1831
Page 3
In an address to the public on January 1, in the first issue of The Liberator, Garrison explained his position on slavery. Invoking the principles of the Declaration of Independence, Garrison demanded the immediate, unconditional abolition of slavery and vowed to use extreme measures to effect a “revolution in public sentiment.” He proclaimed he would abjure politics and refuse to ally himself with any denomination. Instead, he desired a brotherhood of reformers willing to raise their voices to defend “the great cause of human rights.” He warned that he would not compromise, nor would he rein in his words: “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 a 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.”
Garrison, who grew up in Newburyport, Massachusetts, began his working life as a writer and editor for assorted newspapers in New England. In 1829, at age twenty-four, he joined Benjamin Lundy in Baltimore as co-editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation, an antislavery newspaper started by Lundy in 1821. The two men differed temperamentally. Lundy, a Quaker, had none of his associate’s zeal. He favored gradual, moderate approaches toward the abolition of slavery and wrote in careful, measured phrases. But he knew that his paper needed revitalizing, and he chose the right person for the job. Though Garrison was not yet the radical abolitionist he would soon become, in 1829 he was already pushing the boundaries of the antislavery argument. In a Fourth of July address at the Park Street Church in Boston, he proclaimed that slaves possessed inherent and unalienable rights, that the churches did nothing for the enslaved, that the nonslaveholding states were complicit in the guilt of slaveholding, and that with freedom and education blacks would be equal to whites in every way. The time to act, he declared, was now: “If we cannot conquer the monster in his infancy, while his cartilages are tender and his limbs powerless, how shall we escape his wrath when he goes forth a gigantic cannibal, seeking whom he may devour. If we cannot safely unloose two millions of slaves now, how shall we unbind upwards of TWENTY MILLIONS at the close of the present century?”15
It did not take Garrison long to find an object for scorn and derision, a target for the words that fired forth with such intensity. When he discovered that a fellow townsman from Newburyport, Francis Todd, owned the brig Francis, which transported seventy slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans, it was too much for him to take. “I am resolved to cover in thick infamy all who are concerned in this nefarious business,” he proclaimed. In a November 1829 issue of the Genius, he excoriated Todd and the boat’s captain for their participation in the domestic slave trade. Exposing the source of their wealth, he labeled them “enemies of their own species—highway robbers and murderers.” “Unless they speedily repent,” Garrison warned, they would one day “occupy the lowest depths of perdition.” For his vituperative comments, Garrison faced criminal and civil charges of libel. Following a brief trial, the editor was found guilty and fined fifty dollars and costs. He refused to pay, and authorities imprisoned him in the Baltimore jail for seven weeks in 1830 until a wealthy New York abolitionist, Lewis Tappan, paid the fine.16
Those weeks in jail transformed Garrison. From his cell, he wrote Todd: “I am in prison for denouncing slavery in a free country! You, who have assisted in oppressing your fellow-creatures, are permitted to go at large, and to enjoy the fruits of your crime.” Garrison’s rage deepened as he contemplated the injustice of his treatment. An editorial in his former paper, the Newburyport Herald, called him vain and vehement. Garrison responded: “If I am prompted by ‘vanity’ in pleading for the poor, degraded, miserable Africans, it is at least a harmless, and, I hope, will prove a useful vanity … a vanity calculated to draw down the curses of the guilty … a vanity that promises to its possessor nothing but neglect, poverty, sorrow, reproach, persecution, and imprisonment.” As for vehemence, “the times and the cause” demanded it, because “truth can never be sacrificed, and justice is eternal. Because great crimes and destructive evils ought not to be palliated, or great sinners applauded.” From his cell, Garrison witnessed firsthand the effects of slavery as he heard slave auctions conducted and observed as masters came to reclaim their fugitive slaves. He made eye contact with the enslaved and came to compare his own situation, his own “captivity,” to their fate.17
In prison, Garrison experienced a final awakening. His confinement led him to identify so strongly with the sufferings of the enslaved that he felt he would burst if forced to endure one more day. To be sure, one can find in pre-Baltimore Garrison the views of post-Baltimore Garrison. But his prison experience liberated him: “The court may shackle the body, but it cannot pinion the mind.” Garrison imagined what it meant to die unfree, to be made “an abject slave, simply because God has given a skin not colored like his master’s; and Death, the great liberator, alone can break his fetters!”
Garrison fled Baltimore and found his way back to Boston, where in the fall he announced plans to start a newspaper that would insist upon the immediate abolition of slavery. He called it The Liberator and proclaimed that the slaves must be freed not in death but in life. Garrison sought public absolution from what he now saw as his earlier sinful belief that “the emancipation of all the slaves of this generation is most assuredly out of the question.” On January 1, 1831, Garrison offered “a full and unequivocal recantation” of the gradualist position that left millions to die in slavery. He begged “pardon of my God, of my country, and of my brethren the poor slaves, for having uttered a sentiment so full of timidity, injustice, and absurdity.”18
No one would ever again accuse Garrison of timidity. He not only agitated for the immediate abolition of slavery in the South, he also struggled for the equal rights of free blacks in the North. In June, he attended a convention of free people of color in Philadelphia. “I never rise to address a colored audience,” he confessed, “without being ashamed of my own color.” With Independence Day celebrations a few weeks away, Garrison admitted, “If any colored man can feel happy on the Fourth of July, it is more than I can do … . I cannot be happy when I look at the burdens under which the free people of color labor.” “You are not free,” he lamented, “you are not sufficiently protected in your persons and rights.” Garrison saw hope in the Constitution of the United States, which “knows nothing of white or black men; it makes no invidious distinctions with regard to color or condition of free inhabitants; it is broad enough to cover your persons; it has power enough to vindicate your rights. Thanks be to God that we have such a Constitution.” But just as Garrison came to see through gradual schemes of emancipation, so too did he lose faith in the Constitution when he recognized that, through such provisions as the three-fifths and fugitive-slave clauses, it defended slavery. Setting the document on fire, the flames lapping at his fingertips, he condemned the Constitution as a proslavery compact, “a covenant with death, an agreement with hell.”
Garrison urged free blacks to embrace temperance, industry, and piety as the means to rise. He recommended trades and education, seeing “no reason why your sons should fail to make as ingenious and industrious mechanics, as any white apprentices,” and calling “knowledge of the alphabet … the greatest gift which a parent can bestow upon his child.” He had special hopes for the creation of a black college in New Haven that would combine manual arts with higher education. “What Yale College … has done for the whites,” he wished, “may in time be done by the new college for the colored people.” The delegates in Philadelphia agreed to raise ten thousand dollars in support of the school.19
The citizens of New Haven had other ideas. At a meeting on September 10, the mayor and aldermen resolved that a black college
would be “destructive of the best interests of the City,” and that, since slavery did not exist in Connecticut, and the college tacitly supported the immediate emancipation of slaves, a black college represented “an unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other States.” Abolitionists had miscalculated. They had selected New Haven because of the “friendly, pious, generous, and humane” residents of the town and were mortified by the way in which “a sober and christian community … rush[ed] together to blot out the first ray of hope for the blacks.” The hypocrisy about not interfering with internal concerns was galling. After all, these same citizens sent flour and supplies to support revolutionaries in Poland, and evinced outrage over Georgia’s treatment of the Cherokee Indians, yet themselves treated free blacks with the same disdain. A “Dialogue in Two Acts,” printed in the New-Haven Register, exposed the contradictions:
FRIEND: Have you heard the Georgians are driving off the Indians?
PUBLIC SPIRIT: Yes! And my blood boils with indignation at the deed … . It is astonishing that in this christian country, the precepts of religion and humanity are so grossly violated … . Let us declare in the face of the world that we wage eternal war against ignorance and oppression … .
FRIEND: Have you heard of the proposition to establish a College in this place for the improvement of the colored youth? …
PUBLIC SPIRIT: Colored youth! What do you mean, Nigger College in this place! … Have you lost your senses! … Give a liberal education to a black man! Look at the consequences! Why the first thing he will do when educated will be to run right off and cut the throats of our Southern brethren; or if he should stay among us he will soon get to feel himself almost equal to the whites … . Send them off to Africa, their native country, where they belong.20
Samuel J. May, Unitarian minister in Brooklyn, Connecticut, and contributor to The Liberator, warned of the consequences of such prejudice. He despaired that whites were “shamefully indifferent to the injuries inflicted upon our colored brethren” and declared that “we are implicated in the guilt” of the slaves’ oppression. Arguing that “men are apt to dislike most those whom they have injured most,” he concluded that the intensity of racial prejudice was deepened “by the secret consciousness of the wrong we are doing them.” “The slaves are men,” alerted May. “They are already writhing in their shackles,” he observed on July 3, and will “one day throw them off with vindictive violence.”21
Among the many subjects broached in the pages of The Liberator in its first months of publication, slave insurrections received special attention. The focus of discussion was a brief work published by David Walker in the fall of 1829 and now in its third printing: Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Walker had been born free in North Carolina, part of a growing, mainly urban, community of artisans, day laborers, and farmhands whose freedom dated from a spate of manumissions that followed the American Revolution. He traveled throughout the South and North before settling in Boston in the 1820s. He lectured against slavery, joined the Massachusetts General Colored Association, and served as local agent for Freedom’s Journal and Rights of All, black papers published in New York. The Appeal took the form of a preamble and four articles.
Walker began by declaring, “We (colored people of these United States) are the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began.” Rejecting all gradual, ameliorative approaches to slavery, he appealed directly to his race: “Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour.” “When shall we arise from this death-like apathy?,” he asked, “And be men!!”
Walker refuted Thomas Jefferson’s racial beliefs as expressed in Notes on the State of Virginia. According to Walker, Jefferson believed “it is unfortunate for us that our creator has been pleased to make us black,” but “we will not take his say so, for the fact.” He implored all people of color to challenge Jefferson’s judgment by showing they were men, not brutes, and by demonstrating that “man, in all ages and all nations of the earth, is the same.” The way to accomplish this was by escaping the state of ignorance in which they were kept, by overturning the tenets of slaveholding religion for a gospel of equality, and by adhering to the words of the Declaration of Independence even if white Americans would not. Sounding both millennial and revolutionary chords, Walker alerted Americans, “Your DESTRUCTION is at hand.”
Southerners sought immediately to suppress the publication and circulation of the Appeal, which nonetheless made its way into Southern ports, carried by black sailors and ship’s stewards who had been approached by antislavery agents in Boston Harbor. One bemused writer in North Carolina found it odd that, “when an old negro from Boston writes a book and sends it amongst us, the whole country is thrown into commotion.” State legislatures met in closed session and passed laws against seditious writings and slave literacy. Across the South, prohibitions on slaves’ reading, writing and preaching were enacted. The mayor of Savannah asked the mayor of Boston to arrest Walker, and newspapers reported prices as high as ten thousand dollars on the author’s head. Walker perished in 1830 under mysterious circumstances. One writer, “a colored Bostonian,” had no doubt that Walker was murdered, a casualty of “Prejudice—Pride—Avarice—Bigotry,” a “victim to the vengeance of the public.” 22
In the second issue of The Liberator, Garrison condemned Walker’s call for violence. Garrison believed in the Christian doctrine of nonresistance, that evil should not be resisted by force; moral, not violent, means would transform public opinion and bring an end to slavery. “We deprecate the spirit and tendency of this Appeal,” he wrote. “We do not preach rebellion—no but submission and peace.” And yet, while proclaiming that “the possibility of a bloody insurrection in the South fills us with dismay,” he averred that, “if any people were ever justified in throwing off the yoke of their tyrants, the slaves are that people.” Garrison also observed, “Our enemies may accuse us of striving to stir up the slaves to revenge,” but their false accusations are intended only “to destroy our influence.”
In the spring, Garrison published an extensive three-part review of the Appeal by an unidentified correspondent. The writer acknowledged that Walker was an extremist, but denied reports that the pamphlet was “the incoherent rhapsody of a blood-thirsty, but vulgar and ignorant fanatic.” Quoting at length from the text and approving Walker’s analysis, the correspondent proclaimed that insurrection was inevitable, justifiable, even commendable. He recalled:
A slave owner once said to me, “Grant your opinions to be just, if you talk so to the slaves they will fall to cutting their master’s throats.”
“And in God’s name,” I replied, “why should they not cut their master’s throats? … If the blacks can come to a sense of their wrongs, and a resolution to redress them, through their own instrumentality or that of others, I shall rejoice.”23
When word of Turner’s revolt came, Garrison did not rejoice, but neither did he denounce. “I do not justify the slaves in their rebellion: yet I do not condemn them … . Our slaves have the best reason to assert their rights by violent measures, inasmuch as they are more oppressed than others.” Noting that the “crime of oppression is national,” he directed his comments to New Englanders as well as Virginians. Indeed, it astonished him that Northern editors opposed to slavery would express support for the South. According to Garrison, Badger’s Weekly Messenger offered the “tenderest sympathy for the distresses” of the slaveholders and the New York Journal of Commerce thought it understandable that “under the circumstances the whites should be wrought up to a high pitch of excitement, and shoot down without mercy, not only the perpetrators, but all who are suspected of participation in the diabolical transaction.”24
Among those “suspected” of inciting the slaves to revolt was Garrison himself. Within several weeks of the insurrection, Southern editors were seeking information about the dissemination of abolitionist literature. The Rich
mond Enquirer asked its readers to “inform us whether Garrison’s Boston Liberator (or Walker’s appeal) is circulated in any part of this State.” The Vigilance Association of Columbia, South Carolina, offered a fifteen-hundred-dollar reward for the arrest and conviction of any white person circulating “publications of a seditious tendency.” In Georgia, the Senate passed a resolution offering a reward of five thousand dollars for Garrison’s arrest and conviction. The National Intelligencer reprinted a letter claiming that The Liberator was published “by a white man with the avowed purpose of inciting rebellion in the South” and was carried by “secret agents” who if caught should be barbecued. Northern editors also evinced hostility and pledged “to suppress the misguided efforts of … short-sighted and fanatical persons.” Garrison began receiving “anonymous letters, filled with abominable and bloody sentiments.” He published some of the letters in The Liberator on September 10. One slaveholder, writing from the nation’s capital, warned Garrison “to desist your infamous endeavors to instill into the minds of the negroes the idea that ‘men must be free.’” The prospect of martyrdom only deepened the activist’s resolve: “If the sacrifice of my life be required in this great cause, I shall be willing to make it.”25