The Project Gutenberg eBook of Right and Wrong, by Maria Weston Chapman.

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RIGHT AND WRONG

CHAPTER I. RETROSPECTION.

The position of New England in 1829, was a most cheerless one for Freedom. All the great interests of the country were nearly or remotely involved in slaveholding, through all their various arrangements, civil, ecclesiastical, mercantile and matrimonial; yet all disclaimed its alliance. Every body was, in some way or other, actively or passively, sustaining slavery; yet every body disclaimed all responsibility for its existence, opposed all efforts for its extinction, and was ‘as much anti-slavery as any body else.’ Even the natural and kindly tide of human sympathy for [Pg 4]suffering, was turned away from the service of Freedom by the Colonization Society. The moving principles of Northern and Southern life, had become inseparably mingled below the surface of events, like the roots of giant trees beneath the soil.

In the midst of this utter ignorance, iron indifference and base hypocrisy respecting that groundwork of the human soul,—its Freedom—rose up one to vindicate the grandeur and paramount importance of its universal claim. He was young—unknown—poor:—“lord of his presence, and no wealth beside.” But he had that best of all educations, self-education, and that best of all qualifications for his work, an entire devotedness to the principles of liberty which he had espoused. Every step he took, was characteristic. He was enabled by his ability as a writer, his skill as a practical mechanic, and his laborious self-denial, to issue the first number of a periodical, without having obtained a single subscriber. To him and to the principles he advocated, the important thing was to find readers; which the power evinced in his little sheet enabled him to do. Its name was characteristic. It was neither a “journal,” nor an “observer,” nor a “register,” nor a “recorder,” nor an “examiner.” He called it THE[Pg 5] LIBERATOR. Any other name would have but feebly expressed the depth and affirmative nature of its principles. Those sacred and fundamental principles found a response in the land, though the hearts from which it came, were few and far between. The New England Anti-Slavery Society was formed; and as man after man planted himself by the side of Garrison and Knapp, a sense of duty seemed to pervade the soul of each—the duty of promulgating the truth of whose beauty and necessity his soul was then made sensible. The Liberator was not their organ, in an official sense,—but how could they conscientiously do otherwise than sustain the instrumentality which their own experience had proved so effectual?

They lectured on the subject of slavery as they found opportunity; and by circulation of the Liberator and such publications as their means could furnish, and by diligence in conversation and argument, they succeeded in arousing a portion of the community to its consideration.

Though the idea of united, concentrated moral effort, was familiar to their minds,—though the land was in fact permeated by education and missionary Societies,—though this was emphatically[Pg 6] the age of benevolence and of voluntary association, yet a mighty preparation of heart was needed in every individual who listened to this call of Liberty, before he could resolve to avail himself of similar means for the promulgation of her great principles: principles, which, lying deeper than the shallow foundations of the popular benevolent enterprises of the day, were identical with those of Christianity herself.

Christianity, in every age, has ever presented herself as the antagonist of its crying abomination. The same in spirit, her visible appearance is modified by the giant obstacle she meets in each successive generation. Sometimes, in conflict with idolatry, she stands with her face of triumphant brightness opposed to the refined, the intellectual, and the powerful; and every step is over a crumbling altar and a prostrate priest. Sometimes, as in the days immediately preceding those of which we write, her advanced guard are casting out the unclean spirit of intemperance. In the close-succeeding years, she comes, like LIBERTY, to inhabit the dwelling from which intemperance has been banished to make room for her beatific presence.

By this call of the age for a manifestation of Christianity against slavery, were hundreds drawn together during the first two years of the existence[Pg 7] of the N. E. Anti-Slavery Association. They came from every sect, and class, and party—of every age and sex and color: and often might the feeling with which the differing sectaries beheld, each, the anxious labors of the other for the same object, and to their astonishment found how much they possessed in common, have been well expressed by the colloquy of the high caste German protestant and the despised Jew.

To establish their association on this broad and enduring foundation of sympathy and earnest union in the exercise of every means sanctioned by each member’s idea of law, humanity and religion, was the early labor of New England abolitionists. At their second annual gathering, Charles Follen offered the following resolution:—

This resolution, says the report of that year, “was sustained in a truly admirable manner, and unanimously adopted.”

The enthusiasm for liberty was sufficiently strong to overcome not only bigotry but selfishness. Indeed those who had sacrificed lucrative or honorable situations, or labored gratuitously, receiving nothing in guerdon but the misrepresentation of the oppressor, were hardly likely to yield to the temptation incident to other associated operations,—that of making them subserve the love of power or praise. Sectarianism and selfishness having been overcome, it was without any emotion but that of joyful anticipation, that the New England Society labored to carry out the following resolution, introduced by Mr. Garrison in 1833:—

These enlarged souls thought it no humiliation to take a lower seat. Their object was Liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof, and not the establishment of a powerful institution, of which they should have the control. They go on to say,—

We find them abjuring every thought of control, jurisdiction, centralization and monopoly of means and power. Voluntarily taking what in the apprehension of many would be a lower seat, they assumed the name of the Massachusetts, instead of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. The plan of a national organization, with its various [Pg 10]component parts, from state and county to town and parish societies, was skilfully planned, and its execution commenced with great spirit. There was no difficulty in obtaining funds for the use of the Executive Committee of this national association, as all the abolitionists were its members, and their confidence in the men they had selected to form this Committee, was very great. Unlike the parent and pioneer Committee, it numbered among its members men of wealth; and their liberality enabled them to send into the field numbers of able financial and lecturing agents.

At the State gatherings and New England Conventions, these agents were wont to take donations and pledges, which Massachusetts abolitionists, with their characteristic disinterestedness, were anxious to make, that the central committee might be supplied, even though it drained the State Society of its resources.

A practical difficulty soon became obvious. Some, meaning to pledge money to the State Society, found their pledge received as to the National Society—others, meaning to sustain the National, found their pledge recorded as to the State; and great confusion, both in the accounts of the agents, and in the minds of[Pg 11] abolitionists, was the consequence. Notwithstanding this, the work went most encouragingly forward;—all being delighted with the efficiency of the National Society, however inconvenient and depressing, in a business sense, its mode of operation might be, and however the action of the State Society was paralyzed by the labors of its financial agents. Still it was thought that some arrangement might be devised by which to obviate the uncertainty and inconvenience which the double draft of funds occasioned; and at the last quarterly meeting of the Massachusetts Society in 1835, a committee was appointed to consider the subject. They reported that the then existing arrangements were very embarrassing to the Massachusetts Society; but no plan was adopted for more convenient ones.

This was the situation and bearing of the fiscal arrangements at the beginning of 1836.

Meanwhile the grand battle had been going powerfully on, and the energies of all were severely tasked. The enthusiasm for the cause had overleaped not only sectarian divisions, but the “graceful feebleness,” which the age cherished as an ornament in the female character. The women of the cause, in the difficult times of 1835,[Pg 12] were peculiarly active. They devoted themselves to the work of obtaining signatures to petitions with commendable energy. A history of their progress from door to door, with the obstacles they encountered, would be at once touching, ludicrous, and edifying. Young women, whose labors depended on public opinion, laid the claims of the enslaved to freedom before those whose simple word might grant or deny their own means of subsistence. Benevolent-looking elderly gentlemen, individuals of the highest respectability and influence in the community, were wont to witness the appeal kindly, favoring the applicant with good advice as to her future course.

“My dear young lady, it gives me pain to see your efforts so entirely wasted. You only injure the cause you espouse by thus leaving your sphere. You actually prevent those who are capable of understanding this question, and whom their sex points out as the only proper persons to consider it, from entering upon its consideration. You make the whole matter seem little, and below the attention of men.” But the women judged for themselves, and very rationally too, that the women whose efforts for the cause could not be hindered by men, were more valuable auxiliaries[Pg 13] than the men whose dignity forbade them to be fellow-laborers with women.

The individual and collective energy of the community, both moral and physical, was that year employed to keep women from leaving what was termed “their appropriate sphere,” by petitioning and holding the meetings of their respective Societies; but in vain.

Their sole reply to the restrictive efforts of the public, was conveyed in such resolutions as the following:—“Resolved, that, in a conflict of principles, we believe Scripture to teach that there is neither bond or free, male or female, foreigner or native; but all are one in Christ Jesus; and therefore feel ourselves called in common with man, to toil and suffer, as all must, who effectually defend the truth.” Manifold were the pretences under which men disguised their hatred to freedom. From the beginning, those who professed to be thoroughly opposed to Slavery in the abstract, (such was the cant phrase of that time,) had concealed their hatred to liberty under the guise of dislike to the measures of abolitionists. As those measures were entirely unexceptionable in reality, the pretence settled down into a stereotyped aversion to harsh language. Under this term, were comprehended that faithfulness to[Pg 14] principle, accuracy of moral classification, appropriateness of style to subject, and strict impartiality which the effects of Mr. Garrison’s example had been to make general in the cause. It was this example of fidelity which made an expression of confidence in him, or an expression of approbation of his course, equivalent to a test-act. There are so many persons who will assent to an abstractly righteous proposition, though they start back in alarm from righteousness personified, that it was fortunate for the cause, if such were prevented by his faithfulness from clogging it with their useless numbers.

The most delightful and at the same time the most surprising feature of the Anti-Slavery cause was the harmonious co-operation of all engaged in its advancement. Delightful, because rare in any circumstances,—surprising, because the materials of which the Society was formed, were, to human eye, so discordant. But each member, in virtue of a clear perception of the truth that the whole is greater than a part, when sect came in collision with the universal cause of freedom, made the less give way to the greater, and each was zealously and kindly watchful, not to enforce his distinctive opinions, in religion or politics, on his brother. Seeing that his brother had religious[Pg 15] and political principles of his own, he contented himself with urging their constant application to the case of the enslaved. This watchfulness was perhaps more careful in Massachusetts, than in any other state. Abolition there had been a growth and not a manufacture; and it was observable that the more devoted was the zeal of the abolitionists, the more enlarged was their toleration. It was neither natural nor desirable that differences of opinion should not occasionally appear in Abolition meetings, but their appearance was never the signal of wrath and clamor.

The great hope of the association was that the church might be roused by its instrumentality to put forth her moral power against slavery; and at the New England convention of 1836, a resolution was proposed declaring that a church using its influence to delay and prevent the fulfilment of the will of Christ, has no claim to be considered his; and that only those churches who employed their associated influence for reform, should be considered the true and real church of God. Elizur Wright objected to any resolution which would divide the church;—our object was to purify. Rev. Mr. Peckham followed him, declaring that this Convention, not being an ecclesiastical body, was not qualified to sit in judgment[Pg 16] on the churches. Many of the members of the Convention were not, he said, even church members, and therefore it was improper for them to sit in judgment on the conduct of church members. Should we say to this man, who is an abolitionist, Stand thou here, and to another, who is opposed to abolition, Stand thou there? Were there no spots upon our own garments, which those we undertake to sever from the church might point out? On the question of abolition he was ready to go as far as any Anti-Slavery man he ever saw; but when a measure was proposed that must divide the churches, he must oppose it. The Rev. Geo. Allen, of Shrewsbury, thought the passage of a resolution dangerous which might be followed by denunciation, vituperation and division of the churches. The resolution was recommitted. Subsequently one was offered by Rev. J. T. Woodbury, enforcing discipline and excommunication of slaveholders. The strong words of truth he uttered on that occasion sank deep into the hearts of hundreds who heard them, and influence their conduct to this day.

A graphic picture, distinct as just, and yet there sat a few in this very convention “ready to go as far as any Anti-Slavery man they ever saw,” who deprecated division on Anti-Slavery ground, though their general principle was, to hold no fellowship with immorality. The resolution of Mr. Woodbury passed, with but one dissenting voice. Mr. Sewall, who voted in the negative, and Mr. May, who declined voting on the question, explained their conduct by stating that they “entertained doubts whether any body of Christians had a right to exclude a man from the communion table at all.” At the same time they heartily agreed with the Abolition spirit of the resolution, and thought it the duty of Christians who believe in the propriety of this discipline in the church to vote for it. In the course of the Convention, a resolution was presented, involving a personal pledge from each member, of life and fortune and honor to the cause; and well-remembered words of fervent solemnity yet sound in the ears of those who were then adjured to stand firm, “come what might.” Women were earnestly entreated to assist the passage of this resolution, and almost all present united in it.

The ecclesiastical opposition to the cause could[Pg 20] not fail to be brought out in bold relief by the proceedings of this Convention. During the whole year, its workings were manifest, and at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Society in 1837, its efforts were successfully exerted in reducing the Abolitionists to the necessity of meeting in a stable. Though the church cast its whole weight in their way, the State was less obstinate in its opposition, and the use of the State House was permitted for one session of the Society. Mr. Stanton wished that this yielding on the part of the State might be considered as a keen rebuke to those churches which had refused their houses of worship, that we might plead in them the cause of 2,000,000 of American heathen. Mr. Fitch deprecated this “turning aside” to remark upon the obstacles cast in our way. He feared there was danger of losing sight of the end of our organization as an Anti-Slavery Society. “We should not let these efforts for free discussion so absorb our minds. Let us think of the infinitely more oppressive wrongs of the poor slave.” There was an indefinable something in these remarks, which revealed an entire want of comprehension of the hearts of abolitionists in general. Was it for themselves, then, that they made these efforts,[Pg 21] and administered these rebukes? Were not their thoughts riveted on the Slave? and was not this fixedness of determination the very cause of their rebukes, and of their efforts for free discussion? Free discussion of what? Why, of the Slaves’ wrongs and the means of righting them! and yet this incomprehensible jargon about turning aside!

During the succeeding meetings, the Anti-Slavery spirit swelled high and strong. The Liberator was warmly sustained by all the friends present, among whom were Messrs. Chaplin, Walker, May, and Stanton. “The inquiry is often made of me,” said Mr. Stanton, “why does not the American Society sustain it? The answer is, Let Massachusetts sustain it, as she ought.” Mr. St. Clair, in particular, expressed the warmest eulogy on the Liberator. Mr. Garrison spoke as one knowing the folly of being elevated by human applause, or depressed by human censure; he remarked that it was neither his aim nor expectation, to please every subscriber. “It must suffice that free discussion is my motto, and those who are opposed to me in sentiment are always invited to occupy a place.” Political action, as one of the modes contemplated by the Society, was adverted to.[Pg 22] Mr. Stanton introduced a resolution, affirming that the people of Massachusetts ought not to vote for an upholder of slavery. Mr. Garrison warmly seconded the resolution.

At the New-England Convention of 1837, Mr. Phelps followed up the efforts upon the church, by a series of resolutions, accompanied by most convincing reasons, urging the necessity of the excommunication of slaveholders, and a solemn consideration of the question whether, the churches remaining obdurate, it be not the duty of the advocates of truth and righteousness to “come out from among them, and be separate.” These resolutions were heartily approved by the Convention, with the exception of the Rev. Samuel Lee. The argument by Mr. Peckham, in 1836, that this Convention was not an ecclesiastical body, and that many of its members were unconnected with any church, weighed much in the mind of Mr. Lee. He represented that the brethren present, ought to consider, before adopting the resolutions, the manner in which they would be met by the associations of the Ministry. They will say that this Convention was composed of men who hold that Christ is God, and must be worshipped as such, and others who deny this, and believe it[Pg 23] idolatry so to worship him; again there are others who make no pretensions to religion, but trample under foot the blood of Christ: now they will say, these persons come together in an Anti-Slavery Convention, conniving at each other’s sins, and then pass resolutions touching a particular sin about which the church differs. There were a great many ministers engaged in this good work, but though we were abolitionists, must not the ministers of the church stand up for the church, and protect her walls from being thrown down? These resolutions proposed to divide the church—that would be the effect. They would be an entering wedge. They would be driven home by the newspapers and other influences, till the church was severed. Subsequently Mr. Lee gave his brethren a word of caution not to say too much against the church. Bad as it was, it was the light of the world; and if we wanted to save the world, we must preserve the church of Christ on earth.

The Convention sat uneasily under this speech. Its spirit was faithfully and eloquently opposed, and the resolutions were adopted with but three dissenting voices; one, Mrs. Fifield of Weymouth, on the ground that it was too great an assumption[Pg 24] of power in man to exclude his brother from the table of the Lord. The Rev. George Trask introduced a resolution on the subject of peace, as connected with abolition, which was sustained by William Goodell and others. Mr. Goodell said that he was a peace man, and had he not supposed the American Anti-Slavery Society to be also a Peace Society, he never should have joined it. A discussion ensued respecting the declaration of sentiment and constitution of the Society. Some thought the Peace principles were involved in them, some not, according to their different ideas of the extent of these principles.

The discussion had continued two hours, when Mr. Garrison arose. “Brethren,” he said, “you all know my views on this subject. They cover the extreme ground of non-resistance, and so, in my understanding of it, does this resolution. Let me say to Brother Goodell, that I think he, on further thought, would not wish to adopt it, neither do I think the Assembly ready to pass it. This is neither the place nor the occasion. Let us stop discussing it now.” The resolution was moulded into the shape of a re-affirmation of pacific principles, as set forth in the Declaration of sentiment of the National Convention in 1833,[Pg 25] and in that modified form unanimously adopted.

Many of the members of this meeting had their minds firmly anchored on the ultra non-resistance principle. They saw it through their abolition principles, as the eye fastens upon the farthest surface of a diamond through the transparent medium of the nearest; yet they felt that it was not the business of Anti-Slavery organizations as such, to come to a decision upon it, and they were desirous to wave its consideration. Who could have foretold that these very persons, and Mr. Garrison in particular, were hereafter to be arraigned as loading the cause with foreign topics?

Up to this point of time, May, 1837, the hearts of the abolitionists were united as the heart of one. Exceptions did exist to the general love and harmony, but they were very rare. As a general rule, the mobs, misrepresentations, and threats of prosecution at common law, seemed to unite them the closer. Each strove to shelter the rest from whatever storm of opposition they were called to share. They defended each other from the charge of harsh and unchristian feelings and language—they called for, and recorded[Pg 26] the votes of women—they unanimously declared in solemn assembly, that they, as abolitionists, believed that the anti-slavery cause was one, with regard to which all human beings, whether men or women, citizens or foreigners, white or colored, had the same duties and the same rights—they passed resolutions of thanks for the co-operation of women, under the unusual and difficult duties that devolved upon them. In vain were the noise of the waves, and the tumult of the people; they broke harmlessly against this rock-founded fortress.

CHAPTER II. THE CLERICAL APPEAL.

The re-action of the church, in consequence of such an effort as the one made by this Convention, was greater than some who had fancied themselves abolitionists were able to bear. Compelled to choose between their pro-slavery brethren of the church and ministry and their brethren of the abolition cause, they shrunk from the latter. Their efforts to justify themselves in cramping the cause, that they might avoid its reproach, constitute an era in its progress, known as the “Boston Controversy.” The plan originated with five clergymen of Boston and vicinity, the Rev. Messrs. Charles Fitch, Joseph H. Towne, Jonas Perkins, David [Pg 28]Sandford, and William Cornell. When the ecclesiastical tumult swelled high, their hearts were stirred up with it, as the water of inland wells is said to rise and fall with the ebb and flow of the bitter ocean tide without.

Their appeal commenced with an acknowledgment of the sins of their brethren, in the use of harsh language, and an accusation of the most prominent abolitionists, of an unkind, improper and unchristian course, as such, assuming as one of the principles of action in the cause, that it must not be presented in a “brother’s pulpit,” when by so doing a brother might be aggrieved. This last assumption was in direct contradiction to the motto of every pulpit, as well as in defiance of the professed principles of every christian minister to “cry aloud and spare not” in the promulgation of truth, and “to show the people their transgressions,”—“whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear.”

The accusation of harsh language was robbed of its power by the heavily charged and indiscriminate epithets which some of the appellants themselves were accustomed to use. Having no standard within themselves by which to graduate their language, the quality of their labors was [Pg 29]regulated by the market principle of demand and supply. The respective churches in Boston, to which two of them had been called from the country to minister, had more fame (or infamy, as the world counted it) on account of abolition, than they deserved. The appellants soon ascertained that the market was fluctuating, and they also fluctuated and fell. Ignorant of the general temperature of the abolition mind without, they fancied it in correspondence with that under their immediate observation, and took the ill-considered step of appealing before the world from the requisitions of their own acknowledged principles of action with regard to the preaching of acknowledged truth.

It must be remembered, in excuse of clergymen who in this stage of the cause put their hands to the plough and turned back, that the laudable desire of the National Society to have the field filled with agents had induced some to enter it whose preparation of heart was altogether unequal to the work. They yielded to circumstances and to entreaties, rather than to convictions of duty and love of the cause. Some too had been prematurely urged into the anti-slavery ranks by the anxiety of the women of their respective congregations to obtain the influence of their names for the cause. This[Pg 30] practice of making those life members who are but slightly interested in the cause, however well calculated to swell the funds of popular societies, and secure the efforts of the ministry in their favor, has been productive of nothing but mischief in Anti-Slavery Societies, and it is to be hoped that no persons will hereafter be subjected to the painful alternative of accepting a testimony of regard of which they are unworthy, or of acknowledging enmity to the cause of Freedom. Let no one be constituted a life member, whose own heart has not so wrought upon his life as to make it clear that his membership is something more than a payment of fifteen dollars.

The clerical appeal was, in fact, an invitation to the leaders of the opposing host of clergymen, to come and take the direction of the Anti-Slavery cause. The former character of its signers as abolitionists—their confident tone, and the suddenness of the movement, drew general attention and remark. A lively sensation ensued throughout New England.

The appellants reported that they were cheered on by nine tenths of their brother clergymen. This increased the agitation; for the abolitionists had found, from the beginning, their most active[Pg 31] opponents among this class of men. Coming, as it did, immediately after the claim of the Mass. General Association of Ministers, for more respect and for the exclusion of agitating topics, the appeal identified its originators with the opposing ministry, and disjoined them from abolitionists. It was already seen of all, that this new principle of suppressing the truth when the truth gives offence, would, if generally adopted, completely extinguish the Anti-Slavery cause. Merchants, who had received hints that they were to be hissed off ’Change, for bringing their principles into daily practice,—lawyers, whose clients had deserted them in disgust when the pictures of kneeling slaves found room in their places of business,—women, who had been proscribed from their respective social circles for making a morning call the medium of presenting a petition,—all perceived that this case was the parallel of their own, and demanded of a clergyman that he should resist his temptations to a sinful neglect of duty as well as themselves. They also exclaimed against the unworthy idea of yielding up, on demand, those whose very faithfulness was the origin of all the outcry. A whisper was circulated by the friends of the clerical appeal, that[Pg 32] struggle was useless, that they were sustained not only without but within the camp, that the Executive Committee at New York did not disapprove of their doings, and that it had been decided at head quarters “to cast off Garrison.” This facilitated the general movement of every eye to New York. Societies and individuals loudly protested against the treachery to the cause, the treachery to their own religious principles of action, and the treachery to their comrades of which the appeal was the vehicle.—The religious world, through all its various organs of communication with the universal public, set up a shout of triumph. From Maine to the Potomac, and from the Atlantic to the Ohio, the “Appeal” was the subject of conversation with all to whom the name of abolition was familiar. The Anti-Slavery editors in every state, discerned the spiritual peril as clearly as if it had been a combat before the bodily eye, and all spoke out for the right, except the Emancipator, the organ of the Committee at New York, and James G. Birney, then editor of the Philanthropist in Cincinnati. His misapprehension of the case was excused by those whom he condemned, and accounted for by the fact of his great distance from[Pg 33] the seat of the conflict. The appellants, however, triumphantly claimed him as their own. Mr. Garrison, and the editor pro tem. of the Liberator, Mr. Johnson, were forcible and conclusive in their treatment of the case. Mr. Phelps, whose services as general agent of the Massachusetts Society, some members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society forseeing this emergency, had made great exertions to secure, came boldly up, to fill the breach where his presence was so needful and desirable. The vigor of his assault quickly dislodged the appellants from their new position “in a brother’s pulpit.” But he received no thanks for his good service, from the committee at New York. Every church, every Anti-Slavery Society, was convulsed by the struggle—still no voice came from the central citadel. The Clerical appellants meanwhile went on, as diverging lines ever will, widening the distance between themselves and rectitude. The Massachusetts Association of the Ministry had, two months previously, given currency to the idea that the abolition cause had wrought deterioration in the female character. The appellants made this idea, too, their own. Mr. Woodbury, now an agent of the American Society, the same who[Pg 34] had thrown down the gauntlet to the pro-slavery church in 1836, chimed in with the appeal, and suggested in addition, that the opinions of Mr. Garrison on other subjects were just cause of offence in him, and that their incidental expression in the Liberator was a high misdemeanor. The appellants eagerly adopted this suggestion also; and explained to the public, and endeavored to convince abolitionists, that the toleration of women as free agents in the cause—the holding George Fox’s views of the Sabbath—or embracing the principles of non-resistance, afforded a just ground for excluding the offending individuals from the Societies. “Let them go out from among us,” they said, “for they are not of us; and the Massachusetts Society must have a new organ.” Mr. Phelps, at this time standing under a load of ignominy with the leaders of his denomination, and publicly threatened by the Recorder, their periodical, that Mr. Garrison’s “brother Phelps” would soon find his present position an unenviable one, succumbed to this new shape of an attack, which, under its first guise, he had met so boldly. Like the prince of Arabian story, he yielded to the insulting outcries which burst out around him,—turned his face from the ascent,[Pg 35] and at that moment underwent the transformation to which the prince’s change into a little black stone by the way-side, is analogous.

It is astonishing that these men should not have been aware that on the abolition platform their own sect stood but on a level with others, and that Sabbatarian or Anti-Sabbatarian, man or woman, clergyman or layman, voter or non-voter, warrior or non-resistant, must be measured by their consistency and energy in applying each his own religious views, to effect the abolition of slavery. But they had yielded to that fear of man that bringeth a snare, and suffered themselves to be overcome by pro-slavery influence, scantily disguised as sectarian zeal.

This pro-slavery influence was wielded by the leaders of the sect to which the appellants belonged, with a skill and industry which the Anti-Slavery party would have done well to imitate. This pretended zeal, stimulated as it was by the hope of securing the approbation of wealthy and influential men of business, who sustained the double character of panders of slavery and pillars of churches, was not without its reward. The leading commercial and religious journals played into each others’ hands, and, from the daily and[Pg 36] weekly press of that period, it appears that great numbers of clergymen, of known hostility to the cause, had contrived to signify that some movement of this kind would afford them a pretence for joining it, while, at the same time, such a movement would operate as an assurance that the cause should no longer be urged forward with the speed and effect that rouses the spirit of persecution. Men who had dreaded suffering, and felt mortification at the idea of becoming followers (so they understood it) of the bold, plain, uncompromising, untitled Garrison, hoped, by means of this stepping-stone, to escape the reproach of their consciences, without sacrificing their parishes or their pride.

The active appellants were but two in number; but from time to time they kept the public informed of the encouragement they received. One, who entered into their feelings with the most ardent sympathy, was the Rev. Charles T. Torrey, then of Providence. He declared that “their appeal gave him unmingled satisfaction—that it would be sustained by others;”—and bade them “thank God and take courage, in view of the Liberator’s abuse.”

As weeks went on, it became evident, through[Pg 37] the columns of the paper in which the clerical appeal first appeared, that the cloak of bigotry and intolerance was to be added to the garment of sectarian zeal, which had at first been employed to hide their want of attachment to the cause. There was talk of a “common ground,” which yet must not be profaned by the feet of those abolitionists who were not of one particular communion. Great preference of the National Society was expressed, (though it counted as many heretics among its numbers as did the Massachusetts Society;) because the members of the Executive Committee chanced to be members also of sects which the appellants considered Orthodox. Much exertion was made in the Theological Seminary, at Andover, to obtain recruits for this new, exclusive “common ground,” and thirty-nine young candidates for the ministerial office came up to its defence.

Meanwhile, the claims of this clerical exclusiveness were adjudged by the great body of abolitionists, to be in an attitude of antagonism with the principles of Freedom. How can he free the slave, they argued, who is occupied in imposing fetters upon the free? How can he love liberty, who is acting in defiance of her first principles?[Pg 38] Are not things which are equal to the same things equal to one another?

The Massachusetts Society met at Worcester, to take action upon this attempt to destroy its broad foundation of religious freedom and toleration; and, disclaiming the exercise of judgment, in their associated capacity, upon any man’s private opinions, the members deemed it their duty to brand inconsistency with one’s own standard of action, as treachery to the cause.

Amasa Walker, a man peculiarly qualified to speak to such a question, being a zealous member of the same sect as the appellants, manifested, upon this occasion, rectitude and steadfastness worthy of a sect so nobly founded, and, until the present day, so nobly sustained. He explained the causes and developed the real character of the appeal, stripping it of its mask of love for the slave, and zeal for the church of God.

Dr. Osgood, of Springfield, was disposed to admit the justice of the charge of harsh language against prominent abolitionists, but he made an exception in favor of Mr. Birney. He thought himself as thorough as it was possible for any man to be in the cause. He had labored for its success wherever he went. “I have,” said he,[Pg 39] “pleaded for it in stage-coaches and steam-boats. I have argued in its behalf in conversation. I have never yet introduced it into my pulpit:—if I had done so, I should have grieved away some of my best people.”

A condemnation was, notwithstanding, expressed against the idea that one man’s wishes or sense of propriety, are the proper measure of the rights and duties of another.

Being thus hindered in their attempt to change the nature and foundation principles of the Massachusetts Society, the appellants strove to destroy it by forming a new organization on the basis of sectarianism, to be auxiliary to the National Society. Mr. Phelps, though somewhat disappointed at the result of the whole campaign, in the utter discomfiture of clerical abolitionism, and vexed that the Massachusetts abolitionists insisted upon evidence of repentance from the clerical appellants, before again placing confidence in them, was still not quite prepared to relinquish his hold upon the old society.

This unwillingness was strengthened by the fact, that the strings of management of the new one were not proffered to his hands. When he learned that the call for a convention to form it was not a[Pg 40] free and general one, but limited to those who were quite decided to quit the Massachusetts Society, and that the important arrangements were all to be settled beforehand, and only the trifling details left to the discretion of the Convention; then, and not till then, he publicly warned abolitionists against putting themselves to the trouble of “doing up Mr. Somebody’s details,” and expressed the hope that the few towns in the Commonwealth that had responded to the new movement, might remain as they were, a few. Orange Scott, one of the most conspicuous of the Methodist abolitionists, exclaimed against the narrow exclusive dividing spirit which was at work, and zealously defended the common cause from its attacks.

Their advice, with the indefatigable labors of Mr. Garrison, cast a damp upon the embryo mischief. But, excited, as Mr. Phelps’s sympathies had been, for his clerical brethren, and alarmed as he had felt at the outcry of heresy they had raised against Mr. Garrison, he could not go on in the work, as aforetime, with a free, untroubled soul. He had previously entered into a correspondence with Professor Smyth, of Maine, a friend of the clerical appeal, respecting the necessity of reforming the Massachusetts Society of its characteristic[Pg 41] freedom, and the means by which that reform could be effected without alarming the sagacious watchfulness of Mr. Garrison;[1] and at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Society, warmly opposed that part of the annual report which condemned the appeal as treacherous to the cause.

Events seldom pass for what they are worth, at the time they transpire; and these signs and tokens

seemed inconsequential to most of those who observed them. The abolitionists had reposed unbounded confidence in Mr. Phelps, and could not brook to have their souls darkened by suspicion of one so well beloved. In watching the train of human events, how often are we admonished to praise no man unreservedly while yet he lives;—to rest our hearts upon no human excellence that is not

We must pause here, and settle in our memories the positions of individuals and societies at this period, if we would understand the times which come after. We must take the bearings and distances of the cause in 1837, if we would possess a chart for our safe guidance among the shoals and quicksands of 1839.

First, let us note the position of the Executive Committee at New York. Blind to the crisis or unequal to it, they labored to preserve neutrality in a case involving the preservation or the sacrifice of principle; and pronounced the whole affair to be “entirely local—a mere Boston controversy.” Of the three tests of fidelity, they stood firm under the application of but two. They were untrue to principles in keeping silence at such a moment, but they were not positively and openly faithless to men, and they vindicated the broad platform of the original Anti-Slavery agreement. They perceived the derangement that a hostile and proscriptive organization in Massachusetts would occasion in the whole Anti-Slavery system of organized action and did not recognize any such society as a part of the affiliation. But the feebleness that marked their course, at that trying crisis, deprived them of the perfect love[Pg 43] and confidence that had till then been felt in them by all the abolitionists. This feebleness and neutrality was, however, a recommendation to those whose estimation is a dispraise. The opposer of the cause instinctively felt that, without any change in his own position, the distance between himself and the New York Committee was somewhat lessened: while the devoted friends were made aware that that committee, notwithstanding its activity in keeping in motion the smaller machinery of the cause, and its ability in conducting the tract and book department, was yet the weak point of the whole Anti-Slavery array. All attentive beholders, whether friends or foes, were taught, by the observation of this period, that the machinery of organization, with all its systematized and mechanical helps, must be utterly unequal to obtain emancipation, unless freedom be the moving “spirit within the wheels;”—that, however efficient may be the appliances and means that money can set in motion, there are moments when one trumpet-blast of victorious truth, were worth them all. The friends in Massachusetts in vain continued to “look southward with upbraiding eye;”—there was no voice nor any that answered to their condemnation of[Pg 44] the base metal which could not stand the furnace of the times. They therefore made their own expression of opinion the more emphatic, and their own testimony the more clear.

The Boston Female Society bore faithful witness to the truth, notwithstanding the reluctance of its President, Vice-President, Treasurer, and Recording Secretary. These officers ran well while they fancied the enterprise under the blessing and direction of a portion of the ministry. But, no sooner did it appear that they must advance alone and self-sustained, than they turned to flight, and from that moment became, in their measure, an obstacle to the cause, and a detriment to the society hitherto so active.

The appellants, recreant to the three grounds of fidelity in the Anti-Slavery cause, fidelity to the principles—to the platform—and to their comrades, were announcing their intention to weep in secret places. Mr. Phelps, faithful to the first ground, but treacherous to the two last, was endeavoring, unknown to his comrades of the Massachusetts Board, to change the original character of the Society, and at the same time to[Pg 45] sustain the office of its General Agent. Mr. Stanton, the most prominent Agent of the New York Committee in Massachusetts, was wanting to the fundamental principle of immediateism, in keeping silence on the first ground of the appeal;—to the mutual agreement that all sects were, in the Anti-Slavery cause, on a common platform, in keeping silence on the second ground of the appeal; and to his brethren personally, in silently seeing them attacked without standing with them on the defensive. Instead of this three-fold fidelity, he was declaring it to be impossible to “screw every body up to this high notch;” and therefore it had better not be attempted, as the work would be done at last by men who had not this devoted love for the cause, from political and interested motives; and that the requisition of higher ones, would certainly occasion division. The faithful in the cause were earnestly urging him, and all who were thus wanting to the right, to insist on the most impregnable fidelity and the most unshaken constancy, as the only aid worth having, and the only means of holding the mastery over policy and selfishness; and solemnly warning him that, when that division, to which he alluded, should take place, the short-sighted, the weak, the[Pg 46] faltering, the treacherous, the unprincipled, the base, would fall back together; while the deep-thinking, the strong, the resolute, the faithful, the well-grounded, the noble-souled, would close up and press onward.

The position of the Massachusetts Society only remains to be considered. It ceased to defray the expenses of the Liberator from its treasury, though most of the members would have rejoiced to continue to do so. But they respected the consciences of the minority, very few as they believed those to be who honestly opposed the paper, and determined, since freedom only could obtain freedom, at all events to avoid the absurdity of infringing on religious liberty.

They concurred with Mr. Garrison in the opinion that the efficacy of the paper and the consistency of the society would be best preserved by the cessation of the pecuniary connection, if it gave pain or embarrassment to the mind of a single contributor to the funds.

This did not greatly mend the matter to those who profaned the sacred name of conscience, by making it a cloak for malice and for weakness. Still Mordecai sat in the king’s gate—still it was the abolition of Massachusetts which sustained the Liberator.

The Society received the natural reward of its faithfulness, in the increase of its strength. Full of cheerful constancy, and reposing undiminished confidence in its General Agent, whose short-comings were known to but few, it pursued its course, rejoicing in freedom, with renewed determination to impart her life-giving influence to the enslaved. At the annual meeting of the National Society, an arrangement was made to obviate that clashing of the fiscal concerns and the interference of agents with each other’s track, which had been so troublesome from the first. By this arrangement, no agents were to labor in Massachusetts but in connection with the wishes of the State Board of officers, and under their direction. With this understanding, ten thousand dollars, were to be raised during the year, in this State, in quarterly payments, for the central treasury at New York. Having thus cast aside every weight and besetting sin, the society girt itself afresh, to run with patient swiftness the race set before it.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Clergymen, he intimated, must not be put forward to do it, as in that case Mr. Garrison would have a handle by which to repel the attempt; but laymen must be sought out and employed for the purpose.

CHAPTER III. THE PLOT.

The difficulties of writing the history of the past, are greatly enhanced by the scantiness of the materials: our own contemporaneous history on the contrary, seems clogged with their abundance. So many simultaneous events, seemingly of small consequence, yet all having an important bearing on each other, and proving, in reality, the hinges on which the more conspicuous ones turn;—so many threads, which the insufficiency of narration at once to combine, compels the writer to drop for a time, although he must finally travel back to pick them up, or the connections of things will but imperfectly appear;—no wonder if the Mexican method of preserving the memory of[Pg 49] events by pictures, should seem preferable to our own. A succession of paintings seems capable of presenting a much clearer view of contemporaneous transactions, than any arrangement of pages. “Narrative is linear—action is solid;” and we must overcome the difficulties of conveying the latter through means of the former, as best we may.

The spirit of Freedom had, by the energy of its advent, struck terror into the world that comprehended it not. The attempts to check its advance by means of mobs, were but as the spur in a victorious charge. The policy of the foes of Freedom became more subtle. It was now their aim, by counterfeiting the voice of truth, by continually substituting a false issue for the real one, and by assuming the guise of zeal for the institutions of religion and government, to operate influentially and as a check upon the abolition mind.—Though their first attempt, developed in the preceding chapter, was, on the whole, a signal failure, owing to the devoted love of abolitionists for their cause and for each other, yet the hatred of the New England opposition seemed to deepen as the increase of light and love exposed its malignity. The position of the ministry, generally, grew more and more uneasy, as the discrepancy between their[Pg 50] claims as ambassadors of Christ, and the character of their lives as opposed to the requisitions of his gospel, became apparent.

They had, from the very commencement of the agitation, professed themselves abolitionists in the abstract, and met the charge of inconsistency in their practice by strong disapprobation of Mr. Garrison. One might have thought, from their representations, that Mr. Garrison possessed a power over their course, by which he could actually hinder them from doing right. They addressed themselves to the work of communicating their own prejudices to the minds of their congregations, and greatly misrepresented both Mr. Garrison and the Liberator. The most false and derogatory reports were circulated as to his Christian and moral character. His blameless and excellent life nullified these efforts with all who knew him; but it is not wonderful that they should have taken effect in minds at a distance, whose only avenues to information were the ones which this malicious course choked up. It was unhesitatingly affirmed that the object of the Liberator was to abolish the office of the ministry; though its pages were searched in vain for any evidence of such an object. Nothing could there be found but proofs that slavery[Pg 51] had disqualified the great majority of the incumbents of that office from exercising it.

It was triumphantly told that the Massachusetts Society had dropped the Liberator—that Mr. Garrison was a Fanny Wright man—an infidel—a Sabbath-breaker—a bad and dangerous man—promulgating the doctrines of the French Jacobins, &c. &c.

An outcry was raised by the enemy without the camp, which was responded to by the confederates within, that Mr. Garrison was loading the cause with a burden of extraneous topics. All the careful observers of the movement were aware of the falsity of this allegation, and testified to his habitual avoidance of such topics in Anti-Slavery meetings.

In fact, such discussions were always introduced by those who complained of them the loudest. All the anti-slavery editors were in the allowed practice of incidentally introducing their own religious and other opinions, notwithstanding their papers were the organs of State Societies, and therefore bound to more caution. But it was made a subject of accusation against Mr. Garrison when he did the same, though his paper was his own, and he introduced no subjects into it unless they[Pg 52] had a practical bearing on the cause, and were at the same time considered debateable in all sects. Others might introduce column after column of extraneous matter: he was publicly accused, for a single line. Special efforts were made to induce men to cease to subscribe for the Liberator. It was, like Socrates, termed a corrupter of youth. Men of high ecclesiastical standing declared that they, though “as much abolitionists as any one else,” would never unite with the movement for abolition, as long as Mr. Garrison led the van.

The Rev. Joel Hawes, D. D., of Connecticut, was one of these. Judging of them from their ominous silence, when sectarianism had been most violent in its attacks on the integrity of the cause, he felt a drawing towards the Executive Committee at New York, and fancied them altogether such ones as himself.

His adhesion had been hailed with joy by abolitionists. They soon found reason to know that such adherents are more ruinous than open enemies, to the cause they espouse.

He travelled in Massachusetts, shortly after the New England Convention of 1838, memorable as the scene of the first attempt to exclude women from membership in anti-slavery meetings.

A number of clergymen of his own denomination, headed by Mr. Torrey and Mr. Phelps, had most inconsistently labored to vote away the freedom and the rights of the female members of that Convention. So indefinite were their ideas on the whole great subject of rights, that they overlooked the obvious thought, that no general anti-slavery convocation could take such ground without denying the fundamental principle that brought them together. In the horror of their great darkness on the subject of “woman’s rights,” they trampled on human rights, and the rights of membership, in the persons of those women whom they labored to exclude.

They also deeply wounded the feelings of the great body of the men there present; few of whom but had occasion to acknowledge, with grateful affection and respect, how much a mother, wife or sister had done, in the difficult years that were past, to help and strengthen them in the labors and sacrifices of the cause.

Women are so accustomed to suffering under the many indignities which men unconsciously inflict, that in this instance they felt less keenly for themselves than did their brethren for them, the tyrannical attempt to assume their responsibilities.

The refusal of the Convention to eject them from their seats, with the excellent memorial of its Committee, Mr. Johnson, Miss Kelley and Mr. St. Clair, to the ecclesiastical associations of New-England, excited much indignation among the ministry, with which Dr. Hawes was in a state of mind to sympathize. After his return to Connecticut, he stated, in a letter to a friend, that he had recently visited Massachusetts, and conversed with several leading abolitionists there: that in reference to the doings of the New England Convention, they declared that “they could no longer work in such a team,” and that, unless the Massachusetts Society would take ground in opposition to this action of the Convention, there must and should be a new organization. Dr. Hawes added, that if he resided in Massachusetts he should be with them in favor of such a movement.

One spark of true love of Freedom—the feeblest real desire to impart it to the enslaved, would have overpowered, in his heart, this spirit of the clerical appeal, and forbade him to identify himself with any such effort to subvert the broad foundations of the cause or to exclude any who had borne the burden and heat of the earlier abolition day.

Notwithstanding all the efforts of calumny, bigotry and tyranny, Mr. Garrison still led the van. There was no help for it. It was a necessity growing out of the nature of the case, and which could not be avoided, however much the foe might desire it, and the false friends labor to accommodate them. There is an efficacy in treacherous concealment, to “be-darken and confound the mind of man,” or these Parleys and Flatterwells must have discerned the philosophical impossibility. But, failing to do so, they went on with their secret devices.

In all these efforts, the friends of the clerical appeal joined with great zeal. They had announced the intention of weeping in secret places, because of its ill success. They were better than their word; not only weeping, but laboring in secret places. Mr. Torrey, who had, in the mean time removed from Providence to Salem, was particularly active. He instituted a vigorous secret correspondence to facilitate the establishment of a new anti-slavery paper in Massachusetts. He was now the Secretary of the Essex Co. Society, and, as such, used all the influence in his power to misrepresent and injure the Liberator; he intimated that Mr. Garrison had become insufferably idle and negligent, that his paper was left to [Pg 56]printer’s boys and any body to fill up, that it was demoralizing in its tendency and miserably deficient in talent; and in conformity with these declarations, he instructed the agents of the county society to recommend other papers in the towns where they labored. Having done this, he urged the necessity of a new paper, because there was such a prejudice against the Liberator, that it was impossible to get it into sufficient circulation, even to advertise the county meetings.

He was aided in sowing the new-paper seed, by Mr. Phelps and Mr. St. Clair. The latter will be recollected as the neophyte of the Massachusetts Annual Meeting of 1837. The apparent sincerity and heartiness of his appearance there had recommended him to an agency. His summary absolution of all the sins of the Liberator, past, present, and to come, was pardoned, as prompted by a good feeling, though too carelessly expressed.[2] It seemed impossible to believe that he was insincere, though certainly indiscreet.

In their progress through the country on anti-slavery missions, the agents of the Massachusetts[Pg 57] Society never failed, from the beginning, to learn how hard it is to be reproached for a righteous man’s name’s sake. To appreciate the force of their temptation, let the beholder, for a moment, place himself in their situation. It is in the power of the minister in almost every parish, to procure them a hearing,—but he is in combination with his brethren to “put down Garrison.” Is it wonderful that, instead of silencing the bigot or the slanderer with the assertion “he is a good man and a faithful abolitionist, and his opinions on other subjects are no more our business than your own,” they should have striven to repel their assailants by endeavoring to draw a line of distinction between him and themselves? Parallel to this was the course of Peter; unrepented of, it deepens into the darker dye that marks a Judas.

When men who sought a pretence to avoid the consideration of the cause, were told that the Massachusetts Board of Managers differed as widely as themselves from Mr. Garrison’s opinions on other subjects, their intolerance forbade them to credit the statement. If the Agents ventured to cast freely off, in the name of the Society, all responsibility for Mr. Garrison’s individual opinions, and to vindicate the rectitude and[Pg 58] energy of his abolition course from the beginning, they were obliged to endure the reproach of being “tools of Garrison,” and singing his praises, when they should rather be employed in removing such a stumbling-block out of the path of “good men.” A truly noble soul, thus spurred up to the encounter, would have exclaimed in the spirit of Bürger:—

The enemy, thus met, would have ceased to play so ineffectual a string; but, perceiving the weakness of the agents of this year, he never ceased to have recourse to it.

Let not those who have never been tried in such a furnace, condemn, without pardon and pity, those whose nobility of spirit was not equal to pass the assay.

There appears to have been, on the part of Mr. Phelps, and the other agents of this period, an inability to comprehend or appreciate the just and straight-forward course of the Massachusetts Board, with whom they were associated, as well as a consciousness that it would never permit its sanction to be used for their purposes.[Pg 59] They therefore carefully kept their operations secret from the Board, while they were using its funds and sanction to carry them on, in conjunction with Mr. Torrey, and Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of the Executive Committee at New York. All the Summer and Autumn of 1838, the scheme for a new paper was thus secretly carried on. Mr. Torrey wrote afterwards to a friend, “the clergymen throughout the State have been sounded; and they are for it, to a man.”

The plan of a new paper, to be under their own dictation, and in an attitude of opposition to the man and to the paper whom their misrepresentations had made odious, could not fail to be approved by the ministry; but to abolitionists, a different form of introduction was found necessary. To them it was represented that it would aid the Liberator, and that possibly Mr. Garrison might be induced to become the editor. Its comparative cheapness, too, was an inducement to some honest minds, who were unaware of its purpose to effect a division in their ranks.

More than a year had elapsed since the clerical appeal conspiracy. Some of the appellants had become officers of county Societies. Certain of their brethren in spirit, as well as in the[Pg 60] ministry, had taken the lead in town Societies;—a creeping movement was in this way going on among them, to get the control of the organizations; and, co-operating with it, were the young theologians who had aided the old attempt against the cause; now, some of them, as the occupants of pulpits, rejoicing in the opportunity to lend their aid to the new one.

Mr. Phelps, in whom general confidence was yet unimpaired, was every where warm in his eulogies of Mr. Torrey’s diligence in the cause. But those who had opportunities of observing his course closely, were made aware that mischief and diligence are by no means incompatible. His labors were unremitting to weaken the bonds of relationship between the County Society and the State Society. The abolitionists of Essex, generally, saw not the tendency and design of these efforts. They could be made without suspicion, as the National Society had ever been a favorite with Massachusetts men, with whom it originated, and who constitute the largest portion of its efficient members. Such men could not readily conceive of the possibility of acting in their County capacity or their National capacity, in opposition to themselves in their State[Pg 61] capacity. But the active brains of the Secretary of the Executive Committee at New York, together with the Secretaries of the Massachusetts and the Essex County Societies, had devised and cherished the idea of such a change, though it would necessarily convert the affiliated Anti-Slavery system from a harmonious whole, into jarring and discordant divisions. A society had, before this, been formed in the western part of the State, to be directly auxiliary to the National Society. This circumstance was unnoticed at the time, except by a few, who waited for the light of future events by which to interpret its meaning.

Such disunion and derangement could not be easily effected in the region where the free spirit first laid the broad foundations of its organized action. It was necessary to cast about for some plausible ground on which to create division of feeling, and to proceed upon it with the utmost caution.

Public sentiment had become so far changed in Massachusetts by the eight years’ warfare of abolitionists, that ministers were almost as liable to public censure for an open pro-slavery course, as for an open advocacy of Freedom. They, of all[Pg 62] men, were, in one sense, justified in the customary declaration that they were “as much anti-slavery as others;” for they kept careful watch of the times, that they might not vary from them materially. With all their prudence and caution, they found this double public a difficult monster to manage. Though, as a body, they had undergone no change of feeling, they perceived that their efforts to check the progress of Freedom, must be made more carefully than ever; and they adopted a tone of great solicitude for “the poor slave.”

Pity, even when unfeigned, is not principle, any more than “American Union”[3] was anti-slavery; and in this instance “poor slave” was but the synonym for hostility to the Massachusetts Society. Well has cant been called “the second power of a lie.”

The additional ground on which a division of feeling preparatory to the projected outward division was attempted, was the assertion, sedulously disseminated by Mr. St. Clair, Mr. Torrey, Mr. Stanton, and Mr. Phelps, that the Massachusetts Society was a “no-government Society.” Of this the only proof was, that it had not ostracised[Pg 63] Mr. Garrison. It was argued that the Constitution of the Massachusetts Society required the use of every means sanctioned by law, humanity and religion; therefore Mr. Garrison and all other Non-Resistants who decline exercising the elective franchise, were, by the terms of the Constitution, excluded from the Society.

“Political action,” adverted to in the Constitution, now had a new definition affixed to it. It was defined by one of this new school to mean poll-itical action, or action at the polls.

This logic, though very efficacious among those who had rather see the battle rage round the polls than round the pulpit, produced but little effect on the real abolitionists. “Law and humanity and religion;” they said——“Well! these must, by the Constitution of the Society, conjunctively agree upon the means to be employed, and each man was of course to be his own judge of their requisitions; for there never would have been a Constitution or a Society on any other understanding. Law! Well; the law sanctions my restoration of a fugitive slave, should I deem such a propitiation of the master likely to produce a happy effect in hastening a general emancipation. Am I therefore bound to do it? No! for my humanity and religion interpose their veto. But, what if[Pg 64] Mr. Garrison’s humanity and religion forbid him to vote? I cannot see why they should, but that’s his look-out as an individual—not mine as an abolitionist:—and the Constitution of the Massachusetts Society covers us both.”

Such plain blunt reasonings could put to flight the assumption that voting at the polls was a test of membership: but of course it did but increase the bitterness of feeling of those who sought a cause of offence against the Society, to find none.

That Mr. Garrison was personally aimed at, and the Massachusetts Society also, because it would not consent to his ignominious expulsion, no one doubted, who was at the receipt of clerical custom. The on dits were plentiful, authenticated and conclusive. “Garrison has too much influence,” said one. “We must take it down little by little.” “Have you got Garrison down yet?” said another; “we are ready to come in when he is out of the way.” “All the Massachusetts meetings are mere Garrison-glorifications,” said a third; “they forget the poor slave.” “Oh, the Massachusetts Society is the mere creature of Garrison,” said a fourth. “So many good abolitionists as there are in the State,[Pg 65] opposed to him, why not get rid of him at once?” said the outside row. “All in good time—a new paper first, as the organ of the Society—and we can make advantageous changes in the Board of Managers also, as they wish to resign,”—replied the inner circle, that were most closely hemming round the Massachusetts Society, with hostility in the disguise of friendship.

Charitable judgment is an excellent thing. Possibly, Arnold thought that the revolutionary principles might be promoted by giving up Washington to the discontents of the factious, and the demands of the foe; and exactly the same possibility exists that these men of great professions and hitherto unattainted names, were sincere blunderers,—not treacherous apostates. An excellent thing in its place, is charitable judgment. Whether its place be to refuse to see or to sum up evidence, admits of controversy.

The accusations against the Massachusetts Society, however, appeared, on evidence, to be unfounded. Its Board of Managers had issued an address to abolitionists preparatory to the political campaign, and had concentrated their agents upon the fourth Congressional District, where the political parties were so nicely matched against each[Pg 66] other, that the abolitionists, though but the dust of the balance, might, it was hoped, by successive defeats of the election, at length procure a candidate from one or the other party on whom they could unite. This one fact of the personal labors and concentration of effort for political effect on the part of the Managers of the Society, presented itself to every mind and neutralized the misrepresentations that were so industriously circulated. In reality, the whole force of the Society had been bent to this one point; and the Board, knowing that the County Societies were deeply pledged in the matter of funds, relied upon abolitionists in their county capacity to raise the money now due to the National Society, on the Massachusetts pledge.

At this juncture, one of the faithful friends in Andover, was startled by the reception of a letter from Mr. Torrey, so explicit as to rouse him at once to a perception of the meaning and tendencies of things, which, till then, had escaped his notice. The letter dwelt on the great influence of Mr. Garrison in Massachusetts, and thence argued that it would not be safe to attack him or the Liberator openly;—on the great need of a new paper;—which he, (Mr. Torrey) had [Pg 67]ascertained by sounding the clergymen throughout the State; and they were for it to a man. “Now, Brother ——, have on a full delegation at the Annual Meeting, at 10 o’clock in the morning, prepared to stay two days. Have them pledged to go for the new paper, and to spar the annual report, and we will show them how it is done.”

Upon the reception of this letter, those who had been wont to keep watch and ward over the interests of the cause in Essex, met and decided to communicate instantly with other friends, that, if possible, the evil might be subdued in this stage of its progress.

Dr. Farnsworth, of Middlesex, with whose own observation and experience their intelligence harmonized, instantly suggested to Mr. Garrison the idea of removing all their pretensions for such a paper by issuing a small cheap sheet of exclusively Anti-Slavery matter. Mr. Garrison, from whom, though in almost daily communication with Mr. Phelps, Mr. St. Clair and Mr. Stanton, their whole plan had been carefully kept, could hardly credit so treacherous a proceeding.

Had an honest desire for a new paper been entertained, he, surely, whose note of joyous exultation had welcomed the appearance of every new[Pg 68] anti-slavery periodical, should have been among the first whose aid was sought; and, that the plan had not reached his ears, seemed to him to prove conclusively, that at least those brethren of the Society with whom he had daily intercourse, could not be engaged in it. Relying on Dr. Farnsworth’s good judgment, he, however, decided to issue the specimen number of the periodical proposed.

But, as day after day brought fresh proof of a skilfully arranged plan of secret action against the Massachusetts Society, his mind misgave him as to the efficiency of any paper he might issue, to stay its progress, and he relinquished the idea.

Dr. Farnsworth, meanwhile, receiving no information of this, continued diligently to prepare the way in Middlesex County for the expected sheet. Of these labors, the enemies of the Liberator took advantage, and artfully represented his honest efforts for a paper which should subserve the pending election, and, at the same time remove all pretence for setting on foot an influence hostile to the Liberator, as a part of their own plan.

Singular symptoms were noticed in the political management of the Fourth District. Without consulting either the Massachusetts or the [Pg 69]Middlesex County Board, Mr. Stanton undertook the task of determining on whom the abolitionists should scatter their votes. Somewhat remarkable was his selection of the Rev. J. T. Woodbury,—the man who, in 1836, had thrown down the gauntlet to the pro-slavery church; and, in 1837, lacked the moral force to sustain the pressure of the antagonism he had impulsively sought; the man against whose commission as a local agent by the New York Executive Committee, the Massachusetts Board formally remonstrated when they found him a participant in the clerical appeal.

Deeper solicitude for the cause would have shown him that men who fail in the “cushioned seat ecclesiastical,” cannot faithfully discharge the equally weighty responsibilities of the Congressional one. The evil considerations that temptingly beset the latter, are as numerous—their angelic disguises as complete. But Mr. Stanton’s own course, during that year, had not been such as to make his soul more keenly alive to the sacred beauty of fidelity.

Dr. Farnsworth’s continually increasing knowledge of the machinations now on foot, increased his sense of the necessity of a counteracting [Pg 70]influence; and, with a faithfulness which was undamped by the apparent neglect which had met his first warning, he continued to urge on the members of the Massachusetts Board, the necessity of a new cheap periodical, as their organ, to be edited by Mr. Garrison; monthly if they thought best, though in his judgment a weekly issue would more effectually remove the pretences of those who were laboring for the destruction of the Liberator.

When this proposition was formally presented to the Board by Mr. Garrison, Mr. Phelps chanced to be absent; but Mr. Eayrs, a member with whom Mr. Phelps was on terms of confidence which he did not extend to all the other members, remarked that it would be better to postpone any action of this kind, as there would probably be changes in the Board at the annual meeting. So innocent were some of the members of the Board of any knowledge of what was practising against them, and so repugnant was suspicion to their natures, that those of them whose eyes had not been recently opened by personal experiences, honestly supposed that such a paper might satisfy the alleged demand; and, after a few days’ delay, on account of Mr. Phelps’s absence, it was decided to issue three thousand copies of a specimen[Pg 71] number, Messrs. Garrison, Phillips and Quincy to be an editorial committee. On learning this, Mr. Phelps said, with much agitation, that such a paper would by no means answer the demand. His words and his manner were a sufficient assurance that the plot had gone too far to be arrested by any possible effort of the Massachusetts Board, and all their energies were now bent to the painful task of hastening its complete development.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] “Of Mr. Garrison I will say, as the Pope said of his minion, I will absolve him of all the sins he ever has committed, or ever will commit.”—Speech of Mr. St. Clair in 1837.

[3] A scheme so called, for benefiting the colored race, without giving offence by the mention of Freedom, or Human Rights.

CHAPTER IV. THE WARNING.

Time, which waits for no man, but keeps on, with even foot-fall, whether witness of right or wrong, frankness and openness, or chicanery and intrigue, brought round the year 1839.

Mr. Torrey, who had represented his county as crying out for a new paper, till possibly the echo of his own voice might have led him to think his testimony true, now found a feeling waking up in Old Essex that he had not anticipated. The women there, with whom, in the spirit of a true [Pg 73]mussulman, he had, a few months previous, considered it defilement to sit in Convention, had always been most effectual helpers of the financial department of the cause. Some of them had been among the earliest laborers; and, experienced in observing the pertinacity with which the enemy, from the beginning, had striven to possess himself of the fortress, by striking down the warder of the gate, were startled by Mr. Torrey’s great zeal for a new paper. They compared it with his hatred of the Liberator, so manifest during the clerical appeal controversy, and took note, from time to time, of the manner in which he argued this new necessity.

They found that, like the Colonization Society, the necessity had two faces; one for the real and the other for the pretended abolitionist. They saw that this “necessity” was founded on prejudice against the Liberator, as the Colonization Society rests upon prejudice against the free man of color.

They decided to strengthen the Liberator for the coming emergency, and raised $500 for its support.

This appropriation operated like an Ithuriel spear upon the craft of the confederated opposers. It had been their policy to represent their proposed periodical as likely to aid the circulation of the Liberator. Now, Mr. Torrey pronounced this appropriation a highly improper one. He put his condemnation of the measure into the shape of a general principle. “An Anti-Slavery Society, aiding the circulation of the Boston Recorder, the Liberator, or any other such irrelevant periodical! it would meet strong opposition at Lynn.” He mistook, from inability to appreciate, the abolitionists of that neighborhood. That indefinable sensation began to stir through the anti-slavery ranks which betokens a conflict. The “oppugnancy” rose in every true heart near the scene of action; but so craftily had the enemy wrought, that the danger was, lest he should accomplish his ends before he could be unmasked to the general gaze. Men who saw not the causes, observed the whirl and eddy of the current of events. The feeling was like that described by Max. Piccolomini, before the revolt of Friedland.

Indications of the exact course that the miners and sappers were pursuing, now came to light. Mr. St. Clair, still an agent of the Massachusetts Board, left in their office a rough draught of resolutions to effect a fatal change in the basis of the Massachusetts Society, making it exclusive and sectarian, by a rejection of all as consistent members, who did not sustain the government of the country at the polls. The establishment of a new paper was also enjoined, in terms the necessary effect of which was destructive of the Liberator. These resolutions were endorsed by Mr. Torrey, thus:

The plan was, to carry the State by counties and by towns, and then to crowd up to the grand annual meeting in irresistible strength, to give the finishing blow.

The next meeting of consequence was that of the Worcester County Society, (north division,) at Fitchburg. There, Mr. St. Clair introduced the new ideas, by means of the [Pg 76]projected resolutions. At the close of the meeting, after most of the friends had retired, and against the wishes of some who remained, he persisted in presenting them. They were adopted, after speeches from himself and the Rev. Mr. Colver, by the raising of five or six hands; probably without a perception of their design and tendency on the part of that few.

These resolutions were lithographed and sent to the officers of Societies, by Mr. Phelps, Mr. St. Clair, and Mr. Torrey, accompanied by earnest injunctions to county meetings to send up great delegations to the annual meeting, instructed to carry them through, with assurances to such as they could not fully trust, that “they were opposed to nothing but dough-face-ism.”

In the same number of the Liberator in which the resolutions appeared, an unanticipated obstacle to their design was also announced. The President of the Massachusetts Society, though neither peace man nor perfectionist, but one who, individually, considered it his duty to use his elective franchise, took charge of the financial concerns of the Liberator, in conjunction with[Pg 79] two of his colleagues of the Board; and in their individual capacity they gave notice to the public of their reasons for so doing. That paper was, in their view identified with the anti-slavery cause in a manner that could be affirmed of no other print, not only from the circumstance of its having been the first, but more strongly, because of the faithfulness, constancy, and disregard of peril and persecution; the excellence of character editorial talent, and intuitive sagacity, of its conductor. And because they thought those qualities never more needed than at that moment, they called upon all who loved the cause to stand by the Liberator. It was signed by Francis Jackson, William Bassett, and Edmund Quincy.

Here was an unexpected blow:—A contradiction of calumnies, a financial security, a politician’s attestation to the value of the Liberator, combined in one view, before the eyes of the anti-slavery community. It was done, too, without any claim on the part of the doers, that the Liberator should sink from being the organ of all in the cause who chose to use it, into the mere instrument of a few. This was prophetic of stout resistance to the narrow, exclusive, and enslaving spirit which had so long wrought in secret, to undermine the broad foundations of the anti-slavery cause.

Happily for the slave, at this critical instant, there were not wanting men to call out “Treason!” against this whole procedure, irrespective of its probable success, in that soul-cleaving and victorious voice which carries with it instant conviction.

It is interesting to observe the course of men in peculiar and trying times, and to notice the strong contrasts of character and conduct that such times present.

Mr. Phelps, Mr. Stanton, Mr. Torrey, and Mr. St. Clair were hurrying from meeting to meeting with the Fitchburg resolutions, or driving the quill over quires of paper, urging the instant convocation of the societies for the introduction of the new paper, saying that it was not intended to be in opposition to the old, but only introduced because nine out of ten of the abolitionists in the State would not take the Liberator,—that it would probably be adopted with great unanimity[Pg 81] as the organ of the State Society, at the Annual Meeting—and dwelling strongly on the importance of sending up large delegations, instructed to vote in its favor.

Mr. Garrison stood calmly watching the aspect of the times, and when the signs were full, he raised the note of warning—

But all external opposition, in whatever form it may appear, is harmless, compared to internal sedition.—And with pain we avow it, there is a deep scheme laid by individuals, at present somewhat conspicuous, as zealous and active abolitionists, to put the control of the anti-slavery [Pg 83]movements in this Commonwealth into other hands. This scheme, of course, is of clerical origin, and the prominent ringleaders fill the clerical office. One of the most restless was a participant in the famous “Clerical Appeal” conspiracy,—though not one of the immortal FIVE. The design is, by previous management and drilling, to effect such a change in the present faithful and liberal-minded Board of Managers of the State Society, at the annual meeting, as will throw the balance of power into the hands of a far different body of men, for the accomplishment of ulterior measures which are now in embryo.—The next object is, to effect the establishment of a new weekly anti-slavery journal, to be the organ of the State Society, for the purpose, if not avowedly, yet designedly to subvert the Liberator, and thus relieve the abolition cause in this State of the odium of counteracting such a paper. Then——make way for the clergy! For, by “hanging Garrison,” and repudiating the Liberator, they will surely condescend to take the reins of anti-slavery management into their own hands!

The plot, thus far, has been warily managed,—so as, if possible, to “deceive the very elect.” Many, we know, are already ensnared, and some, at least, who neither intend nor suspect mischief. The guise in which it is presented, is one of deep solicitude for the success of our cause. No attempt is made to lower down the standard—O no!—but simply to change the men to whom[Pg 84] has been so long entrusted the management of the enterprize, and put in their place younger men, better men, who will accomplish wonders, and perform their duties more faithfully—that’s all! While, privately, by conversation, letters, circulars, &c. &c. every effort is making to disparage the Liberator, (the paper is too tame for these rampant plotters!) and to calumniate its editor, no hostility to either is to be openly avowed! Far from it; for honesty in this case might not, peradventure, prove to be the best policy.—The shape in which this new project is to be urged, is developed in the resolutions which were adopted at the recent meeting of the Worcester County North Division A. S. Society, at Fitchburgh. Those resolutions were concocted in Essex County, by the joint labors of two clergymen, and passed as above stated,—only four or five hands, we learn, being raised in their favor. The plan is, it seems, to get as many anti-slavery societies committed in favor of these resolutions, before the annual meeting, as possible. The political necessity which is urged for another paper is ridiculous; and we know it is nothing but a hollow pretence.

The trusty friends of our good cause, and all who desire to baffle the machinations of a clerical combination, will need no other notice than this, to induce them to rally at the annual meeting, and watch with jealousy and meet with firmness every attempt, however plausibly made, to effect[Pg 85] any material change in the management of the concerns of the State Society. The spirit that would discard such men as Francis Jackson, Ellis Gray Loring, Samuel E. Sewall, Edmund Quincy, and Wendell Phillips, is treacherous to humanity.

As a specimen of the billing and cooing which is going on between gentlemen of the sacerdotal robe, in order to bring about a radical alteration in anti-slavery control, read the following extract from a recent letter of the Rev. Dr. Osgood, of Springfield, to Prof. Emerson, of the Theological Seminary at Andover:

Wendell Phillips, the same who took the brunt of the battle at Faneuil Hall, upon the day when men met there to wash their hands of Lovejoy’s murder, was among the foremost to detect the subtler form of danger. His letter to the financial committee of the Liberator, which appeared in the next column to the call of the watchman, stripped the opposition of their disguises, with a firm and dexterous hand. It exhibits, in a condensed form, the mind of one who had knowledge of the cause throughout the State, as a lecturer and a manager of the Society, and throughout the land, as an acute and philosophical observer. In politics, a voter,—in theology, a Calvinist,—in church government, a congregationalist,—looking on these things from the[Pg 87] same point of view with those who were laboring for the destruction of Freedom, toleration and fraternal confidence in the cause, he came to diametrically opposite conclusions.—

Troubles, however different in their nature, always seem to have fellowship with each other. At this juncture, while the Anti-Slavery community in Massachusetts were laboring under the pain and astonishment of the recent development, came a Sub-Committee, consisting of Mr. Leavitt and Mr. Stanton, from New York, to say that, as the stated payments due to the National Treasury[Pg 90] were unpaid, the contract became null and void.[4]

The Massachusetts Board could not, as lawyers, or as men of business, admit this to be the case; but, anxious to discharge the obligation, they came to the following resolution, in the presence of the New York Committee.

They hoped, by this, to open a way for the instant redemption of the pledge, through the means of the friendly co-operation of the New York Committee, and trusted that the rash,[Pg 91] unbusiness-like and unbrotherly nullification of so necessary an arrangement, would be avoided.

To the surprise of the Massachusetts men, who then could perceive no sufficient motive for such a course, the New York Committee declined to accept these terms. Were they suffering for the money? Why then did they not take the readiest and the best way to get it?—through the Massachusetts Society,—not over it? Did they love peace and unity? Why then for one moment hesitate? They were invited to send in their agents, and take any other means they might deem best, under the arrangement of the preceding June. What more ought brethren and honest men to desire? What more could be accomplished by their plan, of going on as if the Massachusetts Society were not in existence? One thing more it could not fail to accomplish,—the destruction of the Massachusetts Society. Was it possible that the New York brethren had aimed at that? Were it so, they could not better have hit the mark than by coming at that painful moment, to envenom a financial embarrassment which, singly, could have been so easily met, by mingling it with the poisoned sources of difficulty that had just been laid bare. They came for[Pg 92] money, at a moment when the state treasury was found empty—the state agents proved treacherous, the state energies bent upon working out a political demonstration in the eyes of the whole country. And because, under all these difficulties, a part of the money had not been paid when it became due, they refused to collect it, with permission, for the mere pleasure, it seemed, of collecting it without permission. If they were unwilling to acknowledge, even in form, the existence of the Massachusetts Society, what was the legitimate inference? Did the Committee really agree with the slaveholder, and his soul-guard from the truth,—the associations of the ministry, that the Massachusetts Society ought to be destroyed?

Massachusetts men deemed it a virtue to repel these thoughts, which the conduct of the New York Committee could not fail to suggest. They shrunk from the pain of beholding and weighing the evidence of a want of fraternal confidence, and devotion to the cause. They were doomed for this weakness, to feel soon, in their own persons, how much better it is to judge our fellows by their deeds, than by our own hopes or fears.

FOOTNOTE:

[4] For the terms of this contract and the occasion of its necessity, see pages 10 and 47.

CHAPTER V. THE DENOUEMENT.

The annual meeting of the Massachusetts Society was the time proposed by the confederated agents and secretaries of the National and Massachusetts Societies, for the full development of their plans. Like children playing at draughts, they had calculated their own game, but not the counteracting moves of their antagonists. Mr. Garrison’s unexpected trumpet-blast, threw them into confusion. They were ignorant of the extent of his knowledge, and, in their consternation, did the exact thing, that innocence would by its nature have necessarily avoided—denied the existence of any plot.

Mr. Garrison had spoken of two clergymen in Essex County. Mr. Torrey and Mr. St. Clair, like Scrub in the comedy, were “sure he was [Pg 94]talking of them,” and went into a labored denial and explanation; all of which, when examined and condensed, demonstrated that a great amount of time and labor, and by means of the agents and the funds of the Massachusetts and National Societies, had been privately expended in sowing the seed of the new paper.

Mr. Phelps, to whom Mr. Garrison had not alluded, identified himself with the plot, in a series of letters, whose remarkable bitterness was charitably imputed by some to the peevishness of recent illness. Others there were, who received these letters as a proclamation to all concerned, that the writer was no longer “Mr. Garrison’s Brother Phelps;” and as an evidence that the threat of the Recorder had effected its purpose.

The Anti-Slavery Office became a scene of deep interest, both to the devoted friend of the cause, and to the close observer of human nature, while the tide of inquiring comers was on the flood. The innocent regularly brought confirmation that the alarm-note of Mr. Garrison was most fortunately timed. They all recollected some incomprehensible circumstance on which the recent developments had shed a flood of light. Some recalled a conversation with “your agent,”[Pg 95] some, a remark of “our secretary,” hinting at a change in the Board, or a way by which clerical opponents might be gained over to the cause; “for we must have all these men.” Abundance of sayings came to mind, by which, when first uttered, they had been exceedingly puzzled, and had finally laid aside as jests or incomprehensible:—having the master-key, they could now unlock them all. Notes and letters by the dozen were forth-coming, from Mr. Torrey and others, marked “confidential.” His correspondents now began to feel that silence was crime. An eagerness to give and receive information, marked the innocent. Not so the guilty. They vehemently denied the existence of any plot,—said that Mr. Garrison was unfit to be entrusted with any important post in the cause, that Non-Resistants were not properly abolitionists,—that slavery was the creature of law—that votes made it, and votes only could unmake it—that though the Liberator did in its columns advocate political action, it was inconsistent in so doing, and that they thought a new paper absolutely necessary.

In this position, the day of the annual meeting found the conflicting principles and men. Bigotry and sectarism were pitted against religious[Pg 96] liberty and Christian love,—openness and candor against craft and concealment,—treachery against fidelity,—falsehood against truth, and, (for things that are equal to the same things are equal to one another,) freedom against bondage.

It was the largest anti-slavery gathering ever witnessed in Massachusetts, and a noble sight it was to look upon. It preserved its original heterogeneous character, being composed of old and young, men and women; of every sect, party, condition and color, all filled with the most absorbing interest. Well might every eye be rivetted, and every heart wrapped in earnest attention. It was a turning point in the cause. A strong and mighty wind had come to winnow the wheat from the chaff; the crooked was to be made straight—the hidden was to be revealed:—expectation was wrought up to the top of its bent. The report of the Board of Managers, written by Mr. Garrison, was first read. Men looked wonderingly at one another. “Is this the report that we received such earnest entreaties to come and vote down? we find no fault in it. Are these the opinions of our board of officers, which it is represented to us as so desirable, for opinion’s sake, to change? perhaps we might look farther, and find worse.”

The report was laid aside to afford opportunity for the utterance of the thoughts which were swelling up, to find vent in every mind. The business committee, desirous of affording every facility to debate, opened the way by the introductions of the following resolutions.

Mr. St. Clair first spoke. He occupied more than an hour in explaining to the meeting that Mr. Torrey had no hand in the Fitchburg resolutions. Mr. Torrey occupied the remainder of the afternoon in denying the existence of any plot, deprecating the fulsome eulogy of abolitionists, when they spoke of the Liberator;—said that its circulation was so small that there was absolute need of another paper, for the purpose of advertising the meetings, and that abolitionists were determined to have a more effectual medium of communication with the electors of Massachusetts. He said, “Mr. St. Clair, and myself, Mr. Phelps and Mr. Stanton, we four, are the originators of this new paper.”

Mr. Stanton replied “I warn the gentleman to be careful of his pronouns. I defy any one to show a letter or a fragment of a letter, to prove that I have been implicated in the plan; for I have mentioned it in but one, and that to a friend in another State.” Mr. Torrey said that it was contemplated to obtain the services of some first-rate editor—Elizur Wright, or John G. Whittier. “Ah! comes the arrow out of that quiver!” inly responded a few earnest listeners. But the general feeling was, that it was only a swelling word used by Mr. Torrey, for effect, so absurd, so [Pg 99]impossible did it seem that either of those men could be made to stand in Massachusetts upon the clerical platform of hatred to Mr. Garrison. As soon would Wendell Phillips have been suspected of laboring to accommodate pro-slavery prejudice with a less odious editor in Pennsylvania; or Ellis Gray Loring, of supplying the deficiencies of the Emancipator, by a hostile paper in New York. Mr. Torrey urged the forlorn condition of Massachusetts among her sister states, without an organ; and seemed as much impressed with the mortification of being a member of a Society so sadly unfurnished, as were the slavish Jews, when taunted by the surrounding nations with having no king.

Mr. May did not suffer in the view of what so much affected Mr. Torrey. “We have never wanted means of communication with the public,” he said; “when the Massachusetts Society wants an organ, she sounds a trumpet.” Night was closing round the combatants, and Mr. May moved an indefinite postponement of the whole subject. Mr. Phelps exclaimed against thus “giving the go-by to the most important subject that could come before them.” Mr. May withdrew his motion, and the meeting closed, to meet again in an hour.

Again the throng came together, with added numbers and spirit. Mr. Stanton took the floor, and to the utter astonishment of the meeting, proclaimed that the Liberator had lowered the standard of abolition, that Mr. Garrison was recreant to the cause, and that therefore a new paper was indispensable.

His words opened the flood-gates of many memories. Instantly rushed through the minds of abolitionists all that had passed since he first stood among them, the trusted and beloved; their guide—their companion—their own familiar friend. Grief and indignation strove for the mastery in their hearts as he went on. “A new paper was therefore indispensable. True, it was said that the columns of the Liberator were filled with political matter—but how is that political matter obtained? It is wrought into my frame in head-aches and side-aches, how that political matter is obtained. If lamps could speak, they could tell that it is by taking your agents from the field to furnish it, after the day’s exhausting labor.—There ought to be an editor to do it. Again; what accompanied this political matter, on the other side of the paper? Discussions calculated to nullify its effect. Expressions of opposite [Pg 101]opinions. It is not that other subjects are introduced into the Liberator—it is that such other subjects are introduced—subjects so injurious to the cause. Mr. President, I would not injure the Liberator or Mr. Garrison. On the subject of peace, perhaps, he is nearer right than I am. But he has lowered the standard of abolition.”

Mr. Garrison and Mr. Stanton had met continually during the season previous to this attack. They had met as aforetime, brotherly, and Mr. Stanton had never, even by a word, prepared his friend for such a proceeding. Conviction was flashed upon the minds of the audience by every sentence he uttered, that the spurious abolition, which, from its being defended by the ministry, had obtained the name of clerical abolition, had, at last made a conquest of a suitable layman to carry forward its operations. The minds of men rapidly reverted to the clerical effort of 1837 to break up the Massachusetts Society. Again they saw the effort renewed, to cast out its most efficient members. Again the same old war-cry sounded in their ears—“Let them go out from among us, for they are not of us; and the Massachusetts Society must have a new organ!” How many a grieved heart, that had trustingly relied on [Pg 102]Stanton to combat this fresh attack on the cause, on thus hearing his proclamation of his own treachery to his comrades, was ready to exclaim,

All, then, was true; the boast of Mr. St. Clair, that if he were treacherous, then was Stanton and every agent of the Massachusetts Society treacherous too; the declaration of Mr. Torrey—“we four!” No need now, of a conservator of pronouns: the mask was thrown off.

Mr. Garrison indignantly repelled the charge brought against him. “Am I recreant to the cause? who believes it?” “No! No!” burst forth from the crowded aisles and galleries. “Let me ask him a question;” said Mr. Stanton. “Mr. Garrison! do you or do you not believe it a sin to go to the polls?”

The indignant audience did not cry “shame!”—they were too deeply moved for utterance. They were silent in breathless astonishment. Was this Massachusetts? Was it at a meeting of her free-souled sons and daughters, from a platform of toleration so broad that every human being, laboring for immediate emancipation, might[Pg 103] stand upon it, that a man presented a creed-measure to his brethren, with the threat to brand every brow as unworthy, that overtopped that little span? Was it in prophetic fear of this disgraceful scene that Massachusetts abolitionists had so early renounced the doctrine of racks and thumb-screws—the idea of reproach for opinion? The same indignant thoughts thronged up for utterance in every heart. Quakers, Calvinists, Unitarians;—Whigs, Democrats, and Non-Resistants;—men of every religious opinion and every political theory—this question insulted them all. Might the believer in the religious duty of voting claim authority to summon to the confessional, all whom he chose to mark for exclusion from the cause, and enter into discussion and condemnation of their belief? Then might every other sectary do the same. The Baptist might banish the Friend—the Methodist might proscribe the Independent—the white man reject the man of color—the women vote that men were disqualified—or men assert the same absurdity with respect to women. If the precious time of a thousand friends of the slave, met to devise measures for making every voter an abolitionist, was to be consumed in making [Pg 104]every abolitionist a voter, men felt that a change in their point of agreement—a change in the constitution and the principles that made the constitution, must be effected. The common pass-word must no longer be “immediate emancipation” alone, but every sectarian or partizan must shout his own, and draw his weapon upon every abolitionist who heeded it not. Hatred, wrong, and bondage, unmasked their hideous faces to love, right, and freedom, in the question that so roused every soul in that assembly.

Mr. Garrison promptly answered it, so as not to deny his principles, nor yet to take up the gauge of the non-resistance conflict, which Mr. Stanton had thrown down:—“Sin for me!” “I ask you again,” persisted the infatuated questioner, “do you or do you not believe it a sin to go to the polls?” “Sin for me”—was the same imperturbable reply.

This treacherous interrogatory,[5] fit act of a [Pg 105]familiar of the holy office to a heretic, but ineffably disgraceful from the Secretary of the National Anti-Slavery Society to the man on whose motion the National Anti-Slavery Society came into existence, stirred the souls of the abolitionists as if they had seen the slave-driver stand suddenly forth with his scourge and manacles, in visible embodyment of the spiritual tyranny they now felt.

A scene of tempestuous conflict followed, as the whole scope and bearing of the work that had been going on in the Commonwealth under the auspices of the “four,” became apparent. They stood like him who has tampered with the embankments that toil and sacrifice have built between the devouring ocean and a level and fertile land. The indignant feeling of the audience rose to an almost uncontrollable pitch; yet they did restrain it; for the winnowing-time had come,[Pg 106] and they must take careful note of men’s conduct now, that they might know who to trust hereafter. Painful and unexpected it was to see Scott, Codding and Geo. Allen swept away, as the whirlwind of debate went on. The resolutions before the meeting were respecting a new paper. But the arguments by which they were sustained, demanded not only a new paper, but new principles—a new constitution—a new society—new officers. Was the true and original test of membership—not an acknowledgment of the justice and necessity of immediate emancipation, but a belief in the religious duty of voting at the polls? Then would those arguments require the dissolution of the Massachusetts Society, another set of men as managers of a new one, and the utter destruction of the Liberator. Yet those who brought forward those arguments, and who, if sincere, were bound by them to destroy the worthless instrumentalities of which they complained, uniformly declared, with the same breath, that nothing was further from their intention than to injure the Liberator, or to cast any imputations against the Board of Managers.

Ellis Gray Loring rose in reply. “On the question of the need of a new paper, I do not[Pg 107] wish to speak. A need may exist which I do not perceive. Brethren tell me that there is such a need. I only say that to make such a paper the organ of the Society, and to sustain it at the expense of the Society, over the head of the Liberator would have a tendency to injure the latter. I do not say that gentlemen mean it. They tell us they abjure such a thought. But it is a maxim in law, that the purpose of a man’s acts must be presumed to correspond with their manifest tendency.”

Wendell Phillips argued earnestly against the first resolution. The second was so manifestly a mockery that it was scarcely noticed. The spirit of the meeting rose against the whole intolerant contrivance submitted to its decision. The “four,” when they perceived it, strove, by every parliamentary device, to delay judgment. They strove to divide the resolutions—to refer the matter to a committee—to adjourn the meeting. In vain. The spirit that filled the Marlboro’ Chapel that night, refused to be conjured into a committee-room, or to leave its work unfinished. “Vote it down,” “vote it down,” was the reply to every proposition; till Mr. Loring moved an indefinite postponement, which was almost unanimously carried.

While the fate of the new paper was pending, a doubt was raised by Mr. Phelps and Mr. St.Clair, as to the right of women to a voice in the decision. The question was hardly a debateable one in a society whose constitution welcomed all persons to an equal seat, and whose resolutions had proclaimed that, in the cause of philanthropy, all persons, whether men or women, have the same duties and the same rights. The decision was therefore referred to the President.

It was not for Francis Jackson, whose house had, in 1835, been placed at the disposal of the women, under threats of its destruction, after the mercantile world had decided that they were out of their sphere in the anti-slavery cause—it was not for him to shrink from a just decision because the religious world had taken up the cry. Now, as then, the women had judged for themselves. Here, also, was a responsibility which they did not choose to delegate; and leaving ministers on one side and merchants on the other, they came, according to their wont, each to serve the cause as conscience and judgment should dictate. They came with their husbands and their brethren, from the cities and from the villages. The anti-slavery halls had been ever to them as an altar[Pg 109] before which to dedicate their young children to righteousness and freedom. They came with the joyful consciousness that whatever subjects might be adjudged foreign, they, at least, were at home.

Not a voice was raised in appeal. The Massachusetts Society dared not, for the slave’s sake—it would not for its own, exile any of its members from its councils.

The report of the Board of Managers was next taken up, and again the friends of the new paper rallied to the attack. Preparatory to action upon it, and as a step towards its condemnation, Mr. St. Clair presented a resolution, affirming it to be the imperious duty of every abolitionist who could conscientiously do so, to go to the polls. The design of this resolution evidently was, to convict the few non-resistants present, of inconsistency as non-resistants or of guilt as abolitionists; and as such the meeting received it. At any other time the resolution would doubtless have passed—the great majority of the Society being voters. But, aroused to vigilant watchfulness of all who were[Pg 110] attempting to drive them blindfold into absurdity and intolerance, they refused to make the slightest change on the resolutions of former years. They had never said more, during their whole eight years’ existence as a Society, than that they would not vote for slavery; and they saw too plainly the motives of this novel demand for a resolution worded affirmatively. Neither had they been so bitterly reproached with the introduction of foreign subjects, without learning that the word “duty” or the word “ought,” in relation to forms of civil or church government, on which abolitionists so widely differ, must necessarily open the discussion of the whole vast subject of human society in all its aspects. It would have been impossible, at this moment, to have procured the passage of any resolution whatever, on which the opposition might build enginery by which to cast reproach upon any faithful abolitionist. So plainly had they exhibited their hearts, even while professing the greatest regard for the Society and all its members, that men’s common sense forbade them to afford any facilities for such a purpose.

Mr. Garrison substituted the following resolution, which, being in agreement with the uniform [Pg 111]practice of the Society, and in strict conformity to its principles and constitution, was almost unanimously adopted.

The Society thus refused to turn its attention from its original object—to make every slave a freeman, to the new and inferior one, of making every freeman a voter. The members felt that this latter was their more appropriate business, as citizens of Massachusetts.

After the passage of this resolution, the previous arguments of the “four,” for a new paper, were reiterated against the report, by the Rev. Orange Scott, the Rev. Daniel Wise, and the Rev. Hiram Cummings, of the Methodist Church.

There appeared evidences, however, that the Methodist laity were not so easily won into the[Pg 112] toils of the clerical Congregationalists. However much they might love their clergy and their sect, they loved the universal cause of liberty and humanity more. The venerable Seth Sprague expressed this, with feeling and noble simplicity, in answer to Mr. Cummings, of whose church he was a member.

“I love to hear my young brother preach the gospel; but when he talks of politics, it will hardly be considered vanity in me to say I know more about that than he. For forty years I have been in the political harness; and many a day, in that time, have I been out to rouse men up to the polls. Sir, I never found any difficulty in it—they are always ready enough to go; but to make them vote right, after they get there—that’s the rub. And who can do that like my brother Garrison? His paper converted me, politically.

I have had great satisfaction in my old age in going to all the Anti-Slavery meetings within my reach; and as I returned from them, with my heart warmed by the hopes which their union and zeal and harmony had kindled, I thought within myself, I am old now—an old man, and shall not live to see the work of emancipation accomplished. But, on my death-bed, when about to quit[Pg 113] this world, I shall joyfully think of those I leave in it, the abolitionists,—a band of brothers—united as the heart of one, to accomplish this great work.—But I cannot say so now!—I cannot say so now!” And the venerable man thought it no shame to weep over the love and confidence he had seen so wantonly betrayed; and all the people wept with him.

The opposition still wished to continue the discussion, though noon was long past, and their words were but repetition upon repetition. Dr. Follen said, “I think discussion should now cease, upon the same principle that bids the miller stop the wheel, when there is no more grain in the hopper.”

The whole unmodified report was accepted—Ayes 183—Noes 24. A better proof than its adoption could not be offered, that the great body of the Massachusetts Society separated that day, with the determination of carrying the work vigorously forward, through means of the elective franchise. They separated, with the triumphant consciousness of a three-days’ battle,

It was a painful trial they had passed; painful as when brother meets the visor’d face of brother in civil war. They had hoped that this cup might pass, but they had not refused to drink it; and their eyes were opened, and the bitterness of their grief taken away.

The same Board of Managers having been selected, the acceptance of the report and the rejection of the new paper, were sufficient indications of the course they were expected by the Society to pursue. They therefore suggested to their agents, Mr. St. Clair and Mr. Wise, that, as there existed in the Commonwealth a difference of opinion in regard to the contemplated periodical, and there having been no prospectus or specimen number issued by which it could be judged, it would be proper to use no efforts while engaged in their agency, to further its introduction or extend its circulation.

But those agents were already too deeply involved to heed the suggestion. The paper was already started, as an individual enterprize, in their names, with those of Mr. Phelps, Mr. Scott and others, to the number of twenty-seven, as a publishing committee, Mr. Stanton acting as editor. Various and discordant were the reasons given for[Pg 115] persevering in the undertaking, after the demonstration of the Annual Meeting, that its necessity was not of that imperative nature that had been represented.

Mr. Stanton stated that it was a satellite of the Liberator, and that he could have wished it had been named “the Liberator Junior.” Mr. John E. Fuller, on the contrary, when men who had never professed to be abolitionists hesitated to take it, gave them to understand that it was “to put down Garrison.” Mr. Wise described it as an “anti non-resistance paper,” and Mr. St. Clair as “a plan of Mr. Garrison’s own, warmly advocated by the wealthy and influential Dr. Farnsworth.”

They went on to procure subscribers in connection with their lectures, and at the expense of the Massachusetts Society. Mr. Scott and Mr. Stanton were no less active in the same way, at the expense of the National Society.

The paper was named “The Massachusetts Abolitionist;” and when the array of its twenty-seven god-fathers appeared, Mr. Garrison directed public attention to them, as the nucleus of a hostile society in Massachusetts. This they individually denied; but the nature of the case, as[Pg 116] well as their course as individuals, prevented their denial from obtaining credence. Colonization—American Union—Clerical Appeal—those embodyings of the spirit of the reluctant age with which abolitionists were in conflict,—had all been baffled. But the spirit yet lived, subtler from added experience, and this was the new tabernacle it had built. All these movements had, at their first appearance, comprised some of the faithful, but deceived. Great forbearance was therefore to be exercised, and great efforts made to unmask the deceit.

This could only be effected by calling the attention of abolitionists to the personal conduct of the men; as the paper itself was purposely kept free from any thing which could enlighten the friends at a distance as to the enmity of its conductors to the Massachusetts Society. Their scheme could not, at first, be fairly judged by those who did not witness its less public manifestations. It was like the fabled mermaid, seated where it could delude the unwary mariner;—above the water, fair and human—beneath, terminating in scaly and horrible deformity. Those could not fairly judge it, who did not know that its principal supporters, at the very moment that[Pg 117] they disclaimed hostility to the Massachusetts Society, were laboring at county meetings to disjoin the Counties from the State organization, and to divert funds from its treasury; while, at the same time, they labored to produce the most unfavorable impression from the fact that its pledge to the central treasury yet remained unpaid.

The Massachusetts Society was like a ship struggling with a heavy sea. No sooner was one wave surmounted, than another threatened its destruction. The next came in the shape of an answer from the New York Committee to the invitation to collect the money due, by whatever means they chose, provided that they should but acknowledge the existence of the Massachusetts Society. It contained a refusal on the part of the Committee to abide by the contract (the final limitation of which had not yet arrived,) and declared their intention to proceed as if neither contract nor Massachusetts Society were in existence. Such a step would be so fatal to harmonious and efficient action—so destructive to the Massachusetts Society,—so disgraceful to the New York Committee, that, in the hope that a last strenuous effort might prevail against it, a special deputation was instantly sent to New York, to confer with the brethren, face to face.

Arguments, remonstrance, entreaty, were alike in vain. One of the Committee thought that “New York should assume the entire control of the Anti-Slavery funds, paying to Massachusetts such an allowance as should be necessary for carrying on the cause in that State, which sum would not, he supposed, be large.” All the New York brethren remained firm in their determination;—neither modification—mitigation—nor even what the merchant often grants his bankrupt creditor,—extension,—could be obtained.

The Massachusetts brethren felt it necessary to allude to the new paper, and its injurious effects on the treasury and the cause. The reply of the New York brethren was, “We are neutral.”

Fatal rock! to which the blind, the feeble, and the faltering cling, as the tide of controversy rises which is to overwhelm them, but on which the unfaithful merely pretend to find anchorage!

The Massachusetts brethren turned to their homes in sorrow and surprise at the determination they had been unable to move. Only one course remained for the preservation of their Society. Its injury, if not its destruction, would be the necessary consequence of hesitating to adopt it, and they announced their intention of public [Pg 119]remonstrance against the conduct of the Ex. Committee, and a reference of the whole case to their common constituents—the abolitionists of Massachusetts. Grief, they must, at all events, have felt: but astonishment at the result of their conference would have been spared, had they been informed that it was, on one side, but a mere form, the whole affair having been decided, a week previous, by the issue of a circular, of which the following is an extract, signed by Messrs. Stanton, Tappan, Leavitt, Birney, and the most prominent of the New York Board.

Ah, what a rent was here, in the love—the trusting reverence with which Massachusetts abolitionists had persisted, against their better judgments, in looking to New York! What a document to cast before her faithful men,—this new style of account-current, in which what they had paid, was equally placed to their discredit with what they had not paid! What a reproach to her high-souled women, who had unreservedly dedicated themselves to the cause![6] What a shock to behold the anti-slavery enterprize presented in this degrading view to the gaze of the world! The[Pg 122] American A. S. Society, placed, by this act of its committee, in the attitude of glorying in the collectorship of coppers!—the Parent Society, (as it had ever been affectionately and deferentially called,) busied like Saturn, in devouring its progeny!

This act created a necessity for a procedure still more vigorous than had been contemplated. The integrity and usefulness and good name of the National Society must, if possible, be rescued from the jeopardy in which this course of the committee had placed them. More than the existence of the Massachusetts Society was at stake—the cause was endangered by the conduct of the committee at this moment. It was painful to meet them on the low ground of dollars and cents; but they had taken the field there, and there they must, of consequence, be met and rebuked.

The Massachusetts Board, therefore, not only issued an address to the Abolitionists of the State, as they had given notice of their purpose to do, calling on them to assume the conduct of the affair, but they, at the same time, gave solemn warning of the perilous crisis, and appointed the quarterly State meeting, as a suitable time for its consideration.

More confirmation greeted the Massachusetts brethren on their return, of the fact that their agents were undermining the ground on which the Society stood.

Mr. St. Clair had concerted with the Rev. S. Hopkins Emery, and two or three other clergymen, comprising one third of the Bristol county board of officers, and, in the absence of the rest, they passed resolutions hostile to the Massachusetts Society, making that county auxiliary to the plans of the New York Committee, and nominating himself as a county agent. He had forwarded his resignation of his commission as an agent of the State board,—Mr. Wise shortly afterwards followed his example, and both were thereupon appointed agents of the N. York Committee, in which capacity they continued to labor in alienating the counties, and circulating the new paper.

Boards of Managers and the people they aim to manage, not unfrequently differ, in the anti-slavery cause, as in all other causes; and therefore it was that the Massachusetts Board, feeling no love of management or rule, were in the habit, on every extraordinary case, of referring its decision to their constituents, as the only[Pg 124] way of presenting to each one the opportunity to discharge his individual duty to the Society, and as the best method of obtaining the manifold advantages of discussion.

The town and parish societies, in various parts of the State, began to meet for the consideration of this matter, which was felt to be one involving more than a single glance could unriddle.

Those members of the Boston Female Society, who had the interests of the slave most at heart, communicated with their officers, for the purpose of calling a meeting. Their request was not complied with. Again they applied, to the number of forty-five, which number was deemed a sufficient assurance that a meeting was seriously required by the members. Notwithstanding the remonstrances of two of the counsellors, the President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer, the identical individuals who, in 1837, refused to sustain the cause against the incursions of spiritual wickedness, still refused to notify a meeting.

Every moment stands at the juncture of two eternities, and is therefore of solemn consequence; but the importance of making use of this, was more than ordinarily apparent.

The women of Lynn were standing alone and unsupported at the post of danger;—the Massachusetts Society in peril, never more needed or better deserved support;—a hope existed that George Thompson might again be induced to visit America by a timely and earnest effort to second the invitation of the Young Men’s Convention, with the necessary funds;—Henry Clay, from his place in the Senate, was calling upon his fair countrywomen “to desist from anti-slavery efforts;”—this was the moment taken by the officers of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society to labor harder to make it desist, than they had ever before done to induce it to go forward. They visited the members personally, assuring them that it was unconstitutional to call a special meeting [7]—that the board saw no necessity for one, and finally entreated them to take their names from the requisition. As one among other reasons why they should do so, the President said that she apprehended there was a design on the[Pg 126] part of some, to recall George Thompson, and, as he left the country in debt, his return would, from that circumstance, be a prejudice to the cause, and she was therefore anxious to prevent a meeting!!

By labors like this, a meeting was hindered at the time; but as one wrong step ever demands another to sustain it, preparation was made for the Society’s impending quarterly meeting, which could not be prevented, by the use of a sectarian gathering-word, which did not fail to rally all the unworthy members:—“Come and help us to put down the Unitarians.” Not one in fifty of the members were of that denomination, and the few who were, had ever been remarkable for the joy and good faith with which they met all who differed from them in opinion, and the heartiness with which they condemned the sins against freedom committed by their own sect. Mr. Phelps, now the pastor of the Free Church, was also affording his aid to unjustifiable sectarism, and, by a meeting thus drawn together, was a majority obtained who left undone all that the interests of the slave most loudly demanded should be done. A majority, in behalf of whom the President declared at that meeting that “as to the difficulty between the Massachusetts Society and the [Pg 127]Executive Committee, the ladies did not understand it—they had not come prepared to go into it,—it would take too much time—why should we enter into the quarrels that were going on?” Yet, after that very meeting, the President, and Secretary, as a committee on the fair for raising funds, issued an address, without the knowledge but in the name of the whole Society, in which they argued the necessity that existed that all the women of Massachusetts should send their funds to New-York, because the Massachusetts Society had failed to meet its stated payments!! This circular was committed to one of the agents of the new paper, to be distributed in the country, with instructions to keep it private in the city from those in whose name it was issued.

The minority of the Society, who were neither ignorant nor unprepared, and who neither grudged their time nor themselves wholly, when the Anti-Slavery cause called for the sacrifice, were much pained to find that into this little sluice, opened at the time of the clerical appeal, had rushed the cold and bitter waters of indifference, and sectarism and chicanery, in a flood that threatened to sink the little vessel that had, in earlier days, done good service to the cause. But they knew their place as a minority, and prepared to fulfil that [Pg 128]duty in another capacity, that they were prevented from discharging in this. The Massachusetts Society,—the parent and pioneer of all the rest, must not suffer for its fidelity, because the officers of the Boston Female Society had done wrong.

They were, besides, a very large and efficient minority, numbering among them the women who had first originated and mainly sustained, for four successive years, the plan of raising funds by means of an annual fair, and they did not permit themselves to be hindered on this occasion, any more than in former years, by the smallness of the pivot on which the duty of the moment turned. They knew that, for a season, it would appear trifling;—they also knew that it really was the type and representative of a principle,—one of the many indications now observable of that stage in the progress of reform, when minds a little enlarged by its principles, begin to resist, in alarm, the philosophical necessity of a further widening process, and, to avoid it, return to their original state.

The tenth wave seemed about to break upon the Massachusetts Society. The Board of Managers looked around them upon the circumstances[Pg 129] of their case, for indications of the will of Providence. They were ready and desirous to cast down the painful staff of office. Better men, they wished, might be found to sustain it—but each looked on the other and said, “Where can his fellow be found, for clear-sighted devotion and faithfulness.”

Once more they decided to mount the breach together, for the cause’s sake. Had it been only for themselves, they would have scorned to stand one instant, in the humiliating posture in which the conduct of the New York Committee had placed them. But it was for the slave—for their brethren throughout the State, who had confided in them; and they doubted not that those brethren would throng up to the rescue. This mutual confidence was not misplaced. The members of the Society came together in great numbers, with the determination of paying up all arrearages, and, if possible, staying the destructive collision of feeling which they saw going on.

The New York Committee were not absent. Thither came Birney, and Torrey, and Stanton, and Tappan, and St. Clair, and Phelps, and Scott; and face to face they met Garrison, and Loring, and Phillips, and Chapman, and Follen, and French, and Brimblecom, in the presence[Pg 130] of all the people. Men from the counties were there, to tell how those who should be acting as financial agents, were laboring to complete the division which had, more than any thing else, occasioned the deficiency in the funds. Men from the towns were there, to hand over their purses with the declaration that to their delay the deficiency should, in part, be charged, and not to their Board of officers. The indignant members from New Bedford were there, who had forwarded eight hundred and fifty dollars for the slave, and had seen it used for the purpose of casting reproach on the Massachusetts Society. And there, too, was Lynn, and Andover, and Plymouth, and Reading, and Abington, and the representatives of fifty other towns, where the Anti-Slavery enterprize had first struck root and borne the most abundant fruits—all earnestly bent upon conciliation—upon healing the breach, and upon sustaining the Massachusetts Society.

In the course of discussion, many things before unknown appeared. The New York Committee excused themselves by the plea of necessity. They were dunned daily themselves, and they had been compelled to this course to get the money. “Had they got it?” asked Wendell Phillips,[Pg 131] “had not all the sources been stopped by this proceeding, against which they had been warned? Why could they not have co-operated—why could they not still co-operate harmoniously with the State Board? why should their agents, Mr. Stanton, one of themselves, among the number, make terms with the County Boards, which they had denied to the State Board? Mr. Stanton could, it appeared, co-operate with Mr. Torrey, in Essex, raising funds for the county treasury, and receiving only a part of them again for the National Treasury—why could he not extend co-operation, on better terms, to us in Boston?” The fact appeared that money had been forwarded to New York by the hand of agents on account of the pledge, which had never been credited accordingly. Men saw that there had been no delay or hesitancy in “taking the Massachusetts Board by the throat, and crying, Pay what thou owest,” and they inquired why their own attempts to liquidate the debt, had not been noticed.[8] The live-long day the discussion went on, the perplexity in which men’s minds had been involved becoming clearer and clearer, till after as complete[Pg 132] an investigation of the case as could be made, and the most determined opposition on the part of the New York Committee and those engaged in the new paper, the meeting sustained the course of the Massachusetts Society, by the passage of the following resolution: ayes 142—noes 23.

Hereupon the long-denied and painfully-concealed hostility to the Massachusetts Society burst forth, and the attempts to cast out Mr. Garrison, or to sink the Society with him, were [Pg 133]renewed. Mr. Tappan saw no reason why the Committee should expect to receive the money at all, unless by taking the matter entirely out of the hands of the Massachusetts Society. The Managers could offer no better guarantee than at first.

“We can—we do offer a better guarantee,” replied Wendell Phillips. “We are in a far better condition to meet this pledge, than before. The political campaign in the Fourth District is at an end, and will no longer absorb the funds, or the energies of the agents. We are stronger as a Board; we have a new General Agent; we are awake, throughout the State, to the emergency.”

Mr. Stanton seemed to suppose that membership in the Massachusetts Society implied an obligation never to change one’s views on other subjects; for he read extracts from the Liberator, proving that Mr. Garrison had changed his opinions as to the principles of civil government, since the first establishment of that paper. Rev. George Allen burst into vehement invective. “I am ready,” said he, pointing to Mr. Garrison, “to attack the wolf in his very den, with the bleeding relics of his mangled victims yet [Pg 134]between his teeth.” Mr. Birney, to the utter astonishment of the meeting, descended to the proscriptive ground first assumed by Mr. Stanton, and intimated that no non-resistant could consistently or honorably remain a member of the Anti-Slavery Society.

Men’s minds went back to the days of the clerical appeal, when Birney, then an editor in Ohio, had been tried and found wanting. That deficiency, so long veiled with silent and brotherly care by those whom he yielded up to the enemy, now defied concealment. He proclaimed his sympathy and knowledge with that of the N. Y. Committee, in the recent plottings. “WE felt the need of this new paper in Massachusetts.”

A sudden light burst upon the meeting. All this whole long day’s labored ringing of changes upon “dollars”—“contract”—“non-fulfilment”—“null and void”—all the foregone course of the Committee,—it was only a pretence, then, for keeping hostile agents in the State to work the Society’s destruction, under pretence of obtaining money! This debt of a few thousand dollars—men now saw why the wound it had made should be so dangerous. It was like the scratch of a poisoned weapon—slight, but possibly mortal.

Rodney French, of New Bedford, informed the meeting of the manner in which the funds of abolitionists had been necessarily absorbed; those of the clear-sighted, in sustaining the cause against the insidious attacks it had been undergoing—those of the blinded, in unsuspectingly co-operating with the disguised enemy. “Had this paper been presented in its true colors,” said he, “no funds would have been swallowed up by it in our county of Bristol. But men have been deceived, and they are now finding it out. Let me beseech our National Committee to change the ground they have taken. I do entreat them to meet us like brothers, and accede to this resolution. It is an olive-branch. The money will easily be raised by this harmonious co-operation—confidence will be preserved, and the slave in his chains will rejoice.” Abby Kelly, the delegate from Millbury, followed in the same strain. “Let us even make ourselves beggars,” she said, “for the slave, who is denied the poor privilege of begging!” and she pledged herself to pay fifty dollars of the amount necessary to be raised, and her town of Millbury three times that sum. John A. Collins, the General Agent of the Massachusetts Society, stepped upon the platform, with securities to the amount[Pg 136] of seven hundred dollars, in his hands, and begged Mr. Birney, who had risen to speak, to give way for a moment, that he might announce them to the meeting. Mr. Birney waved him aside—“We do not want your pledges!” and proceeded to reply to Rodney French.—“If the gentleman supposes that I will be the bearer of such a proposition as the one contained in this resolution, to my colleagues at New York, let me tell him that he has altogether mistaken my character.”

No more remained to be said. Wendell Phillips immediately withdrew the resolution so decisively repulsed.

Mr. Tappan commented with severity upon the “disgraceful scene he had witnessed,” and counselled a division in the Society, saying that were he resident in Massachusetts as he was in New York, he should endeavor to effect it.

A division in the Society, because the Society had determined, for the slave’s sake, to continue to exist; and had sustained its Board of Managers in their efforts for its preservation! here, then, was another layman, ready to do the bidding of the ministry in breaking up the Massachusetts Society. He might not be doing it intentionally, but doing it men saw he was, by this counsel.

The meeting separated, but not till multitudes had been disenchanted by that eight hours’ session of many a fond belief, that, till then, had stood undoubted in their minds.

The friends resolved in their inmost spirits, as they departed, to pay the utmost farthing of this pledge, notwithstanding the afflicting disclosure the Committee had made of their motives for having all along refused harmonious co-operation for its redemption.

This day had been a painful one for the Massachusetts Board; but they knew that they had done right, and therefore felt no anxiety as to the result.

They were sustained by the abolitionists of the State, and they rejoiced at it; not for themselves, but as a proof of the fidelity of their brethren to the cause. They had been sustained against the most determined hostility. A statement of the case, in the form best calculated to injure the Society, had, previous to the meeting, been scattered broad-cast over the State, under the direction of Mr. Stanton. It was matter of astonishment that so much effort to do injury should not have produced a greater effect. Truth was mighty, and had prevailed, to strip the difficulty of one[Pg 138] of its disguises—the cloak of the mere dun, and show it in the attitude of the assassin.

The effect of the meeting was magical. The friends, in all parts of the State, rallied together and mulcted themselves afresh. How prompt were their donations, how fervent and brotherly their expressions of confidence, how painful their solicitude at the developments made by the New York Committee, how forbearing their course with regard to its doings, the resolutions and correspondence of that period, testify. The Committee returned to New York, still keeping in the field, at the public expense, the agents who had been creating a division. The work went vigorously on, notwithstanding the drawback this occasioned. All this imbroglio had been caused, in the first instance, by men of the orthodox Congregational sect, and it was fitting that the honor of that sect should be vindicated by the laborious fidelity of others of its members. That the money was raised,—five or six thousand dollars in the space of two months, for the most part in very small sums, so that the State Treasurer was enabled to authorize the draft of the N. York Committee before the final payment became due, was owing mainly to the self-devoting labors of [Pg 139]orthodox Congregational licentiates, of the Theological Seminary at Andover. From that sect came the bane—from that sect came also the antidote.

At that moment of general and anxious effort for the payment of the pledge, private circulars were issued by Mr. Phelps, in behalf of the publishing committee of the new paper, in which he urged men to devote all their funds to its establishment, for this, among other reasons, that they would then know what became of their money. This showed the origin of the rumors which had been circulated, that the Massachusetts Society fraudulently permitted its funds to be used to sustain the Liberator; and that it paid an editorial stipend—(“a fat salary” as the term was,) to Mr. Garrison. These reports, false as they were, came with an ill grace from those who, it is to be hoped unknowingly, received from Mr. James Boutelle, one of their agents, money entrusted to him for the payment of the pledge, but who appropriated it to the “Massachusetts Abolitionist.”

All these labors were in vain.—The pledge was redeemed, against all opposition.

Next came the Annual Meeting of the National Society, where men from all the States met to consult for the good of the cause.

In full National Assembly, they resisted the idea that a difference of mind respecting forms of government was a disqualification for membership in the Society. They preserved inviolate the ancient broad foundation. They resisted, as the Massachusetts Society had done, any attempt to deprive women of their constitutional and inalienable right “to know, and utter, and to argue freely,” in this National Council. A resolution was also reported by the financial committee of the Society, that thirty-five thousand dollars was as large a sum as could be advantageously placed at the disposal of the Executive Committee during the year; as they deemed that more could be effected for the cause by a local than by a central expenditure.

The Society also earnestly requested the Executive Committee to send no agents into the States, except with the advice of the State Societies. This salutary measure was strenuously opposed by those connected with the new paper in Massachusetts. Previous to the meeting, they labored personally and by correspondence, to secure the attendance of such as would co-operate with them for the exclusion of women, and of the non-resisting members. The Executive Committee, too, were, some of them, no less active to the[Pg 141] same effect. Mr. Birney issued an article in the Emancipator, the organ of the whole Society, and sustained from its treasury, in which he asserted not only that a part of the members were unfitted, by their religious principles, for a place in the Society, but argued the merits of their principles per se, representing them as identical with those of the bloody and licentious Anabaptists of the sixteenth century.

These labors all fell short of their aim. Still, as at first, the Society continued odious by the presence of its founder:—he, into whose heart God had put strength not to deny his individual principles, though their sacrifice was demanded by those whose love and approbation had heretofore been so dear, and who, through four dangerous and toilsome years, had stood with him, shoulder to shoulder, in the forefront of the battle against slavery. Oh that evil tongues and times had not been too mighty for their integrity! May every one of them yet be enabled to see that any infringement of the principles of Freedom, is a hindrance to the emancipation of the slave, not to be removed by thousands of gold and silver, or the mightiest physical array. May God of his infinite mercy grant us, as a National [Pg 142]Association of Americans, for the redemption of our country from slavery, the grace to see, that, as we can never give what we cease to possess, so our labors for the emancipation of the slave must be in vain, after the insulted angel of freedom has departed.

The Massachusetts Board of Officers met immediately after this meeting, and decided to raise five thousand dollars, for the year 1839-40, as the proportion which ought to be borne by their State, of the thirty-five thousand dollars specified by the Financial Committee, as the proper appropriation to the central treasury. They notified the Executive Committee of this pledge, upon the understanding that all money raised in Massachusetts should be credited to its redemption, and that no agents of the New York Committee should labor in the State without the concurrence of the State Board.

To this communication, Mr. Stanton, in behalf of the committee, replied, that they had still two agents in the field, (Mr. St. Clair and Mr. Wise,) and he inquired whether any objection would be made to their remaining in that capacity!!!

The New England Convention followed quickly upon the tread of the National Meeting. This[Pg 143] occasion had ever been, among abolitionists, a hallowed festival, to which each came to receive from all the rest whatever they might be able to give of comfort, and of knowledge, and of cheer, and to bid them all be sharers in his own full jubilee of heart.

Here they had enjoyed their last earthly communion with the early-called and tenderly-beloved, who had been caught up out of the thick of the battle into heaven; and, therefore, the returns and the memories of this day,

A shadow marred the customary brightness of the day, to those who had witnessed those workings of the spirit of treachery and intolerance, which have been traced in the preceding pages.

Their forebodings were justified. This spirit made one more attempt to rend them as it departed; but, failing in its purpose, it deserted the foundation it had been unable to destroy. The intention of forming a hostile Society had frequently been charged home upon the members of the publishing committee of the new paper, and as often strenously denied. Yet, here it stood, at length, a[Pg 144] new organization in Massachusetts, giving, as its reason for coming into existence, the recreancy, i.e. the tolerance of the old. That it differed from the old Society, in not seeing that every real interest of mankind must be universal, and necessarily gather up all men in the prosecution of its march, was narrow, short-sighted, unfortunate. That its founders had not openly announced themselves at the time when Dr. Hawes consulted with leading abolitionists nearly a year before, and that they had ever since been carrying on a concealed warfare upon the old Society, in the mask of friendship and brotherhood, must be very differently characterized.

Elizur Wright, Jr., so well known and loved of abolitionists, in days that were past, was carried away in the toils—another layman, in the clutches of the power that constitutes in New England the strongest obstacle to emancipation. He became a Secretary of the new organization, and the editor of the Massachusetts Abolitionist, and immediately strove to justify his course by asserting the recreancy of the Massachusetts Society. He was like the child drifting from the shore, after having un-moored his little bark, who cried out that the land was rushing backward, as the treacherous waves[Pg 145] bore him swiftly away. In the New England Convention of 1836, he had deprecated division, in a church so corrupted by slavery, that nothing but division could save it from destruction. In 1839, he was wrought upon by the circumstances with which the corrupt leaders of that same corrupt body had surrounded him, to labor on their behalf, for a division in the anti-slavery ranks. Those who recollected his course then, possessed a key to his present proceedings.

Some of the leaders of the new movement appeared in the N. England Convention, after their secession, and gave reasons for their conduct. The reason of the Rev. John Le Bosquet was, that they felt conscientiously obliged to impede the free and conscientious action of women in the anti-slavery cause. The Rev. Mr. Trask said that they wished to afford an opportunity for men of name and influence, in church and state, to come and take the conduct of the anti-slavery enterprise;—men who now took no interest in it, and never would do so, unless they were made officers. Elizur Wright thought the new organization needed, because the old Society had refused to pronounce the act of voting at the polls a fundamental principle—a test of membership—Christian[Pg 146] duty. That ninety-nine hundredths of the Society actually and conscientiously went to the polls, was nothing so long as those remained members, in as good standing as himself, who conscientiously refused to go. The Rev. Mr. Torrey’s reasons were all these, with “others which had never yet been given by any one.” Mr. Garrison, deeply pained by the wounds inflicted on the cause, had said, with much feeling, “I could weep tears of blood over this division, if it would avail to stay its evils.” Mr. Torrey, ridiculing his emotion, remarked that, “to see the gentleman weep tears of blood, would indeed be a curious physiological fact.”

Disconcerted as the exclusive councils of the framers of the new organization had frequently been by the intrusive “common people,” they took, from that experience, a hint in modelling their new constitution. Not every one who signed it was to be permitted to vote in their Society, however strictly his vote might be required of him at the polls. Only one gentleman for every twenty-five members was to have the privilege of uniting with the officers and agents of the Society in the transaction of business.

Of the two chief pretences for such an [Pg 147]organization—the first, that the subject of women’s rights to sustain civil and ecclesiastical offices &c. had been “dragged in,” and “hitched on,” (as the phrases were,) was an entirely false pretence, that subject never having been introduced in the Massachusetts Society. Women had, indeed, persisted in exercising the rights and duties of members, which they could not be prevented from doing without a violation of the letter and spirit of the Society’s constitution, and if the necessity of a new organization was grounded on this circumstance, its contrivers were plainly hypocritical in striving to make it auxiliary to the National Society, which also admitted women. They intimated, that they hoped to be able to make that Society recede from its ground next year;—but honestly bigoted minds, conscientiously opposed to women’s acting in the anti-slavery cause on their own responsibility, would surely never begin their course of opposition by the sin of co-operation for a year. The second pretence, that the old Society had become a no-government society, was without a shadow of foundation. The strongest political resolution it had ever adopted, to which Mr. Stanton’s resolution in 1837 was feeble, had been passed this year. But, then it had refused[Pg 148] to cast out Mr. Garrison: “ay! there’s the rub!” This exclamation of the Prince of Denmark, when his mind was occupied with the question, “to be or not to be,” conveys, in this connection, a summary of the reasons which decided the new organization “to be.”

The New England convention decided that such an association, so gathered, so founded and so organized, could not give aid to any organization upon the old basis, which it had deserted and condemned; and they notified the Executive Committee at New York of the same. The hostility of its founders to the Massachusetts Society—the difference it had made as to the fundamental principles, the exclusiveness of its foundation—its mathematical position, working the same derangement in the anti-slavery system as a new planet in the orbit of the earth might do in the solar system,—all forbade it fraternal greeting or long life.

The course the New York Committee should take in action, would be the measure of their own worth to the cause. So opposite were these two Societies, that one or the other must needs be unworthy of the affiliation. If the New York Committee should, after their well-remembered wont, think neutrality possible, still to be neutral would[Pg 149] be to spare the criminal; and “Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur.”

From the new organization thus formed, it was planned to send out division unto every local Society. Mr. St. Clair, and Mr. Wise, who had been the Swiss of this warfare, at one time during the year, the agents of the Massachusetts Board, at another, of the new paper, at another, of the New York Committee, were now made the agents of the new organization, for completing the work of division.

This having been done, Mr. Stanton no longer delayed to intimate to the Massachusetts Board “that it would be the aim of the New-York Committee to comply, as far as they could conscientiously, with the advice of their constituents as to agents.”

What was the new organization, then, in reality?—men asked themselves. Its designs were unmasked by abolitionists in Massachusetts, as the Annual Meeting, the Quarterly Meeting, the Bristol County Meeting, the Essex County Meeting, the Plymouth County Meeting, the Worcester County Meetings, the Middlesex County Meeting, and the multiplied meetings of town Societies had conclusively proved. It was but an[Pg 150] agent of the New York Committee, under the name of an organization. What would be its effect? to fulfil the wishes of pro-slavery divines, by multiplying nominal abolitionists of its own spirit, as millstones about the neck of the cause. May the New-York Committee dare to claim credit for veracity, if they but

When, at the Judgment, they shall stand up face to face with the New England band of early abolitionists who so loved and trusted them, what more can each one of them say than this:—“My mouth has never lied to thee!”

What is the attitude of the contending hosts of freedom and slavery in Massachusetts, at the present time—the summer of 1839? The unfaithful have turned to flight, overpowered by the subtlety and fury of a pro-slavery church and ministry;—have dishonored their Master, by conceding that such a church and ministry are his;—have forsaken and betrayed the faithful, offering them up as a propitiation to this ecclesiastical pro-slavery;—have devised a new anti-slavery organization on hypocritical and false pretences, behind which to disguise their apostacy for a season.

The faithful, undismayed by treachery, undeterred by obloquy and persecution, unshaken by abuse, strengthened by experience, relying neither on a pro-slavery church, government, or ministry, but on GOD, and themselves as his ready instruments, have bound themselves more firmly to the cause and to each other, and are laboring with increased ardor in the promulgation of the truth which alone can save this slaveholding people.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] The following resolution, submitted to the business Committee in the hand-writing of Mr. Stanton, will explain the use which was to have been made of Mr. Garrison’s answer, had the plot succeeded. “We shall thus,” said one, “get rid of the Non-Resistants and the women.”

[6] Those women of the Boston Female Society who had long seen a tendency in the conduct of the New York Committee to injure the Massachusetts Society, had taken pains to have their customary annual appropriation to the cause pledged through the Massachusetts treasury, in anticipation of this very contingency. Their surprise was proportionately great at the ingenuity with which their contribution was made discreditable to the Massachusetts Society and to themselves, by the incorrect assertion that it had been made in consequence of Mr. Stanton’s labors.

[7] Most of the business of this Society had, from the beginning, been transacted in Special Meeting, and almost the only power granted to the Board of this Society by its Constitution, is this, of calling meetings. The Constitution expressly states that “the President and other officers ARE AUTHORIZED to call special meetings,” while there is not a syllable which authorizes them to refuse.

CHAPTER VI. CONCLUSION.

CHAPTER VI.

Friends and co-laborers for freedom! We have now a new and indispensable, though painful duty to perform. Our foes have hitherto been without the pale of the associations: we have now found the most deadly within. It misbecomes us to talk of “dissensions among brethren”—of “quarrels among ourselves,”—of “dreading the strife of tongues,”—of “hiding ourselves till this calamity be overpast.” Without our most strenuous exertions, it will never pass, but as the remorseless sea passes over the sinking vessel. If we would free the slave, we must meet and conquer a tyrannous influence and spirit, in the shape that it has now taken, as we have done in all its [Pg 153]transformations in the times that are past. We must disabuse our minds of the idea that all are brethren in the cause, who call themselves such.

“Do you love freedom?” is the question we have startled our age withal; and we have begun to judge men—of all classes and conditions,—by the reply their lives make to it. Class after class have thus been tried and condemned. In earlier times, we have bound ourselves steadfastly to the truth which condemned them. Its might made riches a reproach, and “gentlemen of property and standing” a by-word. All our band joined their voices to the oracular one of truth, when these sinners were tried by their own principles of action, and found wanting. Why is it that some now cast aside the inspired maxim, “by their fruits ye shall know them”—when another class of men—the ministry, are found recreant to the cause of humanity? It is because they have become like unto them.

We are not without experience of the facility with which men add hypocrisy to wrong. Let the professions of such be to us, from henceforth, as though they were not uttered; their past good deeds, registered with those of Lucifer before his fall. This and this only, in this emergency,[Pg 154] is allegiance to the God “whose word is truth—whose will is love—whose law is freedom.”

When, in earlier days in the cause, some of us foresaw the present state of things, we submitted our souls to the prospect of its painfulness. We said, “thy will be done,” in thus keeping our instrumentality effectual and pure.

“May the numerous unpopular questions with which the anti-slavery cause is connected” (thus ran our prayer) “continually come up with it as it is borne onward. So that, up to the final triumph, the act of joining an anti-slavery association may be, as it has hitherto proved,—a test-act.”[9]

And so we pray still; for still and forever, Truth is one and indivisible. All moral questions are by their nature inseparable, in any other than a mechanical sense, and while we sedulously keep them thus mechanically separate, because to do otherwise would be a sin against the freedom of others, and a betrayal of their confidence, we feel it to be no less a sin against freedom for others to impede any man’s course with reproach, on account of this eternal decree of God’s providence.

We have all preached emancipation by [Pg 155]peaceful means; and now some are amazed that the attainment of all right, in like manner, should have suggested itself to men’s minds! We have all denied that might makes right, and asserted the supremacy of moral power; and yet some are standing in terror-stricken astonishment that the “woman question” is stirred in every heart; and “other some” are persecuting and forsaking their brethren, because the examination and application of principles, though limited in the anti-slavery society by the terms of association, cannot be stayed in men’s minds or individual lives. The time has come for men to look their terrors for the future in the face. A little thought will show them thus much at least;—that it is no sin against an anti-slavery society, to apply, in another association, the peaceful principles by which it is proposed to abolish slavery, to the sins involved in existing governments or sacerdocies. If institutions, religious or political, are unable to stand the test of such an application, that, in the opinion of some, is the fault of the institutions. With this opinion, anti-slavery societies have no more to do than with the question sometimes started, of the duty of urging prayer upon the unconverted, whose prayers God pronounces an abomination.[Pg 156] Discussion of collateral subjects is often salutary and necessary in our associations; but to a decision upon them, by which new tests of membership are introduced, no anti-slavery society is competent. It ceases to be an anti-slavery society from the moment it assumes to decide upon opinions respecting governments or churches.

No man is required, as an abolitionist, to endorse or oppose governments or church establishments. But every thoughtful and honest mind, whether its anchor have “entered into that which is within the veil” or not, feels called by its allegiance to freedom, instantly to resist any attempt to make one man accountable to another for the progress of his mind. This same allegiance to the foundation principle of inalienable human rights, warns a man against laboring to prevent woman from standing upon it, if such should be her determination. She may, in his opinion, be sinning against propriety—sinning against Paul, by acting in anti-slavery societies: but he himself sins against freedom in striving for her exclusion; and any act against freedom, is treason to the slave.

Men whose principles, thus imperfectly developed, are at war with each other, will, in all probability, become worse in their last state than[Pg 157] in their first, especially if they are yielding not so much to their own convictions as to the pretexts in which a public abstractly opposed to slavery, is fain to clothe its hatred to a real opposition. If they are striving to pacify the foes of freedom by these outrages upon her principles and her advocates, their case is a desperate one, and affords but little probability of repentance.

Surrounded as we are by the smoke and dust of the hottest conflict, we must keep all these considerations in mind, if we would avoid perplexity and doubt. Let us, from time to time, survey the field from a higher point of view, and take careful note of the divisions of the battle, and the nature of the ground on which the hosts are encamped. What do we discern, as we ascend the mount of vision and of difficulty? We perceive hatred and malignant opposition occupying the same post as when we first roused them from their apathy. We are ever contending with our old opponents, under new names, and with every change of name and pretext, some whom we have loved and trusted, are “carried away by their dissimulation.”[10]

At the beginning, they were “as much Anti-Slavery as any one, but hated Mr. Garrison.” What are they now? Even “more Anti-Slavery than any one, but hate Mr. Garrison.” Through all their various phases of Colonizationists, American Unionists, Clerical Appellants, new organizationists, their moving spirit is the same;—hatred of the freedom that defies their control. Even while professing to be laboring for emancipation, they have always been careful to express their hatred of the free spirit in which abolitionists carry on the enterprize. It must needs be so. There is eternal enmity between the spirit which prompts a man to strive for the mastery, and the spirit which calls no man master. It is an eternal truth, that he who wishes to rule, is unfit to serve.

From this point of observation, we may notice not only the timidity and treachery of some, but the touching fidelity of others. A single individual was once exalted by our opponents into a symbol of faithfulness to liberty and humanity. Now, the whole associated host of a State are[Pg 159] assailed with slander and contempt for a like fidelity.

In this symbolic sense, an association is endowed by the enemies of truth and freedom with a notoriety and importance not its own. In every such case, we have a finger of Providence, pointing out to us the course we should pursue with respect to it. Identifying ourselves with it, we listen for the voices that have been wont to cheer the onset. The soul that is now silent is self-condemned.

Let us enlarge our horizon by ascending still higher, so that we can at a glance command the present and the past; for so come many instructive lessons to the mind. We behold far back in the distance, days like those of Wat Tyler, of Wycliffe, of Knox, and Luther and Washington. On closely observing any such era of accelerated progress, we perceive great bodies of men, unaccountably to us, giving back at a critical instant—thrown into confusion by circumstances which we, at this distance of time, discern to have been of but the smallest moment; and, seeing how the speedy and triumphant success of the right is thereby prevented, we suffer a sort of pain that we are unable to cast upon their path the light of our[Pg 160] knowledge. “Had they but known what we so readily discern,” we exclaim, “how different would have been their course!” and we marvel that they were unable to break the spell that bound them, and which one added glance of foresight or of faith would have shivered.

We forget that, besides the natural obscurity of the hour unilluminated by the future, there is ever a shrinking terror on men’s minds, which forbids them boldly to face the phantoms of their own times:—a spurious charity for wrong, which, prompted by a vision of oneself in a similar condemnation, is not forgiveness, but treachery to Right. We overlook the obvious consideration that those transition periods were, like our own, infested with the treacherous and the selfish, whose fancied interest it was to suppress facts, circulate falsehoods, make up false issues, apologise for wrong, palliate crime, veil baseness under “decent pretexts,” exalt profession into performance, and by any and every means delay impending change.

This reflection should remind us that such light as we are fain to cast upon past times in our impatience of their blindness, is the same as duty binds us to communicate to our own. When we[Pg 161] observe the importance of small things in the world’s history; it should point us to the cheerful discharge of so lowly a duty as to record those in which we have been engaged. Let us not deem any of them so unimportant as to refuse to draw from them lessons of wisdom, nor strive to persuade ourselves that aught can be trifling, which is wrought into the great page of the past. “To serve the nineteenth century we must know the nineteenth century:” therefore, nothing is without consequence which helps to illustrate our times. Facts, warnings, rebuke, encouragement, consolation, advice, labor,—whatever the times demand, let us give as we have power and opportunity, and we shall soon be made to know what it was that kept so great a distance between the words of lonely warning that have risen prophet-like upon the past; and why, at some periods, there could be no “open vision” or corresponding energy, but only the feebleness and incertitude of ignorance and fear. Custom is never, by her nature, the handmaid of freedom; and therefore in a struggle for the extinction of slavery, if we speak only according to custom, we shall lose the unhesitating distinctness which the occasions of the cause demand. The occasion now[Pg 162] demands, in an especial manner, the plain directness of the very palace of truth.

Let us, however, avoid the mistake of supposing that we can find in the past, the exact parallel of the present, in any other than a spiritual sense. Truth—Love—Freedom—are ever the same; but the outward signs of their presence, and the manner of their workings upon society, will, at different times, be far unlike. The problems they present, may be wrought out by different processes, though the results are the same. This reflection will enlighten us as to the causes of the convulsive terror now manifested by the body of the ministry and their dupes—the clerical politicians. We shall learn how it came to pass that the latter were desirous of disjoining themselves from the abolition host, while they yet claimed the name of abolitionists. We shall see on what temptations they have

At the outset, they were encouraged by the comparatively quiet progress of abolition in England, to believe that our own would necessarily follow the same course. Strong as was the agitation[Pg 163] there, it effected its work, without shaking the ponderous establishments, civil and ecclesiastical, which bore down upon the land with their “weight of calm.” Here, on the contrary, the lighter yokes of church and state are so shaken by the contest, as to convulse those hearts with terror for their existence which lack the honesty to acknowledge the worse than uselessness of a church or a government which sustains slavery, and the humble faith in God to say,

When such lose their confidence in the identity of the principles of freedom, with those of order and Christianity, they are disunited in soul from those who are pressing forward with undiminished confidence; and to disguise their change of feeling they sacrifice their integrity.[11]

In our grief at their conduct, we undergo strong temptations to palliate and conceal, when we ought to expose and condemn. The greater need, therefore, that we often ascend the mount[Pg 164] of communion with the HIGHEST, there to strengthen our vision and our hearts.

“Some natural tears we shed” over those who have turned back from the van, and are trampling down the ranks they once cheered onward; but thus strengthened and enlightened, we shall not long indulge a useless sorrow. We shall cease to be impatient when those whom we yet believe true, are slow to see and to act, in an emergency requiring promptitude. We shall but redouble our own laborious vigilance;—we shall but make more intense our own fervent endeavor. We are laying the foundations of many[Pg 165] generations; and need not to be disturbed by the discomposure of such as comprehend us not. What though, to our human weakness, the end to be attained seem farther off, as faithfulness rouses indifference into opposition, or converts spiritual terror into treachery? yet is the day of redemption nearer than when we believed. What though, in future and severer perils which we KNOW beset the path we must go, we should, for a season, be deserted of all in whom we trusted for aid in this work of redemption? even our Savior was left to “watch alone one bitter hour,” before any comforting angel was sent of heaven to strengthen him.

Truth—Love—Freedom! evermore must their victories for humanity be won through suffering—but they shall be WON. “Forever, Oh Lord! thy word is settled in heaven.”

FOOTNOTES:

[10] See Paul to the Galatians, from which epistle it appears that the Christian cause had then reached a stage in its progress where it was beset with the same difficulties as the anti-slavery cause at present meets. It had so diminished the trust in the existing institutions, and so strengthened the reverence for principles, that many professing Christianity, were driven back into Judaism.

[11] Better, far better, said the organ of the clerical appellants in 1837, that slavery should remain perpetual, than that the existing institutions with which it is so intimately interwoven, should be disturbed. To most minds comes this moment of distrust of the principles of righteousness—want of faith in God. Orange Scott, who then stood firm, has in this last crisis, deserted the cause, moved by the same temptation. When he sees Church and State shaken by the advent of righteous and free principles, “upon the earth distress of nations with perplexity—the sea and waves roaring—men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming upon the earth,” he says—“Slavery is the least evil of the two.” With propriety might he be asked, with what feelings would the slave of the Louisiana sugar cauldron contemplate the utter destruction of the civil and ecclesiastical arrangements by which he is crushed, soul and body? Would he say better, far better that slavery should remain perpetual as “the least evil of the two?” Yet we are commanded to remember those in bonds as bound with them. However deep may be our attachment to institutions, we must do right, in the faith that righteousness can destroy no good thing.

APPENDIX.

The following letters are selected and subjoined as specimens of the secret correspondence of this period.

Such efforts and accusations as the above letter Mr. Phelps did not hesitate privately to put forth against his brethren of the Board, though he never intimated to them, personally, that any such imaginations darkened his mind. And even on resigning his seat with them, one month after the[Pg 175] date of this letter, he did not intend that his reasons for doing so should be made public. His own testimony, respecting similar allegations presented as reasons for the formation of a new Society only a year previous, is true now. At the moment that this letter was written, the Massachusetts Society had eight Orthodox Agents in the field, and but one of another belief. True, the Society could not, without violating its principles, become an Orthodox Society exclusively; but the Society did deem it a fortunate circumstance that Orthodox pro-slavery should be met and exposed by Orthodox anti-slavery.

Who that reads Mr. Phelps’s testimony, Jan. 1838, as given below, but must deeply compassionate the struggle and concealment and weakness of soul which afterwards completely overpowered him, notwithstanding his better knowledge, and dictated his course during the remainder of that year, up to the formation of a new organization, in 1839, and until, as the climax of his course, he submitted to be examined for installation as pastor of the Free Church, by the well known pro-slavery divine, the Rev. Hubbard Winslow.

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(1.) By individuals and societies, and sent directly to the Treasury of this Society, and, in the collection of which, the Massachusetts Society took no part,	$471 12
(2.) By the “Cent-a-week” Societies, through the labors of N. Southard, who is employed and paid by the American Society,	271 05
(3.) By the direct labors of Messrs. O. Scott, Ichabod Codding, and H. B. Stanton, who was employed and paid by the American Society,	812 42
(4.) By Isaac Winslow and H. B. Stanton, at New Bedford, for circulating Thome and Kimball’s journal,	750 00
(5.) Received of the Treasurer of the Massachusetts Society, $1,616 24; $500 of which was collected by Messrs. Stanton, Tillson, and Thomson,—the former employed by the American Society;—and $500 of which were paid by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, on condition that Mr. Stanton would deliver an address before them, and solicit pledges, which he did.	Total, $3,920 83