Ever and anon in the world’s history there has been some one who has broken out as a living fountain of the free spirit of humanity, has given bold utterance to the pent-up thought of wrongs, too long endured, and has made the demand for some God-given right, until then withheld,—a demand so obviously just, that the tyrants of earth have trembled as if called to judgment, and the oppressed have rejoiced as at the voice of their deliverer. “It is thus the spirit of a single mind makes that of multitudes take one direction.”

Such, as the subsequent history of our country has shown, such was the spirit of the mind of that man who will be honored through all coming time, as the leader of the most glorious movement ever made in humanity’s behalf,—the movement for perfect, impartial liberty, which for the last thirty-nine years has rocked our Republic from centre to circumference, and will continue to agitate it until every vestige of slavery is shaken out of our civil fabric.

“When the tourist of Europe has descended from the Black Forest into Suabia, his guide asks him if he does not wish to see the source of the Danube. Only one answer can be given to such a question. So he is conducted into the garden of an obscure nobleman of Baden; and there, within a small stone enclosure, he is shown the highest spring of that river, which has worn its channel deeper and wider for sixteen hundred miles, and, receiving on its way the contributions of thirty navigable streams, enters the Black Sea by five mouths, thus opening a communication between the interior of Europe and the Mediterranean, bearing on its bosom the commerce of fifty millions of people, and bringing them into the community of nations.”

Soon after Mr. Garrison’s assault upon the institution of American slavery began to be felt, (and that was almost as soon as it began,) a Southern governor wrote to the mayor of Boston, demanding to know what was to be expected, what to be feared, from this attack upon “the peculiar institution of the South.” In due time the gentleman who was then the high official addressed replied to his Southern excellency, that there was no occasion for uneasiness. “He had made diligent search for the would-be ‘Liberator.’ The city officers had ferreted out the paper and its editor. His office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a few very insignificant persons of all colors.”

Undoubtedly to that dainty gentleman the rise of the antislavery enterprise in our country did seem insignificant,—quite as insignificant as the little spring of water in the garden at Baden. He may never have learnt among his nursery rhymes, that

and he must have forgotten that Christianity began in a stable,—“that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble were called. But that God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.” Our poet, Lowell, estimated, more justly “the would-be Liberator,” his office and his humble assistant.

It cannot be denied that the spirit of Mr. Garrison’s mind has made the minds of multitudes—yes, of the majority of the people of our country—take a new direction in favor of impartial liberty. Of course, I do not claim that this new love of liberty originated with him. He was no more the creator of this moral power, which has taken our nation in its grasp, and is remoulding all our civil and religious institutions, than the fountain in the garden at Baden is the originator of the mighty Danube. Mr. Garrison, no less than that spring, is but a medium, through which the Father of all mercies pours from the hollow of his hand the waters that refresh the earth, and, from the fulness of his heart, the streams that purify the souls, making glad the children of God on earth and in heaven. But although to God we must ultimately ascribe all our blessings, yet do we naturally, and with great reason, revere and love as our benefactors those persons who have been the means and instruments by which personal, political, or religious blessings have been conferred upon us. Especially do we acknowledge our indebtedness to them, if they have suffered reproach, persecution, loss, death, for the sake of the good which we enjoy. The time, therefore, is coming, if it be not now, when the people of our reunited Republic will gratefully own William Lloyd Garrison among the greatest benefactors of our nation and our race.

However much our gratitude to the fathers of our Revolution may dispose us to hide their shortcomings of the goal of impartial liberty, however much we may find or devise to excuse or extenuate their infidelity to the cause of down-trodden humanity, there the shameful facts stand, and never can be effaced from the record;—the fact that (notwithstanding their glorious Declaration) the American revolutionists did not intend the deliverance of all men from oppression; no, not of all the men who heroically fought for it side by side with themselves; no, not of the men who, of all others, needed that deliverance the most;—the fact that the Constitution of this Republic (notwithstanding its avowed purpose) did not mean to secure liberty to all the dwellers in the land over which it was to preside; nor did it provide that those might depart from under it who were not to have any share in its blessings, nor allow the spirit of liberty in them to assert its claims;—the shameful fact that the aim, the tendency, and the result of that great struggle for freedom were partial, restricted, selfish;—the terrible fact that the American revolutionists of 1776 left more firmly established in our country a system of bondage, a slavery, “one hour of which” was known and acknowledged by them to be “more intolerable than whole ages of that from which they had revolted.”

To complete, by moral and religious means and instruments, the great work which the American revolutionists commenced; to do what they left undone; to exterminate from our land the worst form of oppression, the tremendous sin of slavery, was the sole purpose of the enterprise of the Abolitionists, commenced in January, 1831. In this great work Mr. Garrison has been the leader from the beginning. Of him, therefore, I shall have the most to say. But of many other noble men and women I shall have occasion to make most grateful mention.

Although I claim that Mr. Garrison has done more than any one else for the liberation of the immense slave population of America, I am not ignorant or forgetful of those who, before his day, made some attempts for their deliverance. Not to mention the many eminent divines and statesmen of England and the Colonies, before the Revolution, who utterly condemned slavery,—the prominent leaders in that momentous conflict with Great Britain, and in the institution of our Republic, felt and acknowledged its glaring inconsistency with a democratic government. Some of that day predicted, with almost prophetic foresight, the evils, the ruin, which it would bring upon our nation, if slavery should be permitted to abide in our midst. Many protested against the Constitution, because of those articles in it which favored the continuance and indefinite extension of “the great iniquity.” But their objections were too generally overruled by plausible expositions of the potency of other parts of our Magna Charta; and they acquiesced, in the vain hope that the spirit of the Constitution would prove to be better than the letter.

For twenty years after the re-formation of our General Government in 1787, true-hearted men and women spoke and wrote in terms of strong condemnation of slavery, as well as the slave-trade. They spoke and wrote and published what the spirit of liberty dictated, in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, not less than in Pennsylvania, New York, and the New England States. Nay, more, they instituted “societies for the amelioration of the condition of the enslaved, and their gradual emancipation.” Headed by no less a man than Dr. Franklin, they besieged Congress with petitions for the suppression of the African slave-trade, and the gradual abolition of slavery. But after, in 1808, they had obtained the prohibition of the trade, they subsided, as did the abolitionists of Great Britain, into the belief that the subversion of the whole evil of slavery would soon follow as a consequence; not foreseeing that, so long as the market for slaves should be kept open, the commodity demanded there would be forthcoming, let the hazard of procuring it be ever so great. It is now notorious that the traffic in human beings has never been carried on so briskly as since its nominal abolition, while the sufferings of the victims, and the destruction of their lives, have been threefold greater than before.

Owing to this mistaken expectation of the effect of the Act of 1808 abolishing the slave-trade, the attention of philanthropists was in a great measure withdrawn from the subject of slavery for ten years or more. Meanwhile, the friends of “the peculiar institution” were busily engaged in extending its borders and strengthening its defences. The purchase of the Louisiana and Florida territories threw open countless acres of virgin soil, on which the labor of slaves was more profitable than elsewhere. The invention of the “cotton-gin” rendered the preparation of that staple so easy, that our Southern planters could compete with any producers of it the world over. Cotton plantations, therefore, multiplied apace. The value of slaves was more than doubled. The spirit of private manumission, which in Virginia alone, between 1798 and 1808, had set free more than a thousand bondmen annually, was checked by avarice, and then forbidden by law. And the “Ancient Dominion,” proud Virginia, rapidly became the home of slave-breeders; and from that American Guinea was carried on a traffic in human beings as brisk and horrible as ever desolated the coast of Africa.

The free colored population at the South were subjected to new disabilities, were exposed to most vexatious annoyances, and were denied the protection of law against encroachments or personal injuries by the “whites”; and very many of them, on slight pretexts, were reduced to slavery again.

Social intercourse between the Northern and the Southern States was then infrequent. It was kept up mainly by the wealthy and pleasure-seeking, who, in their enjoyment of the hospitality of the planters, could learn little of the condition and character of their bondmen, and were easily led to take “South-side views of slavery.”

Whatsoever we gathered from these sources of information led us too readily to acquiesce in the common assumption, that the negroes were a thick-skulled, stupid, kind-hearted, jolly people, not much if any worse off in slavery at the South than most of the free people of color, and some other poor folks were at the North. So, when we were disquieted at all on their account, it was but for a little time, and we relieved ourselves of the burden by a sigh or two over the misery that everywhere “flesh is heir to.”

The first event that fixed the attention of Northern men seriously upon the subject of slavery, over which they had slumbered since 1808, was the dispute that arose in 1819, upon the proposal to admit Missouri into the Union as a slave State. The contest was a vehement one. Mr. Webster was then upon the side of liberty. He led the van of the opposition that arrayed itself in New England, and would have averted the catastrophe, but for the cry “dissolution of the Union,” then first raised at the South, and the necromancy of Henry Clay, who, with his wand of compromise, conjured the people into acquiescence. Words, however, significant words, touching the evil and the awful wrong of slavery, were uttered in that controversy which were not to be forgotten. And feelings of compassion for the bondmen were awakened which were not allayed by the result.

Shortly before the Missouri controversy a movement had commenced in the slave States, which was pregnant with effects very different from those intended by the projectors of it. Often was it roughly demanded of us Abolitionists, “Why we espoused so zealously the cause of the enslaved?” “why we meddled so with the civil and domestic institutions of the Southern States?” Our first answer always was, in the memorable words of old Terence, “Because we are men, and, therefore, cannot be indifferent to anything that concerns humanity.” Liberty cannot be enjoyed, nor long preserved, at the North, if slavery be tolerated at the South. But to those who felt so slightly the cords of love and the bonds of a common humanity that they could not appreciate these reasons, we gave another reason for our interference with the slavery in our Southern States, even this: we were solicited, we were urged, entreated by the slaveholders themselves to interfere.

About the year 1816, while intent upon their projects for perpetuating and extending their “peculiar institution,” the slaveholders were alarmed by symptoms of discontent among the free colored people, imagined that they were promoting insubordination amongst the slaves, and so conceived the project of colonizing them in Africa. To insure the accomplishment of so mighty an undertaking, it was obviously necessary to obtain the aid of the general government. In order to sustain that government in making such a large appropriation of the public money as would be needed, the people of the North, as well as of the South, were to be conciliated to the plan; and to conciliate them it was necessary to make it appear to be a philanthropic enterprise, conferring great benefits immediately upon the free colored people, and tending certainly, though indirectly, to the entire abolition of slavery. Accordingly, agents, eloquent and cunning men, were sent into all the free States, especially into Pennsylvania, New York, and New England, to press the claims of the oppressed people of the South upon the compassion and generosity of the Northern philanthropists. Never did agents do their work better. Never were more exciting appeals made to the humane than were pressed home upon us by such men as Mr. Gurley, Mr. Cresson, and their fellow-laborers. They kept out of sight the real design, the primal object, the animus of the founders and Southern patrons of the American Colonization Society. They presented to us views of the debasing, dehumanizing effects of slavery upon its victims; the need of a far-distant removal from its overshadowing presence of those who had been blighted by it, that they might revive, unfold their humanity, exhibit their capacities, command the respect of those who had known them only in degradation, and, by their new-born activities, not only secure comfort and plenty for themselves on the shores of their fatherland, but prepare homes there for the reception of millions still pining in slavery, who, we were assured, would be gladly released whenever it should be known that the bestowment of freedom would be a blessing and not a curse to them. Such appeals were not made to our hearts in vain. Suffice it to say that Mr. Garrison, Gerrit Smith, Arthur Tappan, William Goodell, and all the early Abolitionists, were induced to espouse the cause of our oppressed and enslaved countrymen, by the speeches and tracts of Southern Colonizationists.

If I were intending to write a complete history of the conflict with slavery in our country, gratitude would impel me to give some account of a number of philanthropists who, in different parts of the Union, some of them in the midst of slaveholding communities, before Mr. Garrison’s day, had fully exposed and faithfully denounced “the great iniquity,” I should make especial mention of

REV. JOHN RANKIN AND REV. JOHN D. PAXTON.

The former was a Presbyterian minister in Kentucky, where, in 1825, having heard that his brother, Mr. Thomas Rankin, of Virginia, had become a slaveholder, he addressed to him a series of very earnest and impressive letters in remonstrance. They were published first in a periodical called the Castigator, and afterwards went through several editions in pamphlet form. He denounced “slavery as a never-failing fountain of the grossest immoralities, and one of the deepest sources of human misery.” He insisted that “the safety of our government and the happiness of its subjects depended upon the extermination of this evil.” We New England Abolitionists, in the early days of our warfare, made great use of Mr. Rankin’s volume as a depository of well-attested facts, justifying the strongest condemnation, we could utter, of the system of oppression that had become established in our country and sanctioned by our government.

Mr. Paxton was the pastor of a Presbyterian church in Cumberland, Virginia. He was a member of the Presbyterian General Assembly, which in 1818 denounced “the voluntary enslaving of one part of the human race as a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature,—utterly inconsistent with the law of God.” Believing what that grave body had declared, he set about endeavoring to convince the church to which he ministered of the exceeding sinfulness of slaveholding; and that “they ought to set their bondmen free so soon as it could be done with advantage to them.” His preaching to this effect gave offence to many of his parishioners, and led to his dismission. In justice to himself, and to the cause of humanity, for espousing which he had been persecuted, Mr. Paxton also published a volume of letters, which were of great service to us. In these letters he faithfully exposed the abject, debased, suffering condition of our American slaves,—incomparably worse than that which was permitted under the Mosaic dispensation,—and pretty effectually demolished the Bible argument in support of the abomination. However, the labors of these good men, and of those whom they roused, were erelong diverted into the seductive channel of the Colonization scheme.

But there was another of the early antislavery reformers, of whom I may write much more fully in accordance with my plan, which is to give, for the most part, only my personal recollections of the prominent actors, and the most significant incidents, in our conflict with the giant wrong of our nation and age.

BENJAMIN LUNDY.

In the month of June, 1828, there came to the town of Brooklyn, Connecticut, where I then resided, and to the house of my friend, the venerable philanthropist, George Benson, a man of small stature, of feeble health, partially deaf, asking for a public hearing upon the subject of American slavery. It was Benjamin Lundy. We gathered for him a large congregation, and his address made a deep impression on many of his hearers. He exhibited the wrong of slavery and the sufferings of its victims in a graphic, affecting manner. But the relief which he proposed was to be found in removing them to some of the unoccupied territory of Texas or Mexico, rather than in recognizing their rights as men here, in the country where so many of them had been born; and in making all the amends possible for the injuries so long inflicted upon them by giving them here the blessings of education, and every opportunity and assistance to become all that God has made them capable of being. Nevertheless, Mr. Lundy had done then, and he continued afterwards, until his death in 1839, to do excellent service in the cause of the enslaved. Indeed, his labors were so abundant, his sacrifices so many, and his trials so severe, that no one will stand before the God of the oppressed with a better record than he.

Benjamin Lundy was born in New Jersey, of Quaker parents, in 1789, and was educated in the sentiments and under the influence of the society of Friends. He was, therefore, from his earliest days, taught to regard slaveholding as a great iniquity. At the age of nineteen he went to reside in Wheeling, Virginia, and there learnt the saddler’s trade. This he afterwards carried on, with great success for a number of years, in the village of St. Clairville, Ohio, about ten miles from Wheeling. But he could not banish from his memory the sights he had seen at Wheeling, which was the great thoroughfare of the slave-trade between Virginia and the Southern and Southwestern States; nor efface from his heart the impression that he ought “to attempt to do something for the relief of that most injured portion of the human race.” As early as 1815, when twenty-six years of age, he formed an antislavery society, which at first consisted of only six members, but in a few months increased to nearly five hundred, among whom were many of the influential ministers, lawyers, and other prominent citizens of several of the counties in that part of Ohio. Although unused to composition, he wrote an appeal to the philanthropists of the United States, which was published and extensively circulated, and led to the formation, in different parts of the State, of societies similar in spirit and purpose to the one he had instituted. He then engaged in the publication of an antislavery paper; and to promote its circulation, and to gather materials for its columns, he commenced his travels in the slave States. These were performed for the most part on foot. Thus he journeyed thousands of miles, through Virginia, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina. In most places where he lectured publicly, or privately, he obtained subscribers to his paper. In some places he succeeded in forming associations similar to his own. Not unfrequently he met with angry rebuffs and violent threats of personal injury. But he was a man of the most quiet courage, as well as indomitable perseverance. He disconcerted his assailants by letting them see that they could not frighten him; that the threat of assassination would not deter him from prosecuting his object. Several slaveholders were so much affected by his exposition of their iniquity that they manumitted their bondmen, on condition that he would take them to a place where they would be free. Twice or thrice he went to Hayti, conducting such freed ones thither, and finding homes for others whom he hoped to send there. Afterwards he explored large portions of Mexico and Texas; and made strenuous endeavors to obtain by grant or purchase sections of lands, upon which he might found colonies of emancipated people from this country. In this attempt he was unsuccessful; but while prosecuting it he gathered much valuable information respecting the state of that country, of which afterwards important use was made by the Hon. J.Q. Adams, in his strenuous opposition in 1836 to the audacious plot by which Texas was annexed to our Republic.

Mr. Lundy was indefatigable in laboring for whatever he undertook to accomplish. He learnt the printer’s art, that he might communicate to the public whatever he discovered by his diligent inquiries of the condition of the enslaved, and enkindle in others that sympathy for them which glowed in his own bosom. He was not stationary for a long while in any one place. His paper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation, was published successively in Ohio, Missouri, Tennessee, and in Philadelphia, Washington, and Baltimore. For a considerable time his lecturing excursions were so frequent, diverse, and distant, that it was most convenient to him to get his paper printed, wherever he happened to be, from month to month. So he earned along with him the type, “heading,” the “column-rules,” and his “direction-book,” and issued “the Genius,” &c., from any office that was accessible to him. He often had to pay for the publication of it by working as a journeyman printer, and at other times had to support himself by working at his saddler’s trade. Nothing discouraged, nothing daunted Benjamin Lundy. He possessed, in an eminent degree, the faith, patience, self-denial, courage, and endurance necessary to a pioneer. He was frequently threatened, repeatedly assaulted, and once brutally beaten. But he could not be deterred from prosecuting the work to which he was called. He was a rare specimen of perfect fidelity to duty, a conscientious, meek, but fearless, determined man, a soldier of the cross, a moral hero.

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.

William Lloyd Garrison commenced his literary and philanthropic labors when a young journeyman printer, in his native place, Newburyport, Mass. In 1825 he removed to Boston, and labored for a while in the office of the Recorder. In 1827 he united with Rev. William Collier in editing and publishing the National Philanthropist, the only paper then devoted to the Temperance cause. And soon after he engaged in conducting The Journal of the Times, at Bennington, Vt. In each of these papers, especially the last, he took strong ground against slavery. Believing the plan of the Colonization Society to be intended to remove the great evil from our country, he espoused it with ardor, and advocated it with such signal ability, that he was recalled to Boston to deliver, in Park Street church, the annual address to the Massachusetts Colonization Society, on the 4th of July, 1828.

Mr. Garrison’s writings attracted the attention of that devoted, self-sacrificing friend of the enslaved, Benjamin Lundy, of whom I have just now given some account. He urged him in 1828, and persuaded him in the autumn of 1829, to remove to Baltimore, and assist in editing The Genius of Universal Emancipation. There Mr. G. soon saw, with his own eyes, the atrocities of slavery and the inter-state slave-trade; there he discovered the real design and spirit of the Colonization scheme; there the radical doctrine of immediate, unconditional emancipation was revealed to him. He soon made himself obnoxious to slaveholders by his faithful exposure of their cruelties; and his unsparing condemnation of their atrocious system of oppression. After he had been in Baltimore a few months, a Northern captain came there in a ship owned and freighted by a gentleman of Newburyport, Mr. Garrison’s birthplace. Failing to obtain another cargo, said captain, with the consent of his owner, took on board a load of slaves to be transported to New Orleans. Such an outrage on humanity, perpetrated by Massachusetts men, enkindled Mr. G.’s hottest indignation, and drew from his pen a scathing rebuke. He was forthwith arrested as both a civil and criminal offender. He was prosecuted for a libel upon the captain and owner of the ship “Francis,” and for disturbing the peace by attempting to excite the slaves to insurrection.

It would be needless to spend time in proving that, in the presence of a slaveholding judge, before a slaveholding jury, surrounded by a community of incensed slaveholders, the young reformer did not have a fair trial. He was found guilty under both indictments. He was fined and sentenced to imprisonment a certain time, as the punishment for his alleged crime, and afterward, until the fine imposed for “the libel” should be paid. It was then and there that his free, undaunted spirit inscribed upon the walls of his cell that joyous, jubilant sonnet, which could have been written only by one conscious of innocence in the sight of the Holy God, of a great purpose and a sacred mission yet to be accomplished.

After seven weeks of close confinement Mr. Garrison was liberated by the noble, discriminating generosity of the late Arthur Tappan, then in the height of his affluence, who, so long as he had wealth, felt that he was an almoner of God’s bounty, and gave his money gladly, in many ways, to the relief of suffering humanity. The spirit of freedom,—the true American eagle,—thus uncaged, flew back to his native New England, and thence sent forth that cry which disturbed the repose of every slaveholder in the land, and has resounded throughout the world.

It so happened, in the good Providence “which shapes our ends,” that I was on a visit in Boston at that time,—October, 1830. An advertisement appeared in the newspapers, that during the following week W. Lloyd Garrison would deliver to the public three lectures, in which he would exhibit the awful sinfulness of slaveholding; expose the duplicity of the Colonization Society, revealing its true character; and, in opposition to it, would announce and maintain the doctrine, that immediate, unconditional emancipation is the right of every slave and the duty of every master. The advertisement announced that his lectures would be delivered on the Common, unless some church or commodious hall should be proffered to him gratuitously. If I remember correctly, it was intimated in the newspapers, or currently reported at the time, that Mr. G. had applied for several of the Boston churches, and been refused, because it was known that he had become an opponent of the Colonization Society. A day or two after the first I saw a second advertisement, informing the public that the free use of “Julien Hall,” occupied by Rev. Abner Kneeland’s church, having been generously tendered to Mr. Garrison, he would deliver his lectures there instead of the Common. I had not then seen this resolute young man. I had been much impressed by some of his writings, knew of his connection with Mr. Lundy, and had heard of his imprisonment. Of course I was eager to see and hear him, and went to Julien Hall in due season on the appointed evening. My brother-in-law, A. Bronson Alcott, and my cousin, Samuel E. Sewall, accompanied me. Truer men could not easily have been found.

The hall was pretty well filled. Among some persons whom I did, and many whom I did not know, I saw there Rev. Dr. Beecher, Rev. Mr. (now Dr.) Gannett, Deacon Moses Grant, and John Tappan, Esq.

Presently the young man arose, modestly, but with an air of calm determination, and delivered such a lecture as he only, I believe, at that time, could have written; for he only had had his eyes so anointed that he could see that outrages perpetrated upon Africans were wrongs done to our common humanity; he only, I believe, had had his ears so completely unstopped of “prejudice against color” that the cries of enslaved black men and black women sounded to him as if they came from brothers and sisters.

He began with expressing deep regret and shame for the zeal he had lately manifested in the Colonization cause. It was, he confessed, a zeal without knowledge. He had been deceived by the misrepresentations so diligently given, throughout the free States by Southern agents, of the design and tendency of the Colonization scheme. During his few months’ residence in Maryland he had been completely undeceived. He had there found out that the design of those who originated, and the especial intentions of those in the Southern States that engaged in the plan, were to remove from the country, as “a disturbing element” in slaveholding communities, all the free colored people, so that the bondmen might the more easily be held in subjection. He exhibited in graphic sketches and glowing colors the suffering of the enslaved, and denounced the plan of Colonization as devised and adapted to perpetuate the system, and intensify the wrongs of American slavery, and therefore utterly undeserving of the patronage of lovers of liberty and friends of humanity.

Never before was I so affected by the speech of man. When he had ceased speaking I said to those around me: “That is a providential man; he is a prophet; he will shake our nation to its centre, but he will shake slavery out of it. We ought to know him, we ought to help him. Come, let us go and give him our hands.” Mr. Sewall and Mr. Alcott went up with me, and we introduced each other. I said to him: “Mr. Garrison, I am not sure that I can indorse all you have said this evening. Much of it requires careful consideration. But I am prepared to embrace you. I am sure you are called to a great work, and I mean to help you.” Mr. Sewall cordially assured him of his readiness also to co-operate with him. Mr. Alcott invited him to his home. He went, and we sat with him until twelve that night, listening to his discourse, in which he showed plainly that immediate, unconditional emancipation, without expatriation, was the right of every slave, and could not be withheld by his master an hour without sin. That night my soul was baptized in his spirit, and ever since I have been a disciple and fellow-laborer of William Lloyd Garrison.

The next morning, immediately after breakfast, I went to his boarding-house and stayed until two P.M. I learned that he was poor, dependent upon his daily labor for his daily bread, and intending to return to the printing business. But, before he could devote himself to his own support, he felt that he must deliver his message, must communicate to persons of prominent influence what he had learned of the sad condition of the enslaved, and the institutions and spirit of the slaveholders; trusting that all true and good men would discharge the obligation pressing upon them to espouse the cause of the poor, the oppressed, the down-trodden. He read to me letters he had addressed to Dr. Channing, Dr. Beecher, Dr. Edwards, the Hon. Jeremiah Mason, and Hon. Daniel Webster, 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. Those letters were eloquent, solemn, impressive. I wonder they did not produce a greater effect. It was because none to whom he appealed, in public or private, would espouse the cause, that Mr. Garrison found himself left and impelled to become the leader of the great antislavery reform, which must be thoroughly accomplished before our Republic can stand upon a sure foundation.

The hearing of Mr. Garrison’s lectures was a great epoch in my own life. The impression which they made upon my soul has never been effaced; indeed, they moulded it anew. They gave a new direction to my thoughts, a new purpose to my ministry. I had become a convert to the doctrine of “immediate, unconditional emancipation,—liberation from slavery without expatriation.”

I was engaged to preach on the following Sunday for Brother Young, in Summer Street Church. Of course I could not again speak to a congregation, as a Christian minister, and be silent respecting the great iniquity of our nation. The only sermon I had brought from my home in Connecticut, that could be made to bear on the subject, was one on Prejudice,—the sermon about to be published as one of the Tracts of the American Unitarian Association. So I touched it up as well as I could, interlining here and there words and sentences which pointed in the new direction to which my thoughts and feelings so strongly tended, and writing at its close what used to be called an improvement. Thus: “The subject of my discourse bears most pertinently upon a matter of the greatest national as well as personal importance. There are more than two millions of our fellow-beings, children of the Heavenly Father, who are held in our country in the most abject slavery,—regarded and treated like domesticated animals, their rights as men trampled under foot, their conjugal, parental, fraternal relations and affections utterly set at naught. It is our prejudice against the color of these poor people that makes us consent to the tremendous wrongs they are suffering. If they were white,—ay, if only two thousand or two hundred white men, women, and children in the Southern States were treated as these millions of colored ones are, we of the North should make such a stir of indignation, we should so agitate the country, with our appeals and remonstrances, that the oppressors would be compelled to set their bondmen free. But will our prejudice be accepted by the Almighty, the impartial Judge of all, as a valid excuse for our indifference to the wrongs and outrages inflicted upon these millions of our countrymen? O no! O no! He will say, “Inasmuch as ye did not what ye could for the relief of these, the least of the brethren, ye did it not to me.” Tell me not that we are forbidden by the Constitution of our country to interfere in behalf of the enslaved. No compact our fathers may have made for us, no agreement we could ourselves make, would annul our obligations to suffering fellow-men. “Yes, yes,” I said, with an emphasis that seemed to startle everybody in the house, “if need be, the very foundations of our Republic must be broken up; and if this stone of stumbling, this rock of offence, cannot be removed from under it, the proud superstructure must fall. It cannot stand, it ought not to stand, it will not stand, on the necks of millions of men.” For “God is just, and his justice will not sleep forever.” I then offered such a prayer as my kindled spirit moved me to, and gave out the hymn commencing,

When I rose to pronounce the benediction I said: “Every one present must be conscious that the closing remarks of my sermon have caused an unusual emotion throughout the church. I am glad. Would to God that a deeper emotion could be sent throughout our land, until all the people thereof shall be roused from their wicked insensibility to the most tremendous sin of which any nation was ever guilty, and be impelled to do that righteousness which alone can avert the just displeasure of God. I have been prompted to speak thus by the words I have heard during the past week from a young man hitherto unknown, but who is, I believe, called of God to do a greater work for the good of our country than has been done by any one since the Revolution. I mean William Lloyd Garrison. He is going to repeat his lectures the coming week. I advise, I exhort, I entreat—would that I could compel!—you to go and hear him.”

On turning to Brother Young after the benediction I found that he was very much displeased. He sharply reproved me, and gave me to understand that I should never have an opportunity so to violate the propriety of his pulpit again. And never since then have I lifted up my voice within that beautiful church, which has lately been taken down.

The excited audience gathered in clusters, evidently talking about what had happened. I found the porch full of persons conversing in very earnest tones. Presently a lady of fine person, her countenance suffused with emotion, tears coursing down her cheeks, pressed through the crowd, seized my hand, and said audibly, with deep feeling: “Mr. May, I thank you. What a shame it is that I, who have been a constant attendant from my childhood in this or some other Christian church, am obliged to confess that to-day, for the first time, I have heard from the pulpit a plea for the oppressed, the enslaved millions in our land!” All within hearing of her voice were evidently moved in sympathy with her, or were awed by her emotion. For myself I could only acknowledge in a word my gratitude for her generous testimony.

The next day I perceived, on his return from his place of business in State Street, that my revered father was much disturbed by the reports he had heard of my preaching. Some of the “gentlemen of property and standing” who had been my auditors said it was fanatical, others that it was incendiary, others that it was treasonable, and begged him to “arrest me in my mad career.” The only one, as he soon afterwards informed me, who had spoken in any other than terms of censure was the great and good Dr. Bowditch, who said, “Depend upon it, the young man is more than half right.” My father tried to dissuade me from engaging in the attempt to overthrow the system of slavery which Mr. Garrison proposed. He had come, with most others, to regard it as an unavoidable evil, one that the fathers of our Republic had not ventured to suppress, but had rather given to its protection something like a guaranty. He thought, with most others at that day, that slavery must be left to be gradually removed by the progress of civilization, the growth of higher ideas of human nature, and the manifest superiority and hotter economy of free labor. He admonished me that, in assailing the institution of American slavery, I should only be “kicking against the pricks,” that I should lose my standing in the ministry and my usefulness in the church. I need not add that he failed to convince me that “the foolishness of preaching” would not yet be “mighty to the pulling down of the stronghold of Satan.” In less than ten years he was reconciled to my course.

A few days afterwards I gave my sermon on Prejudice to my most excellent friend, Rev. Henry Ware, Jr., who was then the purveyor of tracts for the American Unitarian Association. He accepted the discourse as originally written, but insisted that the interlineations and the additions respecting slavery should be omitted. He would not have done this, nor should I have consented to it, a few years later. But we were all in bondage then. Unconsciously to ourselves, the hand of the slaveholding power lay heavily upon the mind and heart of the people in our Northern as well as Southern States.

What a pity that my words in that sermon, respecting slavery, were not published in the tract! They might have helped a little to commit our Unitarian denomination much earlier to the cause of impartial liberty, in earnest protest against the great oppression, the unparalleled iniquity of our land. Of whom should opposition to slavery of every kind have been expected so soon as from Unitarian Christians? The insensibility of the people of our country to the wrongs, the outrages, we were directly and indirectly inflicting upon our colored brethren, when Mr. Garrison commenced the antislavery reform,—the insensibility of the Northern people, scarcely less than that of the Southern,—of New England as well as of the Carolinas and Georgia, of the professing Christians, almost as much as of the political partisans,—that insensibility, not yet wholly overpast, even in Massachusetts, is a moral phenomenon. A more glaring inconsistency does not appear in the whole history of mankind.

The love of liberty was an American passion. We gloried in our Revolution. We thought our fathers were to be honored above all men for throwing off the British yoke. Taxation without representation was not to be submitted to. “Resistance to tyrants was obedience to God.” We regarded the “Declaration of Independence” as the most momentous document ever penned by mortal man, the herald note of deliverance to the race. The first sentence of the second paragraph of it was as familiar to everybody as the Lord’s Prayer; and almost as sacred as that prayer did we hold the words “All men were created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And yet few had given a thought to the fact that there were millions of men, women, and children in our land who were held under a heavier bondage than that to which the Israelites were subjected in the land of Egypt, were denied all the rights of humanity, were herded together like brutes,—bought, sold, worked, whipped like cattle.

All in our country who were descendants from the Puritans, especially those of us who claimed descent from the fathers of New England, were imbued with the spirit of religious liberty, had much to say about the rights of conscience; but we gave no heed to the awful fact that there were millions in the land who were not allowed to exercise any of those rights, were not permitted to read the Bible or any other book, and were taught little else about God, but that He was an invisible, ever-present, almighty overseer of the plantations upon which they were worked like cattle, standing ready at all times, everywhere, to inflict upon them, if they neglected their unrequited tasks, a thousand-fold more dreadful punishment than their earthly tormentors were able even to conceive.

We Americans, especially we New-Englanders, were, or thought we were, all alive to the cause of human freedom. We were quick to hear the cry of the oppressed, that came to us from distant lands. We stopped not to ask the language, character, or complexion of the sufferers. It was enough for us to know that they were human beings, and that they were deprived of liberty. We hesitated not to denounce their tyrants.

The call for succor which came to us from Greece was quickly heard and promptly answered in almost all parts of our country. And why? Not because the Greeks were a more virtuous or more intelligent people than their enemies. No; we had little reason to think them better than the Turks. But they were the injured party, and therefore we roused ourselves to aid them. How much soever our orators and poets gathered up the hallowed associations which cluster around that classic land, they all were but the decorations, not the point, of their appeals. It was the story of the wrongs of the Grecians which found the way to our hearts, and stirred us up to encourage and succor them in their conflict for liberty. Dr. Howe will tell you that it was not their admiration of Greece in her ancient glory, but their sympathy for Greece in her modern degradation, that impelled him and his chivalrous companions to fly thither, and peril their lives in her cause.

Coming to us from any other land, the cry for freedom sent through American bosoms a thrilling emotion. We stopped not to inquire who they were that would be free. If they were men, we knew they had a right to liberty. No matter how the yoke had been fastened on them,—whether by inheritance, or conquest, or political compromise,—we felt that it ought to be broken. And although to break it the whole social fabric of their oppressors must be overturned, still we said, Let the yoke be broken!

Thus we quickly felt, thus we reasoned and acted, in all cases of oppression excepting one,—the one at home, the one in which we were implicated with the oppressors. We were blind, we were deaf, we were dumb, to the wrongs and outrages inflicted upon one sixth part of the population of our own country. In the Southern States the colored people were held as property, chattels personal, liable to all the incidents of the estates of their owners, could be seized to pay their debts, or mortgaged, or given away, or bequeathed by them. To all intents and purposes, they were regarded by the laws of those States, and might be legally disposed of, and otherwise treated, just like domesticated brute animals. In most of the Northern States they were not admitted to the prerogatives of citizens. In none of them were they allowed to enjoy equal social, educational, or religious privileges; nor were they permitted to engage in any of the lucrative professions, trades, or handicrafts. They were condemned to all the menial offices. It was impossible not to respect and value many of them as servants and nurses, but they were not suffered to come nearer to white people in any domestic or social relations. Intermarriages with them were illegal, and punishable by heavy penalties. They were not allowed to travel (unless as servants) in any public conveyances. Their children were excluded from the schools which white children attended, and they were set apart in one corner of the places of public worship called the houses of God,—the impartial Father of all men. A certain shade of complexion, though much lighter than some brunettes, consigned any one guilty of it to the grade of the blacks, which was de-gradation. We were educated to regard negroes as an inferior race of beings, not entitled to the distinctive rights and privileges of white men. Ignorance, poverty, and servitude came to be considered the birthright, the inheritance, of all Africans and their descendants; and therefore we did not feel the pressure of their bonds, nor the smart of the wounds that were continually given them.

Prejudice against color had become universal. The most elevated were not superior to it; the humblest white men were not below it. Colorphobia was a disease that infected all white Americans. Let me give my readers one instance of its virulence.

In 1834, being on a visit to my father in Boston, I was requested to call upon one of his old friends, that he might dissuade me from co-operating any further with “that wrong-headed, fanatical Garrison.” The honorable gentleman was very prominent in the fashionable, professional, and political society of that city. He had always expressed a kind regard for me, and had shown his confidence by committing to my care the education of two of his sons.

I did not doubt that he had been moved to send for me by his sincere concern for what he deemed my welfare. He received me with elegant courtesy, as he was wont to do, but entered at once upon the subject of “Mr. Garrison’s misdirected, mischievous enterprise.” He insisted that, while the negroes ought to be treated humanely, the thought of their ever being elevated to an equality with white men was preposterous, and he wondered that a man of common sense should entertain the thought an hour. He said: “Why, they are evidently an inferior race of beings, intended to be the servants of those on whom the Creator has conferred a higher nature,” and adduced the arguments which were then becoming, and have since been, so common with those who would maintain this position. At length I said to him: “Sir, we Abolitionists are not so foolish as to require or wish that ignorant negroes should be considered wise men, or that vicious negroes should be considered virtuous men, or poor negroes be considered rich men. All we demand for them is that negroes shall be permitted, encouraged, assisted to become as wise, as virtuous, and as rich as they can, and be acknowledged to be just what they have become, and be treated accordingly.” He replied, with great emphasis: “Mr. M., if you should bring me negroes who had become the wisest of the wise, the best of the good, the richest of the rich, I would not acknowledge them to be my equals.” “Then,” said I, “you might be laughed at; for, if there be any meaning in your words, such men would be your superiors. Think, sir, a moment of your presuming to contemn the wisest of the wise, the best of the good, the richest of the rich, because of their complexion. This would be the insanity of prejudice. Why, sir,” I continued, “Rammohun Roy is soon coming to this country; and he is of a darker hue than many American persons who are prescribed and degraded because of their color.” “Well, sir,” he angrily replied, “I am not one who will show him any respect.” “What,” I cried, “not take pains to know and treat with respect Rammohun Roy?” “No,” he rejoined,—“no, not even Rammohun Roy!” “Then,” I retorted, “you will lose the honor of taking by the hand the most remarkable man of our age.” He was much offended, and, as I afterwards learnt, chose that our acquaintance should end with that interview.

Such was the prejudice that Mr. Garrison found confronting him everywhere, and it still is the greatest obstacle in our country to the progress of liberty and the establishment of peace.

Never, since the days of our Saviour, have these lines of Pope been more fully verified than in the experience of Mr. Garrison. So soon as it was known that he opposed the Colonization plan, and demanded for the enslaved immediate emancipation, without expatriation, he was at once generally denounced as a very dangerous person. Very few of those who were convinced by his facts and his appeals that something should be done forthwith for the relief of our oppressed millions ventured, during the first twelve months of his labors, to help him. Even the excellent Deacon Grant would not trust him for paper on which to print his Liberator a month. And most of those who assisted him to get audiences wherever he went, and who subscribed for the Liberator, and who expressed their best wishes, were intimidated by his boldness, frequently half acknowledged that he demanded too much for our bondmen, and could not be made to understand his fundamental doctrine of “immediate unconditional emancipation,” often and clearly as he expounded it.

In November, 1831, I happened again to be in Boston on a visit, when it was proposed to attempt the formation of an antislavery society. A meeting was called at the office of Samuel E. Sewall, Esq. Fifteen gentlemen assembled there. We agreed in the outset that, if the apostolic number of twelve should be found ready to unite upon the principles that should be thought vital, and in a plan of operations deemed wise and expedient, we would then and there organize an association. Mr. Garrison announced the doctrine of “immediate emancipation” as being essential to the great reform that was needed in our land, the extirpation of slavery, and the establishment of the human rights of the millions who were groaning under a worse than Egyptian bondage. We discussed the point two hours. But though we were the earliest and most earnest friends of the young reformer, only nine of us were brought to see, eye to eye with him, as to the right of the slave and the duty of the master. Only nine of us were brought to see that a man was a man, let his complexion be what it might be; and that no other man, not the most exalted in the land, could regard and hold him a moment as his property, his chattel, without sin. Only nine of us were brought to understand that the first thing to be done for those men held in the condition of domesticated brutes, was to recognize, acknowledge their humanity, and secure to them their God-given rights,—those rights of all men set forth as inalienable in the immortal Declaration of American Independence. Only nine of us were brought to see that the first thing to be done for the improvement of the condition of the slave is to break his yoke, to set him free, and that what needs to be done first ought to be done without delay, immediately. The rest of the company partook of the fear, common at that day, that it would be very dangerous to set millions of slaves free at once. Although liberty was announced to the world, in our American Declaration, as the birthright of all the children of men, yet were the people of our country so blinded and besotted by the influence of our slave system, that it was almost universally pronounced unsafe to give liberty to adult men, who were slaves, until they should be prepared for freedom, and deemed qualified to exercise it aright. Mr. Garrison had had to meet and combat this senseless fear everywhere, from the commencement of his enterprise. He had shown to all who could see that slavery was not a school in which men could be educated for liberty; that they could no more be trained to feel and act as freemen should, so long as they were kept in bondage, than children could be taught to walk so long as they were held in the arms of nurses. Moreover, he argued, that if those only should be intrusted with liberty who knew how to use it, slaveholders were of all men the last that should be left free, seeing that they habitually outraged liberty,—indeed, had been educated to trample upon human rights. Still, his doctrine was generally misunderstood, egregiously misrepresented, and violently opposed. And, as I have stated, only nine out of fifteen of his elect followers, after he had been preaching and publishing the doctrine a year, fully believed or dared to unite with him in announcing it to the world as their faith. We therefore separated in November, 1831, without having organized. I returned disappointed to my home in Connecticut, eighty miles from Boston; too far at that day, ere railroads were lain, to come, in the depth of winter, to assist in the formation of the New England Antislavery Society, which took place in January, 1832. So I lost the honor of being one of the actual founders of the first society based upon the true principle,—immediate emancipation.

That there was point, vitality, power, in this doctrine was proved by the commotion which was everywhere caused by the promulgation of it. From one end of the country to the other the cry went forth against the editor of the Liberator, Fanatic! Incendiary! Madman! The slaveholders raved, and their Northern apologists confessed that they had too much cause to be offended. Grave statesmen and solemn divines pronounced the doctrines of the New England Abolitionists unwise, dangerous, false, unconstitutional, revolutionary. Encouraged by these responses, the slaveholding aristocrats grew so bold as to demand that “this fanatical assault upon one of their domestic institutions should be quelled at once,” that the publications of the Abolitionists should be suppressed, our meetings dispersed, our lecturers and agents arrested. And scarcely had the Liberator entered upon its second year before a reward was offered by a Southern Legislature for the abduction of the person, or for the life of its editor. And no Northern Legislature expressed its alarm or surprise. No Northern paper, secular or religious, reproved these assaults upon the liberty of the press and the freedom of speech. Thus was the viper cherished that has since stung so deeply the bosom of our Republic, has inflicted a wound that is still open and festering.

The grossest abuse was heaped upon Mr. Garrison; the vilest aspersions cast upon his character by those who knew nothing of his private life; the worst designs imputed to his great enterprise by those who were interested directly or indirectly in upholding the system of iniquity which he had resolved to overthrow.

One of the charges brought against him, the one which probably hindered his success more than any other, was that he was an enemy of religion, an infidel, and that his covert but real purpose was to subvert the institutions of Christianity.

Now Mr. Garrison is, and ever has been since I knew him, a profoundly religious man, one of the most so I have ever known. No one really acquainted with him will say the contrary, unless it be under the impulse of a sectarian prejudice, personal resentment, or a sinister purpose. True, his doctrinal opinions and his regard for rites and forms have come to differ from those of the popular religionists of our day, as much as did the opinions of Jesus Christ differ from those of the temple and synagogue worshippers of his day. It would have been politic in him not to have incurred, as he did, the opposition and hatred of so many of the ministers and churches of our country. But Mr. Garrison knew not how to counsel with the wisdom of this world. He surely had as much cause and as frequent occasions to expose the inhumanity and hypocrisy of our country as Jesus had to denounce the scribes, Pharisees, and priests of Judea. He soon discovered, to his astonishment, that the American Church was the bulwark of American slaveholders. The truth of this accusation was afterwards elaborately proved by the Hon. J.G. Birney. It was emphatically acknowledged by the Rev. Dr. Albert Barnes, and has since been repeatedly declared by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and Rev. Dr. Cheever, all honorable, orthodox men. Now, pray, how ought a great captain, though his army be a small one,—how ought he to treat the bulwark of the enemy he means to subdue? how but to assail and demolish it if he can? God be praised, Christianity and the American Church were not then, and are not now, identical. The religion of Jesus Christ is dearer to Mr. Garrison than his own life. It was only the hollow-hearted pretenders to piety whom he exposed, censured, ridiculed. He never uttered from his pen or his lips a word that I have read or heard, or that has been reported to me,—not a word but in reverence and love of the truth and the spirit, the doctrines and the precepts, of Jesus Christ. Many of those who were interested in Mr. Garrison’s holy purpose, and wished him success, thought him too severe; many more thought him indiscreet. He was remonstrated with often earnestly. But he could not be persuaded that it was not right and wise to blame those persons most for our national sin who had the most influence on the government, the policy, the prevailing sentiments, the customs, and, above all, the religion of the nation. Mr. Garrison would sometimes argue, and argue powerfully, convincingly, with those who found fault with his words of fiery indignation, and show that tamer language would be inapt, unfelt. At other times he would say, “Do the poor, hunted, hounded, down-trodden slaves think my language too severe or misapplied? Do that wretched husband and wife who have just now been separated from each other forever by that respectable gentleman in Virginia,—the one sold to be taken to New Orleans, the other kept at home to pine in the hovel made desolate,—do that husband and wife think my denunciation of their master too severe, because he is a judge, or a governor, or a minister, or because he is a member of a Christian church, or even because he has been hitherto, and in other respects, a kind master to them? Until I hear such ones complain of my severity, I shall not doubt its propriety.” “If those who deserve the lash feel it and wince at it, I shall be assured I am striking the right persons in the right place.” “I will be,” are his memorable words that rung through the land,—“I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On the subject of slavery I do not wish to think or speak or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire; but 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 an inch; and I will be heard.”

Mr. Garrison will perhaps remember that, a few months after he commenced the Liberator, when almost everybody was finding fault with him, or wishing that he would be more temperate, I was one of the friends that came to remonstrate and entreat. He and his faithful partner, Isaac Knapp, were at work in the little upper chamber, No. 6 Merchants’ Hall, where they lived, as well as they could, with their printing-press and types, all within an enclosure sixteen or eighteen feet square. I requested him to walk out with me, that we might confer on an important matter. He at once laid aside his pen, and we descended to the street. I informed him how much troubled I had become for fear he was damaging the cause he had so much at heart by the undue severity of his style. He listened to me patiently, tenderly. I told him what many of the wise and prudent, who professed an interest in his object, said about his manner of pursuing it. He replied somewhat in the way I have described above. “But,” said I, “some of the epithets you use, though not perhaps too severe, are not precisely applicable to the sin you denounce, and so may seem abusive.” “Ah!” he rejoined, “until the term ‘slaveholder’ sends as deep a feeling of horror to the hearts of those who hear it applied to any one as the terms ‘robber,’ ‘pirate,’ ‘murderer’ do, we must use and multiply epithets when condemning the sin of him who is guilty of the ‘sum of all villanies.’” “O,” cried I, “my friend, do try to moderate your indignation, and keep more cool; why, you are all on fire.” He stopped, laid his hand upon my shoulder with a kind but emphatic pressure, that I have felt ever since, and said slowly, with deep emotion, “Brother May, I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.” From that hour to this I have never said a word to Mr. Garrison, in complaint of his style. I am more than half satisfied now that he was right then, and we who objected were mistaken.

A year or two afterwards I was in the study of Dr. Channing, who, from the rise of the antislavery movement, watched it with deep and increasing emotion, and often sent for me, and oftener for the heroic Dr. Follen, to converse with us about it. I was in the Doctor’s study, and had been endeavoring to explain and reconcile him to some measures of the Abolitionists which I found had troubled him, when he said, with great gravity and earnestness, “But, Mr. May, your friend Garrison’s style is excessively severe. The epithets he uses are harsh, abusive, exasperating.” I replied, “Dr. Channing, I thought so once myself. But you have furnished me with a sufficient apology, if not justification, of Mr. Garrison’s severity.” And taking from his bookcase the octavo volume of the Doctor’s Discourses, Reviews, and Miscellanies, published in 1830, I read parts of the passage commencing on the twenty-second and closing on the twenty-fourth page, in which he replies to the charge, brought against the great Milton’s prose writings, of “party-spirit, coarse invective, and controversial asperity.” I wish there were room here for me to quote the whole of it, it is all so applicable to Mr. Garrison; but I will give only the close: “Men of natural softness and timidity, of a sincere but effeminate virtue, will be apt to look on these bolder, hardier spirits as violent, perturbed, uncharitable; and the charge will not be wholly groundless. But that deep feeling of evils, which is necessary to effectual conflict with them, and which marks God’s most powerful messengers to mankind, cannot breathe itself in soft and tender accents. The deeply moved soul will speak strongly, and ought to speak so as to move and shake nations. We must not mistake Christian benevolence as if it had but one voice,—that of soft entreaty. It can speak in piercing and awful tones. There is constantly going on in our world a conflict between good and evil. The cause of human nature has always to wrestle with foes. All improvement is a victory won by struggles. It is especially true of those great periods which have been distinguished by revolutions in government and religion, and from which we date the most rapid movements of the human mind, that they have been signalized by conflict. At such periods men gifted with great power of thought and loftiness of sentiment are especially summoned to the conflict with evil. They hear, as it were, in their own magnanimity and generous aspirations the voice of a divinity; and thus commissioned, and burning with a passionate devotion to truth and freedom, they must and will speak with an indignant energy, and they ought not to be measured by the standard of ordinary minds in ordinary times.

“Milton reverenced and loved human nature, and attached himself to its great interests with a fervor of which only such a mind was capable. He lived in one of those solemn periods which determine the character of ages to come. His spirit was stirred to its very centre by the presence of danger. He lived in the midst of battle. That the ardor of his spirit sometimes passed the bounds of wisdom and charity, and poured forth unwarrantable invective, we see and lament. But the purity and loftiness of his mind break forth amidst his bitterest invectives. We see a noble nature still. We see that no feigned love of truth and freedom was a covering for selfishness and malignity. He did indeed love and adore uncorrupted religion and intellectual liberty, and let his name be enrolled among their truest champions.”

The Doctor bowed and smiled blandly, saying, “I confess the quotation is not inapt nor unfairly made.”

MISS PRUDENCE CRANDALL AND THE CANTERBURY SCHOOL.

Often, during the last thirty, and more often during the last ten years, you must have seen in the newspapers, or heard from speakers in Antislavery and Republican meetings, high commendations of the County of Windham in Connecticut, as bearing the banner of equal human and political rights far above all the rest of that State. In the great election of the year 1866 the people of that county gave a large majority of votes in favor of negro suffrage.

This moral and political elevation of the public sentiment there is undoubtedly owing to the distinct presentation and thorough discussion, throughout that region, of the most vital antislavery questions in 1833 and 1834, called out by the shameful, cruel persecution of Miss Prudence Crandall for attempting to establish in Canterbury a boarding-school for “colored young ladies and little misses.”

I was then living in Brooklyn, the shire town of the county, six miles from the immediate scene of the violent conflict, and so was fully drawn into it. I regret that, in the following account of it, allusions to myself and my acts must so often appear. But as Æneas said to Queen Dido, in telling his story of the Trojan War, so may I say, respecting the contest about the Canterbury school, “All of which I saw, and part of which I was.” In the summer or fall of 1832 I heard that Miss Prudence Crandall, an excellent, well-educated Quaker young lady, who had gained considerable reputation as a teacher in the neighboring town of Plainfield, had been induced by a number of ladies and gentlemen of Canterbury to purchase a commodious, large house in their pretty village, and establish her boarding and day school there, that their daughters might receive instruction in several higher branches of education not taught in the public district schools, without being obliged to live far away from their homes.

For a while the school answered the expectations of its patrons, and enjoyed their favor; but early in the following year a trouble arose. It was in this wise. Not far from the village of Canterbury there lived a worthy colored man named Harris. He was the owner of a good farm, and was otherwise in comfortable circumstances. He had a daughter, Sarah, a bright girl about seventeen years of age. She had passed, with good repute as a scholar, through the school of the district in which she lived, and was hungering and thirsting for more education. This she desired not only for her own sake, but that she might go forth qualified to be a teacher of the colored people of our country, to whose wrongs and oppression she had become very sensitive. Her father encouraged her, and gladly offered to defray the expense of the advantages she might be able to obtain. Sarah applied for admission into this new Canterbury school. Miss Crandall confessed to me that at first she hesitated and almost refused, lest admitting her might offend the parents of her pupils, several of whom were Colonizationists, and none of them Abolitionists. But Sarah urged her request with no little force of argument and depth of feeling. Then she was a young lady of pleasing appearance and manners, well known to many of Miss Crandall’s pupils, having been their class-mate in the district school. Moreover, she was accounted a virtuous, pious girl, and had been for some time a member of the church of Canterbury. There could not, therefore, have been a more unexceptionable case. No objection could be made to her admission into the school, excepting only her dark (and not very dark) complexion. Miss Crandall soon saw that she was unexpectedly called to take some part (how important she could not foresee) in the great contest for impartial liberty that was then beginning to agitate violently our nation. She was called to act either in accordance with, or in opposition to, the unreasonable, cruel, wicked prejudice against the color of their victims, by which the oppressors of millions in our land were everywhere extenuating, if not justifying, their tremendous system of iniquity. She bowed to the claim of humanity, and admitted Sarah Harris to her school.

Her pupils, I believe, made no objection. But in a few days the parents of some of them called and remonstrated. Miss Crandall pressed upon their consideration Sarah’s eager desire for more knowledge and culture, the good use she intended to make of her acquirements, her excellent character and lady-like deportment, and, more than all, that she was an accepted member of the same Christian church to which many of them belonged. Her arguments, her entreaties, however, were of no avail. Prejudice blinds the eyes, closes the ears, hardens the heart. “Sarah belonged to the proscribed, despised class, and therefore must not be admitted into a private school with their daughters.” This was the gist of all they had to say. Reasons were thrown away, appeals to their sense of right, to their compassion for injured fellow-beings, made no impression. “They would not have it said that their daughters went to school with a nigger girl.” Miss Crandall was assured that, if she did not dismiss Sarah Harris, her white pupils would be withdrawn from her.

She could not make up her mind to comply with such a demand, even to save the institution she had so recently established with such fond hopes, and in which she had invested all her property, and a debt of several hundred dollars more. It was, indeed, a severe trial, but she was strengthened to bear it. She determined to act right, and leave the event with God. Accordingly, she gave notice to her neighbors, and, on the 2d day of March, advertised in the Liberator, that at the commencement of her next term, on the first Monday of April, her school would be opened for “young ladies and little misses of color.”

Only a few days before, on the 27th of February, I was informed of her generous, disinterested determination, and heard that, in consequence, the whole town was in a flame of indignation, kindled and fanned by the influence of the prominent people of the village, her immediate neighbors and her late patrons. Without delay, therefore, although a stranger, I addressed a letter to her, assuring her of my sympathy, and of my readiness to help her all in my power. On the 4th of March her reply came, begging me to come to her so soon as my engagements would permit. Accompanied by my friend, Mr. George W. Benson, I went to Canterbury on the afternoon of that day. On entering the village we were warned that we should be in personal danger if we appeared there as Miss Crandall’s friends; and when arrived at her house we learnt that the excitement against her had become furious. She had been grossly insulted, and threatened with various kinds of violence, if she persisted in her purpose, and the most egregious falsehoods had been put in circulation respecting her intentions, the characters of her expected pupils, and of the future supporters of her school. Moreover, we were informed that a town-meeting was to be held on the 9th instant, to devise and adopt such measures as “would effectually avert the nuisance, or speedily abate it, if it should be brought into the village.”

Though beat upon by such a storm, we found Miss Crandall resolved and tranquil. The effect of her Quaker discipline appeared in every word she spoke, and in every expression of her countenance. But, as she said, it would not do for her to go into the town-meeting; and there was not a man in Canterbury who would dare, if he were disposed, to appear there in her behalf. “Will not you, Friend May, be my attorney?” “Certainly,” I replied, “come what will.” We then agreed that I should explain to the people how unexpectedly she had been led to take the step which had given so much offence, and show them how she could not have consented to the demand made by her former patrons without wounding deeply the feelings of an excellent girl, known to most of them, and adding to the mountain load of injuries and insults already heaped upon the colored people of our country. With this arrangement, we left her, to await the coming of the ominous meeting of the town.

On the 9th of March I repaired again to Miss Crandall’s house, accompanied by my faithful friend, Mr. Benson. There, to our surprise and joy, we found Friend Arnold Buffum, a most worthy man, an able speaker, and then the principal lecturing agent of the New England Antislavery Society. Miss Crandall gave to each of us a respectful letter of introduction to the Moderator of the meeting, in which she requested that we might be heard as her attorneys, and promised to be bound by any agreement we might see fit to make with the citizens of Canterbury. Miss Crandall concurred with us in the opinion that, as her house was one of the most conspicuous in the village, and not wholly paid for, if her opponents would take it off her hands, repaying what she had given for it, cease from molesting her, and allow her time to procure another house for her school, it would be better that she should move to some more retired part of the town or neighborhood.

Thus commissioned and instructed, Friend Buffum and I proceeded to the town-meeting. It was held in the “Meeting-House,” one of the old New England pattern,—galleries on three sides, with room below and above for a thousand persons, sitting and standing. We found it nearly filled to its utmost capacity; and, not without difficulty, we passed up the side aisle into the wall-pew next to the deacon’s seat, in which sat the Moderator. Very soon the business commenced. After the “Warning” had been read a series of Resolutions were laid before the meeting, in which were set forth the disgrace and damage that would be brought upon the town if a school for colored girls should be set up there, protesting emphatically against the impending evil, and appointing the civil authority and selectmen a committee to wait upon “the person contemplating the establishment of said school, ... point out to her the injurious effects, the incalculable evils, resulting from such an establishment within this town, and persuade her, if possible, to abandon the project.” The mover of the resolutions, Rufus Adams, Esq., labored to enforce them by a speech, in which he grossly misrepresented what Miss Crandall had done, her sentiments and purposes, and threw out several mean and low insinuations against the motives of those who were encouraging her enterprise.

As soon as he sat down the Hon. Andrew T. Judson rose. This gentleman was undoubtedly the chief of Miss Crandall’s persecutors. He was the great man of the town, a leading politician in the State, much talked of by the Democrats as soon to be governor, and a few years afterwards was appointed Judge of the United States District Court. His house on Canterbury Green stood next to Miss Crandall’s. The idea of having “a school of nigger girls so near him was insupportable.” He vented himself in a strain of reckless hostility to his neighbor, her benevolent, self-sacrificing undertaking, and its patrons, and declared his determination to thwart the enterprise. He twanged every chord that could stir the coarser passions of the human heart, and with such sad success that his hearers seemed to be filled with the apprehension that a dire calamity was impending over them, that Miss Crandall was the author or instrument of it, that there were powerful conspirators engaged with her in the plot, and that the people of Canterbury should be roused, by every consideration of self-preservation, as well as self-respect, to prevent the accomplishment of the design, defying the wealth and influence of all who were abetting it.

When he had ended his philippic Mr. Buffum and I silently presented to the Moderator Miss Crandall’s letters, requesting that we might be heard on her behalf. He handed them over to Mr. Judson, who instantly broke forth with greater violence than before; accused us of insulting the town by coming there to interfere with its local concerns. Other gentlemen sprang to their feet in hot displeasure; poured out their tirades upon Miss Crandall and her accomplices, and, with fists doubled in our faces, roughly admonished us that, if we opened our lips there, they would inflict upon us the utmost penalty of the law, if not a more immediate vengeance.

Thus forbidden to speak, we of course sat in silence, and let the waves of invective and abuse dash over us. But we sat thus only until we heard from the Moderator the words, “This meeting is adjourned!” Knowing that now we should violate no law by speaking, I sprang to the seat on which I had been sitting, and cried out, “Men of Canterbury, I have a word for you! Hear me!” More than half the crowd turned to listen. I went rapidly over my replies to the misstatements that had been made as to the purposes of Miss Crandall and her friends, the characters of her expected pupils, and the spirit in which the enterprise had been conceived and would be carried on. As soon as possible I gave place to Friend Buffum. But he had spoken in his impressive manner hardly five minutes, before the trustees of the church to which the house belonged came in and ordered all out, that the doors might be shut. Here again the hand of the law constrained us. So we obeyed with the rest, and having lingered awhile upon the Green to answer questions and explain to those who were willing “to understand the matter,” we departed to our homes, musing in our own hearts “what would come of this day’s uproar.”

Before my espousal of Miss Crandall’s cause I had had a pleasant acquaintance with Hon. Andrew T. Judson, which had led almost to a personal friendship. Unwilling, perhaps, to break our connection so abruptly, and conscious, no doubt, that he had treated me rudely, not to say abusively, at the town-meeting on the 9th, he called to see me two days afterwards. He assured me that he had not become unfriendly to me personally, and regretted that he had used some expressions and applied certain epithets to me, in the warmth of his feelings and the excitement of the public indignation of his neighbors and fellow-townsmen, roused as they were to the utmost in opposition to Miss Crandall’s project, which he thought I was inconsiderately and unjustly promoting. He went on enlarging upon the disastrous effects the establishment of “a school for nigger girls” in the centre of their village would have upon its desirableness as a place of residence, the value of real estate there, and the general prosperity of the town.

I replied: “If, sir, you had permitted Mr. Buffum and myself to speak at your town-meeting, you would have found that we had come there, not in a contentious spirit, but that we were ready, with Miss Crandall’s consent, to settle the difficulty with you and your neighbors peaceably. We should have agreed, if you would repay to Miss Crandall what you had advised her to give for her house, and allow her time quietly to find and purchase a suitable house for her school in some more retired part of the town or vicinity, that she should remove to that place.” The honorable gentleman hardly gave me time to finish my sentences ere he said, with great emphasis:—

“Mr. May, we are not merely opposed to the establishment of that school in Canterbury; we mean there shall not be such a school set up anywhere in our State. The colored people never can rise from their menial condition in our country; they ought not to be permitted to rise here. They are an inferior race of beings, and never can or ought to be recognized as the equals of the whites. Africa is the place for them. I am in favor of the Colonization scheme. Let the niggers and their descendants be sent back to their fatherland; and there improve themselves as much as they may, and civilize and Christianize the natives, if they can. I am a Colonizationist. You and your friend Garrison have undertaken what you cannot accomplish. The condition of the colored population of our country can never be essentially improved on this continent. You are fanatical about them. You are violating the Constitution of our Republic, which settled forever the status of the black men in this land. They belong to Africa. Let them be sent back there, or kept as they are here. The sooner you Abolitionists abandon your project the better for our country, for the niggers, and yourselves.”

I replied: “Mr. Judson, there never will be fewer colored people in this country than there are now. Of the vast majority of them this is the native land, as much as it is ours. It will be unjust, inhuman, in us to drive them out, or to make them willing to go by our cruel treatment of them. And, if they should all become willing to depart, it would not be practicable to transport across the Atlantic Ocean and settle properly on the shores of Africa, from year to year, half so many of them as would be born here in the same time, according to the known rate of their natural increase. No, sir, there will never be fewer colored people in our country than there are this day; and the only question is, whether we will recognize the rights which God gave them as men, and encourage and assist them to become all he has made them capable of being, or whether we will continue wickedly to deny them the privileges we enjoy, condemn them to degradation, enslave and imbrute them; and so bring upon ourselves the condemnation of the Almighty Impartial Father of all men, and the terrible visitation of the God of the oppressed. I trust, sir, you will erelong come to see that we must accord to these men their rights, or incur justly the loss of our own. Education is one of the primal, fundamental rights of all the children of men. Connecticut is the last place where this should be denied. But as, in the providence of God, that right has been denied in a place so near me, I feel that I am summoned to its defence. If you and your neighbors in Canterbury had quietly consented that Sarah Harris, whom you knew to be a bright, good girl, should enjoy the privilege she so eagerly sought, this momentous conflict would not have arisen in your village. But as it has arisen there, we may as well meet it there as elsewhere.”

“That nigger school,” he rejoined with great warmth, “shall never be allowed in Canterbury, nor in any town of this State.”

“How can you prevent it legally?” I inquired; “how but by Lynch law, by violence, which you surely will not countenance?”

“We can expel her pupils from abroad,” he replied, “under the provisions of our old pauper and vagrant laws.”

“But we will guard against them,” I said, “by giving your town ample bonds.”

“Then,” said he, “we will get a law passed by our Legislature, now in session, forbidding the institution of such a school as Miss Crandall proposes, in any part of Connecticut.”

“It would be an unconstitutional law, and I will contend against it as such to the last,” I rejoined. “If you, sir, pursue the course you have now indicated, I will dispute every step you take, from the lowest court in Canterbury up to the highest court of the United States.”

“You talk big,” he cried; “it will cost more than you are aware of to do all that you threaten. Where will you get the means to carry on such a contest at law?”

This defiant question inspired me to say, “Mr. Judson, I had not foreseen all that this conversation has opened to my view. True, I do not possess the pecuniary ability to do what you have made me promise. I have not consulted any one. But I am sure the lovers of impartial liberty, the friends of humanity in our land, the enemies of slavery, will so justly appreciate the importance of sustaining Miss Crandall in her benevolent, pious undertaking, that I shall receive from one quarter and another all the funds I may need to withstand your attempt to crush, by legal means, the Canterbury school.” The sequel of my story will show that I did not misjudge the significance of my case, nor put my confidence in those who were not worthy of it. Mr. Judson left me in high displeasure, and I never met him afterwards but as an opponent.

Undismayed by the opposition of her neighbors and the violence of their threats, Miss Crandall received early in April fifteen or twenty colored young ladies and misses from Philadelphia, New York, Providence, and Boston. At once her persecutors commenced operations. All accommodations at the stores in Canterbury were denied her; so that she was obliged to send to neighboring villages for her needful supplies. She and her pupils were insulted whenever they appeared in the streets. The doors and door-steps of her house were besmeared, and her well was filled with filth. Had it not been for the assistance of her father and another Quaker friend who lived in the town, she might have been compelled to abandon “her castle” for the want of water and food. But she was enabled to “hold out,” and Miss Crandall and her little band behaved somewhat like the besieged in the immortal Fort Sumter. The spirit that is in the children of men is usually roused by persecution. I visited them repeatedly, and always found teacher and pupils calm and resolute. They evidently felt that it was given them to maintain one of the fundamental, inalienable rights of man.

Before the close of the month, an attempt was made to frighten and drive away these innocent girls, by a process under the obsolete vagrant law, which provided that the selectmen of any town might warn any person, not an inhabitant of the State, to depart forthwith from said town; demand of him or her one dollar and sixty-seven cents for every week he or she remained in said town after having received such warning, and in case such fine should not be paid, and the person so warned should not have departed before the expiration of ten days after being sentenced, then he or she should be whipped on the naked body not exceeding ten stripes.

A warrant to this effect was actually served upon Eliza Ann Hammond, a fine girl from Providence, aged seventeen years. Although I had protected Miss Crandall’s pupils against the operation of this old law, by giving to the treasurer of Canterbury a bond in the sum of $10,000, signed by responsible gentlemen of Brooklyn, to save the town from the vagrancy of any of these pupils, I feared they would be intimidated by the actual appearance of the constable, and the imposition of a writ. So, on hearing of the above transaction, I went down to Canterbury to explain the matter if necessary; to assure Miss Hammond that the persecutors would hardly dare proceed to such an extremity, and strengthen her to bear meekly the punishment, if they should in their madness inflict it; knowing that every blow they should strike her would resound throughout the land, if not over the whole civilized world, and call out an expression of indignation before which Mr. Judson and his associates would quail. But I found her ready for the emergency, animated by the spirit of a martyr.

Of course this process was abandoned. But another was resorted to, most disgraceful to the State as well as the town. That shall be the subject of my next.

THE BLACK LAW OF CONNECTICUT.

Foiled in their attempts to frighten away Miss Crandall’s pupils by their proceedings under the provisions of the obsolete “Pauper and Vagrant Law,” Mr. Judson and his fellow-persecutors urgently pressed upon the Legislature of Connecticut, then in session, a demand for the enactment of a law, by which they should be enabled to effect their purpose. To the lasting shame of the State, be it said, they succeeded. On the 24th of May, 1833, the Black Law was enacted as follows:—

“Section 1. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives, in General Assembly convened, that no person shall set up or establish in this State any school, academy, or literary institution for the instruction or education of colored persons who are not inhabitants of this State; nor instruct or teach in any school, or other literary institution whatsoever, in this State; nor harbor or board, for the purpose of attending or being taught or instructed in any such school, academy, or literary institution, any colored person who is not an inhabitant of any town in this State, without the consent in writing, first obtained, of a majority of the civil authority, and also of the Selectmen of the town, in which such school, academy, or literary institution is situated,” &c.

I need not copy any more of this infamous Act. The penalties denounced against the violation of it, you may be sure, were severe enough. That the persecutors of Miss Crandall were determined to visit them upon her, if they might, the sequel of my story will show.

On the receipt of the tidings that the Legislature had passed the law, joy and exultation ran wild in Canterbury. The bells were rung and a cannon fired, until all the inhabitants for miles around were informed of the triumph. So soon as was practicable, on the 27th of June, Miss Crandall was arrested by the sheriff of the county, or the constable of the town, and arraigned before Justices Adams and Bacon, two of the leaders of the conspiracy against her and her humane enterprise. The trial of course was a brief one; the result was predetermined. Before noon of that day a messenger came to let me know that Miss Crandall had been “committed” by the above-named justices, to take her trial at the next session of the Superior Court at Brooklyn in August; that she was in the hands of the sheriff and would be put into jail, unless I or some of her friends would come and “give bonds” for her in the sum of $300 or $500, I forget which. I calmly told the messenger that there were gentlemen enough in Canterbury whose bond for that amount would be as good or better than mine; and I should leave it for them to do Miss Crandall that favor. “But,” said the young man, “are you not her friend?” “Certainly,” I replied, “too sincerely her friend to give relief to her enemies in their present embarrassment; and I trust you will not find any one of her friends, or the patrons of her school, who will step forward to help them any more than myself.” “But, sir,” he cried, “do you mean to allow her to be put into jail?” “Most certainly,” was my answer, “if her persecutors are unwise enough to let such an outrage be committed.” He turned from me in blank surprise, and hurried back to tell Mr. Judson and the justices of his ill success.

A few days before, when I first heard of the passage of the law, I had visited Miss Crandall with my friend Mr. George W. Benson, and advised with her as to the course she and her friends ought to pursue, when she should be brought to trial. She appreciated at once and fully the importance of leaving her persecutors to show to the world how base they were, and how atrocious was the law they had induced the Legislature to enact,—a law, by the force of which a woman might be fined and imprisoned as a felon, in the State of Connecticut, for giving instruction to colored girls. She agreed that it would be best for us to leave her in the hands of those with whom the law originated, hoping that, in their madness, they would show forth all its hideous features.

Mr. Benson and I therefore went diligently around to all whom we knew were friendly to Miss Crandall and her school, and counselled them by no means to give bonds to keep her from imprisonment, because nothing would expose so fully to the public the egregious wickedness of the law, and the virulence of her persecutors as the fact that they had thrust her into jail.

When I found that her resolution was equal to the trial which seemed to be impending, that she was ready to brave and to bear meekly the worst treatment that her enemies would venture to subject her to, I made all the arrangements for her comfort that were practicable in our prison. It fortunately so happened that the most suitable room, not occupied, was the one in which a man named Watkins had recently been confined for the murder of his wife, and out of which he had been taken and executed. This circumstance, we foresaw, would add not a little to the public detestation of the Black Law.

The jailer, at my request, readily put the room in as nice order as was possible, and permitted me to substitute, for the bedstead and mattress on which the murderer had slept, fresh and clean ones from my own house and Mr. Benson’s.

About two o’clock P. M. another messenger came to inform me that the sheriff was on the way from Canterbury to the jail with Miss Crandall, and would imprison her, unless her friends would give him the required bail. Although in sympathy with Miss Crandall’s persecutors, he clearly saw the disgrace that was about to be brought upon the State, and begged me and Mr. Benson to avert it. Of course we refused. I went to the jailer’s house and met Miss Crandall on her arrival. We stepped aside. I said:—

“If now you hesitate, if you dread the gloomy place so much as to wish to be saved from it, I will give bonds for you even now.”

“O no,” she promptly replied; “I am only afraid they will not put me into jail. Their evident hesitation and embarrassment show plainly how much they deprecate the effect of this part of their folly; and therefore I am the more anxious that they should be exposed, if not caught in their own wicked devices.”

We therefore returned with her to the sheriff and the company that surrounded him to await his final act. He was ashamed to do it. He knew it would cover the persecutors of Miss Crandall and the State of Connecticut with disgrace. He conferred with several about him, and delayed yet longer. Two gentlemen came and remonstrated with me in not very seemly terms:—

“It would be a —— shame, an eternal disgrace to the State, to have her put into jail,—into the very room that Watkins had last occupied.”

“Certainly, gentlemen,” I replied, “and you may prevent this if you please.”

“O,” they cried, “we are not her friends; we are not in favor of her school; we don’t want any more —— niggers coming among us. It is your place to stand by Miss Crandall and help her now. You and your —— abolition brethren have encouraged her to bring this nuisance into Canterbury, and it is —— mean in you to desert her now.”

I rejoined: “She knows we have not deserted her, and do not intend to desert her. The law which her persecutors have persuaded our legislators to enact is an infamous one, worthy of the Dark Ages. It would be just as bad as it is, whether we should give bonds for her or not. But the people generally will not so soon realize how bad, how wicked, how cruel a law it is, unless we suffer her persecutors to inflict upon her all the penalties it prescribes. She is willing to bear them for the sake of the cause she has so nobly espoused. And it is easy to foresee that Miss Crandall will be glorified, as much as her persecutors and our State will be disgraced, by the transactions of this day and this hour. If you see fit to keep her from imprisonment in the cell of a murderer for having proffered the blessing of a good education to those who, in our country, need it most, you may do so; we shall not.”

They turned from us in great wrath, words falling from their lips which I shall not repeat.

The sun had descended nearly to the horizon; the shadows of night were beginning to fall around us. The sheriff could defer the dark deed no longer. With no little emotion, and with words of earnest deprecation, he gave that excellent, heroic, Christian young lady into the hands of the jailer, and she was led into the cell of Watkins. So soon as I had heard the bolts of her prison-door turned in the lock, and saw the key taken out, I bowed and said, “The deed is done, completely done. It cannot be recalled. It has passed into the history of our nation and our age.” I went away with my steadfast friend, George W. Benson, assured that the legislators of the State had been guilty of a most unrighteous act; and that Miss Crandall’s persecutors had also committed a great blunder; that they all would have much more reason to be ashamed of her imprisonment than she or her friends could ever have. The next day we gave the required bonds. Miss Crandall was released from the cell of the murderer, returned home, and quietly resumed the duties of her school, until she should be summoned as a culprit into court, there to be tried by the infamous “Black Law of Connecticut.” And, as we expected, so soon as the evil tidings could be carried in that day, before Professor Morse had given to Rumor her telegraphic wings, it was known all over the country and the civilized world that an excellent young lady had been imprisoned as a criminal,—yes, put into a murderer’s cell,—in the State of Connecticut, for opening a school for the instruction of colored girls. The comments that were made upon the deed in almost all the newspapers were far from grateful to the feelings of her persecutors. Even many who, under the same circumstances, would probably have acted as badly as Messrs. A.T. Judson and Company, denounced their procedure as unchristian, inhuman, anti-democratic, base, mean.

ARTHUR TAPPAN.

The words and manner of Mr. Judson in the interview I had with him on the 11th of March, of which I have given a pretty full report, convinced me that he would do all that could be done by legal and political devices, to abolish Miss Crandall’s school. His success in obtaining from the Legislature the enactment of the infamous “Black Law” showed too plainly that the majority of the people of the State were on the side of the oppressor. But I felt sure that God and good men would be our helpers in the contest to which we were committed. Assurances of approval and of sympathy came from many; and erelong a proffer of all the pecuniary assistance we could need was made by one who was then himself a host. At that time Mr. Arthur Tappan was one of the wealthiest merchants in the country, and was wont to give to religious and philanthropic objects as much, in proportion to his means, as any benefactor who has lived in the land before or since his day. I was not then personally acquainted with him, but he had become deeply interested in the cause of the poor, despised, enslaved millions in our country, and alive to whatever affected them.

Much to my surprise, and much more to my joy, a few weeks after the commencement of the contest, and just after the enactment of the Black Law and the imprisonment of Miss Crandall, I received from Mr. Tappan a most cordial letter. He expressed his entire approbation of the position I had taken in defence of Miss Crandall’s benevolent enterprise, and his high appreciation of the importance of maintaining, in Connecticut especially, the right of colored people, not less than of white, to any amount of education they might wish to obtain, and the respect and encouragement due to any teacher who would devote himself or herself to their instruction. He added: “This contest, in which you have been providentially called to engage, will be a serious, perhaps a violent one. It may be prolonged and very expensive. Nevertheless, it ought to be persisted in to the last. I venture to presume, sir, that you cannot well afford what it may cost. You ought not to be left, even if you are willing, to bear alone the pecuniary burden. I shall be most happy to give you all the help of this sort that you may need. Consider me your banker. Spare no necessary expense. Command the services of the ablest lawyers. See to it that this great case shall be thoroughly tried, cost what it may. I will cheerfully honor your drafts to enable you to defray that cost.” Thus upheld, you will not wonder that I was somewhat elated. At Mr. Tappan’s suggestion I immediately “retained” the Hon. William W. Ellsworth, the Hon. Calvin Goddard, and the Hon. Henry Strong, the three most distinguished members of the Connecticut bar. They all confirmed me in the opinion that the “Black Law” was unconstitutional, and would probably be so pronounced, if we should carry it up to the United States Court. They moreover instructed me that, as the act for which Miss Crandall was to be tried was denounced as criminal, it would be within the province of the jury of our State court to decide upon the character of the law, as well as the conduct of the accused; and that therefore it would be allowable and proper for them to urge the wickedness of the law, in bar of Miss Crandall’s condemnation under it. But, before we get to the trials of Miss Crandall under Mr. Judson’s law, I have more to tell about Mr. Arthur Tappan.

He requested me to keep him fully informed of the doings of Miss Crandall’s persecutors. And I assure you I had too many evil things to report of them. They insulted and annoyed her and her pupils in every way their malice could devise. The storekeepers, the butchers, the milk-pedlers of the town, all refused to supply their wants; and whenever her father, brother, or other relatives, who happily lived but a few miles off, were seen coming to bring her and her pupils the necessaries of life, they were insulted and threatened. Her well was defiled with the most offensive filth, and her neighbors refused her and the thirsty ones about her even a cup of cold water, leaving them to depend for that essential element upon the scanty supplies that could be brought from her father’s farm. Nor was this all; the physician of the village refused to minister to any who were sick in Miss Crandall’s family, and the trustees of the church forbade her to come, with any of her pupils, into the House of the Lord.

In addition to the insults and annoyances mentioned above, the newspapers of the county and other parts of the State frequently gave currency to the most egregious misrepresentations of the conduct of Miss Crandall and her pupils, and the basest insinuations against her friends and patrons. Yet our corrections and replies were persistently refused a place in their columns. The publisher of one of the county papers, who was personally friendly to me, and whom I had assisted to establish in business, confessed to me that he dared not admit into his paper an article in defence of the Canterbury school. It would be, he said, the destruction of his establishment. Thus situated, we were continually made to feel the great disadvantage at which we were contending with the hosts of our enemies.

In one of my letters to Mr. Tappan, when thus sorely pressed, I let fall from my pen, “O that I could only leave home long enough to visit you! For I could tell you in an hour more things, that I wish you to know, than I can write in a week.”

A day or two afterwards, about as quickly as he could then get to me after the receipt of my letter, the door of my study was opened, and in walked Arthur Tappan. I sprang to my feet, and gave him a pressure of the hand which told him more emphatically than words could have done how overjoyed I was to see him. In his usual quiet manner and undertone he said, “Your last letter implied that you were in so much trouble I thought it best to come and see, and consider with you what it will be advisable for us to do.” I soon spread before him the circumstances of the case,—the peculiar difficulties by which we were beset, the increased and increasing malignity of Miss Crandall’s persecutors, provoked, and almost justified in the public opinion, by the false reports that were diligently circulated, and which we had no means of correcting. “Let me go,” said he, “and see for myself Miss Crandall and her school, and learn more of the particulars of the sore trials to which her benevolence and her fortitude seem to be subjected.” As soon as possible the horse and chaise were brought to the door, and the good man went to Canterbury. In a few hours he returned. He had been delighted, nay, deeply affected, by the calm determination which Miss Crandall evinced, and the quiet courage with which she had inspired her pupils. He had learned that the treatment to which they were subjected by their neighbors was in some respects worse even than I had represented it to him; and he said in a low, firm tone of voice, which showed how thoroughly in earnest he was, she must be protected and sustained. “The cause of the whole oppressed, despised colored population of our country is to be much affected by the decision of this question.”

After some further consultation he rose to his feet and said, “You are almost helpless without the press. You must issue a paper, publish it largely, send it to all the persons whom you know in the county and State, and to all the principal newspapers throughout the country. Many will subscribe for it and contribute otherwise to its support, and I will pay whatever more it may cost.” No sooner said than done. We went without delay to the village, where fortunately there was a pretty-well-furnished printing-office that had been lately shut up for want of patronage. We found the proprietor, examined the premises, satisfied ourselves that there were materials enough to begin with, and Mr. Tappan engaged for my use for a year the office, press, types, and whatever else was necessary to commence at once the publication of a newspaper, to be devoted to the advocacy of all human rights in general, and to the defence of the Canterbury school, and its heroic teacher in particular.

We walked back to my house communing together about the great conflict for liberty to which we were committed, the spirit in which it ought to be conducted on our part, and especially the course to be pursued in the further defence of Miss Crandall. Soon after the stage-coach came along. Mr. Tappan, after renewed assurances of support, gave me a hearty farewell and stepped on board to return to New York. He left me the proprietor of a printing-office, and with ample means to maintain, as far as might be necessary, the defence of the Canterbury school against the unrighteous and unconstitutional law of the State of Connecticut. I need now only add that the trials at law were protracted until August, 1834, and that they, together with the conduct of the newspaper, cost me more than six hundred dollars, all of which amount was most promptly and kindly paid by that true philanthropist,—Arthur Tappan.

CHARLES C. BURLEIGH.

The excitement caused by Mr. Tappan’s unexpected visit, the hearty encouragement he had given me, and the great addition he had made to my means of defence, altogether were so grateful to me that I did not at first fully realize how much I had undertaken to do. But a night’s rest brought me to my senses, and I clearly saw that I must have some other help than even Mr. Tappan’s pecuniary generosity could give me. I was at that time publishing a religious paper,—The Christian Monitor,—which, together with my pulpit and parochial duties, filled quite full the measure of my ability. Unfortunately the prospectus of The Monitor, issued a year before the beginning of the Canterbury difficulty, precluded from its columns all articles relating to personal or neighborhood quarrels. Therefore, though the editor of a paper, I could not, in that paper, repel the most injurious attacks that were made upon my character. Had it been otherwise, there would have been no need of starting another paper. But, as Mr. Tappan promptly allowed, another paper must be issued, and to edit two papers at the same time was wholly beyond my power. What should I do?

Soon after the enactment of the “Black Law” an admirable article, faithfully criticising it, had appeared in The Genius of Temperance, and been copied into The Emancipator. It was attributed to Mr. Charles C. Burleigh, living in the adjoining town of Plainfield. I had heard him commended as a young man of great promise, and had once listened to an able speech from him at a Colonization meeting. To him, therefore, in the need of help, my thoughts soon turned. And the morning after Mr. Tappan’s visit I drove over to Plainfield. Mr. Burleigh was living with his parents, and helping them carry on their farm, while pursuing as he could his studies preparatory to the profession of a lawyer. It was Friday of the week, in the midst of haying time. I was told at the house that he was in the field as busy as he could be. Nevertheless, I insisted that my business with him was more important than haying. So he was sent for, and in due time appeared. Like other sensible men, at the hard, hot work of haying, he was not attired in his Sunday clothes, but in his shirt-sleeves, with pants the worse for wear; and, although he then believed in shaving, no razor had touched his beard since the first day of the week. Nevertheless, I do not believe that Samuel of old saw, in the ruddy son of Jesse, as he came up from the sheepfold, the man whom the Lord would have him anoint, more clearly than I saw in C.C. Burleigh the man whom I should choose to be my assistant in that emergency. So soon as I had told him what I wanted of him his eye kindled as if eager for the conflict. We made an arrangement to supply his place on his father’s farm, and he engaged to come to me early the following week. On Monday, the 14th of July, 1833, according to promise, he came to Brooklyn. He then put on the harness of a soldier in the good fight for equal, impartial liberty, and he has not yet laid it aside, nor are there many, if indeed any, of the antislavery warriors who have done more or better service than Mr. Burleigh.

On the 25th of July, 1833, appeared the first number of our paper, called The Unionist. After the first two or three numbers most of the articles were written or selected by Mr. Burleigh, and it was soon acknowledged by the public that the young editor wielded a powerful weapon. The paper was continued, if I remember correctly, about two years, and it helped us mightily in our controversy with the persecutors of Miss Crandall. After a few months C.C. Burleigh associated with him, in the management of The Unionist, his brother, Mr. William H. Burleigh, who also, at the same time, assisted Miss Crandall in the instruction of her school; and for so doing suffered not a little obloquy, insult, and abuse.

It was still the cherished intention of C.C. Burleigh to devote himself to the law, and without neglecting his duties to The Unionist he so diligently and successfully pursued his preparatory studies, that in January, 1835, he was examined and admitted to the bar. The committee of examination were surprised at his proficiency. He was pronounced the best prepared candidate that had been admitted to the Windham County Bar within the memory of those who were then practising there; and confident predictions were uttered by the most knowing ones of his rapid rise to eminence in the profession. Scarcely did Wendell Phillips awaken higher expectations of success as a lawyer in Boston, than C. C. Burleigh had awakened in Brooklyn. But just at the time of his admission I received a letter from Dr. Farnsworth, of Groton, Massachusetts, then President of the Middlesex Antislavery Society, inquiring urgently for some able lecturer, whose services could be obtained as the general agent of that Society. I knew of no one so able as C.C. Burleigh. So I called upon him, told him of the many high compliments I had heard bestowed upon his appearance on the examination, and then said, “Now I have already a most important case, in which to engage your services,” and showed him Dr. Farnsworth’s letter. For a few minutes he hesitated, and his countenance fell. The bright prospect of professional eminence was suddenly overcast. He more than suspected that, if he accepted the invitation, he should get so engaged in the antislavery cause as to be unable to leave the field until after its triumph. He would have to renounce all hope of wealth or political preferment, and lead a life of continual conflict with ungenerous opponents; be poorly requited for his labors, and suffer contumely, hatred, persecution. I saw what was passing in his mind, and that the struggle was severe. But it lasted only a little while,—less than an hour. A bright and beautiful expression illuminated his countenance when he replied, “This is not what I expected or intended, but it is what I ought to do. I will accept the invitation.” He did so. Before the close of the week he departed for his field of labor. And I believe he ceased not a day to be the agent of one antislavery society or another, until after the lamented President Lincoln had proclaimed emancipation to all who were in bondage in our land.

When, in April, 1835, I became the General Agent of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, I was brought into more intimate relations with Mr. Burleigh. We were indeed fellow-laborers. Repeatedly did we go forth together on lecturing excursions, and never was I better sustained. With him as my companion I felt sure our course would be successful. I always insisted upon speaking first; for, if I failed to do my best, he would make ample amends, covering the whole ground, exhausting the subject, leaving nothing essential unsaid. And if I did better than ever, Mr. Burleigh would come after me, and fill twelve baskets full of precious fragments. He is a single-minded, pure-hearted, conscientious, self-sacrificing man. He is not blessed with a fine voice nor a graceful manner. And the peculiar dress of his hair and beard has given offence to many, and may have lessened his usefulness. But he has a great command of language. He has a singularly acute and logical intellect. His reasoning, argumentative powers are remarkable. And he often has delighted and astonished his hearers by the brilliancy of his rhetoric, and the surpassing beauty of his imagery, and aptness of his illustrations. The millions of the emancipated in our country are indebted to the labors of few more than to those of Charles C. Burleigh. But to return.

MISS CRANDALL’S TRIAL.

On the 23d of August, 1833, the first trial of Prudence Crandall for the crime of keeping a boarding-school for colored girls in the State of Connecticut, and endeavoring to give them a good education,—the first trial for this crime,—was had in Brooklyn, the seat of the county of Windham, within a stone’s throw of the house where lived and died General Israel Putnam, who, with his compatriots of 1776, perilled his life in defence of the self-evident truth that “all men were created equal, and endowed by their Creator with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It was had at the County Court, Hon. Joseph Eaton presiding.

The prosecution was conducted by Hon. A.T. Judson, Jonathan A. Welch, Esq., and I. Bulkley, Esq. Miss Crandall’s counsel were Hon. Calvin Goddard, Hon. W. W. Ellsworth, and Henry Strong, Esq.

The indictment of Miss Crandall consisted of two counts, which amounted to the same thing. The first set forth, in the technical terms of the law, that “with force and arms” she had received into her school; and the second, that, “with force and arms,” she had instructed certain colored girls, who were not inhabitants of the State, without having first obtained, in writing, permission to do so from the majority of the civil authority and selectmen of the town of Canterbury, as required by the law under which she was prosecuted.

Mr. Judson opened the case. He, of course, endeavored to keep out of sight the most odious features of the law which had been disobeyed by Miss Crandall. He insisted that it was only a wise precaution to keep out of the State an injurious kind of population. He urged that the public provisions for the education of all the children of the inhabitants of Connecticut were ample, generous, and that colored children belonging to the State, not less than others, might enjoy the advantages of the common schools, which were under the supervision and control of proper officials in every town. He argued that it was not fair nor safe to allow any person, without the permission of such officials, to come into the State and open a school for any class of pupils she might please to invite from other States. He alleged that other States of the Union, Northern as well as Southern, regarded colored persons as a kind of population respecting which there should be some special legislation. If it were not for such protection as the law in question had provided, the Southerners might free all their slaves, and send them to Connecticut instead of Liberia, which would be overwhelming. Mr. Judson denied that colored persons were citizens in those States, where they were not enfranchised. He claimed that the privilege of being a freeman was higher than the right of being educated, and asked this remarkable question: “Why should a man be educated who could not be a freeman?” He denied, however, that he was opposed to the improvement of any class of the inhabitants of the land, if their improvement could be effected without violating any of the provisions of our Constitution, or endangering the union of the States. His associates labored to maintain the same positions.

These positions were vigorously assailed by Mr. Ellsworth and Mr. Strong, and shown to be untenable by a great array of facts adduced from the history of our own country, of the opinions of some of the most illustrious lawyers and civilians of England and America, and of arguments, the force of which was palpable.

Nevertheless, the Judge saw fit, though somewhat timidly, in his charge to the Jury, to give it as his opinion that “the law was constitutional and obligatory on the people of the State.”

The Jury, after an absence of several hours, returned into court, not having agreed upon a verdict. They were instructed on some points, and sent out a second, and again a third time, but with no better success. They stated to the Court that there was no probability they should ever agree. Seven of them were for conviction, and five for acquittal. So they were discharged.

Supposing that this result operated as a continuance of the case to the next term of the County Court, to be held the following December, a few days after the trial I went with my family to spend several weeks with my friends in Boston and the neighborhood. But much to my surprise and discomfort, the last week in September, just as I was starting off to deliver an antislavery lecture, at a distance from Boston, I received the information that the persecutors of Miss Crandall, too impatient to wait until December for the regular course of law, had got up a new prosecution of her, to be tried on the 3d of October, before Judge Daggett of the Supreme Court, who was known to be hostile to the colored people, and a strenuous advocate of the Black Law. It was impossible for me so to dispose of my engagements that I could get back to Brooklyn in time to attend the trial. I could only write and instruct the counsel of Miss Crandall, in case a verdict should be obtained against her, to carry the cause up to the Court of Errors.

The second trial was had on the 3d of October; the same defence as before was set up, and ably maintained. But Chief Justice Daggett’s influence with the Jury was overpowering. He delivered an elaborate and able charge, insisting upon the constitutionality of the law; and, without much hesitation, the verdict was given against Miss Crandall. Her counsel at once filed a bill of exceptions, and an appeal to the Court of Errors, which was granted. Before that—the highest legal tribunal in the State—the cause was argued on the 22d of July, 1834. The Hon. W.W. Ellsworth and the Hon. Calvin Goddard argued against the constitutionality of the Black Law, with very great ability and eloquence. The Hon. A.T. Judson and the Hon. C.F. Cleaveland said all that perhaps could be said to prove such a law to be consistent with the Magna Charta of our Republic. All who attended the trial seemed to be deeply interested, and were made to acknowledge the vital importance of the question at issue. Most persons, I believe, were persuaded that the Court ought to and would decide against the law. But they reserved the decision until some future time. And that decision, I am sorry to say, was never given. The Court evaded it the next week by finding that the defects in the information prepared by the State’s Attorney were such that it ought to be quashed; thus rendering it “unnecessary for the Court to come to any decision upon the question as to the constitutionality of the law.”

Whether her persecutors were or were not in despair of breaking down Miss Crandall’s school by legal process, I am unable to say, but they soon resorted to other means, which were effectual.

Soon after their failure to get a decision from the Court of Errors, an attempt was made to set her house on fire. Fortunately the match was applied to combustibles tucked under a corner where the sills were somewhat decayed. They burnt like a slow match. Some time before daylight the inmates perceived the smell of fire, but not until nearly nine o’clock did any blaze appear. It was quickly quenched; and I was sent for to advise whether, if her enemies were so malignant as this attempt showed them to be, it was safe and right for her to expose her pupils’ and her own life any longer to their wicked devices. It was concluded that she should hold on and bear yet a little longer. Perhaps the atrocity of this attempt to fire her house, and at the same time endanger the dwellings of her neighbors would frighten the leaders and instigators of the persecution to put more restraint upon “the baser sort.” But a few nights afterwards it was made only too plain that the enemies of the school were bent upon its destruction. About twelve o’clock, on the night of the 9th of September, Miss Crandall’s house was assaulted by a number of persons with heavy clubs and iron bars; five window-sashes were demolished and ninety panes of glass dashed to pieces.

I was summoned next morning to the scene of destruction and the terror-stricken family. Never before had Miss Crandall seemed to quail, and her pupils had become afraid to remain another night under her roof. The front rooms of the house were hardly tenantable; and it seemed foolish to repair them only to be destroyed again. After due consideration, therefore, it was determined that the school should be abandoned. The pupils were called together, and I was requested to announce to them our decision. Never before had I felt so deeply sensible of the cruelty of the persecution which had been carried on for eighteen months, in that New England village against a family of defenceless females. Twenty harmless, well-behaved girls, whose only offence against the peace of the community was that they had come together there to obtain useful knowledge and moral culture, were to be told that they had better go away, because, forsooth, the house in which they dwelt would not be protected by the guardians of the town, the conservators of the peace, the officers of justice, the men of influence in the village where it was situated. The words almost blistered my lips. My bosom glowed with indignation. I felt ashamed of Canterbury, ashamed of Connecticut, ashamed of my country, ashamed of my color. Thus ended the generous, disinterested, philanthropic, Christian enterprise of Prudence Crandall. This was the second attempt made in Connecticut to establish a school for the education of colored youth. The other was in New Haven, two years before. So prevalent and malignant was our national prejudice against the most injured of our fellow-men!

MR. GARRISON’S MISSION TO ENGLAND.—NEW YORK MOBS.

The subject of this article is very opportune at the present time.A While the roar of the cannon, fired in honor of Mr. Garrison at the moment of his late departure from England, is still reverberating through the land, it will be interesting and instructive to recall the purpose of his mission to that country just thirty-four years ago; and how he was vilified when he went, and denounced, hunted, mobbed, on his return. He went there to undeceive the philanthropists of Great Britain as to a gigantic fraud which had been practised upon them, as well as the antislavery people of the United States. He has gone now to the World’s Antislavery Convention as a delegate from our National Association for the education, and individual, domestic, and civil elevation of our colored population, whose condition thirty years ago, and until a much more recent period, it was confidently maintained, and pretty generally conceded, could not be essentially improved within the borders of our Republic, if, indeed, on the same continent with our superior Anglo-Saxon race.

The conscience of our country was never at peace concerning the enslavement of the colored people. It was denounced by Jefferson in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, and afterwards in his “Notes on Virginia.” An effort to abolish slavery was made in the Convention that framed our Constitution; and strenuous opposition to that Magna Charta was made in several of the State Conventions called to ratify it, because the abominable wrong was indirectly and covertly sanctioned therein. Soon after we became a nation plans were proposed and associations formed for the improvement of the condition of the colored population; and the General Government was earnestly entreated, in a petition headed by Dr. Franklin, “to go to the utmost limits of its power” to eradicate the great evil from the land. But the doctrine was industriously taught by our statesmen that the status of that class of the people was left, in the Constitution of the Union, to be determined by the government of each of the States in which they may be found. And still greater pains were taken, by those who were bent on the perpetuation of slavery, to make it generally believed throughout the country that negroes were naturally a very inferior race of men; utterly incapable of much mental or moral culture, and better off in domestic servitude on our continent than in their native state in Africa. Notwithstanding this disparagement of them, and the other inducements pressed upon the white people everywhere to acquiesce in their enslavement, many colored persons emancipated themselves, especially in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Louisiana; and many more were set free by the workings of the consciences of their owners, or in gratitude for their services to individuals or the public. Thus, considerable bodies of freedmen were found almost everywhere in the midst of the slaves. Not without reason, these persons became objects of distrust to slaveholders. Devices were therefore sought to get rid of their disturbing influence, and to prevent the increase of the number of such persons.

In 1816 the grand scheme was proposed, and readily adopted in most of the slaveholding States, for colonizing on the coast of Africa the free colored people of the United States, and prohibiting the emancipation of any more of the enslaved, excepting upon the condition of their removal to Liberia.

To carry this great undertaking into complete effect it was necessary to secure the patronage of the Federal Government. This obviously could not be done, without first conciliating to the project the approval and co-operation of the people of the non-slaveholding States. Accordingly, agents, eloquent and cunning, were sent north, east, and west, to summon the benevolent and patriotic everywhere to aid in an enterprise which, it was claimed, would result in the safe but entire abolition of American slavery.

The dreadful wrongs and cruelties inflicted upon our bondmen were not kept out of sight by these agents, but sometimes glowingly depicted. The participation of the Northern States in the original sin of the enslavement of Africans was pertinently urged. The utter impracticability and danger of setting free such hordes of ignorant, degraded people were insisted on with particular emphasis. The immense good that would be done to benighted Africa was eloquently portrayed,—how the slave-trade might be stopped, and the knowledge of the arts of civilized America, and the blessings of our Christian religion, might be spread throughout that dark region of the earth, from the basis of colonies planted at Liberia and elsewhere along those coasts, hitherto visited only by mercenary and cruel white men. All these considerations were so pressed upon the churches and ministers and kind-hearted people of the Northern States, that erelong an enthusiasm was awakened everywhere in favor of colonizing the colored people of our country “in their native land,” and thus, at the same time, evangelizing Africa and wiping out the shame of the American Republic. Without stopping to consider the glaring inconsistencies of the scheme, it was taken for granted to be the only feasible way of doing what we all longed to have done,—abolishing slavery. So the colonization of our colored population became the favorite enterprise at the North, even more than at the South. Thousands who were so prejudiced against them that they would never consent to admit them to the enjoyment of the rights, and the exercise of the prerogatives, of men in our country were ready to give liberally to have them transported across the Atlantic, and were deluded into the belief that it was a benevolent, yes, a Christian enterprise. The very elect were deceived. The men who have since been most distinguished among the Abolitionists—Mr. Garrison, Arthur Tappan, Gerrit Smith, James G. Birney, and hundreds more—were for a while zealous Colonizationists.

Not until Mr. Garrison had been some time resident in Baltimore as co-editor, with Benjamin Lundy, of the Genius of Universal Emancipation, were the true purpose and spirit of Colonization discovered. He there found out, as he afterwards made it plainly appear, that the intention of the originators, and of the Southern promoters of the scheme, really was, “to rivet still closer the fetters of the slaves, and to deepen the prejudice against the free people of color.”

So different had been the representations of its purpose by the agents of the Colonization Society who had labored in its behalf throughout the free States, and so utterly unconscious were most of the Colonizationists on this side of Mason and Dixon’s line of harboring any such designs, that Mr. Garrison’s accusations fired them with indignation and wrath. They would not give heed to his incontrovertible evidence. Though his witnesses were numerous and could not be impeached, yet were they spurned by most of the persons in the free States who had espoused the cause. It was enough that Mr. Garrison had come out in opposition to the plan of Colonization. He was denounced as an infidel, set upon as an enemy of his country. The churches were all closed against him. Few ministers ventured to give him any countenance, and the politicians heaped upon him unmeasured abuse. All this made the more plain to the young Reformer and his co-laborers how thoroughly the virus of slavery had poisoned the American body ecclesiastic, as well as the body politic. It was seen that the church was becoming the bulwark of slaveholders. Mr. Garrison felt that the first thing to be done, therefore, was to batter down the confidence of the humane in the Colonization plan. Against this he drove his sharpest points, at this he aimed his heaviest artillery. So when it became known to us that the agents of that plan had labored, with sad effect, in Great Britain; that they had suborned to their purpose the aid of the English philanthropists, we all felt, with Mr. Garrison, that those friends of the oppressed must be undeceived without delay. No one was competent to do this work so thoroughly as Mr. Garrison himself. Accordingly, it was determined, in the spring of 1833, that he must see personally the prominent Abolitionists of Great Britain.

In pursuance of this object he sailed from New York on the first day of this month, thirty-four years ago. He went with the execrations of the leading Colonizationists, and all the proslavery partisans of our country upon his head. He was received in England with the utmost cordiality and respectful confidence by all the friends of liberty; for although, as he found, many of them had been persuaded by the agents of the Colonization Society to give their approval and aid to that scheme, they had done so because they had been made to believe that it was intended and adapted to effect the entire abolition of slavery in the United States.

Nothing could have been more opportune than was his arrival in London. He found there most of the leading Abolitionists of the United Kingdom watching and aiding the measures in Parliament about to issue in the emancipation of the enslaved in the British West India Islands. He was invited to their councils, and interchanged opinions freely and fully with them on the great questions, which were essentially the same in that country and our own. It was especially his privilege to become acquainted with William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson and Fowell Buxton and George Thompson, to name no more of the noble host that had fought the battles and won the victory of freedom for eight hundred thousand slaves. He was there when William Wilberforce was summoned to lay aside his earthly life, with his antislavery armor, and ascend, we trust, to the right hand of God. How appropriate that the young leader of the Abolitionists of America, whose work had just begun, should be present, as he was, at the obsequies of the veteran leader of the British Abolitionists just as their work was done!

Mr. Garrison remained in England three or four months, long enough to accomplish fully the object of his mission. He reached New York on the 30th of the following September, bringing with him this emphatic protest, signed by the most distinguished philanthropists, and several of the most distinguished statesmen of Great Britain:—

“We, the undersigned, having observed with regret that the American Colonization Society appears to be gaining some adherents in this country, are desirous to express our opinions respecting it. Our motive and excuse for thus coming forward are the claims which that Society has put forth to Antislavery support. These claims are, in our opinion, wholly groundless; and we feel bound to affirm that our deliberate judgment and conviction are that the professions made by the Colonization Society of promoting the abolition of slavery are delusive....

“While we believe its precepts to be delusive we are convinced that its real effects are of the most dangerous nature. It takes its root from a cruel prejudice and alienation in the whites of America against the colored people, slave or free. This being its source, its effects are what might be expected....

“On these grounds, therefore, and while we acknowledge the colony of Liberia, or any other colony on the coast of Africa, to be in itself a good thing, we must be understood utterly to repudiate the principles of the American Colonization Society. That Society is, in our estimation, not deserving of the countenance of the British public.

(Signed)
“Wm. Wilberforce,
Zachary Macaulay,
William Evans, M. P.,
Samuel Gurney,
S. Lushington, M. P.,
T. Fowell Buxton, M. P.,
James Cropper,
Daniel O’Connell, M. P.,”
and others.

Nothing could have maddened the slaveholders and their Northern abettors more than Mr. Garrison’s success in England, and their malignant, ferocious hatred of him broke out on his return. It so happened that, without any expectation of his arrival at the time, a meeting of those desirous of the abolition of slavery was called, on the evening of October 2, in Clinton Hall, to organize a city society. When it was known that Mr. Garrison would be present, most of the New York newspapers teemed with exciting articles, and an advertisement, signed “Many Southerners,” summoned “all persons interested in the subject” to be present at the same time and place. The Abolitionists, aware that a meeting at Clinton Hall would be broken up, quietly withdrew to Chatham Street Chapel, and had nearly completed the organization of the “New York City Antislavery Society,” when the mob of slaveholding patriots, disappointed of their prey at Clinton Hall, and finding out the retreat of the Abolitionists, rushed upon and dispersed them from Chatham Street Chapel, with horrid cries of detestation and threats of utmost violence, especially aimed at Mr. Garrison, of whom they went in search from place to place, declaring their determination to wreak upon him their utmost vengeance. Mr. Garrison, secure in their ignorance of his person, and curious to learn all he might of the mistaken notions and corrupt principles by which they were misled and driven to such excesses, went around with them in their bootless pursuit until he was tired, and the fire of their fury had cooled.

The New York newspapers, especially the Courier and Inquirer, the Gazette, Evening Post, and Commercial Advertiser, by their half-way condemnation of this outrage, and their gross misrepresentations of the sentiments and purposes of Mr. Garrison and his fellow-laborers, virtually justified that fearful assault upon “the liberty of speech,” and inauguration of “the Reign of Terror,” of which I shall hereafter give my readers some account.

THE CONVENTION AT PHILADELPHIA.

The publication of Mr. Garrison’s “Thoughts on Colonization” had arrested the attention of philanthropists in all parts of our country. Everywhere, public as well as private discussions were had respecting the professed and the real purpose and tendency of the Colonization plan. Converts to the great doctrine of the young Reformer—“Immediate emancipation without expatriation, the right of the slave and the duty of the master”—were added daily. Tidings came to us that many town and several county antislavery societies had been formed in several States of the Union, and the circulation of the Liberator had greatly increased. There was a growing feeling that Abolitionists of the whole country ought to know each other, devise some plan of co-operation, and make their influence more manifest. Repeatedly during the spring of 1833 Mr. Garrison expressed his opinion that the time had come for the formation of a National Antislavery Society.

After his departure on his mission to England the need of such an organization became more and more apparent, and before Mr. Garrison’s return, on the 30th of September, the call was issued for the Convention to be held in Philadelphia on the fourth, fifth, and sixth days of the ensuing December. Had we foreseen the peculiarly excited state of the public mind at that time, the important meeting might have been deferred. The success of Mr. Garrison’s labors in England, in opening the eyes of the British philanthropists to the egregious imposition which had been put upon them by the Colonization Society, the protest of the sainted Wilberforce and his most illustrious fellow-laborers, the stinging sarcasms of O’Connell, the champion of Ireland and of universal freedom, were working like moral blisters. More than all, the report of the great Exeter Hall meeting in London, by which colonization was denounced, and the doctrine of “immediate emancipation” fully indorsed, had lashed into fury all the proslavery-colonization-pseudo patriotism throughout the land. The storm had burst upon us in the mobs at New York; and whether it would ever subside until it had overwhelmed us, was a question which many answered in tones of fearful foreboding to our little band. But the Convention had been called before the outbreak, and we were not “wise and prudent” enough to relinquish our purpose of holding it.

On my way to the “City of Brotherly Love” I joined, at New York, a number of the brethren going thither, whom I had never seen before. I studied anxiously their countenances and bearing, and caught most thirstily every word that dropped from their lips, until I was satisfied that most of them were men ready to die, if need be, in the pass of ThermopylÆ.

There was a large company on the steamer that took us from New York to Elizabethtown, and again from Bordentown to Philadelphia. There was much earnest talking by other parties beside our own. Presently a gentleman turned from one of them to me and said, “What, sir, are the Abolitionists going to do in Philadelphia?” I informed him that we intended to form a National Antislavery Society. This brought from him an outpouring of the commonplace objections to our enterprise, which I replied to as well as I was able. Mr. Garrison drew near, and I soon shifted my part of the discussion into his hands, and listened with delight to the admirable manner in which he expounded and maintained the doctrines and purposes of those who believed with him that the slaves—the blackest of them—were men, entitled as much as the whitest and most exalted men in the land to their liberty, to a residence here, if they choose, and to acquire as much wisdom, as much property, and as high a position as they may.

After a long conversation, 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.” I need not describe, you can easily imagine, the incredulous surprise with which this announcement was received. And so it has been from the beginning until now. Those who have only heard of Mr. Garrison, and have believed the misrepresentations of his enemies, have supposed him to be “a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” But those who have become most intimately acquainted with him have found him to be “as harmless as a dove,” though indeed “as wise as a serpent.”

When we arrived in Philadelphia on the afternoon of the 3d of December, 1833, we learnt that a goodly number were already there; and the newspapers of the day were seeking to make our coming a formidable affair, worthy the especial attention of those patriotic conservators of the peace who dealt in brickbats, rotten eggs, and tar and feathers. The Police of the city had given notice to our Philadelphia associates that they could not protect us in the evening, and therefore our meetings must be held by daylight.

A previous gathering was had that evening at the house of Evan Lewis, a man who was afraid of nothing but doing or being wrong. Between thirty and forty were there, and we made such arrangements as we could for the ensuing day. One thing we did, which we were not careful to report, so you may never have heard of it. It was a weak, a servile act. We were ashamed of it ourselves, and you shall have a laugh at our expense if you like.

Some one suggested that, as we were strangers in Philadelphia, our characters and manner of life not known there, the populace might the more easily be made to believe that we had come for an incendiary purpose, and be roused to prevent the accomplishment of it; that, in order to avert the opposition which seemed preparing to thwart us, it would be well to get some one of the distinguished philanthropists of that city to preside over our deliberations, and thus be, as it were, a voucher to the public for our harmlessness. There was no one proposed of whom we could hope such patronage, save only Robert Vaux, a prominent and wealthy Quaker. To him it was resolved we should apply. Five or seven of us were delegated to wait upon the great man, and solicit his acceptance of the Presidency of the Convention. Of this committee I had the honor to be one. Just for this once I wish I had some wit, that I might be able to do justice to the scene. But I need not help you to see it in all its ludicrousness. There were at least six of us—Beriah Green, Evan Lewis, Eppingham L. Capron, Lewis Tappan, John G. Whittier, and myself—sitting around a richly furnished parlor, gravely arguing, by turns, with the wealthy occupant, to persuade him that it was his duty to come and be the most prominent one in a meeting of men already denounced as “fanatics, amalgamationists, disorganizers, disturbers of the peace, and dangerous enemies of the country.” Of course our suit was unsuccessful. We came away mortified much more because we had made such a request, than because it had been denied. As we left the door Beriah Green said in his most sarcastic tone, “If there is not timber amongst ourselves big enough to make a president of, let us get along without one, or go home and stay there until we have grown up to be men.”

The next morning as we passed along the streets leading to the place of meeting, the Adelphi Buildings, we were repeatedly assailed with most insulting words. On arriving at the hall we found the entrance guarded by police officers, placed there, I suppose, at the suggestion of some friends by order of the Mayor. These incidents helped us to realize how we and the cause we had espoused, were regarded in that City of Brotherly Love and Quakers.

At the hour appointed, on the morning of the 4th, nearly all the members were in their seats,—fifty-six in all, representing ten different States. No time was lost. A fervent prayer was offered for the divine guidance. If there was ever a praying assembly I believe that was one.

Beriah Green, then President of Oneida Institute, was chosen President of our Convention. Lewis Tappan, one of the earliest and most untiring laborers in the cause of the oppressed, a well-known merchant of New York, and John G. Whittier, one of Liberty’s choicest poets, were chosen Secretaries.

The first forenoon was spent in a free but somewhat desultory interchange of thought upon the topics of prominent interest, and in listening to a number of cheering letters from individuals in different parts of the United States, assuring us of their hearty sympathy and co-operation, though they were unable to be with us in person.

Discussion and argument were not found necessary to bring us to the resolution to institute an American Antislavery Society, for that was the especial purpose for which we had come together. Committees were chosen to draft a constitution and to nominate a list of officers. When the dining hour arrived, with one consent it was agreed that it was better than meat to remain in the hall, and commune with one another upon the interests of the cause we had espoused. And there and thus did we spend the dinner-time on that and each of the succeeding days. Baskets of crackers and pitchers of cold water supplied all the bodily refreshment that we needed.

The reports of the committees occupied us through the afternoon. We then came unanimously to the conclusion that it was needful to give, to our country and the world, a fuller declaration of the sentiments and purposes of the American Antislavery Society than could be embodied in its Constitution. It was therefore resolved “that Messrs. Atlee, Wright, Garrison, Joselyn, Thurston, Sterling, William Green, Jr., Whittier, Goodell, and May be a committee to draft a Declaration of the Principles of the American Antislavery Society for publication, to which the signatures of the members of this Convention shall be affixed.”

In my next article I will give my readers a particular account of the conception and production of our Magna Charta.

THE PHILADELPHIA CONVENTION.

The committee of ten, appointed at the close of the first day to prepare a declaration of the sentiments and purposes of the American Antislavery Society, felt that the work assigned them ought to be most carefully and thoroughly done, embodying, as far as possible, the best thoughts of the whole Convention. Accordingly, about half of the members were invited to meet, and did meet, the committee early at the house of our chairman, Dr. Edwin P. Atlee.

After an hour’s general conversation upon the importance of the document to be prepared, and the character it ought to possess, we agreed that each one present should, in his turn, utter the sentiment or announce the purpose which he thought ought to be given in the declaration. This was done, and revealed great unanimity, and at the same time not a little individuality of opinion among the members. I cannot now recall many of the suggestions thrown out. One, however, was so pregnant that it contained the text and the substance of several of my lectures afterwards. “I wish,” said Elizur Wright, “that the difference between our purpose and that of the Colonization Society should be explicitly stated. We mean to exterminate slavery from our country with its accursed influences. The Colonizationists aim only to get rid of the slaves so soon as they become free. Their plan is unrighteous, cruel, and impracticable withal. Our plan needs but a good will, a right spirit amongst the white people, to accomplish it.”

After a session of more than two hours thus spent a sub-committee of three was appointed to prepare a draft of the proposed declaration, to be reported next morning at nine o’clock to the whole committee, in the room adjoining the hall of the Convention. William L. Garrison, John G. Whittier, and myself composed that sub-committee. We immediately repaired to the house of Mr. James McCrummel, a colored gentleman, with whom Mr. Garrison was at home; and there, after a half-hour’s consultation, it was of course determined that Mr. Garrison, our CoryphÆus, should write the document, in which were to be set before our country and the world “the sentiments and purposes of the American Antislavery Society.” We left him about ten o’clock, agreeing to come to him again next morning at eight.

On our return at the appointed hour we found him, with shutters closed and lamps burning, just writing the last paragraph of his admirable draft. We read it over together two or three times very carefully, agreed to a few slight alterations, and at nine went to lay it before the whole committee. By them it was subjected to the severest examination. Nearly three hours of intense application were given to it, notwithstanding repeated and urgent calls from the Convention for our report. All the while Mr. Garrison evinced the most unruffled patience. Very few alterations were proposed, and only once did he offer any resistance. He had introduced into his draft more than a page in condemnation of the Colonization scheme. It was the concentrated essence of all he had written or thought upon that egregious imposition. It was as finished and powerful in expression as any part of that Magna Charta. We commented upon it as a whole and in all its parts. We writhed somewhat under its severity, but were obliged to acknowledge its exact, its singular justice, and were about to accept it, when I ventured to propose that all of it, excepting only the first comprehensive paragraph, be stricken from the document, giving as my reason for this large erasure, that the Colonization Society could not long survive the deadly blows it had received; and it was not worth while for us to perpetuate the memory of it, in this Declaration of the Rights of Man, which will live a perpetual, impressive protest against every form of oppression, until it shall have given place to that brotherly kindness, which all the children of the common Father owe to one another. At first, Mr. Garrison rose up to save a portion of his work that had doubtless cost him as much mental effort as any other part of it. But so soon as he found that a large majority of the committee concurred in favor of the erasure, he submitted very graciously, saying, “Brethren, it is your report, not mine.”

With this exception, the alterations and amendments which were made, after all our criticisms, were surprisingly few and unessential; and we cordially agreed to report it to the Convention very much as it came from his pen. Between twelve and one o’clock we repaired with it to the hall. Edwin P. Atlee, the Chairman, read the Declaration to the Convention. Never in my life have I seen a deeper impression made by words than was made by that admirable document upon all who were there present. After the voice of the reader had ceased there was a profound silence for several minutes. Our hearts were in perfect unison. There was but one thought with us all. Either of the members could have told what the whole Convention felt. We felt that the word had just been uttered which would be mighty, through God, to the pulling down of the strongholds of slavery.

The solemn silence was broken by a Quaker brother, Evan Lewis, or Thomas Shipley, who moved that we adopt the Declaration, and proceed at once to append to it our signatures. He said, “We have already given it our assent; every heart here has responded to it; and there is a doctrine of the ‘Friends’ which impelled me to make the motion I have done: ‘First impressions are from heaven.’ I fear, if we go about criticising and amending this Declaration, we shall qualify its truthfulness and impair its strength.”

The majority of the Convention, however, thought it best, in a matter so momentous, to be deliberate; to weigh well every word and act by which our countrymen and the world would be called to justify or condemn us and our enterprise. Accordingly, we adjusted ourselves to hear the Declaration read again, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, and to pass judgment upon it in every particular. The whole afternoon, from one o’clock until five, was assiduously and patiently devoted to this review. Discussion arose on several points; but no one spoke who had not something to say. Never had I heard in a public assembly so much pertinent speech, never so little that was unimportant. The result of the afternoon’s deliberations was a deeper satisfaction with the Declaration. Some expressions in it were called in question, but few were changed. And just as the darkness of night had shut down upon us we resolved unanimously to adopt it. On motion of Lewis Tappan we voted that Abraham L. Cox, M.D., whom the mover knew to be an excellent penman, be requested to procure a suitable sheet of parchment, and engross thereon our magna charta before the following morning, that it might then receive the signatures of each one of the members.

At the opening of the meeting next morning the Doctor was there, with the work assigned him beautifully executed. He read the Declaration once and again. Another hour was expended in the consideration of certain expressions in it. But no changes were made. It was then submitted for signatures; and Thomas Whitson, of Chester County, Pennsylvania, being obliged to leave the city immediately, came forward and had the honor of signing it first. Sixty-one others subscribed their names on the 6th day of December, 1833.

If I ever boast of anything it is this: that I was a member of the Convention that instituted the American Antislavery Society. That assembly, gathered from eleven different States of our Republic, was composed of devout men of every sect and of no sect in religion, of each political party and of neither; but they were all of one mind. They evidently felt that they had come together for a purpose higher and better than that of any religious sect or political party. Never have I seen men so ready, so anxious to rid themselves of whatsoever was narrow, selfish, or merely denominational. I was all the more affected by the manifestation of this spirit, because I had been living for ten years in Connecticut, where every one who did not profess a faith essentially “Orthodox” was peremptorily proscribed. In the Philadelphia Convention there were but two or three of my sect, which you know at that time had but few avowed adherents anywhere except in the eastern half of Massachusetts, and was then, much more than now, especially obnoxious to all other religionists in the land. Yet we were cordially treated as brethren, admitted freely, without reserve or qualification, into that goodly fellowship. They were indeed a company of the Lord’s freemen, a truly devout company. And the scrupulous regard for the rights of the human mind, no less than for the other natural rights of man, was shown from the beginning to the end of the Convention.

Much the largest number of any sect present were what were then, and are now, called Orthodox, or Evangelical. There were ten or twelve ministers of one or the other of those denominations that claim to be Orthodox; yet I distinctly remember that some of them were the most forward and eager to lay aside sectarianism, and their generous example was gladly followed by all others. At the suggestion of an Orthodox brother, and without a vote of the Convention, our President himself, then an Orthodox minister, readily condescended to the scruples of our Quaker brethren, so far as not to call upon any individual to offer prayer; but at the opening of our sessions each day he gave notice that a portion of time would be spent in prayer. Any one prayed aloud who was moved so to do.

It was at the suggestion also of an Orthodox member that we agreed to dispense with all titles, civil or ecclesiastical. Accordingly, you will not find in the published minutes of the Convention appendages to any names,—neither D.D., nor Rev., nor Hon., nor Esq.,—no, not even plain Mr. We met as fellow-men, in the cause of suffering fellow-men. When the resolution was read recommending the institution of a monthly “concert of prayer” for the abolition of slavery, a Quaker objected to its passage, on the ground that he believed not in stated times and seasons for prayers, but that then only can we truly pray when we are moved to do so by the Holy Spirit. Effingham L. Capron, a member of the “Society of Friends,” immediately and earnestly expressed regret that his brother had interposed such an objection. “For,” said he, “this measure is only to be recommended by the Convention, not insisted on, much less to be incorporated into the constitution of the society we have formed; and such is the liberal, catholic spirit of all here present,” he added, “that I do not suspect any one wishes to urge the measure upon those who would have conscientious scruples against it.” “Certainly not, certainly not,” said the mover of the resolution. “Certainly not, certainly not,” was responded from all parts of the hall. On this explanation the brother withdrew his opposition, and the resolution passed, nem. con.

LUCRETIA MOTT.

A number of excellent women, most of them of the “Society of Friends,” were in constant attendance upon the meetings of the Convention, which continued three days successively, without adjournment for dinner. On the afternoon of the second day, in the midst of a very interesting debate (I think it was on the use of the productions of slave-labor), a sweet female voice was heard. It was Lucretia Mott’s. She had risen and commenced speaking, but was hesitating, because she feared the larger part of the Convention not being Quakers might think it “a shame for a woman to speak in a church,” and she was unwilling to give them offence. Her beautiful countenance was radiant with the thoughts that had moved her to speak; and the expression was made all the more engaging by the emotion of deference to the supposed prejudices of her auditors, with which it was suffused.

Our President, Beriah Green, conferred not with flesh and blood, but, filled as he was with the liberal spirit of the apostle who wrote, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,” at once, without waiting for the formal sanction of the Convention, cried out in the most encouraging, cordial tone, “Go on, ma’am, we shall all be glad to hear you.” “Go on,” “Go on,” was responded by many voices. She did go on; and no man who was there will dissent from me when I add that she made a more impressive and effective speech than any other that was made in the Convention, excepting only our President’s closing address.

Lucretia Mott afterwards spoke repeatedly; and one or two graceful amendments of the language of our Declaration were made at her suggestion. Two other excellent women also took part in our discussions,—Esther Moore and Lydia White,—and they spoke to good purpose. Now, that no brother was scandalized by this procedure (and there were several there who afterwards opposed us on the “woman question,”) we have evidence enough in the following resolution, which was passed near the close of the third day, without dissent or a word to qualify or limit its application: “Resolved, that the thanks of the Convention be presented to our female friends for the deep interest they have manifested in the cause of antislavery, during the long and fatiguing session of the Convention.” Was not the fact that three of our female friends had taken an active part in our meetings, had repeatedly “spoken in the church”—must not this fact have been prominent to the view of every one who was called to vote on the above resolution? And yet I do aver that I heard not a word, either in or out of the hall, censuring their course, or expressing regret that they had been allowed to take part in our discussions. Far otherwise. It seemed to be regarded as another of the many indications we had seen of the deep hold which the antislavery cause had taken of the public heart. We remembered in the history of our race that, (although women had ordinarily kept themselves in the retirement of domestic life,) in the great emergencies of humanity,—in those imminent crises which have tried men’s souls, and from which we date the signal advances of civilization,—women have always been conspicuous at the martyr’s stake, in the councils of Church and State, and even in the conduct of armies. We therefore hailed the deep interest manifested by them in the cause of our oppressed countrymen, as an omen that another triumph of humanity was at hand. No one suggested that it would be well to invite the women to enroll their names as members of the Convention and sign the Declaration. It was not thought of in season. But I have not a doubt, such was the spirit of that assembly, that, if the proposal had been made, it would have been acceded to joyfully by a large majority, if not by all. We had not convened there to shape our enterprise to the received opinions or usages of any sect or party. We were not careful to do what might please “the scribes and pharisees and rulers of the people.” We had come together at the cry of suffering, wronged, outraged millions. We had come to say and do what, we hoped, would rouse the nation to a sense of her tremendous iniquity. We were willing, we were anxious, that all who had ears to hear should hear “the truth which only tyrants dread.” And I have no doubt, that at that time all immediate Abolitionists would have readily consented that every one (man or woman) who had the power had also the right to utter that truth; to utter it with the pen or with the living voice; to utter it at the fireside in the private circle, or to the largest congregation from the pulpit, or, if need be, from the house-top. It was not then in our hearts to bid any one be silent, who might be moved to plead for the down-trodden millions in our country who were not permitted to speak for themselves. We were willing “that the very stones should cry out,” if they would.

The subjects that elicited most discussion in the Convention were Colonization; the use of the productions of slave-labor; the doctrine of compensation; and the duty of relying wholly on moral power. The results to which we came are expressed in the Constitution, the Declaration, or the Resolutions that were passed.

No one can read the published minutes of our proceedings, and not perceive how emphatically and solemnly we avowed the determination not to commit the cause we had espoused in any way to an arm of flesh, but to trust wholly to the power of truth and the influence of the Holy Spirit to change the hearts of slaveholders and their abettors. This principle, which was repudiated by a portion of the American Antislavery Society under the excitement caused by the murder of Lovejoy in 1837, was accounted by a large majority of the Convention as the principle upon which our enterprise should be prosecuted, or could be brought to a peaceful triumph. Those only who were ready to take up the cross, to suffer loss, shame, and even death, seemed to us then fit to engage in the work we proposed. The third article of the Constitution was as follows: “This Society will never, in any way, countenance the oppressed in vindicating their rights by physical force.” And the pacific spirit and intentions of the Society were still more distinctively and emphatically set forth in the Declaration, in exposition of the third article above quoted. That document begins with an allusion to the Magna Charta of the American Revolution, which was prepared and signed fifty-seven years before in the very city where we were assembled. It exhibits clearly the contrast between our philanthropic enterprise and that of our fathers. It says: “Their principles led them to wage war against their oppressors, and to spill human blood like water in order to be free. Ours forbid the doing of evil that good may come, and lead us to reject, and entreat the oppressed to reject, the use of any carnal weapons for deliverance from bondage; relying solely upon those which are spiritual and ‘mighty through God’ to the pulling down of strongholds. Their measures were physical,—the marshalling in arms, the hostile array, the mortal encounter. Ours shall be such only as the opposition of moral purity to moral corruption, the destruction of error by the potency of truth, the overthrow of prejudice by the power of love, the abolition of slavery by the spirit of repentance.”

This language was not adopted hastily or inconsiderately. Its import was duly weighed. A few of the members hesitated. They were not non-resistants. They were not, at first, ready to say they would not fight, if they should be roughly used by the opposers of our cause. But it was strenuously urged in reply that, whatever might be true as to the right of self-defence, in the prosecution of our great undertaking, violent resistance to the injurious treatment we might receive would have a disastrous effect. It was insisted that we ought to go forth to labor for the abolition of slavery, in the spirit of Christian reformers, expecting to be persecuted, and resolved never to return evil for evil. The result of our discussion was that all the members of the Convention signed the Declaration, thereby pledging themselves, and all who should thereafter sign the Constitution—“Come what may to our persons, our interests, or our reputations; whether we live to witness the triumph of liberty, justice, and humanity, or perish untimely as martyrs in this great, benevolent, and holy cause.”

Such was the spirit that at last pervaded the whole body. I cannot describe the holy enthusiasm which lighted up every face as we gathered around the table on which the Declaration lay, to put our names to that sacred instrument. It seemed to me that every man’s heart was in his hand,—as if every one felt that he was about to offer himself a living sacrifice in the cause of freedom, and to do it cheerfully. There are moments when heart touches heart, and souls flow into one another. That was such a moment. I was in them and they in me; we were all one. There was no need that each should tell the other how he felt and what he thought, for we were in each other’s bosoms. I am sure there was not, in all our hearts, the thought of ever making violent, much less mortal, defence of the liberty of speech, or the freedom of the press, or of our own persons, though we foresaw that they all would be grievously outraged. Our President, Beriah Green, in his admirable closing speech, gave utterance to what we all felt and intended should be our course of conduct. He distinctly foretold the obloquy, the despiteful treatment, the bitter persecution, perhaps even the cruel deaths we were going to encounter in the prosecution of the undertaking to which we had bound ourselves. Not an intimation fell from his lips that, in any extremity, we were to resort to carnal weapons and fight rather than die in the cause. Much less did he intimate that it might ever be proper for us to defend, by deadly weapons, the liberty of speech and the press. O no! The words which came glowing from his lips were of a very different import. He exhorted us most solemnly, most tenderly, to cherish the Holy Spirit which he felt was then in all our hearts, and go forth to our several places of labor willing to suffer shame, loss of property, and, if need be, even of life, in the cause of human rights; but not intending to hurt a hair of the heads of our opposers, whom we ought to regard in pity more than in anger. Would that every syllable which he uttered had been engraven upon some imperishable tablet! Would that the spirit which then inspired him had been infused into the bosom of every one who has since engaged in the antislavery cause!

MRS. L. MARIA CHILD.

The account I have given above of the valuable services rendered in the Philadelphia Convention by Lucretia Mott, Esther Moore, and Lydia White, doubtless reminded my readers of many other excellent women, whose names stand high among the early antislavery reformers. The memories of them are most precious to me. If I live to write out half of my Recollections, and you do not weary of them, I shall make most grateful mention of our female fellow-laborers in general, of several of them in particular, though I cannot do ample justice to any.

There is one of whom I must speak now, because I have already passed the time, at which her inestimable services commenced. In July, 1833, when the number, the variety, and the malignity of our opponents had become manifest, we were not much more delighted than surprised by the publication of a thoroughgoing antislavery volume, from the pen of Mrs. Lydia Maria Child. She was at that time, perhaps, the most popular as well as useful of our female writers. None certainly, excepting Miss Sedgwick, rivalled her. The North American Review, then, if not now, the highest authority on matters of literary criticism, said at the time: “We are not sure that any woman in our country would outrank Mrs. Child. This lady has long been before the public as an author with much success. And she well deserves it, for in all her works we think that nothing can be found which does not commend itself by its tone of healthy morality and good sense. Few female writers, if any, have done more or better things for our literature, in its lighter or graver departments.” That such an author—ay, such an authority—should espouse our cause just at that crisis, I do assure you, was a matter of no small joy, yes, exultation. She was extensively known in the Southern as well as the Northern States, and her books commanded a ready sale there not less than here. We had seen her often at our meetings. We knew that she sympathized with her brave husband in his abhorrence of our American system of slavery; but we did not know that she had so carefully studied and thoroughly mastered the subject. Nor did we suspect that she possessed the power, if she had the courage, to strike so heavy a blow. Why, the very title-page was pregnant with the gist of the whole matters under dispute between us,—“Immediate Abolitionists,” and the slaveholders on the one hand, and the Colonizationists on the other,—“An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans CALLED Africans.” The volume, still prominent in the literature of our conflict, is replete with facts showing, not only the horrible cruelties that had been perpetrated by individual slaveholders or their overseers, but the essential barbarity of the system of slavery, its dehumanizing influences upon those who enforced it scarcely less than upon those who were crushed under it. Her book did us an especially valuable service in showing, to those who had paid little attention to the subject, that the Africans are not by nature inferior to other—even the white—races of men; but that “Ethiopia held a conspicuous place among the nations of ancient times. Her princes were wealthy and powerful, and her people distinguished for integrity and wisdom. Even the proud Grecians evinced respect for Ethiopia, almost amounting to reverence, and derived thence the sublimest portions of their mythology. And the popular belief, that all the gods made an annual visit to feast with the excellent Ethiopians, shows the high estimation in which they were then held, for we are not told that such an honor was bestowed on any other nation.” Mrs. Child’s exposure of the fallacy of the Colonization scheme, as well as the falsity of the pretensions put forth by its advocates, amply sustained all Mr. Garrison’s accusations. And her exposÉ of the principles of the “Immediate Abolitionists” was clear, and her defence of them was impregnable.

This “Appeal” reached thousands who had given no heed to us before, and made many converts to the doctrines of Mr. Garrison.

Of course, what pleased and helped us so much gave proportionate offence to slaveholders, Colonizationists, and their Northern abettors. Mrs. Child was denounced. Her effeminate admirers, both male and female, said there were “some very indelicate things in her book,” though there was nothing narrated in it that had not been allowed, if not perpetrated, by “the refined, hospitable, chivalric gentlemen and ladies” on their Southern plantations. The politicians and statesmen scouted the woman who “presumed to criticise so freely the constitution and government of her country. Women had better let politics alone.” And certain ministers gravely foreboded “evil and ruin to our country, if the women generally should follow Mrs. Child’s bad example, and neglect their domestic duties to attend to the affairs of state.”

Mrs. Child’s popularity was reversed. Her writings on other subjects were no longer sought after with the avidity that was shown for them before the publication of her “Appeal.” Most of them were sent back to their publishers from the Southern bookstores, with the notice that the demand for her books had ceased. The sale of them at the North was also greatly diminished. It was said at the time that her income from the productions of her pen was lessened six or eight hundred dollars a year. But this did not daunt her. On the contrary, it roused her to greater exertion, as it revealed to her more fully the moral corruption which slavery had diffused throughout our country, and summoned her patriotism as well as her benevolence to more determined conflict with our nation’s deadliest enemy. Indeed, she consecrated herself to the cause of the enslaved. Many of her publications since then have related to the great subject, viz.: The Oasis, Antislavery Catechism, Authentic Anecdotes, Evils and Cure of Slavery, Other Tracts, Life of Isaac T. Hopper, and, more than all, her letters to Governor Wise, of Virginia, and to Mrs. Mason, respecting John Brown. Those letters had an immense circulation throughout the free States, and were blazoned by all manner of anathemas in the Southern papers. Her letter to Mrs. Mason especially was copied by hundreds of thousands, and was doubtless one of the efficient agencies that prepared the mind of the North for the final great crisis.

For several years, assisted by her husband, Mrs. Child edited the Antislavery Standard, elevated its literary character, extended its circulation, and increased its efficiency.

But, in a more private way, this admirable woman rendered the early Abolitionists most important services. She, together with Mrs. Maria W. Chapman and Eliza Lee Follen, and others, of whom I shall write hereafter, were presiding geniuses in all our councils and more public meetings, often proposing the wisest measures, and suggesting to those who were “allowed to speak in the assembly” the most weighty thoughts, pertinent facts, apt illustrations, which they could not be persuaded to utter aloud. Repeatedly in those early days, before Angelina and Sarah GrimkÉ had taught others besides Quaker women “to speak in meeting,” if they had anything to say that was worth hearing,—repeatedly did I spring to the platform, crying, “Hear me as the mouthpiece of Mrs. Child, or Mrs. Chapman, or Mrs. Follen,” and convulsed the audience with a stroke of wit, or electrified them with a flash of eloquence, caught from the lips of one or the other of our antislavery prophetesses.

N.B.—That Mrs. Child, when she became an Abolitionist, did not become a woman “of one idea” is evinced, not only by her two volumes of enchanting “Letters from New York,” “Memoirs of Madame de StaËl” and “Madame Roland,” “Biographies of Good Wives,” and several exquisite books for children, but still more by her three octavo volumes, entitled “Progress of Religious Ideas,” which must have been the result of a vast amount of reading and profound thought on all the subjects of theology and religion. Her later work, “Looking towards Sunset,” is full of beautiful ideas about that future life, for which her untiring devotion to all the humanities in this life must have so fully prepared her.

ERUPTION OF LANE SEMINARY.

Lane Seminary was an institution established by our orthodox fellow-Christians, mainly for the preparation of young men for the ministry. It attained so much importance in the estimation of its patrons, that, in 1832, they claimed for it the services and the reputation of Rev. Dr. Beecher, who left Boston at that time and became its president. There he found, or was soon after joined by, Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, another distinguished teacher of Calvinistic theology. This school of the prophets was placed on Walnut Hill, in the vicinity of Cincinnati, that it might be near to the Southwestern States, and was separated from Kentucky only by the river Ohio. It had attracted, by the reputation of its Faculty, from all parts of the country, quite a number of remarkably able, earnest, conscientious, and, as they proved to be, eloquent young men.

At the time when the signal event occurred of which I am now to give some account, there were in the literary and theological departments of Lane Seminary more than a hundred students. Eleven of these were from different slave States; seven of them sons of slaveholders, one himself a slaveholder when he entered the institution, and one of the number—James Bradley—had emancipated himself from the cruel bondage by the payment of a large sum, that he had earned by extra labor. Besides these, there were ten of the students who had resided more or less in the slave States, and were well acquainted with the condition of the people, and the influence of their “peculiar institution” of domestic servitude. Moreover, that you may appreciate fully the importance of the event I am going to narrate to you, and know that it was not (as some at the time represented it to be) a boyish prank, or mere college rebellion,—“a tempest in a teapot,”—let me tell you that the youngest student in the seminary was nineteen years of age, most of the students were more than twenty-six years old, and several of them were over thirty. They were sober, Christian men, who were preparing themselves, in good earnest, to preach the Gospel; and they believed that one of its proclamations was “liberty to the captives, let the oppressed go free, break every yoke.”

Soon after the seminary was opened, a Colonization Society was formed among the students. At the time of which I speak most of them were members of that Society, and were encouraged by the Faculty so to be. But the publication of Mr. Garrison’s “Thoughts on Colonization,” and the formation of the “American Antislavery Society,” attracted the attention of some of their number. Conversations arose on the subject between them and their fellows. An anxious inquiry was awakened as to the truth of the allegations brought against the Colonization scheme, and as to the justice of the new demand made by Mr. Garrison and his associates for the “immediate abolition of slavery.” At length, in February, 1834, it was proposed that there should be a thorough public discussion of two questions:—

1st. Whether the people of the slaveholding States ought to abolish slavery at once, and without prescribing, as a condition, that the emancipated should be sent to Liberia, or elsewhere, out of our country?

2d. Whether the doctrines, tendencies, measures, spirit of the Colonization Society were such as to render it worthy of the patronage of Christian people?

We were informed at the time, by several who were cognizant of the fact, that the Faculty, fearing the effect of such a discussion upon the prosperity of the seminary, officially and earnestly advised that it should be indefinitely postponed. But many of the students had become too deeply interested in these questions to consent that they should remain unsettled. They were therefore discussed,—each one through nine evenings,—in the presence of the President and most of the Faculty, fully, faithfully, earnestly, but courteously debated. The results were, on the first question, an almost unanimous vote to this effect: that “Immediate emancipation from slavery was the right of every slave and the duty of every slaveholder.” And on the second question it was voted, by a large majority, “That the American Colonization Society and its scheme were not deserving of the approbation and aid of Christians.” This was the purport, if not the exact language, of the resolutions at the close of the debate of eighteen evenings.

The report of the proceeding and the result went speedily through the land; and, as speedily, there came back, from certain quarters, no stinted measure of condemnation, warning, threats. These so alarmed the Faculty that, as soon as was practicable, they formally prohibited the continued existence of an Antislavery Society among the students of Lane Seminary; and required that the Colonization Society, which they had cherished hitherto, should be also disbanded and abolished.

At the next meeting of the Overseers, or Corporation of the Seminary, this high-handed measure of the Faculty was approved and confirmed. The remonstrance of the students (all but one of them adult men, thirty of them more than twenty-six years of age) availed not to procure a reconsideration of this oppressive decree. Accordingly, nearly all of them—seventy or eighty in number—withdrew from the Seminary, refusing to be the pupils of theological professors who showed so plainly that their sympathies were with the oppressors, rather than with the oppressed; or that they had not courage enough to denounce so egregious a wrong, so tremendous a sin, as the enslavement of millions of human beings.

Like the disciples after the martyrdom of Stephen, these faithful young men were scattered abroad throughout the land, and went everywhere, preaching the word which they were forbidden to utter within the enclosure of a school, dedicated to the promulgation of the religion of Jesus of Nazareth.

Antislavery truth was disseminated far and wide by their agency. Those who were the sons of slaveholders returned to the homes of their parents, and besought them and their neighbors to repent of their great unrighteousness and flee from the wrath to come. These entreaties were not all lost. Several slaveholders were converted, and gave liberty to their bondmen. If I mistake not, the attention of that admirable man, Hon. James G. Birney, of Kentucky, was fixed by the discussions in Lane Seminary, and by conversations with the students upon the really evil tendency of the Colonization plan, which, with the best intentions, he had done so much to promote. At any rate, his conversion about that time to the doctrine of “immediate emancipation” was an event of signal importance, as I hope to show you in a future article.

It was not my privilege to become personally acquainted with many of these young men, whose conscientious, courteous, dignified, yet determined course of conduct awakened our admiration, and whose subsequent labors helped mightily the great work projected by the American Antislavery Society. Several of them were called to announce and advocate their principles in communities where it was especially dangerous “to speak those truths which tyrants dread.” We were delighted from time to time by the accounts that came to us of their unflinching fidelity. And undoubtedly there were some cases of peculiar trial and suffering endured by them, which are treasured among the secret things that are to be made known, when He “who seeth in secret will reward men openly.”

Amos Dresser, eager to raise the funds he needed to enable him to pursue his studies and complete his preparation for the ministry, took of the publishers an agency for the sale of the “Cottage Bible” in Tennessee. For the transportation of himself and his load he procured a horse and barouche. He had proceeded without molestation as far as Nashville. There it was discovered that he was an Abolitionist,—one of the students that had left Lane Seminary on account of his principles. He was arrested by order of the Mayor, and brought before the Committee of Vigilance. By them his trunk was searched, his journal, private papers, and letters were examined. These showed plainly enough, and he promptly acknowledged, that he was opposed to slavery; that he pitied his fellow-men who were in bondage, and regarded those who held them in chains as guilty of great wickedness.

Therefore, although there was not the slightest proofs that, thus far, he had done or said anything that did not pertain to his business, he was condemned by the Committee to be taken out immediately, to receive twenty lashes upon his bare back, and to depart from the city within twenty-four hours. Accordingly, that American citizen, for the crime of believing “the Declaration of Independence,” was taken by the excited populace to a public square in Nashville, and there on his knees received upon his naked back twenty lashes, laid on by a city officer with a heavy cowhide. He was then hurried away, leaving behind him five hundred dollars’ worth of property, which was never restored. James A. Thome, the son of a Kentucky slaveholder, was so thoroughly converted to Abolitionism that, during the pendency of the infamous decree of the Faculty and Trustees of the Seminary, he was sent as a delegate from the Antislavery Society which the students had formed to attend the annual meetings of the Abolitionists in May, 1834. He came and addressed the public in New York, Boston, and elsewhere. His heartfelt sincerity, his tender, fervid eloquence, made a peculiarly deep impression upon his audiences. And having been born and brought up in the midst of slavery, his testimony to its cruelties, its licentiousness, and its depraving influences was received without distrust, though it sustained the worst allegations that had ever been brought against the domestic servitude in our Southern States.

Henry B. Stanton came with Mr. Thome as another delegate from the Lane Seminary Antislavery Society to the May meetings of 1834. This then young man also evinced so much zeal in the cause, so much power as a speaker and skill in debate, that soon after the dissolution of his connection with the seminary, in the month of October of that year, he was appointed an agent of the American Antislavery Society, and, for ten years or more afterwards, Mr. Stanton continued to do us most valuable service by his eloquent lectures, his pertinent contributions to our antislavery papers, and his diligence and fidelity as one of the secretaries of the National Society.

But Theodore D. Weld was the master-spirit among the Lane Seminary students. Indeed, he was accused by the Trustees of being the instigator of all the fanaticism and incendiary movements that had given them so much trouble and threatened the ruin of the institution. Accordingly, it was moved that Mr. Weld be expelled. No breach of law was charged upon this gentleman; no disrespect to the Faculty, nor anything implicating in the least his moral character, only that he was the leader of the Abolitionists. Still, the proposition to expel him was favored by the majority of the Trustees. When, therefore, the final action of the Board had determined the students to ask for a dismission from the seminary, Theodore D. Weld, with becoming self-respect, chose to remain until he should be cleared by the Faculty of all charges of misconduct. As soon as the Board had had a meeting and withdrawn their accusation, he applied for and received an honorable dismission.

Then he accepted an appointment as an agent of the Antislavery Society, at a salary less by half than was offered him by another benevolent association. And throughout the Western and Middle States, and occasionally in New England, he lectured with a frequency, a fervor, and an effect that justify me in saying that no one, excepting only Mr. Garrison and Mr. Phillips, has done more than Mr. Weld for the abolition of American slavery.

What a loss it would have been to the cause of liberty, if the Faculty and Trustees of Lane Seminary had been wiser men!

I am careful to affix his titles to the name of this distinguished friend of humanity, because they indicate, in some measure, the estimation to which George Thompson has risen both in England and in the United States. The former title was conferred upon him in his own country, the latter in ours. But both nations owe him much more than titles. By each he should be placed high on the list of its public benefactors, and the two should unite to give him every comfort that he may need in his old age, and enable him to provide well for all who are dependent upon him.

George Thompson was born in 1804, the same year that gave birth to William Lloyd Garrison, and, like our illustrious countryman, has risen to his high elevation from a lowly estate of life. His native place was Liverpool, not far from the residence of William Roscoe, his father being, at the time of his birth, in the service of that distinguished scholar and philanthropist. He never attended school a day, but, like Garrison, was indebted to his mother for all elementary instruction. For the rest of his acquisitions he was left to depend upon himself.

While he was quite young his parents removed to London, and so soon as he could be made serviceable he was employed as an errand-boy. Quickened and guided by his excellent mother’s love of knowledge, he early acquired the habit of reading, and greedily devoured all books adapted to his age that she could procure for him.

He was so fortunate as to attract the kind regard of the Rev. Richard Watson, the distinguished writer and preacher in defence of the doctrines of Methodism. He was taken as a chore-boy into that good man’s family, and was with him, as his humble assistant in indoor and outdoor work, during most of the time that Mr. Watson was preparing his most famous publications. Owing to the influence of this divine, but more to his mother, at the age of fifteen George Thompson became the subject of deep, religious convictions, and consecrated himself, by public profession, to the service of God and the redemption of man. When sixteen years old he was appointed a Tract distributor, and joined a society for visiting and nursing the destitute sick. About the same time he was apprenticed to a grocer, and continued in his employment a number of years, having in due time become his accountant.

At the age of twenty George Thompson was admitted a member of a large debating-club. In this connection, he soon disclosed to those about him the value of the acquisitions he had made by reading, under the direction of his mother and Mr. Watson; and sometimes gave off more than sparks of that eloquence which since then has so often electrified and fired his large audiences, throughout Great Britain and our Northern and Western States.

In the course of the years 1825, 1826, and 1827, the benevolent people of England were pretty thoroughly roused by Clarkson, Wilberforce, Macaulay, and their brother philanthropists, to a consciousness of their nation’s wickedness, in consenting to the system of West India slavery under the dominion of the British Crown. The question of immediate emancipation was agitated everywhere throughout the realm. It was introduced into the debating-club which George Thompson had joined. His sympathy for the slaves had been awakened very early in life. His father, when a young man, ran away from home, and enlisted as captain’s clerk on board a slave-ship, not knowing what he did. But so soon as he witnessed the embarkation of the victims of that accursed traffic, and the treatment of them on the “middle passage,” he was too much horrified to remain an hour longer, than he was obliged to, in any way connected with “a business too bad for demons to do.” Immediately, therefore, on the arrival of his ship in the West Indies, he fled to an officer of a British man-of-war, and begged that he might be impressed into the naval service, and so escape the repetition of the horrors he had seen and unwillingly helped to perpetrate. Often had George heard his father narrate the cruelties which were inflicted on board the ship with which he was connected,—cruelties inseparable from the forcible transportation of human beings, without the least regard to their personal comfort, from the freedom of their native wilds to the hell of slavery in America. Thus was his young heart and soul fired with indignation at the sin of his nation, and baptized into the love of impartial liberty. He, of course, welcomed the introduction of the question into the club, and entered upon the debate with holy zeal. The discussion was continued through twelve evenings. It attracted much attention; resulted in a resolution, passed almost unanimously, in favor of immediate emancipation; and was deemed of sufficient importance to be reported to the government. Especial mention was made of “the heartfelt, impassioned eloquence of a young man, named George Thompson”; and our friend became the cherished associate of several gentlemen who have since been widely known among the active friends of all the reforms and social improvements that have blessed Great Britain and Ireland within the last forty years.

In 1828 Mr. Thompson was especially invited to join “The London Literary and Scientific Association,” comprising about a thousand young men. Here, too, the question of West India emancipation came up for consideration, was earnestly and ably debated through three long evenings, and resulted in favor of the immediate abolition of slavery. This result was attributed mainly to “the masterly logic, as well as fervid eloquence, of young Thompson.” The newspapers commented on his success, as an augury of what might be expected from him in a more august debating-club, which in England means Parliament.

And here I must tell you a family secret. The lady who afterwards became his wife, whose position in society was much higher than his own (a circumstance of far greater importance in England than in our country), was present at these debates. She was fired with such admiration of his powers, and of his consecration of them to the cause of suffering humanity, that it lighted a kindred flame in his bosom; or, to speak in plain American English, they there fell in love with each other, and were soon after married.

About this time the London Antislavery Society was formed. The directors, or executive committee thereof, advertised for a suitable man, who was willing to become their lecturing agent. This opened the door to what has since been the business of his life. He hesitated several weeks, distrusting his ability. But, encouraged and urged by his young wife, he at length consented that the Secretary, Mr. Thomas Pringle, should be informed of his wish to receive an appointment. By that gentleman he was invited to an interview with Sir George Stevens and Rev. Zachary Macaulay, who, after satisfying themselves of his qualifications, commended him to Lord Brougham, Lord Denham, and Sir George Bunting, the committee that was to decide the question of appointment. These gentlemen, after an extended conversation with him, gave him a commission for three months, and sent him forth to agitate the community on the question of West India emancipation.

Could you but turn to the English papers of that day, you would see for yourself how rapidly, and to what an unexampled height, rose his reputation as a lecturer. At the end of three months, the demands that came from all parts of the kingdom for the services of Mr. Thompson settled the question with the committee. They gave him an appointment until “the warfare should be accomplished.” And for three or four years he was the principal, if not the only, agent of that Society, performing an amount of labor which seems almost superhuman. In all parts of the United Kingdom his voice was heard, either in speeches to the crowds that everywhere thronged to listen to him, or in debates with Mr. Bostwick and other agents hired by the West India slaveholders to oppose him. And when, in 1833, the victory was achieved; when, overpowered by the outward pressure, both Houses of Parliament were compelled to make a virtue of necessity, and to magnify the glory of England by that Act which gave liberty to eight hundred thousand slaves, Lord Brougham rose in the House of Lords and said: “I rise to take the crown of this most glorious victory from every other head, and place it upon George Thompson’s. He has done more than any other man to achieve it.” This tribute was most justly deserved.

Yet for all his labors, his inestimable services, Mr. Thompson received only pecuniary compensation enough to pay his expenses and support his small family. He asked no more. He had consecrated himself to the cause of suffering humanity for its own sake, not expecting to be enriched thereby. But the friends of that cause which he had served so well, so nobly, could not be indifferent to his future career. Lord Brougham, Lord Denham, and others, confident that he would become an ornament and an honor to the legal profession, offered him all the assistance he could need to defray his own and his family’s expenses for five years, while he should be pursuing his preparatory studies, and getting established as a member of the English bar. The prospect thus opened was most inviting to him; the proposed profession was congenial to his taste. Indeed, if I have been correctly informed, the preliminary arrangements were made, when the claims of the most oppressed of all men,—the enslaved in the United States,—were forcibly urged upon him.

Mr. Garrison had been in England several weeks, laboring successfully to undeceive the philanthropists and people of Great Britain as to the real design and tendency of the American Colonization Society. Their kindred spirits had met and mingled. He had heard Mr. Garrison’s exposition, and had become, with Clarkson, Wilberforce, Buxton, and others, fully satisfied that the expatriation of the free colored people, their removal from this country, if practicable, would only perpetuate the bondage of the enslaved, and aggravate their wrongs. Mr. Garrison, on the other hand, had repeatedly witnessed the surpassing power of Mr. Thompson’s eloquence on the audiences he addressed, had heard the tributes everywhere paid to the importance of his services, and was present at the consummation of his unsparing labors,—the passage by the British Parliament of the bill for the abolition of West India slavery. It was manifest to him that the man, who had done so much for the overthrow of British slavery, could help mightily to accomplish the far greater work needed to be done in this country; and his heart was set on enlisting Mr. Thompson in the service of the American Antislavery Society. He pressed his wish, his demand, upon him just as Mr. Thompson was about to agree to the above-named arrangement for the study of the law. Mr. Garrison’s invitation was not to be accepted hastily, nor could he reject it without consideration. He revolved it anxiously in his mind, as he went from city to city with his now beloved brother, hearing him portray the peculiarities of the American system of slavery, the far greater difficulties against which Abolitionists here had to contend, the need we felt of a living voice, potent enough to wake up thousands who were dead in this iniquity.

On the eve of Mr. Garrison’s departure from England in the fall of 1833 Mr. Thompson, with deep emotion, said to him: “I have thought much of the bright professional prospects opened to me here. I have thought yet more of the dark, dismal, desperate condition of millions of my fellow-beings in your country. They are no farther from me than are the eight hundred thousand whom I have been laboring to emancipate, and their claims upon me for the help God may enable me to give them are just as strong. I cannot withhold myself from their service. If, on your return to Boston, you shall still think I can render you much assistance, and your fellow-laborers concur with you in that opinion, command me, and I will hasten to you.”

Mr. Thompson, however, remained in England almost a year after Mr. Garrison left him, that he might reorganize the antislavery hosts who had triumphed so gloriously in the conflict for British West India emancipation, and induce them to engage as heartily in the enterprise for the emancipation of the millions held in the most abject bondage in these United States, and for the abolition of slavery throughout the world.

GEORGE THOMPSON’S FIRST YEAR IN AMERICA.

When, on his return from England in October, 1833, Mr. Garrison informed us that he had obtained from George Thompson—the champion of the triumphant conflict for West India emancipation—the promise to “come over and help us,” if we concurred in the invitation Mr. Garrison had given him, our hearts were encouraged, our hands strengthened, our purpose confirmed. Our own great antislavery orators, male and female, who since then have done so much to convict and convert the nation, had not yet appeared. Theodore D. Weld and Henry B. Stanton were studying theology in Lane Seminary; Parker Pillsbury, Stephen S. Foster, and John A. Collins were doing likewise somewhere in Vermont; Henry C. Wright had not plucked up quite courage enough to justify Mr. Garrison’s terrible denunciations of slaveholders and their abettors; James G. Birney was the Secretary of the Kentucky Colonization Society; Gerrit Smith had not got wholly out of the toils of that fraudulent scheme which had deceived “the very elect”; Charles C. Burleigh was an unknown youth in Plainfield Academy; Wendell Phillips, our Apollo, was just preparing to leap into his place at the head of the Massachusetts bar; and Angelina GrimkÉ, Lucy Stone, Abby Kelly Foster, Susan B. Anthony, Antoinette L. Brown, Sallie Holley, and other excellent women, who have since rendered such signal services, had not then left “the appropriate sphere of women.”

That George Thompson would come to our aid, the orator to whose relentless logic and surpassing eloquence, more than to any other instrumentality, Lord Brougham had just attributed the triumph of the antislavery cause in England,—that he was about coming to help us did seem at that time a godsend indeed. But, as was stated in my last, his coming was deferred a year, that the Abolitionists of Great Britain and Ireland might not lay aside their well-used weapons, nor cease from their warfare, while so many millions of human beings remained in the most abject slavery, especially in the United States, where the horrid institution was established by the authority of England. Having re-enlisted his fellow-laborers throughout the United Kingdom to co-operate with us, he came to Boston in the fall of 1834.

At that time I was devoting a few weeks of permitted absence from my church in Connecticut to a lecturing tour in the antislavery cause, and came to Mr. Garrison’s house in Roxbury an hour after the arrival of Mr. Thompson. He readily consented to go with us the next day to Groton, there to attend a county convention. We gladly spent the remainder of that day together, in earnest and prayerful communion over the great work in which we had engaged; and at night repaired to lodge at the Earl Hotel in Hanover Street, that we might not fail to be off for Groton the next morning at four o’clock, in the first stage-coach, no conveyance thither by railroad being extant then.

At the appointed hour, the house being well filled, the meeting was called to order, and business commenced. As all were eager to see and hear the great English orator, preliminary matters were disposed of as soon as practicable. Then Mr. Thompson was called up by a resolution enthusiastically passed, declaring our appreciation of the inestimable value of his antislavery labors in England, our joy that he had come to aid us to deliver our country from the dominion of slaveholders, and our wish that he would occupy as much of the time of the convention as his inclination might prompt and his strength would enable him to do. He rose, and soon enchained the attention of all present. He set forth the essential, immitigable sin of holding human beings as slaves in a light, if possible, more vivid, more intense, than even Mr. Garrison had thrown upon that “sum of all villanies.” He illustrated and sustained his assertions by the most pertinent facts in the history of West India slavery. He inculcated the spirit in which we ought to prosecute our endeavor to emancipate the bondmen,—a spirit of compassion for the masters as well as their slaves,—a compassion too considerate of the harm which the slaveholder suffers, as well as inflicts, to consent to any continuance of the iniquity. He most solemnly enjoined the use of only moral and political means and instrumentalities to effect the subversion and extermination of the gigantic system of iniquity, although it seemed to tower above and overshadow the civil and religious institutions of our country. He showed us that he justly appreciated the greater difficulties of the work to be done in our land, than of that which had just been so gloriously accomplished in England, but exhorted us to trust undoubtingly in “the might of the right,”—the mercy, the justice, the power of God,—and to go forward in the full assurance that He, who had crowned the labors of the British Abolitionists with such a triumph, would enable us in like manner to accomplish the greater work he had given us to do.

Mr. Thompson then went on to give us a graphic, glowing account of the long and fierce conflict they had had in England for the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. His eloquence rose to a still higher order. His narrative became a continuous metaphor, admirably sustained. He represented the antislavery enterprise in which he had been so long engaged as a stout, well-built ship, manned by a noble-hearted crew, launched upon a stormy ocean, bound to carry inestimable relief to 800,000 sufferers in a far-distant land. He clothed all the kinds of opposition they had met, all the difficulties they had contended with, in imagery suggested by the observation and experience of the voyager across the Atlantic in the most tempestuous season of the year. In the height of his descriptions, my attention was withdrawn from the emotions enkindled in my own bosom sufficiently to observe the effect of his eloquence upon half a dozen boys, of twelve or fourteen years of age, sitting together not far from the platform. They were completely possessed by it. When the ship reeled or plunged or staggered in the storms, they unconsciously went through the same motions. When the enemy attacked her, the boys took the liveliest part in battle,—manning the guns, or handing shot and shell, or pressing forward to repulse the boarders. When the ship struck upon an iceberg, the boys almost fell from their seats in the recoil. When the sails and topmasts were wellnigh carried away by the gale, they seemed to be straining themselves to prevent the damage; and when at length the ship triumphantly sailed into her destined port with colors flying and signals of glad tidings floating from her topmast, and the shout of welcome rose from thousands of expectant freedmen on the shore, the boys gave three loud cheers, “Hurrah! Hurrah!! Hurrah!!!” This irrepressible explosion of their feelings brought them at once to themselves. They blushed, covered their faces, sank down on their seats, one of them upon the floor. It was an ingenuous, thrilling tribute to the surpassing power of the orator, and only added to the zest and heartiness with which the whole audience applauded (to use the words of another at the time) “the persuasive reasonings, the earnest appeals, the melting pathos, the delightful but caustic irony and enrapturing eloquence of Mr. Thompson.”

Thus commenced his brilliant career in this country. The Groton Convention lasted two days, the 1st and 2d of October. Mr. Thompson went thence immediately to Lowell, where he spoke to a delighted crowd on the 5th. Four days after, on the 9th of October, he gave his first address in Boston. It was at an adjourned meeting of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society. All the prominent Abolitionists, who could be, were there to see and hear “the almost inspired apostle of negro emancipation,” who had “come over to help us.” Every one that heard him then felt that his signal gifts had not been overrated, and joined in thanksgiving to the God of the oppressed, whose Holy Spirit, we believed, had moved him to consecrate those gifts to the abolition of slavery.

Reports of Mr. Thompson’s eloquence spread rapidly, and invitations came to him from all quarters. The day after the meeting in Boston he went into the State of Maine, and lectured on the 12th in Portland, on the 13th in Brunswick, on the 15th in Augusta. Everywhere he was heard with delight, and made many converts. At Augusta, it is true, he received an angry letter from five “gentlemen of property and standing,” informing him that his “coming to their city had given great offence,” and admonishing him not to presume to address the public there again. But his engagements elsewhere, rather than their threats, obliged him to leave immediately. The next evening he lectured in the neighboring city of Hallowell, where the people heard him gladly. On the 17th he delivered an address in Waterville, which was listened to by most of the students and several of the faculty of the College, and made deep impressions upon a large number. On the 20th he spoke again to a crowded audience in Brunswick, with like effect upon the students and faculty of Bowdoin College. Returning, he lectured at Portland in six different churches, to large and delighted audiences, before the close of the month; and then came into New Hampshire and gave lectures in Plymouth, Concord, and other places, on his way back to Boston. After a few days’ repose, he went forth again, in answer to many urgent invitations, and lifted up his voice for the enslaved in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Whoever will turn over the leaves of the Liberator for 1834 and 1835 will find on almost every page some admiring mention of Mr. Thompson’s lectures or speeches, and grateful acknowledgments of the deep impressions his words had made.

It is true that in the same paper will be found, under the appropriate head “Refuge of Oppression,” extracts from newspapers and letters from all parts of the country, denouncing, execrating him, and calling upon the patriotic to put a stop to his incendiary career. He was a foreign intruder, who had come here to “meddle with a delicate matter about which he could know nothing.” He was “a British emissary, sent to embroil the Northern with the Southern States, and break up our glorious Union.” He was “the paid agent of the enemies of republican institutions, supported in our midst, that he might do all in his power to prevent the success of the grandest experiment in national government ever tried on earth.” The changes were rung on these and similar charges until those, who could be deceived thereby, were maddened in their fear and hatred of Mr. Thompson. He was threatened with all kinds of ill-treatment; yet he went fearlessly wherever he was invited to speak, and not unfrequently disarmed and converted some who had come to the meetings intending to do him harm.

In several of his lecturing tours I was his companion; and I wondered how any persons who heard him speak, in public or in private, could suspect or be persuaded that he was an enemy of our country. I was continually surprised, as well as delighted, by the evidences he gave of his just appreciation of the principles of our government, and the admiration of them that he always cordially expressed. Having hitherto contemplated our Republic from a distance, he seemed to have taken a more comprehensive view of it than too many of our own citizens, even statesmen, had done, whose regard for the whole nation had been warped by their concern for the supposed interests of a section or a State. Mr. Thompson’s detestation of slavery was intensified by his clear perception of the corruption it had diffused throughout our body politic and body ecclesiastic; and, if not abolished, the ruin it would inevitably bring upon our country, called, in the providence of God, to be “the land of the free and the asylum of the oppressed.” No American patriot ever felt, for no human heart could feel, a deeper, more sincere, or more intelligent concern for the honor, glory, perpetuity of our Republic than Mr. Thompson felt and evinced in his every word and act. Few home-born lovers of our country have done a tithe as much as he did to save her from the ruin she was bringing upon herself by her recreancy to the fundamental principles, upon which she professed to stand. Not a dozen names, of those who have lived within the last forty years, deserve to stand higher on the list of our public benefactors than the name of George Thompson.

Yet was he maligned, hated, hunted, driven from our shores. The story of the treatment he received is too shameful to be told. During the last six months of his stay here the persecution of him was continuous. The newspapers, from Maine to Georgia, with a few most honorable exceptions, denounced him daily, and called for his punishment as an enemy, or his expulsion from the country. Those few who dared to tell the truth testified, not only to his enrapturing eloquence and his friendliness to our nation, but to his eminently Christian deportment and spirit. But the tide of persecution could not be stayed. He was often insulted in the streets. Meetings to which he spoke, or at which he was expected to speak, were broken up by mobs. Rewards were offered for his person or his life. Twice I assisted to help his escape from the hands of hired ruffians.

All this he bore, for the most part, with fortitude and sweet serenity. He seemed less apprehensive of his danger than his friends were. Sometimes he overawed the men who were sent to take him by his dignified, heroic bearing, and at other times dispelled their evil intentions by his pertinent wit. I will give a single instance. At one of the last meetings he addressed in Boston, some Southerners cried out:—

“We wish we had you at the South. We would cut your ears off, if not your head.”

Mr. Thompson promptly replied: “Would you? Then should I cry out all the louder, ‘He that hath ears to hear let him hear.’” It was irresistible. I believe the Southerners themselves joined in the rapturous applause.

On the 27th of September, 1835, we left Boston together in a private conveyance,—he to lecture at Abington, one of the most antislavery towns in the State, and I at Halifax, a few miles beyond. On my return the next morning I learnt that there had been a fearful onslaught upon Mr. Thompson; and, when I called to take him back to the city, I found him more subdued than I had ever seen him. He had not expected ill-usage there. As we passed the meeting-house, from which he and his audience had been routed the night before, he was overcome by his emotions. There lay strewn upon the ground fragments of windows, blinds, and doors, and some of the heavy missiles with which they had been broken down. He fell back in the chaise, and for several minutes gave way to his feelings. When able to command himself he said:—

“What does it mean? Am I indeed an enemy of your country? Do I deserve this at your hands? Testify against me if you can, Mr. May. You know, if any one does, what sentiments I have uttered, what spirit I have evinced. You have been with me in private and in public. Have you ever suspected me? Have you ever heard a word from my lips unfriendly to your country,—your magnificent, your might-be-glorious, but your awfully guilty country? What have I said, what have I done, that I should be treated as an enemy? Have not all my words and all my acts tended to the removal of an evil which is your nation’s disgrace, and, if permitted to continue, must be your ruin?”

We rode on in silence, for he knew my answers without hearing them from my lips. But the outrage at Abington assured us that the spirit of persecution was rife in the land, and might manifest itself anywhere.

Nevertheless, Mr. Thompson accepted an invitation to lecture a few days afterwards in the afternoon, by daylight, at East Abington. Accordingly, on the 15th of October, I went with him to the appointed place. We had been credibly informed that a number of men were going thither to take him, if they could do so without harm to themselves. But the good men and women of the town and neighborhood were up to the occasion. The meeting-house was crowded, so that, though the evil intenders were there in force, they soon saw that the capture could not be made there. And then the wit, the wisdom, the pathos, the eloquence of the speaker disarmed them, took them captive, and, for the hour, at least, made them delighted hearers.

This was Mr. Thompson’s last public appearance during his first year in America. All his friends insisted that he must keep out of sight, and as soon as practicable return to England. It was well known that his life was in danger. That we had not attributed too great malignity to our countrymen—even to the citizens of Boston—was soon made apparent by their own acts.

It was announced in the Liberator, and so became publicly known, that a regular meeting of the “Boston Female Antislavery Society” would be held in the Hall, 46 Washington Street, on the 21st of October, 1835. Without authority, it was reported by other papers that Mr. Thompson was to address them; and it was more than intimated that then and there would be the time and place to seize him. On the morning of that day the following placard was posted in all parts of the city:—

“THOMPSON THE ABOLITIONIST.

“That infamous foreign scoundrel, Thompson, will hold forth this afternoon at 46 Washington Street. The present is a fair opportunity for the friends of the Union to snake Thompson out! It will be a contest between the Abolitionists and the friends of the Union. A purse of one hundred dollars has been raised by a number of patriotic citizens, to reward the individual who shall first lay violent hands on Thompson, so that he may be brought to the Tar Kettle before dark. Friends of the Union, be vigilant!”

The sequel of the infamous proceedings thus inaugurated will be given hereafter. Mr. Thompson was not there, and so the mob vented itself upon another. Mr. Thompson was, and had been for several days, secreted by his friends in Boston, and afterwards in Brookline, Lynn, Salem, Phillips Beach, and elsewhere, until his enemies were baffled in their pursuit of him, and arrangements were made to take him safely out of the country.

On or about the 20th of November he was conveyed in a small boat, rowed by two of his friends, from one of the Boston wharves to a small English brig, that had fortunately been consigned to Henry G. Chapman, one of our earliest and best antislavery brothers; and in that vessel he was carried to St. Johns. From that port he sailed for England on the 28th of the same month. Would that all my countrymen could read the letter that he wrote to Mr. Garrison on the eve of his departure. If words can truly express a man’s thoughts and feelings, the words of that letter were written by a lover of our country, a true philanthropist, a Christian hero.

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