the crime of slavery; if it did not give it active support, it gave it by silence as to its evils, by tolerating slave-holding by its ministers and members, and by preventing whenever it could meetings or discussions being held against it. The Church, Garrison thought, should not be regarded as the Church of Christ, but as the foe of freedom, humanity, and religion. He hated Sunday because on that day no abolition meetings could be held—yet, as we know, he had been a strict church-goer as a young man, and was always to the end of his life a Christian, longing for men and women and the Church to turn to true Christianity, apart from its forms and dogmas.
Garrison had demanded for the negro full citizenship, but he did not live to see how strong is the prejudice in many places against black people. He had not to face this problem of race. It was a great step in the history of civilization to abolish slavery, but it was not the end of the negro question. Is the black man to have the same rights as the white man, the same opportunities for education and improvement? Is there a place for him in this world? Can he make himself useful and indispensable? If we read the history of the negroes’ struggles to get education against fearful difficulties and opposition, of how they endeavored to learn with their clouded, unused minds, and of how they succeeded in lifting themselves by their own efforts out of ignorance and degradation, I think we must believe that there is a place for them, that, given a share in the world’s work and its responsibilities, they will show themselves worthy of the trust put in them. But the white man himself must become more enlightened before an answer to this problem can be found. In the words of a remarkable negro, Booker Washington, who rose from being a slave to the position of a great teacher: “You cannot hold a man down in a ditch without stopping down there with him yourself.”
D. P.