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CHAPTER III.

 

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.

 

Mr. Garrison’s Birth and Parents—His Mother—Her Conversion—His Boyhood—Apprenticed to a Printer—First Anti-Slavery Address—Advice to Dr. Beecher—Benjamin Lundy—Garrison goes to Baltimore—First Battle with Slavery—In Jail—First number of the Liberator—Threats and Rage from the South—The American Anti-Slavery Society—First Visit to England—The Era of Mob Violence—The Respectable Boston Mob—Mr. Garrison’s account—Again in Jail—The Massachusetts Legislature Uncivil to the Abolitionists—Logical Vigor of the Slaveholders—Garrison’s Disunionism—Denounces the Church—Liberality of the Liberator—The Southerners’ own Testimony—Mr. Garrison’s Bland Manners—His Steady Nerves—His use of Language—Things by their Right Names—Abolitionist “Hard Language;” Garrison’s Argument on it—Protest for Woman’s Rights—The triumph of his Cause—“The Liberator” Discontinued—Second Visit to England—Letter to Mrs. Stowe.

 

We have written the name of a man who has had a more marked influence on our late national history than any other person who can be mentioned.  No man has been more positively active in bringing on that great moral and political agitation whose issues have been in those recent scenes and events which no American can ever forget.

When we remember that it was begun by one man, singlehanded, alone, unfriended, despised and poor, we must feel in advance that such a man came of no common stock, and possessed no common elements of character.  We are interested to inquire after the parentage and the early forming causes which have produced such results.  In Mr. Garrison’s case he frankly ascribes all that he is, or has ever been or done, to the training, example and influence of a mother whose

 

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early history and life-long character were of uncommon interest.

She was born of English stock, in the province of New Brunswick, and grew up in that lethargic state of society which has received not an impulse or a new idea since the time of Queen Anne.  Her parents attended the Established Church, drank the king’s health on all proper occasions, and observed the gradual growing up of a beautiful and spirited daughter with tranquil satisfaction.

At the age of eighteen this young girl, with a party of gay companions, went from curiosity to attend the religious services of some itinerating Baptists, who were startling the dead echoes of that region by a style of preaching, praying and exhorting, such as never had been heard there before.  They were commonly called Ranters, and the young people promised themselves no small amusement from the spectacle of their extravagances.

But the beautiful and gay girl carried unknown and dormant in her own nature, the elements of an earnest and lofty religious character, which no touch of the droning services of a dead church had ever yet stirred to consciousness—and the wild singing, the fervent exhortations, the vivid and real emotions which were exhibited in this meeting, fired the electric train and roused the fervor of her own nature.  Life, death, eternity, all became vivid and real to her, and the command to come out from a vain world and be separate; to confess Christ openly before men, seemed to her to have a living and present power.

 

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It is very commonly the case that minds for the first time awakened to the real power of religion, feel that the only true faith is to be found under the forms and ideas which have so moved them, and that to confess Christ means a visible union with any particular body of Christians who have made real to them the Christian idea.  Such was the call felt by this young girl to join herself with this despised body of Christians.

Her parents were greatly shocked and annoyed when they found that instead of ridiculing the Ranters, she was going again and again to their services, with an undissembled earnestness:  and when finally she announced to them her purpose to unite herself to them in the public ordinance of baptism, their indignation knew no bounds, and they threatened her that if she did she should never enter their doors again, or be to them more than a stranger.

Then was the crisis in which the woman stood between two worlds—two kinds of life—on one side, the most earnest and whole-hearted excitement of the higher moral feelings, on the other side, the material good things of this world.

The mother of Lloyd Garrison hesitated not a moment between the convictions of her conscience and a worldly good.  Like the primitive Christians, she went down into the waters of baptism feeling that she was leaving father, mother, and home, and casting herself on God alone.

Her parents, with true John Bull obstinacy, made good their word, and shut their doors upon her; but an uncle, struck perhaps with her courage and constancy, opened to her an asylum where she remained

 

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till her marriage.  In later years her parents became reconciled to her.

The religious life thus begun was carried on with a marked and triumphant fullness.  She was a woman of enthusiastic convictions, of strong mind, and of great natural eloquence, and during the infancy and great childhood of William Lloyd he was often with her in the prayer-meetings, which were vivified by the electric eloquence of her prayers and exhortations—for the Baptist as well as Methodist denominations, allowed to women as well as men, a Christian equality in the use of the gifts of instruction.

The father of Garrison, a man possessed of some genius and many fascinating and interesting traits, was one of the victims of intemperance in those days when so many families were saddened by its blight; and at quite an early age Mrs. Garrison was left with a family of helpless little ones, with no other heritage but her faith in God, and her own undaunted and courageous spirit.  She was obliged to put her boys out at a very tender age, to struggle for themselves, while she followed the laborious profession of a sick nurse.

William Lloyd, her second son, was by temperament fitted to be impressed by a woman like his mother.  He had listened to the burning recital of her experience, and his heart, even in early infancy, learned to thrill in sympathy with the solemn grandeur of religious devotion and absolute self-sacrifice.  All his mother’s religious ideas became his own; and even as a boy he was a strict and well versed Baptist, having at his tongue’s end every argument which supported

 

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the peculiar faith which his mother’s enthusiasm had taught him to regard as the only true one.

The necessities of life, however, early separated him from her society.  When only nine years of age he was placed in the shop of a shoe-maker to learn the trade, but the confinement and employment were unfavorable to his health and uncongenial to his feelings.  He was longing for educational advantages, and bent on a career in the world of ideas.

He was taken from this situation and sent to school at Newburyport, paying for his board and schooling by sawing wood, doing errands, and performing other labors out of school hours.

After some unsuccessful experiments at different situations, he found at last a congenial sphere in being apprenticed as a printer to Ephraim W. Allen, editor of the Newburyport Gazette.

His bent had always been for letters, and he engaged in this occupation with enthusiasm, and that minute and careful faithfulness and accuracy in regard to the smallest minutiae which formed a very marked trait in his character.  In all that relates to the expression of ideas by the written or printed signs of language, Garrison had a natural aptitude, and attained to a peculiar perfection.

His handwriting was, and is, even at this time of life, as perfect in point of legibility, neatness, and exact finish, as if he had been by profession a writing-master.

Even in the days when the Liberator was the most despised and rejected of all papers, the very lowest in the scale of genteel appreciation, its clear and elegant

 

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typography, and the grace and completeness of its mechanical disposition, won for it admiration.  He understood to a nicety that art which solicits the eye of a reader, and makes a printed sheet look attractive.

It was not long before his fervid mind began to reach beyond the mechanical setting of his types, to the intellectual and moral purposes to be accomplished through them.

Garrison was one of the ordained priests of nature, one of the order of natural prophets who feel themselves to have a message to society, which they must and will deliver.

He began sending anonymous articles to the paper on which he was employed, which were well received, and which, consequently, he had more than once the pleasure of setting up in type.

Encouraged by their favorable reception, he gradually began to offer articles to other journals.  A series of articles for the Salem Gazette, under the signature “Aristides,” attracted particular attention, and were commended by Robert Walsh in the Philadelphia National Gazette, who attributed them to Timothy Pickering; a compliment of no small significance to a young mechanic.

In 1824, his employer, Mr. Allen, was obliged for a long time to be absent from the charge of his paper, when Mr. Garrison acted as editor of the Newburyport Herald, of which he had been previously printer.

In 1826 he became proprietor and editor of a paper called the Free Press, in his native town.  He toiled at it with unceasing industry, and that patient cheerfulness of enthusiasm which made every labor light.

 

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He printed his own editorials, without previously writing them, a fact which more than anything else shows how completely he had mastered the mechanical part of his profession.  But with all this industry and talent, the work of keeping up a newspaper of so high a moral tone as that to which he was always aspiring, was simply beyond the ability of a poor man, and he was obliged to relinquish it.  He went to Boston and engaged as a journeyman printer for a time, till in 1827 he became the editor of the National Philanthropist, the first journal that advocated total abstinence, and in 1828 he joined a friend at Bennington, Vt., in a journal devoted to peace, temperance, and anti-slavery.

On the 4^th of July, 1829, he delivered an address in Park Street church, Boston, on the subject of slavery.  At that time the subject had taken a deep and absorbing hold upon his mind.  He then regarded the American Colonization Society’s as the most practical and feasible issue in the case—an opinion which he afterwards most fully retracted.  At this time he visited the leading orthodox ministers and editors in and about Boston.  Being himself a child of the church, he desired to stir up in behalf of the slave that efficiency of church activity that was effecting so much in the cause of temperance.  Burning with zeal, he sought the then active leader of the orthodox party, and begged him to become leader in the movement, and command the forces in a general anti-slavery crusade.

Dr. Beecher received him favorably, listened to him courteously, wished him success, but said in regard to

 

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himself he had so “many irons in the fire” that he could not think of putting in another.  “Then,” said Garrison, “you had better let all others go, and attend to this one alone.”  The results of time have shown that the young printer saw further than the sages of his day.

It is worth remembering by those who criticized Garrison’s generalship in leading the anti-slavery cause, that in the outset he was not in the least ambitious of being a general, and would willingly have become aide-de-camp to the ruling forces of the religious world.  That the campaign was carried on out of the church of New England, and not in and by it, was because the church and the religious world at that hour were absorbed in old issues—old activities and schemes of benevolence—and had not grace given them to see that the great critical national question of the day had thus been passed out of their hands.

The articles in Garrison’s paper, however, attracted the attention of a little obscure old man, a Quaker, who was laboring in the city of Baltimore, for the cause of the suffering slaves, with a devotion and self-sacrifice worthy of the primitive Christians.

Benjamin Lundy, a quiet, persistent, drab-clothed, meek old man, one of those valiant little mice who nibble undismayed on the nets which enchain the strongest lions, was keeping up, in the city of Baltimore, an anti-slavery paper which was read only by a few people who thought just as he did, and which was tolerated in southern society only because everybody was good-naturedly sure that it was no sort of matter what it said.

 

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Benjamin, however, took his staff in hand, and journeyed on foot up to Bennington, Vt., to see the man who wrote as if he cared for the slave.  The strict Baptist and the meek Quaker met in the common ground of the cross of Christ.  Both were agreed in one thing; that here was Jesus Christ, in the person of a persecuted race, hungry, thirsty, sick and in prison, with none to visit and relieve; and the only question was, would they arise and go to His help?

So Mr. Garrison went down to the city of Baltimore, to join his forces with Benjamin Lundy.  “But,” as he humorously observed, “I wasn’t much help to him, for he had been all for gradual emancipation, and as soon as I began to look into the matter, I became convinced that immediate abolition was the doctrine to be preached, and I scattered his subscribers like pigeons.”

Good little Benjamin took the ruinous zeal of his new partner with the tolerance which his sect extends to every brother who “follows his light;” but a final assault of Garrison on one of the most villainous aspects of slavery, quite upset the enterprise, and landed him in prison.  The story is in this wise:  A certain ship, the Francis Todd, from Newburyport, came to Baltimore and took in a load of slaves for the New Orleans market.  All the harrowing cruelties and separations which attend the rending asunder of families, and the sale of slaves, were enacted under the eyes of the youthful philanthropist, and in a burning article he denounced the inter-state slave trade as piracy, and piracy of an aggravated and cruel kind, inasmuch as those born and educated in civilized and Christianized society,

 

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have more sensibility to feel the evils thus inflicted, than imbruted savages.  He denounced the owners of the ship, and all the parties in no measured terms, and expressed his determination to “cover with thick infamy all who were engaged in the transaction.”  Then, to be sure, the sleeping tiger was roused, for there was a vigor and power in the young editor’s eloquence that quite dissipated the good-natured contempt which had hitherto hung around the paper.  He was indicted for libel, found guilty, of course, condemned, imprisoned in the cell of a man who had been hanged for murder.  His mother at this time was not living, but her heroic, undaunted spirit still survived in her son, who took the baptism of persecution and obloquy not merely with patience, but with the joy which strong spirits feel in endurance.  He wrote sonnets on the walls of his prison, and by his cheerful and engaging manners made friends of his jailor and family, who did everything to render his situation as comfortable as possible.  Some considerable effort was made for his release, and much interest was excited in various quarters for him.

He was finally liberated by Arthur Tappan, who paid the exorbitant fine for want of which he was imprisoned.  He went out of jail, as people generally do who are imprisoned for conscience’s sake, more devoted than ever to the cause for which he suffered.  The river of his life, which hitherto had had many branches, all flowing in the direction of general benevolence, now narrowed and concentrated itself into one intense volume, to beat day and night against the prison

 

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walls of slavery, till its foundations should be washed away, and it should tumble to dust.

He issued a prospectus of an anti-slavery journal at Washington, and lectured through the northern cities, and was surprised to find the many and vital cords by which the Northern States were held from the expression of the natural feelings of humanity on a subject whose claims were so obvious.  In Boston he in vain tried to get the use of a hall to lecture in; but a mob was threatened, and of all the public edifices in the city, not one could be found whose owner would risk it until a club of professed infidels came forward, and offered their hall as a tribute to free speech.

On Jan. 1, 1831, Mr. Garrison issued the first number of the Liberator.  He had no money.  The rank, respectability and religion of Boston alike disowned him.  At first, he and his partner, Isaac Knapp, were too poor even to hire an office of their own, but the foreman in the office of the Christian Examiner generously employed them as journeymen, taking their labor as compensation for the use of his type.  Mr. Garrison, after working as journeyman printer all day, spent the greater part of the night in writing and printing his paper; and under such auspices the first number came out.

Nothing more remarkable in human literature has ever appeared than those few memorable paragraphs in which this obscure, unfriended young mechanic thus issued his declaration of war against an evil embodied in the Constitution and protected by the laws of one of the most powerful nations of the earth.  David meeting Goliath with a sling and stone was nothing to

 

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it.  The words have a prophetic assurance that sounds solemn in the remembrance of recent events.  He speaks as one having authority:

“During my recent tour for the purpose of exciting the minds of the people by a series of discourses on the subject of slavery, every place that I visited gave fresh evidence of the fact that a greater revolution in public sentiment was to be effected in the free States—and particularly in New England—than at the South.  I found contempt more bitter, opposition more active, detraction more relentless, prejudice more stubborn, and apathy more frozen than among slaveholders themselves.  Of course there were individual exceptions to the contrary.  This state of things afflicted, but did not dishearten me.  I determined, at every hazard, to lift up the standard of emancipation in the eyes of the nation, within sight of Bunker Hill, and in the birth-place of liberty.  That standard is now unfurled; and long may it float, unhurt by the spoliations of time or the missiles of a desperate foe; yea, till every chain be broken, and every bondman set free!  Let Southern oppressors tremble; let their secret abettors tremble; let all the enemies of the persecuted black tremble.  Assenting to the self-evident truths maintained in the American Declaration of Independence, ‘that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population.

  *               *               *               *               *               *               *               *               *

 

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“I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity?  I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice.  On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation.  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 into which it has fallen; 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 a single inch.  And I will be heard.  The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.

It is pretended that I am retarding the cause of emancipation by the coarseness of my invective, and the precipitancy of my measures.  The charge is not true.  On this question, my influence, humble as it is, is felt at this moment to a considerable extent; and it shall be felt in coming years—not perniciously, but beneficially—not as a curse, but as a blessing; and POSTERITY WILL BEAR TESTIMONY THAT I WAS RIGHT.  I desire to thank God that He enables me to disregard ‘the fear of man which bringeth a snare,’ and to speak truth in its simplicity and power; and I here close with this dedication:

              *               *               *               *               *               *               *               *               *

 

“Oppression!  I have seen thee, face to face,

And met thy cruel eye and cloudy brow;

But thy soul-withering glance I fear not now—

For dread to prouder feelings doth give place,

Of deep abhorrence!  Scorning the disgrace

 

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Of slavish knees that at thy footstool bow,

I also kneel—but with far other vow

Do hail thee and thy herd of hirelings base;

I swear, while life-blood warms my throbbing veins,

Still to oppose and thwart, with heart and hand,

Thy brutalizing sway—till Afric’s chains

Are burst, and Freedom rules the rescued land,

Trampling Opression and his iron rod;

Such is the vow I take—so help me God!”

 

Just thirty-five years after, on the first of January, 1866, Garrison had the happiness of announcing that the glorious work to which he had devoted himself was finally finished; and with humble ascriptions of all the praise and glory to God, he proclaimed the cessation of the Liberator.  His own son had been a leader in that conquering army which entered Charleston amid the shouts of liberated slaves, and the fetters and hand-cuffs of the slave-mart were sent as peaceful trophies to the Liberator office in Boston.  Never was it given to any mortal in one generation to witness a more perfect triumph of a moral enterprise!

But before this triumph came were years of sharp conflict.  Tones so ringing and so resolute, coming from the poorest den in Boston, could not but find listeners!  The vital instincts of all forms of oppression are surprisingly acute, and prompt to discriminate afar what is really a true and what a false alarm.  A storm of agitation began, which swelled, and eddied, and howled, and shook, and convulsed the nation from year to year, till the end came.

The first number of the Liberator brought fifty dollars from James Forten, a colored man of Philadelphia, and the names of twenty-five subscribers; and before

 

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long an obscure room was rented as an office, where Garrison and his partner made their bed on the floor, boarded themselves, and printed their paper.

A Southern magistrate, trembling for the institutions of his country, wrote a somewhat dictatorial appeal to the mayor of Boston, Harrison Gray Otis, to suppress that paper.  Mr. Otis wrote in reply, that having ferreted out the paper and the editor, he found that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, his supporters a few insignificant persons of all colors—from which he argued that there was no occasion for alarm, even though the obscure paper should prove irrepressible.  Very differently, however, thought the South.  Every mail brought to Garrison threats of assassination, and letters whose mingled profanity and obscenity can only be described as John Bunyan describes the discourse of Apollyon, “He spake as a dragon.”  The Governors of one or two States set a price upon his head.  The Governor of Georgia, in terms somewhat more decent, offered five thousand dollars to any one who should arrest and bring to trial under the laws of that State, the editor or publisher of the Liberator.  Many of Mr. Garrison’s friends, deeming his life in danger, besought him to wear arms.  He was, however, from religious conviction, a non-resistant of evil, interpreting with literal strictness the Saviour’s directions on that subject; and so committed his life simply to the good providence of God.

On January 1, 1832, he secured the co-operation of eleven others, who, with himself, organized the American Anti-Slavery Society upon the principle of immediate emancipation.  Affiliated associations sprang up

 

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all over the country—books, tracts, lectures, all the machinery of moral agitation, began active movement.  He went to England as agent for the Emancipation Society, to hold counsel with the men who had pioneered the same work successfully in England.  He was warmly received by Wilberforce, Brougham, Clarkson, and their associates, and succeeded in opening their eyes to the entire inefficiency of the Colonization Society as a substitute for the great duty of immediate emancipation, so that Wilberforce, with eleven of his coadjutors, issued a protest against it, not as in itself considered, but as it had been made a shield to the consciences of those who deferred their immediate duty to the slave on the ground of this distant and precarious remedy.

While in England this time, Mr. Garrison was invited to Stafford House, and treated with marked attention by the Duchess of Sutherland, then in the zenith of that magnificent beauty which, in union with a generous nature and winning manners, made her one of the most distinguished leaders among the nobility of the times.  With a heart to feel every grand and heroic impulse, she had entered with enthusiasm into the anti-slavery movement of her own country, and was prepared to welcome the obscure, unknown apostle of the same faith from American shores.  At her request, Garrison sat for his portrait to one of the most distinguished artists of the time, and the copy was retained among the memorabilia of Stafford House.  Garrison humorously remarked that many had desired to have his head before now, but the solicitation had never come in so flattering a form.  The

 

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noble woman has lived to enjoy the triumph of that cause in which her large heart gave her that right of personal possession which belongs to the very highest natures.

On his return from England he assisted in organizing the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia, the declaration of whose principles was prepared by him.  From this time the anti-slavery agitation was intensified, and the era of mob violence swept over the country.  The holding of an anti-slavery society in any place was the appointed signal for scenes of riotous violence.  In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Hall was burned, the negroes abused and maltreated.  In Cincinnati, Birney’s printing-press and types were thrown into the Ohio, and the negroes for days were hunted like beasts.  In Alton, Lovejoy was shot while defending his printing-press, and Boston, notwithstanding the sepulchers of the fathers, and the shadow of Bunker Hill spire, has her hour of the powers of darkness.  Leading presses abused the abolitionists in terms which aroused every vindictive passion of the mob, and in October, 1835, a meeting of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Boston was riotously broken up by a collection of persons, described in the journals of the day as “gentlemen of property and standing.”

The heroines of that memorable day and time, were ladies from the very first Massachusetts families; sprung from the old heroic stock of her historic fame.  For vigor of mind, for education, for beauty, accomplishments and genius, some of them might be cited who would scarce find superiors in any land.  Their meet-

 

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ing was in every way feminine and proper, and in strict accordance with the spirit and customs of New England, which recognize female organizations for various benevolent purposes, as one of the most approved means for carrying on society.

There was no more reason why a female Anti-Slavery Society should not meet quietly, transact its own business and listen to speeches of its own chosen orators, than the Female Foreign Missionary Society or the Female Home Missionary Society, or the Female Temperance Union.

But certain newspapers of Boston called attention to the fact that this meeting was so to be held, in articles written in that well known style which stirs up and invites that very mobocratic spirit which it pretends to deprecate.

These papers proceeded to say that those ladies were about to hold a dangerous kind of meeting, which would be sure to end in a mob, that they were about to be addressed by George Thompson, who was declared to be nothing more or less than a British agitator, sent over to make dissension and trouble in America, and kept here for that purpose by British funds.

It was now stated in the public prints that several store keepers in the immediate vicinity of the Hall, had petitioned the Mayor to suppress the meeting, as in case of a riot in the neighborhood their property might be in danger.  A placard was posted and circulated through the city to the following purport, that

‘The infamous foreign scoundrel, Thompson, would hold forth in Anti-Slavery Hall in the afternoon, and

 

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that the present was a fair opportunity for the friends of the Union ‘to snake him out;’ that a purse of $100 has been subscribed by a number of patriotic citizens to reward the individual who would lay violent hands on him, so that he might be brought to the tar kettle before dark.”

In consequence, the Mayor sent a deputy to Mr. Garrison to know if Mr. Thompson did intend to address the meeting, for if he did not he wished to apprise the people of it in order to tranquilize the excitement, and if he did, it would be necessary to double the constabulary forces.

Mr. Garrison sent him word that Mr. Thompson was out of town, and would not be present at the meeting.  The remainder of this scene is best given in Mr. Garrison’s own words:

“As the meeting was to commence at 3 o’clock, P. M., I went to the hall about twenty minutes before that time.  Perhaps a hundred individuals had already gathered around the street door and opposite to the building, and their number was rapidly augmenting.  On ascending into the hall, I found about fifteen or twenty ladies assembled, sitting with serene countenances, and a crowd of noisy intruders (mostly young men) gazing upon them, through whom I urged my way with considerable difficulty.  ‘That’s Garrison,’ was the exclamation of some of their number, as I quietly took my seat.  Perceiving that they had no intention of retiring, I went to them and calmly said—‘Gentlemen, perhaps you are not aware that this is a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, called and intended exclusively for ladies, and those

 

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only who have been invited to address them.  Understanding this fact, you will not be so rude or indecorous as to thrust your presence upon this meeting.  If, gentlemen,’ I pleasantly continued, ‘any of you are ladies—in disguise—why, only apprise me of the fact, give me your names, and I will introduce you to the rest of your sex, and you can take seats among them accordingly.’  I then sat down, and, for a few moments, their conduct was more orderly.  However, the stair-way and upper door of the hall were soon densely filled with a brazen-faced crew, whose behavior grew more and more indecent and outrageous.  Perceiving that it would be impracticable for me, or any other person, to address the ladies; and believing, as I was the only male abolitionist in the hall, that my presence would serve as a pretext for the mob to annoy the meeting, I held a short colloquy with the excellent President of the Society, telling her that I would withdraw, unless she particularly desired me to stay.  It was her earnest wish that I would retire, as well for my own safety as for the peace of the meeting.  She assured me that the Society would resolutely but calmly proceed to the transaction of its business, and leave the issue with God.  I left the hall accordingly, and would have left the building, if the stair-case had not been crowded to excess.  This being impracticable, I retired into the Anti-Slavery Office, (which is separated from the hall by a board partition,) accompanied by my friend, Mr. Charles C. Burleigh.  It was deemed prudent to lock the door, to prevent the mob from rushing in and destroying our publications.

 

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In the mean time, the crowd in the street had augmented from a hundred to thousands.  The cry was for ‘Thompson! Thompson!’—but the Mayor had now arrived, and, addressing the rioters, he assured them that Mr. Thompson was not in the city, and besought them to disperse.  As well might he have attempted to propitiate a troop of ravenous wolves.  None went away—but the tumult continued momentarily to increase.  It was apparent, therefore, that the hostility of the throng was not concentrated upon Mr. Thompson but that it was as deadly against the Society and the Anti-Slavery cause.  The fact is worthy of special note—for it incontestably proves that the object of these ‘respectable and influential’ rioters was to put down the cause of Emancipation, and that the prejudice against Mr. Thompson was only a mere pretext.

Notwithstanding the presence and frantic behavior of rioters in the hall, the meeting of the Society was regularly called to order by the President.  She read a select and exceedingly appropriate portion of scripture, and offered a fervent prayer to God for direction and succour and the forgiveness of enemies and rioters. It was an awful, sublime and soul-thrilling scene  *  *  *  The clear, untremulous tone of that Christian heroine in prayer, occasionally awed the ruffians into silence, and was heard distinctly even in the midst of their hisses, yells and curses—for they could not long silently endure the agony of conviction, and their conduct became furious.  They now attempted to break down the partition, and partially succeeded; but that little band of women still maintained their

 

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ground unshrinkingly, and endeavored to transact their business.

An assault was now made upon the door of the office, the lower panel of which was instantly dashed to pieces.  Stooping down, and glaring upon me as I sat at the desk, writing an account of the riot to a distant friend, the ruffians cried out—‘There he is!  That’s Garrison!  Out with the scoundrel!’  &c., &c.  Turning to Mr. Burleigh I said—‘You may as well open the door, and let them come in and do their worst.’  But he, with great presence of mind, went out, locked the door, put the key into his pocket, and by his admirable firmness succeeded in keeping the office safe.

Two or three constables having cleared the hall and staircase of the mob, the Mayor came in and ordered the ladies to desist, assuring them that he could not any longer guarantee protection, if they did not take immediate advantage of the opportunity to retire from the building.  Accordingly, they adjourned, to meet at the house of one of their number, for the completion of their business; but as they passed through the crowd, they were greeted with ‘taunts, hisses, and cheers of mobocratic triumph, from gentlemen of property and standing from all parts of the city.’  Even their absence did not diminish the throng.  Thompson was not there—the ladies were not there—but ‘Garrison is there!’ was the cry.  ‘Garrison!  Garrison!  We must have Garrison!  Out with him!  Lynch him!’  These and numberless other exclamations arose from the multitude.  For a moment their attention was diverted from me to the Anti-Slavery sign, and they vociferously demanded its possession.

 

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It is painful to state, that the Mayor promptly complied with their demand!  So agitated and alarmed had he become that in very weakness of spirit he ordered the sign to be hurled to the ground, and it was instantly broken in a thousand fragments by the infuriated populace.  The sign being demolished the cry for Garrison was resumed more loudly than ever.  It was now apparent that the multitude would not disperse till I left the building, and as egress out of the front door was impossible, the Mayor and some of his assistants as well as some of my friends earnestly besought me to escape in the rear of the building.  At this moment an abolition brother, whose mind had been previously settled on the peace question, in his anguish and alarm for my safety, and in the view of the helplessness of the civil authority, said, ‘I must henceforth repudiate the principle of non-resistance.  When the civil arm is powerless, my own rights are trodden in the dust, and the lives of my friends are put in imminent peril by ruffians, I will hereafter stand ready to defend myself and them at all hazards.’  Putting my hand upon his shoulder, I said, ‘Hold, my dear brother!  You know not what spirit you are of.  Of what value or utility are the principles of peace and forgivness, if we may repudiate them in the hour of peril and suffering?  Do you wish to become like one of those violent and blood-thirsty men who are seeking my life?  Shall we give blow for blow, and array sword against sword?  God forbid!  I will perish sooner than raise my hand against any man, even in self-defence, and let none of my friends resort to violence for my protection.  If my life be taken, the cause of emancipation

 

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will not suffer.  God reigns—his throne is undisturbed by this storm—he will make the wrath of man to praise him, and the remainder he will restrain—his omnipotence will at length be victorious.’

 

Preceded by my faithful and beloved friend Mr. J-----R-----C-----, I dropped from a back window on to a shed, and narrowly escaped falling headlong to the ground.  We entered into a carpenter’s shop, through which we attempted to get into Wilson’s Lane, but found our retreat cut off by the mob.  They raised a shout as soon as we came in sight, but the proprietor promptly closed the door of his shop, kept them at bay for a time, and thus kindly afforded me an opportunity to find some other passage.  I told Mr. C. it would be futile to attempt to escape—I would go out to the mob, and let them deal with me as they might elect; but he thought it was my duty to avoid them as long as possible.  We then went up stairs, and finding a vacancy in one corner of the room, I got into it, and he and a young lad piled up some boards in front of me, to shield me from observation.  In a few minutes several ruffians broke into the chamber, who seized Mr. C. in a rough manner, and led him out to the view of the mob, saying, ‘This is not Garrison, but Garrison’s and Thompson’s friend, and he says he knows where Garrison is, but won’t tell.’  Then a shout of exultation was raised by the mob, and what became of him I do not know; though, as I was immediately discovered, I presume he escaped without material injury.  On seeing me, three or four of the rioters, uttering a yell, furiously dragged me to the window, with the intention of hurling me from that height to the

 

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ground; but one of them relented, and said, ‘Don’t let us kill him outright.’  So they drew me back, and coiled a rope about my body—probably to drag me through the streets.  I bowed to the mob, and requesting them to wait patiently until I could descend, went down upon a ladder that was raised for that purpose.  I fortunately extricated myself from the rope, and was seized by two or three of the leading rioters, powerful and athletic men, by whom I was dragged along bare-headed, (for my hat had been knocked off and cut in pieces on the spot,) a friendly voice in the crowd shouting, ‘He shan’t be hurt!  He is an American!’  This seemed to excite sympathy in the breasts of some others, and they reiterated the same cry.  Blows, however, were aimed at my head by such as were of a cruel spirit, and at last they succeeded in tearing nearly all my clothes from my body.  Thus was I dragged through Wilson’s Lane into State street, in the rear of the City Hall, over the ground that was stained with the blood of the first martyrs in the cause of LIBERTY and INDEPENDENCE, in the memorable massacre of 1770; and upon which was proudly unfurled, only a few years since, with joyous acclamations, the beautiful banner presented to the gallant Poles by the young men of Boston!  What a scandalous and revolting contrast!  My offence was in pleading for LIBERTY—liberty for my enslaved countrymen, colored though they be—liberty of speech and of the press for ALL!  And upon that ‘consecrated spot’ I was made an object of derision and scorn.

They proceeded with me in the direction of the City Hall, the cry being raised, ‘To the Common!’

 

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whether to give me a coat of tar and feathers, or to throw me into the pond, was problematical.  As we approached the south door, the Mayor attempted to protect me by his presence; but as he was unassisted by any show of authority or force, he was quickly thrust aside; and now came a tremendous rush on the part of the mob to prevent my entering the hall.  For a time the conflict was desperate; but at length a rescue was effected by a posse that came to the help of the Mayor, by whom I was carried up to the Mayor’s room.

In view of my denuded condition, one individual in the Post office below stairs kindly lent me a pair of pantaloons, another a coat, a third a stock, a fourth a cap, &c.  After a brief consultation, the mob densely surrounding and threatening the City Hall and Post Office, the Mayor and his advisers said that my life depended on committing me to jail, ostensibly as a disturber of the peace.  Accordingly a hack was got ready at the door and I was put into it, supported by Sheriff Parkman and Ebenezer Bailey, the Mayor leading the way.  And now ensued a scene which baffles all description.  As the ocean lashed to fury by a storm, seeks to whelm a bark beneath the waves, so did the mob, enraged at their disappointment, rush like a whirlwind upon the frail vehicle in which I sat, and endeavored to drag me out of it.  Escape seemed a physical impossibility.  They clung to the wheels—dashed open the doors—seized hold of the horses—and tried to upset the carriage.  They were, however, vigorously repulsed by the police, a constable sprang in by my side, the doors were closed, and the driver,

 

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using his whip on the bodies of the horses and the heads of the rioters, happily made an opening through the crowd, and drove with all speed to Leverett street.

In a few moments I was locked in a cell, safe from my persecutors, accompanied by two delightful associates, a good conscience and a cheerful smile.  In the course of the evening several of my friends came to my grated window to sympathise and confer with me, with whom I held strengthening conversation, till the hour of retirement, when I threw myself on my prison bed, and slept tranquilly.  In the morning, I inscribed upon the walls of my cell, with a pencil, the following lines:

‘Wm. Lloyd Garrison was put into this cell on Wednesday afternoon, Oct. 21, 1835, to save him from the violence of a “respectable and influential” mob, who sought to destroy him for preaching the abominable and dangerous doctrine that “all men are created equal,” and that all oppression is odious in the sight of God.  “Hail, Columbia!”  Cheers for the Autocrat of Russia, and the Sultan of Turkey!

Reader, let this inscription remain till the last slave in this despotic land be loosed from his fetters.’

 

‘When peace within the bosom reigns,

And conscience gives th’ approving voice,

Though bound the human form in chains,

Yet can the soul aloud rejoice.

 

‘Tis true, my footsteps are confined—

I cannot range beyond this cell;

But what can circumscribe my mind?

To chain the winds attempt as well!’

 

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‘Confine me as a prisoner—but bind me not as a slave.

Punish me as a criminal—but hold me not as a chattel.

Torture me as a man—but drive me not like a beast.

Doubt my sanity—but acknowledge my immortality.’

 

In the course of the forenoon, after passing through the mockery of an examination, for form’s sake, before Judge Whitman, I was released from prison; but, at the earnest solicitation of the city authorities, in order to tranquilize the public mind, I deemed it proper to leave the city for a few days, accompanied by my wife, whose situation was such as to awaken the strongest solicitude for her life.”

At this distance of time it is difficult to conceive of such scenes as occurring in Boston.  They are to be accounted for by two things.  First, the intense keenness of the instincts of the Slave-holding power in the United States, in discriminating from afar what the results of the Anti-Slavery discussion would be, and the real power which was arising in the apparently feeble body of the Abolitionists; and second, the thousand ties of politics, trade, blood relationship, friendship and religion that interlaced the South with the North, and made the North for many years a tool of southern dictators and a mere reflection of southern sympathies.  There was scarcely a thing in northern society that was not interwoven and intertwisted with southern society.  Northern schools and colleges were full of southern scholars—northern teachers were all the while seeking places on southern plantations.  The great political bodies had each its southern wing, every religious denomination had its southern members and southern interests.  Every kind of trade and industrial

 

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calling had its southern outlet.  The ship builders of Maine went to Charleston for their cargoes.  Plantations were fitted out at the North, by every kind of trade.  Our mercantile world was truly and in fact one firm with the South and felt any disturbance to them as virtually as the South itself.

Hence Garrison’s instinctive feeling that the battle was to be fought in the North, where as yet there was a free press and the right of free speech.

It was not long before the South perceived that if free inquiry and free discussion were going to be allowed in Massachusetts, it would be all over with them, and like men who were brought up always to have their own way and had but to command to be obeyed, several southern states sent immediate and earnest communications to the Massachusetts Legislature, requesting the General Court to enact laws making it penal for the citizens of Massachusetts to form abolition societies or print and publish abolition sentiments.

The Governor of Massachusetts, in his message to the Legislature at this time, expressed his belief that the abolitionists were guilty of an offence punishable by common law.

This part of the Governor’s message, together with the resolutions from the Legislatures of slave-holding states, was referred to a committee of five.

The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society addressed a memorial to this committee, praying to be permitted to appear before them and show that they had done nothing but what they had a perfect constitutional right to do by the laws of Massachusetts.

On the Fourth and Eighth of March, 1836, these me-

 

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morable interviews took place at the state house, in the chamber of the representatives.

A committee of some of the leading abolitionists attended—Mr. I. May, Mr. E. Gray Loring, Mr. Sewell, Dr. Follen, of Harvard College, and Mr. Garrison.  Dr. Channing also met with them as an expression of sympathy and to mark his sense of the vitally important nature of the transactions to the rights of personal liberty in Massachusetts.

The meeting was attended by many spectators, and the abolitionists had opportunity to defend their course and conduct.

Mr. Garrison’s speech at this time is one of the most energetic and characteristic of his utterances.  After alluding to the duty of all men to plead for the rights of the dumb and the oppressed, he then went on to say:

“Mr. Chairman, there is one aspect of this great question which has not yet been presented to the committee.  The liberties of the people of the free States are identified with those of the slave population.  If it were not so, there would be no hope, in my breast, of the peaceful deliverance of the latter class from their bondage.  Our liberties are bound together by a ligament as vital as that which unites the Siamese twins.  The blow which cuts them asunder, will inevitably destroy them both.  Let the freedom of speech and of the press be abridged or destroyed, and the nation itself will be in bondage; let it remain untrammelled, and southern slavery must speedily come to an end.”  The chairman of the committee however insulted the abolitionists, refused them a fair hearing, and substantially turned them out of the Legislature, to

 

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protest at their leisure.  The Legislature however did not pass the laws demanded by the South.

Miss Martineau, who visited Boston in those days, described feelingly what she justly called the martyr age in America.

The abolitionists in Boston at this time, were ostracized from genteel society.  Rank and fashion cut them in the street, and crossed out their names from visiting lists.  Whoever joined them must expect as a matter of course to give up what was called in Boston, good society.

Their houses were constantly threatened by anonymous letters, nor was the threat a vain one.

One of the most accomplished women of Boston, whose genius and beauty and fine manners won her a distinguished position afterwards in European society, lives to remember now, how her house was fired while she was still an invalid in her chamber with an infant daughter only three weeks old, and how she was obliged to sit by an open window to get air for herself and infant, from the smoke that filled the house after the fire had been discovered and brought under.

Now there were in the whole North, thousands of people who thought slavery a wrong, an inhumanity, and who wished with a greater or less degree of ardor that it might cease from the earth.  But all these people were associated for some purpose social, moral or religious, with people at the South, who were in a state of feverish combativeness on this subject, who were accustomed to command from their cradles, impatient of contradiction, and violent in their passions; and in every way and form, and every branch of life in state

 

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and church, the demand was stringent and imperative:  You shall not say that slavery is wrong—you shall not agitate that question or discuss it at all, and you shall join with us to discountenance and put down all who endeavor to agitate the public mind.  If you don’t we won’t have any thing to do with you or your purposes or schemes.”

This was the language which kept the whole North boiling like a pot for years.  On the one hand, the force of conscience and humanity, and on the other, the passionate determined resistance of the South operating through northern men, who, though disliking slavery yet had their various purposes to carry, for which they needed the help of the South.

So even the religious societies felt that their great moral and religious work was so important that they must yield a little, in order to gain the help of southern Christians.  The Tract Society struck out from English reprints every line and sentence which might be supposed to reprove slavery; the Sunday School Union followed suit.  The various religious bodies, embarrassed by their southern wings, spent their time in every annual meeting in ingenious skirmishing, in which the main body sought to keep the peace between the active minority of abolitionists, and the irritated, determined, dictatorial southern brethren, whose sentiments were exactly expressed by Dr. Plummer, of Virginia:

“If abolitionists will set the world in a blaze, it is but fair that they should receive the first warming at the fire.  Let them understand that they will be caught if they come among us, and they will take good heed to keep out of our way; there is not one

 

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among them that has any idea of shedding his blood for his cause.”

The ministers of the slaveholding region were driven on by the unsparing, uncompromising slave-owners, and were the most high-handed defenders of the system.  Northern religious bodies, in order to carry on their purposes in union with the South, were obliged to make constant concessions at which their conscience revolted.  The Methodist church, in 1840, passed a law forbidding their colored members to give testimony in church trials in slave States.  The debates on this question are worth looking back to now, as they give a dramatic reality to the great driving, pushing process which was then going in favor of slavery.

A trembling brother, after voting for this astounding prohibition, which took away the last hope of even a hearing in Christ’s church for the poor hunted slave—rose the day after he had helped pass it, and humbly and plaintively tried to get it taken back.

He said that the resolution “was introduced under peculiar circumstances, during considerable excitement, and he went for it as a peace offering to the South, without sufficiently reflecting upon the precise import of its phraseology, but after a little deliberation he was sorry!  He was convinced that if the resolution remained on the journal, it would be disastrous to the whole Northern church.”

Dr. A. J. Few, of Georgia, arose, and it is instructive to see how resolute men, who have made up their minds, and know exactly what they mean to do, despise timid men, who are divided between policy and conscience.  Dr. Few said:

 

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“Look at it!  What do you declare to us, in taking this course!  Why, simply, as much as to say, ‘We cannot sustain you in the condition which you cannot avoid!  We cannot sustain you in the necessary conditions of slaveholding; one of its necessary conditions being the rejection of negro testimony!’  If it is not sinful to hold slaves, under all circumstances, it is not sinful to hold them in the only condition, and under the only circumstances in which they can be held.  The rejection of negro testimony is one of the necessary circumstances under which slaveholding can exist; indeed, it is utterly impossible for it to exist without it; therefore it is not sinful to hold slaves in the condition and under the circumstances in which they are held at the South, inasmuch as they can be held under no other circumstances.  *  *  *  If you believe that slaveholding is necessarily sinful, come out with the abolitionists, and honestly say so.  If you believe that slaveholding is necessarily sinful, you believe we are necessarily sinners; and if so, come out and honestly declare it, and let us leave you.  *  *  *  We want to know distinctly, precisely and honestly the position which you take.  We cannot be tampered with by you any longer.  We have had enough of it.  We are tired of your sickly sympathies.  *  *  *  If you are not opposed to the principles which it involves, unite with us, like honest men, and go home, and boldly meet the consequences.”

From this it appears that the Southern slaveocracy was not only a very united, determined body, but also remarkably logical as to the necessary ways and means which were essential to the support of their system, and

 

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that not only they were prepared to go the whole length themselves, but they meant to have nothing to do with any one who would not go the whole length with them.

The result of this one victory was to split the Methodist church in two.  Mr. Peck was right in supposing that there was yet enough conscience in the Northern Methodists to feel the impossibility of holding a book of discipline which called slavery “the sum of all villainies,” and yet keeping union with those who were making it the first object of life to uphold it.  Some such crisis of conscience, always brought on by the slave-driving, dictatorial, determined and logical South, in time rent asunder all the principal denominations into a northern and southern wing.  For however they might have been disposed towards the policy of non-intervention, the South never allowed them to stand long on that ground.  They must not only cease to remonstrate against slavery, but help them by consenting to positive laws and measures in its defence.  So great was the power of this dictatorial spirit, that when the New School Presbyterian church had broken off from the great body of southern churches, who went with the Old School, yet the one or two synods who were left among them extorted from the whole body the decree that “masters ought no to be disciplined for selling slaves without their consent, even when fellow members of the same churches with themselves.”

Now this history of what went on in the church of America—for the church, meaning by it all the relig-

 

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ious denominations, did embody as a general fact, the whole religious and moral force of the country, shows more strongly than anything else what was likely to be going on in bodies that did not profess any moral character or considerations.  If this was the state to which the dictation of the southern slavepower had driven the church, what was to be hoped of the political world and the world of trade?

Mr. Garrison looked over this dark field, and saw the battle—for there was a battle all over the land—a battle in which the truth and the right were being steadily, daily and everywhere beaten.  The church and the world seemed to be vieing with each other who could retreat fastest before their victorious masters, and every day some new right of humanity was thrown down for the pursuing army to worry and tear—just as retreating fugitives throw back a lamb or a dog to stop a pack of hungry wolves.

Garrison saw at once that the root of all this defeat and disaster was the desire of UNION with slaveholders, and forthwith he unfurled his banner and sounded his trumpet to the watchword, NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS.

Immediately the Constitution of the United States was brought up before him.  Does not the constitution form a union with slaveholders?  Has it not express compromises designed to protect slave property?  Is not the basis of representation throughout all the southern states made on three-fifths of a slave population?  Now Mr. Garrison, what do you say to that?

“What I say,” said Garrison, “is, that slavery is a sin against God and man, and if the constitution of

 

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the United States does agree to defend and protect it, it is a sinful league, and it is a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell,” and out came the Liberator with solemn curses of the old prophets at its head, and the Garrisonian abolitionists organized themselves on the principle that they would hold no union with slaveholders in church or in state, they would belong to no religious or secular body which did not treat slavery as a sin against God, and they would lift up their testimony against every person, party or denomination in church or in state that made any concession to the slaveholding power, for the sake of accomplishing any purpose whatsoever.

Here we see the whole scope of subject-matter for the Liberator, and for all the lectures and speeches from the platforms of the Garrisoian abolition societies for years and years.  For as there was scarcely a thing in society in those days that was not the joint work of the North and the South, and as the South never made a concession, of course there was through all the various ramifications of political, social and religious life, a continued series of concessions on the part of the North.  These concessions were always, everywhere unsparingly discussed, reproved and denounced by the Garrisonians, and so there was controversy constantly and everywhere.

The ministry of New England, from the days of President Edwards, had adopted a peculiar and pungent style of preaching immediate repentance of sin.  They repudiated all half efforts, insensible approaches, dream-like floatings toward right, and narrowed the question of individual responsibility down to the pres-

 

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ent moment, and urged repentance on the spot as the duty of all.  Garrison had received his early education in this school, and he drove his preaching of immediate repentance for the sin of slavery, his requirements for an instant clearing of the soul from all complicity with it, with the solemnity of an old Puritan.  He had the whole language of the Old Testament at his tongue’s end, and a text from the old prophets ready like an arrow on a bow-string, to shoot into every loop-hole of the concessions and compromises that were constantly going on.  He reproved without fear or favor, ministers, elders, Christians, statesmen, governors, authors, and denounced the whole church as contaminated by the sanction and support it gave to the accursed thing.

He was denounced in turn by the church as an infidel and an opposer of religion, but he persisted in hurling right and left the stern denunciations of the Old Testament:  “When thou sawest a thief, thou consentedst with him—thou has been partaker with adulterers,” and he declared that the visible union of church and state with an organization which practiced systematic robbery on four millions of human beings, and made legal marriage among them an impossibility, was in the very highest sense consenting with thieves, and being made partakers with adultery.

There is not the least doubt that the course of entire separation from slaveholders in church and state, would have been a perfect and efficient stop to the evil, could it have been compassed.  Could we once imagine a state of things in which every man and woman in the United States who admitted that slavery was an injust-

 

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ice, should come to the point of refusing all fellowship or connection with it, either in church or state, or in any of the traffic or intercourse of life, we should imagine a state in which there would have been immediately a majority which could have revised the constitution of the United States, and cast out the offensive clauses, as has since been done.

But measures so stringent and thorough, supposed an education of the public conscience which had not yet taken place, and the Garrisonian Abolitionists therefore were always a small minority, extremely unfashionable and every where spoken against.  Small as they were, they were the indispensables of the great conflict—its very heart.  Garrison and his band of coadjutors formed a steady force which acted night and day with unvarying consistency.  While everybody else in the United States had something else to conserve, some side issues to make, some other point to carry, Garrison and his band had but one thing to say—that American slavery is a sin; but one thing to do—to preach immediate repentance and forsaking of sin.  They withdrew from every organization which could in any way be supposed to tolerate or hold communion with it, and walked alone, a small, but always active and powerful body.  They represented the pure, abstract form of every principle as near as it is possible for it to be represented by human frailty.  Free speech, free inquiry and freedom of conscience found perfect expression in their meetings, and the Liberator was the one paper in which any honest, well-meaning person might print any conscientious opinion, however contrary to those generally received in society.  Of course

 

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it became the channel for much crude thought, for much startling and strange expression; and its circulation was confined almost entirely to the small party whose opinions it expressed.  A large portion of the Liberator was every week devoted to extracts cut from southern papers, giving a vivid picture of the barbaric state of society, produced by slavery.  Here, without note or comment, came the accounts clipped from different southern papers, of the assaults, frays and murders daily perpetrated by white men on each other in a land where violence was ever above law.  There were, too, the advertisements of slave auctions and runaway negroes; of blood-hounds kept for human hunting; while in a weekly corner called the “Refuge of Oppression,” all the violent doctrines of the most rabid slave holders found every week a faithful reproduction in their own language.  For an exact picture of the image and body of the most extreme form of southern slave holding and its results on society, the Liberator was as perfect a moral daguerreotype as could be produced.

A solemn instance of the terrible sequence of divine retribution has been presented to this generation which will not soon be forgotten.  All this disgusting, harrowing, dreadful record of cruelty, crime and oppression which the Liberator went on, year after year, in vain holding up to the inspection of the North, as being perpetrated within the bounds of slaveholding society, was shrunk from as too dreadful and disgusting to be contemplated.

“We do not wish to have our feelings harrowed; we do not wish to be appalled and disgusted with rec-

 

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ords of cruelty and crime,” was the almost universal voice of good society at the North, as they went steadily on, compromising with and yielding to the exactions of a barbarous oligarchy.  God so ordered it in return, that the cup of trembling which has so long been drunk by the slave alone, should be put into the hands of thousands of the sons and daughters of the free North.  Thousands of them were starved, tortured, insulted, hunted by dogs, separated from home and friends, and left to linger out a cruel death in life, through the barbarity of those very slaveholders, with whose sin we had connived, with whose cruelties practiced on the helpless negroes we had refused to interfere.  So awful a lesson of the justice of a living God we trust will never be forgotten.  If every northern man and woman had from the very first been as careful in regarding the rights of the slave, as determined to hold no fellowship with evil as Garrison, the solution of our great national question might have been a far more peaceful one.

In the days of the great conflict, Mr. Garrison was accused of being in a bad spirit, of the utterance of violent, angry and abusive language.  A very mistaken idea of his personal character, in fact, went abroad in the world.

In his personal intercourse he is peculiarly bland and urbane, one of the few men capable of conducting an argument on the most interesting subject without the slightest apparent excitement of voice or manner, allowing his adversary every polite advantage and admitting all his just statements with perfect fairness.  It is said that a fiery young southerner once fell

 

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into a discussion on slavery with him when he was traveling incog., on board a steamboat.  Garrison quite won his heart by the fairness and courtesy with which he discussed the subject, and brought him to admissions which the frank southerner in a good humor was quite willing to make.  On parting he said to him, “If that Garrison there in Boston were only like you, we should be more ready to listen to him.”

A great deal of this amiability doubtless is owing to the singular steadiness and healthiness of Garrison’s nervous system.  In this he was one of the most peculiarly constituted men, in whom nature ever combined traits expressly for a great work.  All his personal habits are those of a methodical unexcitable man, and not in the least like the hurry and enthusiasm of a fanatic.  He is methodical, systematic and precise in all his arrangements, neat and careful in respect to the minutest trifle.

His handwriting is always of the finished completeness of a writing master, and in the most vehement denunciations, not a letter was ever misplaced or a comma or exclamation point, omitted.  Every thing he ever wrote was perfected for the press as it left his pen.  Such habits as these speak a composed and equable nervous system.  In fact, Garrison’s nerves never knew what it was to shiver and vibrate either with irritation or with fear.  He is gifted with the most perfect imperturbable cheerfulness, which no outward discomposure seems to have any power to shake.

His politely bowing to the furious Boston mob before descending to put himself in their hands, is a very characteristic thing, and during all the tossings and

 

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tumults of the hour that followed, Garrison was probably the serenest person that ever had his clothes torn off his back for expressing his opinions.

That language in the Liberator which looked to the world as if it must have been uttered in a passion, because it was so far above the usual earnestness of expression on such subjects, was in his case the result of a deliberate system.

Garrison said that the world blinded conscience and made false issues with itself by the habitual calling of things by the wrong names; that there was no kind of vice which might not be disguised under a polite phrase.  Theft might be spoken of as an ingenious transfer of property—adultery as a form of the elective affinity, and so on, but that all such phraseology had an immoral tendency.

In like manner the stealing of men and women from Africa—the systematic appropriation of all the fruits of their industry and labor—was robbery.  Whoever did this was a thief.

Garrison called slaveholders, no matter of what rank in society, of what personal amiabilities and virtues, man-thieves.  Whoever formed union with slaveholders, united with man-thieves, and as the partaker in law is judged as being a thief, those who united with man-thieves became themselves thieves.

Having reasoned this out logically, Garrison steadily and systematically applied these terms wherever he thought they applied.  The Garrisonian tract, “The church a den of thieves,” is a specimen of this kind of logic, and this unsparing use of terms.  Whatever may be thought of the justice of such reasoning or the

 

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propriety of such logical application of terms, we still wish the fact to stand out clear, that these denunciations were not boiled up by heated passions, but reasoned out by logic, and that it was a part of a systematic plan to bring back the moral sense of society by a habit of calling things by discriminating names.  Thus in the Liberator every agent of the United States who helped to catch and return a slave was always spoken of as a kidnapper—all defences of the fugitive slave law were familiarly denominated defences of kidnapping.  Theodore Parker, in his sermons about the time of the fugitive slave law, makes very effective use of these terms, and it is not to be denied that the habit of thus constantly using language which in a word makes a moral discrimination is a very powerful influence in forming popular opinion.

People will boggle a great while about fulfilling constitutional obligation when it is put as “kidnapping,” the question becomes far more direct and simple.  The Garrisonians doubtless were philosophical in the precision of the moral nomenclature they adopted, and their success in stimulating drugged and paralyzed moral sentiment was largely owing to it.

To be sure, in the application of wholesale moral syllogism to particular individual cases, there was often something that appeared extremely hard and unjust to the individual.  When an amiable northern Doctor of Divinity, who never owned a slave in his life and never expected to, found himself cited in the Liberator by the familiar designation of a man-thief, because he had been in the General Assembly, good

 

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naturedly uniting with a large body of southern slaveholders in suppressing all inquiry into their great systematic robbery, the northern Doctor was naturally indignant and so were all his friends and adherents.

To be sure it was only a skillful turning of that syllogistic crank by which New England theology demonstrated that every individual not conscious of a certain moral change of heart, was a malignant enemy of God, and had not a spark of moral excellence of any kind, no matter what sort of a man he might be, or what moral virtues he might practice.

Garrison simply reversed the crank and turned this unsparing kind of logic back on the church and clergy, who felt some of the surprise and pain of the eagle in the fable who found himself shot through by an arrow feathered from his own wing; and in both cases it may be doubted whether great moral syllogisms do not involve many instances of individual and personal injustice.

But it is best to let Garrison state his own case as he did in the Liberator:

“I am accused of using hard language.  I admit the charge.  I have not been able to find a soft word to describe villainy, or to identify the perpetrator of it.  The man who makes a chattel of his brother—what is he?  The man who keeps back the hire of his laborers by fraud—what is he?  They who prohibit the circulation of the Bible—what are they?  They who compel three millions of men and women to herd together, like brute beasts—what are they?  They who sell mothers by the pound, and children in lots to suit purchasers—what are they?  I care not what terms

 

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are applied to them, provided they do apply.  If they are not thieves, if they are not tyrants, if they are not men-stealers, I should like to know what is their true character, and by what names they may be called.  It is as mild an epithet to say that a thief is a thief, as it is to say that a spade is a spade.

“The anti-slavery cause is beset with many dangers; but there is one which we have special reason to apprehend.  It is that this hollow cant about hard language, will insensibly check the free utterance of thought and close application of truth which have characterized abolitionists from the beginning.  As that cause is becoming popular, and many may be induced to espouse it from motives of policy rather than from reverence for principle, let us beware how we soften our just severity of speech, or emasculate a single epithet.  The whole scope of the English language is inadequate to describe the horrors and impurities of slavery.  Instead therefore, of repudiating any of its strong terms, we rather need a new and stronger dialect.

          *               *               *               *               *               *               *               *               *               *

“The cry of hard language has become stale in my ears.  The faithful utterance of that language has, by the blessing of God, made the anti-slavery cause what it is, ample in resources, strong in numbers, victorious in conflict.  *   *   *   Soft phrases and honeyed accents were tried in vain for many a year,—they had no adaptation to the subject.  ‘Canst thou draw out the leviathan, SLAVERY, with a hook?  or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?  Canst thou put a hook into his nose?  or bore his jaw through with a

 

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thorn?  Will he make many supplications unto thee?  wilt thou take him for a servant forever?  Shall not one be cast down at the sight of him?  Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron.  His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.  His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether mill-stone.  When he raiseth up himself, even the mighty are afraid.  He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood.’  O, the surpassing folly of those ‘wise and prudent’ men, who think he may be coaxed into a willingness to be destroyed, and who regard him as the gentlest of all fish—provided he be let alone!  They say it will irritate him to charge him with being a leviathan; he will cause the deep to boil like a pot.  Call him a dolphin, and he will not get angry!  If I should call these sage advisers by their proper names, no doubt they would be irritated too.”

The era of mob violence, which swept over the country in consequence of the anti-slavery agitation, led to a discussion of the peace question, in which Garrison took an earnest part as a champion of the principles of non-resistance, and in 1838 he led the way in organizing the New England Non-Resistance Society, whose declaration of sentiments was prepared by him.  The active part taken by the women of the country in these moral changes, led to a discussion of the rights of women.  Mr. Garrison was at once an advocate for the principle that women should be allowed liberty to do whatever God and nature qualified them to do—to vote, to serve on committees, and to take part in discussions on equal terms with the other

 

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sex.  Upon this principle there was a division in the Anti-Slavery Society in 1840; and in the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, held that year in London, Mr. Garrison, being delegate from that society, refused to take his seat because the female delegates from the United States were excluded.  Probably no act of Mr. Garrison’s eventful life was a more difficult and triumphant exercise of consistent principle than this.

He had come over to England for sympathy, for at home he was despised, and rejected, and hated, and Exeter Hall was filled with an applauding, tumultuous crowd, ready to make him the lion of the hour, but not ready to receive his female coadjutors.

As usual, Mr. Garrison conferred not with flesh and blood for a moment, but rose, bade farewell to the society, and leaving his protest, walked out serenely through the crowd, and thus sealed his protest in favor of the equal rights of woman.

The consideration that he thus renounced an overwhelming public sympathy, and cut himself loose from the patronage of all good society in England, could not weigh a moment with him in comparison with a principle, and the doctrine of the moral, social and political equality of woman may be said to have found in Garrison its first public champion.

The question now arises:  If Garrison and his little band were indeed morally right in their position—No union with slave-holders, on what ground did the whole valiant anti-slavery corps proceed who did not come out from the church or the state, but saw their

 

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way clear to remain in existing organizations, and fight in and by them.

The free soil party of the political abolitionists generally were headed by men of pure and vital moral sense, who believed just as sincerely as Mr. Garrison that slavery was a wrong and an injustice.  How then could they avoid the inference that they could have no union with slave-holders?  The statement of this ground properly belongs to the biographical sketches of Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson, which will immediately follow this.

The Garrisonians, and Mr. Garrison at their head, had so perfect an instinct in their cause that they always could feel when a party was at heart morally sincere and in earnest.  So, though they always most freely and most profusely criticized the works and ways of the political abolitionists, they were on the whole on excellent terms with them.

They had gotten up such a name for speaking just their minds of every body and thing, that their privilege of criticism came to be allowed freely, and on the whole the little band was thought by the larger one to do good political work by their more strictly and purely moral appeals to the conscience of the community.  Where there had been pretty active Garrisonian labor in lecturing, came the largest political vote.

It is but justice to say that Mr. Garrison’s conduct throughout his course demonstrated that it was not a constitutional love of opposition, or a delight in fault-finding which inspired his denunciations of slavery and of the Union as the defence of slavery.  For

 

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from the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, Garrison became a warm, enthusiastic Unionist.  When the United States flag, cleansed of all stain of slavery, was once more erected on Fort Sumter, Garrison made the voyage down to testify by his presence at the scene his devotion and loyalty to the flag of his country.

Garrison’s non-resistant principles did not allow him to take any active part in the war.  But in the same manner they caused him to allow perfect and free toleration to such of his sons as desired to enter the army.  The right of individual judgment in every human being was always sacred with him, and the military command which took possession of Charleston had among its officers a son of William Lloyd Garrison.

The scene in the Boston Music Hall, on the 1^st of January, 1864, when the telegraphic dispatch of the Emancipation Proclamation was received by an enthusiastic concourse of citizens, and welcomed by the first literary talent of Boston, was one of those occurrences of the visible triumph of good men in their day and generation, of which slavery conflict gives many instances.

This scene was in all respects a remarkable one, as marking the moral progress of Boston, but in order to feel its full power we must again run our eye over the events of the past few years, of which it was the outcome.

It was only thirty-four years since the Legislature of Georgia had passed an act signed by Gov. Lumpkin, offering the sum of five thousand dollars for who-

 

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ever would bring into the State of Georgia the person of William Lloyd Garrison, there to answer to the laws of Georgia for the publication of the Liberator—an “incendiary sheet.”  Everybody knew that this proclamation meant a short shrift and a long rope to Garrison, but there was at that time no counter movement on the part of his own State for his protection, no official declaration on the part of the Massachusetts Legislature to certify that she considered offering rewards for the kidnapping of her citizens to be a violation of State rights.  In fact, so completely was Garrison, thus threatened by the South, unprotected by law and public sentiment at the North, that five years later, when the outcry from slaveholding legislatures became stronger, a Massachusetts Governor actually recommended imposing pains and penalties on the abolitionists for the discussion of the subject, and the Legislature actually took into discussion the propriety of doing so.

Was ever thirty years productive of a greater moral change than this 1^st of January, 1864, witnessed?

An assemblage of all that Boston had to show of intellect, scholarship, art, rank and fashion, all came together of one accord to one place to celebrate the triumph of those great principles for which Garrison had once been dragged with a rope ignominiously through the streets of Boston.

Now that serene head, with its benevolent calmness, rising in one of the most conspicuous and honored seats in the house, was the observed of all observers.  The hisses of mob violence, the scoffs and sneers, had changed to whispered tributes all over the house,

 

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“There he is, look!”  and mothers pointed him to their children.  “There is the good man who had the courage to begin this glorious work, years ago!”

Of Garrison’s appearance at this time, it is sufficient to say that it was no more nor less serene and untroubled than when he stood amid the hisses of the mob in Faneuil Hall.  He had always believed in this victory as steadfastly in the beginning as in the end, for God, who makes all his instruments for his own purposes, had given him in the outset that “faith which is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen,” and to God alone, without a thought of self, did he ascribe the glory.

On the 1^st of January, 1865, Mr. Garrison having finished the work for which the Liberator was established in Boston, came out with his last editorial announcing the discontinuing of that paper.  He says:

“The object for which the Liberator was commenced—the extermination of chattel slavery—having been gloriously consummated, it seems to me specially appropriate to let its existence cover the historic period of the great struggle; leaving what remains to be done to complete the work of emancipation to other instrumentalities (of which I hope to avail myself,) under new auspices, with more abundant means and with millions instead of hundreds of allies.

“Most happy am I to be no longer in conflict with the masses of my fellow-countrymen on the subject of slavery.  For no man of any refinement or sensibility can be indifferent to the approbation of his fellow-men, if it be rightly earned.  But to obtain it by going with the multitude to do evil, is self-degradation

 

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and personal dishonor.  Better to be always in a minority of one with God—branded as a madman, incendiary, fanatic, heretic, infidel—frowned upon by the powers that be, and mobbed by the populace—or whose ‘soul is marching on,’ though his ‘body lies mouldering in the grave,’ or burnt to ashes at the stake, like Wickliffe, or nailed to the cross, like Him who ‘gave himself for the world,’ in defence of the RIGHT, than like Herod, having the shouts of the multitude crying, ‘It is the voice of a god, and not of a man!’

“Commencing my editorial career when only twenty years of age, I have followed it continuously till I have attained my sixtieth year—first in connection with The Free Press, in Newburyport, in the spring of 1826; next, with The National Philanthropist, in Boston, in 1827; next with The Journal of the Times, in Bennington, Vt., in 1828-9; next, with The Genius of Universal Emancipation, in Baltimore, in 1829-30; and finally, with the Liberator, in Boston, from the 1^st of January, 1831, to the 1^st of January, 1866,—at the start, probably the youngest member of the editorial fraternity in the land, now, perhaps, the oldest, not in years, but in continuous service,—unless Mr. Bryant, of the New York Evening Post, be an exception.

“Whether I shall again be connected with the press, in a similar capacity, is quite problematical; but at my period of life, I feel no prompting to start a new journal at my own risk, and with the certainty of struggling against wind and tide, as I have done in the past.

 

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“I began the publication of the Liberator without a subscriber, and I end it—it gives me unalloyed satisfaction to say—without a farthing as the pecuniary result of the patronage extended to it during thirty-five years of unremitted labors.

“From the immense change wrought in the national feeling and sentiment on the subject of slavery, the Liberator derived no advantage at any time in regard to its circulation.

               *                    *                    *                    *                    *                    *                    *

“Farewell, tried and faithful patrons!  Farewell, generous benefactors, without whose voluntary but essential pecuniary contributions the Liberator must have long since been discontinued!  Farewell, noble men and women who have wrought so long and so successfully, under God, to break every yoke!  Hail, ye ransomed millions!  Hail, year of jubilee!  With a grateful heart and a fresh baptism of the soul, my last invocation shall be—

 

‘Spirit of Freedom! on—

Oh!  pause not in thy flight

Till every clime is won,

To worship in thy light:

Speed on thy glorious way,

And wake the sleeping lands!

Millions are watching for the ray,

And lift to thee their hands.

Still ‘Onward!’  be thy cry—

Thy banner on the blast;

And as thou rushest by,

Despots shall shrink aghast.

On!  till thy name is known

Throughout the peopled earth;

 

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On!  till thou reign’st alone,

Man’s heritage by birth;

On!  till from every vale, and where the mountains rise,

The beacon lights of Liberty shall kindle to the skies!’

 

                                                                                                            WM. LLOYD GARRISON.”

 

There were those in the party of the Garrisonian Abolitionists whose course at the time seemed to justify the popular impression that faultfinding had so long been their occupation, that they were not willing to accept even their own victory at the price of giving up their liberty of denunciation.  It is doubtless very dangerous to the finer tissues of one’s moral nature to live only to deny and contend and rebuke.

But Mr. Garrison showed conclusively that it was love of right and not love of contention, that animated him by this prompt, whole hearted acknowledgment of the good when it came.  No American citizen ever came more joyfully and lovingly into the great American Union, than he who so many years had stood outside of it, for conscience’ sake; and he showed just as much steadiness and independence in disregarding the criticisms of some of his former coadjutors as he formerly had in disregarding those of pro-slavery enemies.  He would not say that a work was not done which was done—he was honest and fair in acknowledging honest and fair work, and he very wisely distinguished between emancipation, as a fixed and final fact, and reconstruction, as belonging to the new era founded on emancipation.  In his last editorial he very quietly and sensibly states his views on this subject, and repels the charge which had been made that he

 

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was deserting the battle before the victory was won.  He ends by saying:

“I shall sound no trumpet and make no parade as to what I shall do for the future.  After having gone through with such a struggle as has never been paralleled in duration in the life of any reformer, and for nearly forty years been the target at which all poisonous and deadly missiles have been hurled, and having seen our great national iniquity blotted out, and freedom ‘proclaimed throughout all the land to all the inhabitants thereof,’ and a thousand presses and pulpits supporting the claims of the colored population to fair treatment where not one could be found to do this in the early days of the anti-slavery conflict, I might, it seems to me—be permitted to take a little repose in my advanced years, if I desired to do so.  But, as yet, I have neither asked nor wished to be relieved of any burdens or labors connected with the good old cause.  I see a mighty work of enlightenment and regeneration yet to be accomplished at the South, and many cruel wrongs done to the freedmen which are yet to be redressed; and I neither counsel others to turn away from the field of conflict, under the delusion that no more remains to be done, nor contemplate such a course in my own case.”

Mr. Garrison’s health, which had suffered severely from his long labors, required the relief of foreign travel.

He once more revisited England, where his course was one unbroken triumph.  A great breakfast was given in his honor at St. James’ Hall, London, at which John Bright presided.  The Duke of Argyle present-

 

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ed a complimentary address to Mr. Garrison, congratulating him on the successful termination of the Anti-Slavery struggle.  Lord John Russell seconded this address, and at this time magnanimously retracted certain hasty sayings in regard to the recent conflict in America, at its commencement.  In the city of Edinburgh he was received in a crowded public meeting with tumultuous cheering, and the freedom of the city was solemnly presented to him by the Lord Provost and magistracy.  In a private letter he says:

“I need not tell you that I went to England with no purpose or thought of being lionized, but only quietly to see old friends, to seek recreation, hoping to renovate my failing health by the voyage.  But I shall ever gratefully remember those friendly manifestations towards me and my native land.”

In conclusion, it is but justice to human nature in general and to New England in particular, to say that the poets of New England, true to a divine inspiration always honored Garrison, even in his days of deepest darkness and rebuke.  Longfellow, Russell, Lowell, Whittier and Emerson, came out boldly with Anti-Slavery poems.  They were the wise men, star-led, who brought to the stable and the manger of the infant cause, the gold, frankincense and myrrh.  It was a great opportunity, and they had grace given them to use it, and not all the fame they had won otherwise, honors them so much as those tributes to humanity and liberty which they bestowed in the hour of her utmost need.

We will conclude this sketch by a letter from Mr. Garrison, which best shows the spirit in which he regards the result of the great conflict.

 

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“DEAR MRS. STOWE:

 

For your very appreciative and congratulatory letter on the “marvellous work of the Lord,” which the Liberator marks as finished, I proffer you my heartfelt thanks, and join with you in a song of thanksgiving to Him, who, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm has set free the captive millions in our land.

“The instrumentalities which the God of the oppressed has been as multifarious and extraordinary as that system has been brutal and iniquitous.  Every thing that has been done, whether to break the yoke or to rivet it more strongly, has been needed to bring about the great result.  The very madness of the South has worked as effectively anti-slavery-wise as the most strenuous efforts of the abolitionists.

“The outlawry of all Northern men of known hostility to slavery—the numberless pro-slavery mobs and lynchings, her defiant and awful defence of the traffic in human flesh, her increasing rigor and cruelties towards the slaves, and finally her horrible treason and rebellion to secure her independence as a vast slaveholding empire, through all time, all mightily helped to defeat her impious purpose and to hasten the year of jubilee.  Thus it is that

 

God moves in a mysterious way,

His wonders to perform;

He plants his footsteps in the sea,

And rides upon the storm.

 

And who but God is to be glorified?

 

 

 

 

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CHAPTER IV.

 

CHARLES SUMNER.

 

Mr. Sumner an Instance of Free State High Culture—The “Brahmin Caste” of New England—The Sumner Ancestry; a Kentish Family—Governor Increase Sumner; His Revolutionary Patriotism—His Stately Presence; “a Governor that can Walk”—Charles Sumner’s Father—Mr. Sumner’s Education, Legal and Literary Studies—Tendency to Ideal Perfection—Sumner and the Whigs—Abolitionism Social Death—Sumner’s Opposition to the Mexican War—His Peace Principles—Sumner opposes Slavery Within the Constitution, as Garrison Outside of it—Anti-Slavery and the Whigs—The Political Abolitionist Platform—Webster asked in vain to Oppose Slavery—Sumner’s Rebuke of Winthrop—Joins the Free Soil Party—Succeeds Webster in the Senate—Great Speech against the Fugitive Slave Law—The Constitution a Charter of Liberty—Slavery not in the Constitution—First Speech after the Brooks Assault—Consistency as to Reconstruction.

 

In the example of Abraham Lincoln we have shown the working man, self-educated, rising to greatness and station, under influences purely American.  It is our pride to say that in no other country of the world could a man of the working classes have had a career like that of Lincoln.

We choose now another man made famous by the great struggle for principle and right which has ended in our recent war.  As Lincoln is a specimen of the facilities, means of self-education and advance in life which America gives to the working man, so Charles Sumner is a specimen of that finish, breadth, and extent of culture which could be produced by the best blood and the best educational institutions of the oldest among the free States of America.

 

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We may speak properly of the blood of the Sumner family, for they belong to what Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes so happily characterizes as the “Brahmin caste of New England,” that “harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy,” in whom elevated notions of life, and aptitudes for learning, seem, in his words, to be “hereditary and congenital.”  “Families whose names are always on college catalogues; and who break out every generation or two in some learned labor which calls them up after they seem to have died out.”  A glance at the Cambridge catalogue will show a long line of Sumners, from 1723 down to the graduation of our present Senator.

Like many other American families distinguished for energy and intellectual vigor, the Sumner family can trace back their lineage to the hardy physical stock of the English yeomanry.  The race, afterwards emigrating to Oxfordshire, had its first origin in Kent, and it is curious to see how to this day it preserves physical traits of its origin.  The Kentish men were tall, strong, long-limbed, and hardy, much relied on for archery and holding generally the front of the battle.  The Sumners in America have been marked men in these same physical points; men of commanding stature and fine vital temperament, strong, athletic, and with the steady cheerfulness of good health and good digestion.

One of the early ancestors of this family, who lived in Roxbury, is thus characterized in the Antiquarian Register:  “Never was there a man better calculated for the sturdy labors of a yeoman.  He was of colossal size and equal strength of muscle, which was kept in

 

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tone by regularity and good habits.  He shrunk from no labor, however arduous and fatiguing it might seem to others.  Instances of the wonderful feats of strength performed by him were related after his death by his contemporaries in his native place and the vicinity.”

The son of this man was the venerated Increase Sumner, the cousin of Charles Sumner’s father, one of the most distinguished Judges and Governors of Massachusetts.  He was indeed one of the nursing fathers of the State of Massachusetts during the critical period when, just emerging from the tutelage of England, she was trying the experiment of a State constitutional government.

Some of the sayings of Increase Sumner are important, as showing of what stock it was that our present Massachusetts Senator came, and what were the family traditions in which he was educated.  In a letter just in the beginning of the revolutionary war, he says:

“The man who, regardless of public happiness, is ready to fall in with base measures, and sacrifice conscience, honor and his country, merely for his own advancement, must (if not wretchedly hardened,) feel a torture, the intenseness of which nothing in this world can equal.”

Again, in one of his judicial charges, he says:

“America furnishes one of the few instances of countries where the blessings of civil liberty and the rights of mankind have been the primary objects of their political institutions; in which the rich and poor are equally protected; where the rights of conscience are fully enjoyed, and where merit and ability can be the only claim to the favor of the public.  May we not

 

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then pronounce that man destitute of the true principles of liberty and unworthy the blessing of society. Who does not at all times lend his aid to support and maintain a government on the preservation of which depends his own political as well as private happiness?”

Never was a Governor of Massachusetts carried to the chair with more popular enthusiasm than Increase Sumner, to which, doubtless, his stately person and appearance of high physical vigor added greatly.  Hancock had been crippled with gout, and Adams had been bent with infirmity, and the populace, ever prone to walk by sight, were cheered by the stately steppings of their new leader.  “Thank God, we have got a Governor that can walk, at last,” said an old apple woman, as he passed in state at the head of the legislative body, from hearing the election sermon in the Old South.

The father of Charles Sumner was no less distinguished for the personal and mental gifts of the family.  He was an able lawyer, and for many years filled the office of high sheriff of Suffolk county, and is still spoken of with enthusiasm by those who remember him, as a magnificent specimen of a man of the noblest type; noble in person, in manners and in mind, and of most immaculate integrity.  He was the last high sheriff who retained the antique dress derived from English usage, and the custom well became his lordly person and graceful dignity of manner.

Charles Sumner, therefore, succeeded to physical vigor, to patriotic sentiment and noble ideas as his birthright.  His education was pursued in the Boston

 

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Latin school and in Phillips Academy, which is still proud of the tradition of his sojourn, and lastly in Harvard College, where he graduated in 1830.

In the same place he pursued his law studies, under Judge Story, and was admitted to the bar in 1834.  No young man could rise more rapidly.  He soon gained a large practice, and was appointed reporter of the Circuit Court of the United States, in which capacity he published three volumes, known as Sumner’s Reports, containing the decisions of Judge Story.  He also edited the American Jurist, a quarterly law journal.  The first three winters after his admission to the bar he lectured in the Cambridge Law School with such approval that in 1836, he was offered a professorship in the Law School, which he declined.

In 1837 he visited Europe for purposes of travel and general improvement, and remained there for three years, returning in 1840.  As the result of this sojourn, he added to his previous classical and legal knowledge an extensive and accurate acquaintance with the leading languages and literature of modern Europe.  Possessed of a memory remarkable for its extent and accuracy, all these varied treasures were arranged in his mind where they could be found at a moment’s notice.  We have heard of his being present once at a dinner, among the Cambridge elite, when Longfellow repeated some French verses, which he said had struck him by their euphony and elegance, but to which he could not at the moment assign the name of the author.  Sumner immediately rose from the table, took down a volume of Voltaire, and without a moment’s hesitation turned to the passage.  He has

 

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sometimes been accused of a sort of pedantry in the frequent use of classical and historical illustration in his speeches, but the occurrence of these has been the result of a familiarity which made their use to him the most natural and involuntary thing in the world.

In the outset of Sumner’s career it was sometimes said of him that he was a brilliant theorizer, but that he would never be a practical politician.  His mind, indeed, belongs to that class whose enthusiasms are more for ideas and principles than for men.  He had the capacity of loving the absolute right, abstracted from its practical uses.  There was a tendency in his mind to seek ideal perfection and completeness.  In study, his standard was that of the most finished scholarship; in politics and the general conduct of life it was that of the severest models of the antique, elevated and refined by Christianity.

He returned to his native city at a time when the intention in good faith to be an ideal patriot and Christian, was in the general estimation of good society, a mark of a want of the practical faculties.  The Whig party, in whose ranks, by birth and tradition, he belonged, looked upon him as the son of their right hand; though they shook their heads gently at what seemed to them the very young and innocent zeal with which he began applying the weights and measures of celestial regions to affairs where, it was generally conceded, it would be fatal to use them.

Just at this season, the great Babylon, which now is cast down with execration, sat as a queen at Washington, and gave laws, and bewitched northern politicians with her sorceries.  Church and State were en-

 

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tangled in her nets, and followed, half willingly, half unwilling, at her chariot wheels.  The first, loudest, most importunate demand of this sorceress was, that the rule “Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you” should be repealed.  There was no objection to its forming a part of the church service, and being admired in general terms, as an ideal fragment of the apostolic age, but the attempt to apply it to the regulation of national affairs was ridiculed as an absurdity, and denounced as a dangerous heresy.

What then was the dismay of Beacon Street, the consternation of State Street, when this young laurelled son of Cambridge, fresh from his foreign tour, with all his career of honor before him, showed symptoms of declining towards the abolitionists.  The abolitionists, of all men!  Had not Garrison been dragged by a halter round his neck through the streets of Boston?  And did not the most respectable citizens cry,  Well done?  Was it not absolute social and political death to any young man to fall into those ranks?

Had not the Legislature of the sovereign state of Georgia in an official proclamation signed by their governor, set a price on Garrison’s head as an incendiary, and had not a Governor of Massachusetts in his message to a Massachusetts Legislature, so far sympathized with his southern brethren as to introduce into his inaugural a severe censure of the abolitionists, and to intimate his belief that in their proceedings they were guilty of an offence punishable by common law?  Had not Massachusetts legislatures taken into respectful consideration resolutions from slaveholding legislatures, dictating to them in that style for which

 

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such documents are famous, that they should pass laws making it penal to utter abolitionist sentiments?

All this had been going on during the three years while Sumner was in Europe, and now, when he was coming home to take his place as by right in the political ranks, did it not become him to be very careful how he suffered indiscreet moral enthusiasm to betray him into expressions which might identify him with these despised abolitionists?  Was not that socially to forfeit his birthright, to close upon him every parlor and boudoir of Beacon Street, to make State Street his enemy, to shut up from him every office of advancement or profit, and make him for every purpose of the Whig party a useless impracticable instrument?

And so the rising young man was warned to let such things alone; not to strive for the impossible ambrosia of the higher morals, and to content himself like his neighbors, with the tangible cabbage of compromise, as fitted to our mortal state.

He was warned with fatherly unction, by comfortable old Whigs, who to-day are shouting, even louder than he, “Down with Babylon, raze it, raze it to the foundations!”

But in spite of such warnings and cautions, Sumner became an ardent and thoroughgoing anti-slavery man, and did not hesitate to avow himself an abolitionist and to give public utterance to his moral feelings, contrary to the stringent discipline of the Whig party.

On the 4^th of July, 1844, Sumner pronounced in Boston, in view of the threatening Mexican war, and oration on “The True Grandeur of Nations.”

 

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This discussed the general questions of war from the Christian stand point, and deprecated the threatened one on Christian principles.  It might have passed as a harmless peace tract in ordinary times, but just at this period, it was too evidently the raising a standard against Babylon to be considered acceptable doctrine, for had not Babylon issued a decree that Gospel or no Gospel, a war with Mexico must take place, so that she might gain more slave territory?  Let the young man look to himself, applying such impossible, impracticable tests to such delicate political questions!  The speech, however, was widely circulated, both here and in England, and was said by Cobden to be one of the noblest contributions ever made to the cause of peace.

November 4, 1845, Sumner spoke more decidedly against the Mexican war, in a public meeting at Faneuil Hall, and the next year came out boldly in the Whig convention with an address, on “The Anti-Slavery Duties of the Whig Party.”

In this speech, Sumner, as openly as Garrison, declared himself the eternal opponent of slavery, and defined his position and marked out his work within the constitution of the United States, and by the constitution, just as Garrison had marked out his work outside of the constitution, and against it.

Sumner took the ground that the constitution of the United States was not a covenant with death, or an agreement with hell, but an instrument designed to secure liberty and equal rights, and that the present sanction and encouragement it was giving to slavery was owing to a perversion of its original design.  He

 

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maintained that the constitution nowhere recognizes slavery as an institution, that the slave is nowhere spoken of in it as a chattel but as a person, and that those provisions in the constitution which confer certain privileges on slaveholders were supposed to be temporary compromises with what the founders of the constitution imagined would prove only a temporary institution—soon to pass entirely away from the country.  He asserts in this speech:

“There is in the constitution no compromise on the subject of slavery of a character not to be reached legally and constitutionally, which is the only way in which I propose to reach it.  Wherever power and jurisdiction are secured to Congress, they may unquestionably be exercised in conformity with the constitution.  And even in matters beyond existing powers and jurisdiction there is a constitutional mode of action.  The constitution contains an article pointing out how at any time amendments may be made thereto.  This is an important article, giving to the constitution a progressive character, and allowing it to be moulded to suit new exigencies and new conditions of feeling.  The wise framers of this instrument did not treat the country as a Chinese foot, never to grow after its infancy, but anticipated the changes incident to its growth.”

Accordingly, Sumner proposed to the Whig party, as a rallying watch-word, the

REPEAL OF SLAVERY UNDER THE CONSTITUTION AND LAWS OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.

Of this course he said:  “The time has passed when this can be opposed on constitutional grounds.  It

 

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will not be questioned by any competent authority, that Congress may by express legislation abolish slavery, 1^st, in the District of Columbia; 2d, in the Territories, if there should be any; 3d, that it may abolish the slave-trade on the high seas between the states; 4^th, that it may refuse to admit any new state with a constitution sanctioning slavery.  Nor can it be doubted that the people of the free States may in the manner pointed out by the constitution, proceed to its amendment.”

Here we have, in a few words, the platform of the Political Abolitionists, every step of which has actually been accomplished.

But at that time it was altogether too exalted doctrine to be received by the Whig party, and Sumner tried his eloquence upon them in vain.  In vain he called upon Daniel Webster to carry out this glorious programme in his place in the Senate.

“Assume,” he says, “these unperformed duties.  The aged shall bear witness of you; the young shall kindle with rapture as they repeat the name of Webster; and the large company of the ransomed shall teach their children and their children’s children to the latest generation, to call you blessed; while all shall award you another title, not to be forgotten in earth or heaven—Defender of Humanity.”

But Webster had other aspirations.  He wanted to be president of the United States, to be that he must please the South, and so instead of Defender of Humanity he turned to be a defender of kidnapping and of the fugitive slave law.

 

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In 1846, Sumner, in a public letter, rebuked Robert C. Winthrop, then a Massachusetts representative, for voting for the Mexican war.  In this letter he characterizes the Mexican was as an unjust attack on a sister republic, having its origin in a system of measures to extend slavery; as being dishonorable and cowardly, as being the attack of a rich and powerful country on a weak and defenceless neighbor; and having thus characterized it, he adds:

“Such, sir, is the act of Congress to which, by your affirmative vote, the people of Boston have been made parties.  Through you they have been made to declare an unjust and cowardly war, with falsehood, in the cause of slavery.  Through you they have been made partakers in the blockade of Vera Cruz, in the seizure of California, in the capture of Santa Fe, and in the bloodshed of Monterey.  It were idle to suppose that the poor soldier or officer alone is stained by this guilt—it reaches back and incarnadines the halls of Congress; nay, more, through you it reddens the hands of your constituents in Boston.

               *               *               *               *               *               *               *               *               *

“Let me ask you, sir, to remember in your public course the rules of right which you obey in your private capacity.  The principles of morals are the same for nations as for individuals.  Pardon me if I suggest that you do not appear to have acted invariably in accordance with this truth.

               *               *               *               *               *               *               *               *               *

“It has been said in apology by your defenders that the majority of the Whig party joined with you.     *     *     *  In the question of right and wrong it can

 

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be of little importance that a few fallible men, constituting what is called a majority, were all of one mind.  But these majorities do not make us withhold our condemnation from the partakers in those acts.  Aloft on the throne of God, and not below in the footsteps of the trampling multitude of men, are to be found the sacred rules of right which no majorities can displace or overturn.  And the question returns, WAS IT RIGHT to vote for an unjust and cowardly war, with falsehood, for slavery?”

These extracts will give a tolerable certainty that the old Whig party of Massachusetts, which was thoroughly dead in the trespasses and sins of pro-slavery compromise, found Charles Sumner, with all his learning, and vigor and talent, a rather uncomfortable member, and that he soon found that the Whig party was no place for him.

In 1848 he left them to unite in forming the Free Soil party, in which the platform of principles he had already announced, was to form the distinctive basis.

And now came the great battle of the Fugitive Slave Law.  The sorceress slavery meditated a grand coup d’ etat that should found a Southern slave empire, and shake off the troublesome North, and to that intent her agents concocted a statute so insulting to Northern honor, so needlessly offensive in its provisions, so derisive of what were understood to be its religious convictions and humane sentiments, that it was thought verily, “The North never will submit to this, and we shall make here the breaking point.”  Then arose Daniel Webster, that lost Archangel of New England—he who had won her confidence by his

 

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knowledge of and reverence for all that was most sacred in her, and moved over to the side of evil!  It was as if a great constellation had changed sides in the heavens, drawing after it a third part of the stars.  The North, perplexed, silenced, troubled, yielded for a moment.  For a brief space all seemed to go down before that mighty influence, and all listened, as if spell bound, to the serpent voice with which he scoffed at the idea that there was a law of God higher than any law or constitution of the United States.

But that moment of degradation was the last.  Back came the healthy blood, the re-awakened pulse of moral feeling in New England, and there were found voices on all sides to speak for the right, and hearts to respond, and on this tide of re-awakened moral feeling, Sumner was carried into the United States Senate, to take the seat vacated by Webster.  The right was not yet victorious, but the battle had turned so far that its champion had a place to stand on in the midst of the fray.

And what a battle was that!  What an ordeal!  What a gauntlet to run was that of the man in Washington who in those days set himself against the will of the great sorceress!  Plied with temptation on the right hand and on the left, studied, mapped out like a fortress to be attacked and taken, was every Northern man who entered the arena.  Could he be bought, bribed, cajoled, flattered, terrified?  Which, or all?  So planned the conspirators in their secret conclaves.

The gigantic Giddings—he who brought to the strife nerves toughened by backwoods toil, and frontier fights with Indians—once said of this warfare:

 

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“I’ve seen hard fighting with clubs and bullets; I’ve seen men falling all around me; but I tell you it takes more courage to stand up in one’s seat in Congress and say the right thing, than to walk up to the cannon’s mouth.  There’s no such courage as that of the anti-slavery men there.”

Now, Sumner’s superb vitality, that hardy yeoman blood which his ancestors brought from England, stood him in excellent stead.  His strong and active brain was based on a body muscular, vigorous, and healthy, incapable of nervous tremor, bearing him with a steady aplomb through much that would be confusing and weakening to men of less physical force.  Sumner had not the character of a ready debater; not a light-armed skirmisher was he; he resembled rather one of the mailed warriors of ancient tourney.  When he had deliberately put on his armor, all polished and finished down to buckle and shoe-latchet, and engraved with what-not of classic, or Venetian, or Genoese device; when he put down his visor, steadied his lance, took sure aim, and went man and horse against his antagonist, all went down before him, as went down all before the lance of Coeur-de-Lion.

Such a charge into the enemy was his first great speech, “Freedom National, Slavery Sectional,” which he directed against the Fugitive Salve Law.  It was a perfect land-slide of history and argument; an avalanche under which the opposing party were logically buried, and it has a magazine from which catapults have been taken to beat down their fortresses ever since.

 

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If Daniel Webster merited the title of the great expounder of the constitution, Sumner at this crisis merited that of the great defender of the constitution.  In this speech we see clearly the principle on which Charles Sumner, while holding the same conscientious ground with Mr. Garrison in regard to the wickedness of slavery, could yet see his way clear to take the oath to support and defend the constitution of the United States.

It was because he believed ex animo, that that constitution was an agreement made TO PROMOTE AND DEFEND LIBERTY, and though including in itself certain defective compromises, which never ought to have been there, had yet within itself the constitutional power of revoking even those compromises, and coming over entirely on to the ground of liberty.

The fugitive slave law, as it was called, he opposed on the ground that it was unconstitutional, that it was contrary to the spirit and intention of the constitution, and to the well known spirit and intention of the men who made that constitution.  In this part, Mr. Sumner, going back to the history of the debates at the formation of the constitution, gave a masterly resume of the subject, showed that the leading men of those days were all strong anti-slavery men, that they all looked forward to the gradual dying out of slavery as certain, and that with great care they avoided in the constitution any legal recognition of such an unlawful, unnatural relation.  That the word slave did not exist in the document, and that when the slaves of the South were spoken of in relation to apportioning the suffrage, they were spoken of as “persons,”

 

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and not as chattels; that even the very clause of the constitution which has been perverted into a foundation for the fugitive slave law, had been purposely so framed that it did not really describe the position of slaves under southern law, but only that of such laborers as were by law denominated and recognized as persons.  By slave law the slaves were not regarded as “persons held to service and labor,” but as chattels personal, and it was only apprentices and free persons to whom the terms could literally be made to apply.

He showed by abundant quotations from the debates of the times that this use of language was not accidental, but expressly designed to avoid corrupting the constitution of the United States with any recognition of the principle that man could hold man as property.  He admitted that the makers of it knew and admitted that under it slaveholders could recover their slaves, but considering slaveholding as a temporary thing, they had arranged so that the language of their great national document should remain intact and uncorrupt.  From this masterly speech we extract the concluding summary:

“At the risk of repetition, but for the sake of clearness, review now this argument, and gather it together.  Considering that slavery is of such an offensive character that it can find sanction only in positive law and that it has no such ‘positive’ sanction in the constitution; that the constitution, according to its Preamble, was ordained to ‘establish justice,’ and ‘secure the blessings of liberty;’ that in the convention which framed it, and also elsewhere at the time, it was declared not to ‘sanction slavery;’ that according to the

 

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Declaration of Independence, and the address of the Continental Congress, the nation was dedicated to ‘liberty’ and the ‘rights of human nature;’ that according to the principles of common law, the constitution must be interpreted openly, actively, and perpetually for Freedom; that according to the decision of the Supreme Court, it acts upon slaves, not as property, but as persons; that, at the first organization of the national government, under Washington, slavery had no national favor, existed nowhere on the national territory, beneath the national flag, but was openly condemned by the nation, the church, the colleges and literature of the time; and finally, that according to an amendment of the constitution, the national government can only exercise powers delegated to it, among which there is none to support slavery; considering these things, sir, it is impossible to avoid the single conclusion that slavery is in no respect a national institution, and that the constitution nowhere upholds property in man.

“But there is one other special provision of the constitution, which I have reserved to this stage, not so much from its superior importance, but because it may fitly stand by itself.  This alone, if practically applied, would carry freedom to all within its influence.  It is an amendment proposed by the first Congress, as follows:  ‘No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’  Under this aegis the liberty of every person within the national jurisdiction is unequivocally placed.  I say every person.  Of this there can be no question.  The word ‘person,’ in the constitution, embraces every human

 

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being within its sphere, whether Caucasian, Indian, or African, from the President to the slave.”

The moral influence of these doctrines on the political abolitionists was very great.  Garrison’s sharp, clear preaching of the Bible doctrine of sin and repentance, had awakened a great deal of moral feeling in the land, and it became a real case of conscience to a great many, how they could in any way take the oath to support a constitution which they thought supported slavery.  On this subject, in all pure and noble minds, there began to be great searchings of heart, but the clearness, the fullness, the triumphant power with which Sumner and others brought out the true intention of the constitution, and the spirit of its makers, gave a feeling of clean and healthy vigor through the whole party.  Even the Garrisonians could perceive at any rate, that here was a ground where honest Christians might plant their feet, and get a place in the government to fight on, until by the constitutional power of amendment they might some day cast out wholly the usurping devil of slavery, which had lived and thriven so much beyond the expectations of our fathers.

Sumner’s mind is particularly remarkable for a nice sense of moral honor.  He had truly that which Burke calls “that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound,” and he felt keenly the disgrace and shame of such an enactment as the fugitive slave law.  He never spoke of it as a law.  He was careful to call it only an enactment, an attempt at law, which being contrary to the constitution of the country, never could have the binding force of a law.

 

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Next in the political world came the defeat, disgrace, fall and broken hearted death of Webster, who, having bid for the Presidency, at the price of all his former convictions, and in the face of his former most solemnly expressed opinions, was treated by the haughty Southern oligarchy with contemptuous neglect.  “The South never pay their slaves,” said a northern farmer when he heard that Webster had lost the nomination.  Webster felt with keen pangs, that for that slippery ungrateful South, he had lost the true and noble heart of the North.  In the grave with Webster died the old Whig party.

But still, though this and that man died, and parties changed, the unflinching Southern power pushed on its charge.  Webster being done with, it took up Douglas as its next tool, and by him brought on the repeal of the Missouri compromise and the Kansas and Nebraska battle.  The war raged fiercer and hotter and in the fray, Sumner’s voice was often heard crying the war cry of liberty.

And now the war raged deadlier, as came on the struggle for the repeal of the Missouri compromise, when the strokes of Sumner’s battle axe, long and heavy, were heard above the din, and always with crushing execution.  The speech on “The Crime against Kansas,” wrought the furnace of wrath to a white heat.  What was to be done with this man?  Call him out and fight him?  He was known to be on principle a non-resistant.  Answer him?  Indeed!  who ever heard of such a proceeding?  How could they?  Had he not spoken the truth?  What shall we do then?  Plantation manners suggested an answer.  “Come be-

 

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hind him at an unguarded moment, take him at a disadvantage, three to one, knock him down and kill him.”

So said—and but for his strong frame, wonderful in its recuperative power, and but for the unseen protection of a higher power,—it would have been so done..

Everybody knows the brutal history of that coarse and cowardly assault, and how the poor bully who accomplished it was feted and caressed by Southern men and women in high places, who hastened by presents of canes, and snuff boxes, and plate, to show forth how well he had expressed the Southern idea of chivalry.

Three of four years spent abroad, under medical treatment, were necessary to enable even Sumner’s vigorous vitality to recover from an assault so deadly; but at last he came back to take his seat in the Senate.

The poor cowardly bully who had assailed him, was dead—gone to a higher judgment seat; Butler was dead—and other accomplices of the foul deed were gone also.  Under all these circumstances there is something thrilling in the idea of Sumner rising in the very seat where he had been stricken down, and pronouncing that searching speech to which his very presence there gave such force, “The Barbarism of Slavery.”

If he had wished revenge he might have had it, in the fact that he had the solemn right, as one raised from the dead, to stand there and give in his awful testimony.  How solemn and dignified, in view of all these circumstances, seem the introductory words of his speech:

 

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“Mr. President, undertaking now, after a silence of more than four years, to address the Senate on this important subject, I should suppress the emotions natural to such an occasion, if I did not declare on the threshold my gratitude to that Supreme Being, through whose benign care I am enabled, after much suffering and many changes, once again to resume my duties here, and to speak for the cause which is so near to my heart, to the honored commonwealth whose representative I am, and also to my immediate associates in this body, with whom I enjoy the fellowship which is found in thinking alike concerning the Republic.  I owe thanks which I seize this moment to express for the indulgence shown me throughout the protracted seclusion enjoined by medical skill; and I trust that it will not be thought unbecoming in me to put on record here, as an apology for leaving my seat so long vacant, without making way, by resignation for a successor, that I acted under the illusion of an invalid, whose hopes for restoration to his natural health constantly triumphed over his disappointments.

“When last I entered into this debate it became my duty to expose the crime against Kansas, and to insist upon the immediate admission of that Territory as a State of this Union, with a constitution forbidding slavery.  Time has passed, but the question remains.  Resuming the discussion precisely where I left it, I am happy to avow that rule of moderation which, it is said, may venture even to fix the boundaries of wisdom itself.  I have no personal griefs to utter; only a barbarous egotism could intrude these into this chamber.  I have no personal wrongs to avenge; only a

 

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barbarous nature could attempt to wield that vengeance which belongs to the Lord.  The years that have intervened, and the tombs that have been opened since I spoke, have their voices too, which I cannot fail to hear.  Besides, what am I—what is any man among the living or among the dead, compared with the Question before us?  It is this alone which I shall discuss, and I open the argument with that easy victory which is found in charity.”

Though Sumner was thus moderate in allusion to himself or others, it was still the constant suggestion to the minds of all, of the perfect reason he, of all men, had, to know the truth of what he spoke, that gave a vehement force to his words.  That was a speech unanswerable, unanswered.  The South had tried the argument of force, and it had failed!  There he was again!—their accuser at the bar of the civilized world!

In the present administration, as Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Sumner has with his usual learning and power defended American honor against the causeless defamations and sneers of those who should have known better.  None of our public men, perhaps, is more favorably known in the Old World.  His talents and accomplishments, as well as his heroic stand for principle, have given him the familiar entrée to all that is best worth knowing in England; and it is for that reason more admirable that he should, with such wealth of learning and elegance of diction, have remonstrated with that great nation on her injustice to us.  His pamphlet on “Our Foreign Relations” carries a weight of metal in it that is over-powering; it is as thoroughly exhaustive of the subject

 

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as any of his greatest speeches,—grave, grand, and severely true.  It is the strong blood of England herself speaking back to the parent land as sorrowfully as Hamlet to his mother.

In the recent debates on Reconstruction, Sumner has remained true to that “chastity of honor” in relation to the United States Constitution, which has been characteristic of him, in opposing that short sighted republican policy which proposed to secure the political privileges of the blacks by introducing the constitutional amendment, providing that any state disfranchising negroes should be deprived of a corresponding portion of its representation in Congress.

Sumner indignantly repelled the suggestion of introducing any such amendments into the constitution, as working dishonor to that instrument by admitting into it, in any form, or under whatsoever pretext, the doctrine of the political inequality of races of men.  In this we recognize a faultless consistency of principle.

Sumner was cheered in the choice which he made in the darkest hour, by that elastic hope in the success of the right, which is the best inheritance of a strong, and healthy physical and moral organization.  During the time of the Fugitive Slave Law battle, while the conflict of his election was yet uncertain, he was speaking incidentally to a friend of the tremendous influences which the then regnant genius of Daniel Webster could bring to crush any young man who opposed him.  He spoke with feeling of what had to be sacrificed by a Boston young man who set himself to oppose such influences.  The friend, in reply, expressed some admiration of his courage and self-sacrificing.  He stopped,

 

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as he was walking up and down the room, and said, with simplicity, “Courage!  No, it doesn’t require so very much courage, because I know that in a few years we shall have all this thing down under our feet.  We shall set our heel upon it,” and he emphasized the sentence by bringing his heel heavily down upon the carpet.

“Do you really think so?”

“I know so; of course we shall.”

Those words, spoken in the darkest hour of the anti-slavery conflict, have often seemed like a prophecy, in view of all the fast rushing events of the years that followed.  Now they are verified.  Where is the man who counselled the North to conquer their prejudices?  Where is the man who raised a laugh in popular assemblies at the expense of those who believed the law of God to be higher than the law of men?  There is a most striking lesson to young men in these histories.

The grave of the brilliant and accomplished Douglas lay far back on the road by which Lincoln rose to fame and honor, and the grave of Webster on that of Charles Sumner, and on both of those graves might be inscribed “Lo, this is the man that made not God his trust.”  Both scoffed at God’s law, and proclaimed the doctrine of expediency as above right, and both died broken down and disappointed; while living and honored at this day, in this land and all lands, are the names of those, who in its darkest and weakest hour, espoused the cause of Liberty and Justice.

 

 

 

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CHAPTER V.

 

SALMON P. CHASE.

 

England and our Finances in the War—President Wheelock and Mr. Chase’s seven Uncles—His Uncle the Bishop—His sense of Justice at College—His Uncle the Senator—Admitted to the Bar for Cincinnati—His First Argument before a U. S. Court—Society in Cincinnati—The Ohio Abolitionists—Cincinnati on Slavery—The Church admits Slavery to be “an Evil”—Mr. Chase and the Birney Mob—The Case of the Slave Girl Matilda—How Mr. Chase “Ruined Himself”—He Affirms the Sectionality of Slavery—The Van Zandt Case—Extracts from Mr. Chase’s Argument—Mr. Chase in Anti-Slavery Politics—His Qualifications as a Financier.

 

When a future generation shall be building the tombs of our present prophets, and adorning the halls of the Capitol with the busts of men now too hard at work to be sitting to the sculptor, then there will be among the marble throng one head not inferior to any now there in outside marks of greatness—a head to which our children shall point and say, “There is the financier who carried our country through the great slavery war!”

Not a small thing that to say of any man; for this was has been on a scale of magnitude before unheard of in the history of wars.  It has been, so to speak, a fabulous war, a war of a tropical growth, a war to other wars, like the great California pine to the bramble of the forest.  A thousand miles of frontier

 

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to be guarded, fleets to be created, an army to be organized and constantly renewed on a scale of numbers beyond all European experience—an army, too, for the most part, of volunteer citizens accustomed to generous diet, whose camp fare has been kept at a mark not inferior to the average of living among citizens at home.  And all this was to be effected in no common times.  It was to be done amid the revolutions of business, the disturbances of trade and manufacture, then turning into new courses; and above all, the breaking up of the whole system of cotton agriculture, by which the greatest staple of the world was produced.  These changes convulsed and disarranged financial relations in all other countries, and shook the civilized world like an earthquake.

It is not to be wondered at that a merely insular paper, like the London Times, ignorant of all beyond the routine of British and continental probabilities, should have declared us madmen, and announced our speedy bankruptcy.  We all know that paper to be conducted by the best of old world ability, and are ready to concede that the grave writers therein used their best light, and certainly they did their best to instruct us.  How paternally did it warn us that we must not look to John Bull for funds to carry out such extravagances!  How ostentatiously did the old banking houses stand buttoning their pockets, saying, “Don’t come to us to borrow money!” and how did the wonder grow when the sun rose and set, and still new levies, new fleets, new armies!—when hundreds of thousands grew to millions, and still there was no call

 

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for foreign money, and government stocks stood in the market above all others in stability.

One thing, at least, became plain; that whatever might be the case with the army, financially the American people had a leader who united them to a man, and under whose guidance the vast material resources of the country moved in solid phalanx to support its needs.

When a blade does good service, nothing is more natural than to turn and read upon it the stamp that tells where and by whom it was fashioned; and so when we see the quiet and serenity in which our country moved on under its burdens, we ask, Whence comes this man who has carried us so smoothly in such a storm?

America is before all other things an agricultural country, and her aristocracy, whether of talent or wealth, generally trace back their origin to a farm.  The case of Secretary Chase is no exception.

It is one of the traditions of Dartmouth College that old President Wheelock, in one of his peregrinations, once stopped in the town of Cornish, N. H.; a place where the Connecticut river flows out from the embrace of the White Mountains.  Here he passed a night at a farm-house, the dwelling of Samuel Chase, a patriarchal farmer, surrounded by seven sons, as fine, strong and intelligent as those of Jesse of Old Testament renown.  The President used his visit to plead the cause of a college education for these fine youths to such good purpose, that five of the boys, to wit:  Salmon, Baruch, Heber, Dudley and Philander became graduates of Dartmouth College.  Two re-

 

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mained to share the labors of the farm, one of whom was the father of Secretary Chase.

All the boys thus educated attained more than the average mark in society, and some to the highest distinction.  Dudley Chase was one of the most distinguished lawyers and politicians of New England—a member of the United States Senate, and for many years Chief Justice of Vermont.  It is said that he was so enthusiastic a classical scholar that he carried a Greek Homer and Demosthenes always in his pocket, for his recreation in intervals of public business.  He lived to a patriarchal age, an object of universal veneration.

Salmon Chase, another brother, was a lawyer in Portland, the acknowledged leader of that distinguished bar.  He died suddenly, while pleading in court, in 1806, and in memorial of him our Secretary received the name of Salmon Portland, at his birth, which occurred in 1808.  The youngest of the graduates, Philander Chase, was the well-known Episcopal Bishop of Ohio and Illinois.  He was the guardian under whose auspices the education of Salmon P. Chase was conducted.

In regard to Chase’s early education, we have not many traditions.  His parents were of the best class of New Hampshire farmers; Bible-reading, thoughtful, shrewd, closely and wisely economical.  It is said that in that region literary material was so scarce that the boy’s first writing lessons were taken on strips of birch bark.

When his father died, there was found to be little property for the support of the family, and only the

 

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small separate estate of his mother was left.  She was of Scotch blood—that blood which is at once shrewd, pious, courageous and energetic, and was competent to make a little serve the uses of a great deal.

But an education, and a college education, is the goal towards which such mothers in New England set their faces as a flint—and by infinite savings and unknown economies they compass it.

When Chase was fourteen years old, his uncle, the Bishop, offered to take and educate him, and he went to Ohio along with an elder brother who was attached to Gen. Cass’s expedition to the upper waters of the Mississippi.

While at Buffalo the seniors of the party made an excursion to Niagara, but had no room in their vehicle for the boy.  Young Chase, upon this, with characteristic energy, picked up another boy who wanted to see the falls, and the two enterprising young gentlemen footed it through the snow for twenty miles, and saw the falls in company with their elders.

He remained two years with the Bishop, who was a peremptory man, and used his nephew as he did himself and everybody else about him, that is, made him work just as hard as he could.

The great missionary Bishop had so much to do, and so little to do it with, that he had to make up for lack of money by incessant and severe labor, and with such help as he could get.  His nephew being his own flesh and blood, he felt perhaps at liberty to drive a little more sharply than the rest, as that is the form in which the family instinct shows itself in people of his character.

 

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The Bishop supplemented his own scanty salary by teaching school and working a farm, and so Salmon’s preparatory studies were seasoned with an abundance of severe labor.

The youth was near sighted, and troubled with an obstinate lisp.  The former disability was incurable, but the latter he overcame by means of a long and persevering course of reading aloud.

On the whole, the Bishop seems to have thought well of his nephew, for one day in refusing him leave to go in swimming, he did so with the complimentary exclamation, “Why, Salmon, the country might lose its future President, were I to let you get drowned.”

After being fitted under his uncle, Chase entered Dartmouth College.

One anecdote of Chase’s college life is characteristic, as showing that courageous and steady sense of justice which formed a leading feature of his after life.  One of his classmates was sentenced by the faculty to be expelled from college on a charge of which Chase knew him to be wholly innocent.  Chase, after in vain arguing the case with the president, finally told him that he would go too, as he would not stay in an institution where his friends were treated with such injustice.  The two youths packed up their goods and drove off.  But the faculty sent word after them almost before they had got out of the village, that the sentence was rescinded and they might come back.  They said, however, that they must take time to consider whether they would do so, and they took a week, having a pleasant vacation, after which they returned.

 

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After graduating, Mr. Chase found himself dependent on his own exertions to procure his support in his law studies.  He went to Washington intending to open a private school.  He waited in vain for scholars till his money was gone, and then, feeling discouraged, asked his uncle the Senator to get him an office under government.

The old gentleman, who seems to have been about as stern in his manner of expressing family affection as his brother the Bishop, promptly refused:

“I’ll give you half a dollar to buy you a spade to begin with,” he said, “for then you might come to something at last, but once settle a young man down in a government office, he never does any thing more—it’s the last you hear of him.  I’ve ruined one or two young men in that way, and I’m not going to ruin you.”

Thus with stern kindness was Chase turned off from what might have made a contended common-place man of him, and pricked up to the career which gave us a Secretary of the Treasury and a Chief Justice of the United States.  He succeeded at last in obtaining the ownership of a select classical school already established, while he pursued his legal studies under the auspices of Wirt.

In 1830 he was examined for admission to the bar.  At the close of the examination he was told that he had better read for another year.  He replied that he could not do that, as he was all ready to commence practice in Cincinnati.

“Oh, at Cincinnati!” replied the Judge, as if any law or no law was enough for such a backwoods settlement—“well then, Mr. Clerk, swear in Mr. Chase.”

 

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His early days of legal practice, like those of most young lawyers, were days of waiting and poverty.  The only professional work he did for a considerable time was to draw an agreement for a man, who paid him half a dollar, and a week afterwards came and borrowed it back.  In one of his early cases he had occasion to prove the bad character of a witness who was on the other side, on which the fellow, who was a well known rough, threatened to “have his blood,” and undertook to assault him.  But as the rowdy came up at the close of the court, he met so quiet and stern a look from Mr. Chase’s eyes that he turned and sneaked off without opening his mouth or raising his hand.

Mr. Chase’s first argument before a United States Court was at Columbus, O., in 1834.  The case was to him a very important one, and when he arose to make his argument he found himself so agitated that he could not utter a word.  He had therefore to sit down, and after waiting a few moments, tried again, and made his plea.  After he was through, one of the Judges came to him and shook hands with him, saying, “I congratulate you most sincerely.”  Chase, who was feeling very disagreeably, inquired with surprise what he was congratulated for?

“On your failure,” answered the judge, who added, “A person of ordinary temperament and abilities would have gone through his part without any such symptoms of nervousness.  But when I see a young man break down once or twice in that way, I conceive the highest hopes of him.”

 

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This may have been interpreted as a good natured attempt on the part of the Judge to reassure the young lawyer, but there is a deep and just philosophy in it.  The class of men who have what Carlye calls “a composed stupidity, or a cheerful infinitude of ignorance,” are not liable ever to break down through a high sense of the magnitude of their task, and the importance of a crisis.  Such as their work is, they are always in a prepared frame of mind to do it.

Although the Washington judge who passed Mr. Chase into the legal profession had so small an opinion of Cincinnati, yet no place could have afforded a finer and more agreeable position to a rising young man, than that city in those days.  A newly settled place, having yet lingering about it some of the wholesome neighborly spirit of a recent colony—with an eclectic society drawn from the finest and best cultivated classes of each of the older States, there was in the general tone of life a breadth of ideas, a liberality and freedom, which came from the consorting together of persons of different habits of living.

In no city was real intellectual or moral worth in a young candidate likely to meet a quicker and a more appreciative patronage.

Gradually Mr. Chase gained the familiar entrée of all that was worth knowing, and was received with hospitable openness in the best society.  His fine person, his vigorous, energetic appearance, and the record of talent and scholarship he brought with him, secured him, in time the patronage of the best families, and a valuable and extensive practice.  His industry was incessant, and his capability of sustained labor incom-

 

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mon, as may be gathered from the fact that besides the labors of his office, he found time to prepare an edition of the Statutes of Ohio, with notes, and a history of the State, which is now a standard authority in the Ohio courts.

In the outset of Chase’s career, he, like Charles Sumner, and every rising young American of his time, met the great test question of the age.  To Chase it came in the form of an application to plead the cause of a poor black woman, claimed as a fugitive slave.  For a rising young lawyer to take in hand the cause of a poor black, now, would be only a road to popularity and fame.  But then the case was far otherwise.

If the abolition excitement had stirred up Boston it had convulsed Cincinnati.  A city separated from slave territory only by a fordable river, was likely to be no quiet theatre for such discussions.  All the horrors, all the mean frauds and shocking cruelties of the interstate slave-trade, were enacting daily on the steamboats which passed before the city on the Ohio River, and the chained gangs of broken-hearted human beings, torn from home and family, to be shipped to Southern plantations, were often to be seen on steamboats lying at the levee.

The chapter in Uncle Tom’s Cabin called “Select Incidents of Lawful Trade” was no fancy painting.  It was an almost literal daguerreotype of scenes which the author of that book had witnessed in those floating palaces which plied between Cincinnati and New Orleans, and where too, above in the cabin, were happy mothers, wives, husbands, brothers and sisters, rejoicing in secure family affection, and on the deck below, miserable shat-

 

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tered fragments of black families, wives torn from husbands, children without mothers and mothers without children, with poor dumb anxious faces going they knew not whither, to that awful “down river”—whence could come back letter or tidings never more—for slavery took care that slaves should write no letters.

Such scenes as these, almost daily witnessed, gave the discussion of the great question of slavery a startling and tangible reality which it never could have had in Boston.  For the credit of human nature we are happy to state that the Ohio was lined all along its shores, where it ran between free and slave territory, with a chain of abolitionist forts, in the shape of societies prosecuting their object with heroic vigor; and what made the controversy most peculiarly intense was the assistance which these abolitionists stood always ready to give to the escaping fugitive.  For a belt of as much as fifty miles all along the river, the exertions of the abolitionists made slave property the most insecure of all kinds of possessions.

The slave power, as we have seen, was no meek non-resistant, and between it and the abolitionists there was a hand-to-hand grapple, with a short knife, and deadly home thrusts.  The western man is in all things outspoken and ardent; and Garrison’s logical deductions as to the true nature of slavery came molten and red hot, as fired from the guns of western abolitionists.  To do them justice, they were sublimely and awfully imprudent, heroically regardless of any considerations but those of abstract truth and justice; they made no more effort to palliate slavery or conciliate the slaveholders than the slaveholders made efforts

 

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to palliate their doings, or conciliate them.  War, war to the knife, was the word on both sides, the only differences being that the knife of the abolitionist was a spiritual one, and the knife of the slaveholder a literal one.

The Lane Theological Seminary was taken possession of as an anti-slavery fortification by a class of about twenty vigorous, radical young men, headed by that brilliant, eccentric genius, Theodore D. Weld; who came and stationed themselves there ostensibly as theological students under Dr. Beecher and Professor Stowe, really that they might make of the Seminary an anti-slavery fort.

Now at this time, “good society,” so called, as constituted in Cincinnati, had all that easy, comfortable indifference to the fortunes and sufferings of people not so well off as itself, which is characteristic of good society all the world over.  It is so much easier to refine upon one’s own ideal of life, to carpet one’s floors, and list one’s doors and windows and keep out the cold, stormy wind of debate and discussion, than it is to go out into the highways and hedges and keep company with the never-ending sins and miseries and misfortunes and mistakes of poor, heavy-laden humanity, that good society always has sat as a dead weight on any rising attempt at reform.

Then again, Cincinnati was herself to a large extent a slaveholding city.  Her property was in slaveholding states.  Negroes were negotiable currency; they were collateral security on half the contracts that were at the time being made between the thriving men of Cincinnati and the planters of the adjoin-

 

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ing slave states.  If the bold doctrine of the abolitionists was true—if slavery was stealing, then were the church members in the fairest Cincinnati churches thieves—for in one way or another, they were to a large extent often the holders of slaves.

The whole secret instinct of Cincinnati, therefore, was to wish that slavery might in some way be defended, because Cincinnati stood so connected with it in the way of trade, that conscientious scruples on this point were infinitely and intolerably disagreeable.  The whirlwind zeal of the abolitionists, the utter, reckless abandon and carelessness of forms and fashions with which they threw themselves into the fight, therefore furnished to good society a cloak large and long, for all their own sins of neglect.  They did not defend slavery, of course, these good people—in fact, they regarded it as an evil.  They were properly and decorously religious—good society always is, and so willing in presbytery and synod to have judiciously worded resolutions from time to time introduced, regretting slavery as an evil.  The meetings of ecclesiastical bodies afforded at this time examples of most dexterous theological hair-splitting on this subject.  Invariably in every one of them, were the abolitionists forward and fiery, calling slavery by that ugly old Saxon word, “a sin.”  Then there were the larger class of brethren, longing for peace, and hating iniquity, who had sympathy for the inevitable difficulties which beset well-meaning Christian slaveholders under slave laws.  Now if these consented to call slavery a sin, they imposed on themselves the necessity of either enforcing immediate repentance and change of life

 

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on the sinner, or excluding him from the communion.  So they obstinately intrenched themselves in the declaration that slavery is—an EVIL.

When a synod had spent all its spare time in discussing whether slavery ought to be described in a resolution as an evil or as a moral evil, they thought they had about done their share of duty on the subject; meanwhile, between the two, the consciences of those elders and church members who were holding slaves on bond and mortgage, or sending down orders to sell up the hands of plantations as securities for their debts, had a certain troublous peace.

How lucky it was for these poor tempest-tossed souls that the abolitionists were so imprudent and hot headed, that they wore garments of camel’s hair, and were girt about the loins with a leathern girdle, and did eat locusts and wild honey, being altogether an unpresentable, shaggy, unkempt, impracticable set of John the Baptist reformers.  Their unchristian spirit shocked the nerves of good pious people far more than the tearing up of slave families, or the wholesale injustice of slavery.  “The abolitionists do things in such bad taste,” said good society, “that it really makes it impossible for us to touch the subject at all, lest we should become mixed up with them, and responsible for their proceedings.”  To become mixed up with and responsible for the proceedings of slaveholders, slave-traders, and slave-drivers, who certainly exhibited no more evidences of good taste in their manner of handling subjects, did not strike good society at this time as equally objectionable.

 

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It had got to be a settled and received doctrine that the impudent abolitionists had created such a state of irritation in the delicate nerves of the slaveholding power, that all good Christian people were bound to unite in a general effort to calm irritation by suppressing all discussion of the subject.

When, therefore, James G. Birney, a southern abolitionist, who had earned a right to be heard, by first setting free his own slaves, came to Cincinnati and set up an abolition paper, there was a boiling over of the slaveholding fury.  For more than a week Cincinnati lay helpless in a state of semi-sack and siege, trod under the heels of a mob led by Kentucky bullies and slave-traders.  They sacked Birney’s anti-slavery office, broke up his printing press and threw the types into the river, and then proceeded to burn negro houses, and to beat and maltreat defenceless women and children, after the manner of such evil beasts generally.

At the time the mob were busy destroying the printing press, Mr. Chase threw himself in among them with a view to observe, and if possible to obstruct their proceedings.

He gathered from their threats while the process of sacking the office was going on, that their next attack would be on the life of Mr. Birney.  On hearing this, he hastened before them to Mr. Birney’s hotel, and stood in the door-way to meet them when they came up.

No test of personal courage or manliness is greater than thus daring to stand and oppose a mob in the full flush of lawless triumph.  Mr. Chase had a fine commanding person, and perfect courage and coolness,

 

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and he succeeded in keeping back the mob, by arguing with them against lawless acts of violence to persons or property, until Birney had had time to escape.

The upper ten of Cincinnati, when tranquility was once more restored to that community, were of course very much shocked and scandalized by the proceedings of the mob, but continued to assert that all these doings were the fault of the abolitionists.  What could be expected if they would continue discussions which made our brethren across the river so uncomfortable?  If nobody would defend the rights of negroes there would be no more negro mobs, and good society became increasingly set in the belief that speaking for the slave in any way whatever was actually to join the abolitionists, and to become in fact a radical, a disorganizer, a maker of riots and disturbances.

No young lawyer who acted merely from humane sentiment, or common good natured sympathy, would have dared at that time to plead a slave’s cause against a master’s claim.  Then and always there were a plenty of people to feel instinctive compassion, and in fact slily to give a hunted fugitive a lift, if sure not to lose by it—but to take up and plead professionally a slave’s cause against a master was a thing no young man could do without making up his mind to be counted as one of the abolitionists, and to take upon his shoulders the whole responsibility of being identified with them.

Mr. Chase was a man particularly alive to the value of all the things he put in peril by such a step.  He had a remarkable share of what is called the “Yankee” nature, which values and appreciates

 

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material good.  He had begun poor, and he knew exactly what a hard thing poverty was.  He had begun at the bottom of the social ladder, and he knew exactly how hard it was to climb to a good position, and he truly appreciated it.  His best patrons and warmest friends now, with earnestness warned him not to listen to the voice of his feelings, and take that course which would identify him with the fanatical abolitionists.  They told him that it would be social and political death to him to take a step in that direction.

For all that, when the case of the slave girl Matilda was brought to his door he defended it deliberately, earnestly and with all his might.  Of course it was decided against him, as in those days, such cases were sure to be.

As Chase left the court room after making his plea in this case, a man looked after him and said, “There goes a fine young fellow who has just ruined himself.”  Listening, however, to this very speech was a public man of great ability whose efforts afterwards went a long way towards making Chase United States Senator; and to-day we see that same young lawyer on the bench, Chief Justice of the United States.

The decision of Chase in this matter was not merely from the temporary impulse of kindly feelings, but from a deep political insight into the tendencies and workings of the great slave power.  His large, sound, logical brain saw in the future history of that power all that it has since brought to light.  He saw that the exorbitant spirit of its exactions was directed

 

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against the liberties of the free States and the principles on which free government is founded.

The plea of Chase, in this case, was the first legal break-water in Ohio to the flood of usurpation and dictation which has characterized the slaveocracy from its commencement.  In this plea he took a ground then unheard of, to wit:  That the phrase in the Constitution which demanded the giving up of fugitives to service on demand of masters, did not impose on the magistrates of the free States the responsibility of catching and returning slaves.  He denied that Congress had any right to impose any such duties on State magistrates, or to employ State resources in any way for this purpose.  This principle was afterwards recognized by the United States in the slave law of 1850, by appointing special United States Commissioners for the conducting of such cases.

From the time of this plea many of the former patrons and friends of the rising young lawyer walked no more with him; but he had taken his ground like a strong man armed, and felt well able to keep his fortress single handed till recruits should gather around him.

He was soon called on to defend James G. Birney for the crime of sheltering a fugitive slave.  In this plea he asserted the great principle afterwards affirmed by Charles Sumner in Congress, that slavery is sectional and freedom national.  As slavery was but a local institution, he claimed that it ceased when the slave was brought by his master to a free State.  This assertion caused great excitement in a community separated from a slave State only by the Ohio, where

 

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slave masters were constantly finding it convenient to cross with their slaves, or to send them across, to the neighboring city.  Of course the decision went against him.  What judge who had any hopes of the presidency, or the Supreme Bench, would dare offend his southern masters by any other?

In 1846 came on the great Van Zandt case.  Van Zandt was originally a thriving Kentucky farmer and slave owner.  He figured in Uncle Tom’s Cabin under the name Van Tromp.  He was a man who, under a shaggy exterior, had a great, kind, honest heart, and in that day, when ministers and elders were studying the Bible to find apologies for slavery, Van Zandt needed no other light than that of this same heart to teach him that it was vile and devilish, and so, setting his slaves free, he came over and bought a farm in the neighborhood of Cincinnati; and it was well known that no hungry, wandering fugitive was ever turned from Van Zandt’s door.  The writer has still memory of the wild night ride of husband and brother through woods, and over swelled creeks dangerous enough to cross, which carried a poor, hunted slave girl to this safe retreat.  But Van Zandt was at last found out, and the slaveocrats brought suit against him.  Chase and Seward defended him, and made noble pleas—pleas as much for the rights of the whites as of the blacks.  Of course, like all cases of the kind at that date, the judgment had been pre-ordained before the court sat.  Chase’s elaborate and unanswerable argument before the United States Court, was afterward printed in a pamphlet of some three hundred and fifty octavo pages.

 

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The opening of this great plea and its close we shall quote as best showing the solemn and earnest spirit in which this young lawyer entered upon his work.

“MR. CHIEF JUSTICE AND JUDGES:

I beg leave to submit to your considerations an argument in behalf of an old man, who is charged, under the act of Congress of February 12, 1793, with having concealed and harbored a fugitive slave.

Oppressed, and well nigh borne down by the painful consciousness, that the principles and positions which it will be my duty to maintain, can derive no credit whatever from the reputation of the advocate, I have spared no pains in gathering around them whatever of authority and argument the most careful research and the most deliberate reflection could supply.  I have sought instruction wherever I could find it; I have looked into the reported decisions of almost all the state courts, and of this court; I have examined and compared state legislation and federal; above all, I have consulted the constitution of the Union, and the history of its formation and adoption.  I have done this, because I am well assured, that the issues, now presented to this court for solemn adjudication, reach to whatever is dear in constitutional liberty, and what is precious in political union.  Not John Van Zandt alone—not numerous individuals only—but the States also, and the Nation itself, must be deeply affected by the decision to be pronounced in this case.”

Then followed the technical and legal plea which is a most close and unanswerable legal argument, show-

 

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ing conclusively that under the words of the statute the defendant could not be held guilty.

After this, follows a clear and masterly argument on the unconstitutionality of the then existing fugitive slave law, of 1793.  In this, Chase took with great skill, boldness, ingenuity and learning, the same course afterwards taken by Sumner in his great speech before Congress, on the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

The conclusion is solemn and weighty—and in the light of recent events has even a prophetic power:

“Upon questions,—such as are some of those involved in this case,—which partake largely of a moral and political nature, the judgment, even of this Court, cannot be regarded as altogether final.  The decision, to be made here, must, necessarily, be rejudged at the tribunal of public opinion—the opinion, not of the American People only, but of the Civilized World.  At home, as is well known, a growing disaffection to the Constitution prevails, founded upon its supposed allowance and support of Human Slavery; abroad, the national character suffers under the same reproach.  I most earnestly hope, and,—I trust it may not be deemed too serious to add,—I most earnestly pray, that the judgment of your honors in this case, may commend itself to the reason and conscience of Mankind; that it may rescue the Constitution from the undeserved opprobrium of lending its sanction to the idea that there may be property in men; that it may gather around that venerable charter of Republican Government the renewed affection and confidence of a generous People; and that it may win for American Institutions the warm admiration and profound hom-

 

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age of all, who, everywhere, love Liberty and revere Justice.”

The question was decided as all such cases in those times invariably were decided.

The Judge never undertook even the form of answering the argument; never even adverted to it, but decided directly over it, with a composure worthy of a despotism.  It was a decision only equaled by that of the most corrupt judges of the corrupt age of Charles II.

Honest Van Zandt was ruined, “scot and lot,” by a fine so heavy that all he had in the world would not pay it, and he died broken-hearted; a solemn warning to all in his day, how they allowed themselves to practise Christian charity in a way disagreeable to the plantation despots.

As for Chase, he was undiscouraged by ill success, and shortly reaffirmed his argument and principles in the case of Driskull vs. Parish.  He was at least educating the community; he was laying foundations of resistance on which walls and towers should by-and-by arise.  Humanity and religion had already made the abolitionists numerically a large and active body in Ohio.  They needed only a leader like Chase, of large organizing brain and solid force of combination, to shape them into a political party of great efficiency.  In 1841, he united in a call for an Anti-Slavery Convention in Columbus, and in this convention was organized the Liberty party of Ohio.  In 1845 he projected a Southwestern Anti-Slavery Convention.

 

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The ground taken was substantially that to which a bloody, weary experience has brought the whole nation now, to wit:  “That whatever is worth preserving in republicanism can be maintained only by uncompromising war against an usurping slave-power, and that all constitutional measures for the extinction of slavery in their own States, and the reduction of it to constitutional limits in the United States.

This convention met in Cincinnati, in 1845, and Chase prepared the address, giving the history of slavery thus far, and showing the condition of the Whig and Democratic parties respecting it; and urging the importance of a political combination unequivocally committed to the denationalizing of slavery and the slave power.  So vigorous were the tactics of this party, so strongly moving with the great central currents of God’s forward providences, that in 1847 Chase was made Governor of Ohio, by the triumph of those very principles which in the outset threatened utter loss to their advocate.  In 1847 he attended a second Liberty Convention; and afterwards took part in the Buffalo Convention, the celebrated Buffalo Platform being mainly his work.

In 1849, he was chosen United States Senator from Ohio, and his presence was hailed as a tower of strength to the hard fighting anti-slavery party at Washington.  When, directly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, the Democratic party in Ohio voted for Pierce, knowing him directly committed to its enforcement, Chase withdrew from it, and addressed a letter to B. F. Butler, of New York, recommending the formation

 

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of an Independent Democratic party.  He prepared a platform for this purpose, which was substantially adopted by the convention of the Independent Democracy of 1852.

And now came on the battle of Kansas and Nebraska.  Chase was one of the first to awaken the people to this new danger.  He, in conference with the anti-slavery men of Congress, drafted an address to the people to arouse them as to this sudden and appalling conspiracy, which was intended to seize for slavery all the unoccupied land of the United States, and turn the balance of power and numbers forever into the slaveholders’ hands.  It was a critical moment; there was but little time to spare; but the whole united clergy of New England, of all denominations, Catholic and Protestant, found leisure to send in their solemn protest.  When that nefarious bill passed, Chase protested against it on the night of its passage, as with threats, and oaths, and curses, it was driven through.  It seems in the retrospect but a brief passage from that hour of apparent defeat to the hour which beheld Lincoln in the presidential chair and Chase, Secretary of the Treasury.  His history in that position has verified the sagacity that placed him there.  It has been the success of a large, sound, organizing brain, apt and skillful in any direction in which it should turn its powers.  It was the well-known thrift and shrewdness of the Yankee farmer, thrift and shrewdness cultivated in years of stern wrestling with life, coming out at the head of the United States treasury in a most critical hour.  No men are better to steer through exigencies than these same Yankee farmers, and it seems the sa-

 

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vor of this faculty goes to the second and third generations.

We have said before, that if Chase made sacrifices of tangible and material present values for abstract principles, in his early days, it was not because, as is sometimes the case, he was a man merely of ideas, and destitute of practical faculties.  On the contrary, the shrewd, cautious, managing, self-preserving faculties were possessed by him to a degree which caused him to be often spoken of by the familiar proverb, “a man who can make every edge cut.”  By nature, by descent, by hard and severe training, he was a rigid economist, and a man who might always safely be trusted to make the very most and best of a given amount of property.

It is praise enough to any financier who could take a nation in the sudden and unprepared state ours was, and could carry it along for three or four years through a war of such gigantic expenditure, to say that the country was neither ruined, beggared, nor hopelessly embarrassed, but standing even stronger when he resigned the treasury than when he took it.

His financial management was at first to raise the money needed for the war by loans, until the expenses became so great as to be beyond the capacity of the specie in the country.  Then, still adhering to the principle of raising the means for the war within the United States, he introduced the legal tender paper currency, and by providing that it should be a necessary basis for banking capital of the United States in a position where it must live or die with the country.  This not

 

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only provided funds, but made every dollar of money act as a direct stimulus to the patriotism of those who supplied it.

On June 30, 1864, Chase resigned his position in the treasury.  That Providence which has ordained so many striking and peculiar instances of victory and reward for men who espoused the cause of humanity in its dark hours, had also one for Chase.

Oct. 12, 1864, by the death of Taney, the Chief Justiceship of the United States Supreme Court became vacant, and Lincoln expressed the sense of the whole American people in calling Chase to fill that venerable office.

The young lawyer, who without name or prestige, dared to put in pleas for the poorest of his brethren, when the slave power was highest and haughtiest, and whose pleas were overruled with the most chilling contempt, now by God’s providence holds that supreme position on the national bench from which, let us trust, the oppressor and the tyrant have faded away forever!