1844. words, all these moralists of the forum and the pulpit CHAP. IV. whom conscience constrained to draw the line at Texas, thereby gave their complete sanction to the act of their forefathers in striking the inhuman alliance between free and slave institutions, called the Federal Constitution. Mr. Garrison and his disunion associates, on the contrary, put themselves where any of the statesmen of 1787 might have stood, in implacable opposition to the sacrifice (for the sake of Union) of the blacks, and to the guarantee of a slaveholding political supremacy. The deed having been done, a new Revolution was called for;1 and the only wonder is, not that Mr. Garrison was the first to proclaim it, but that he should have waited so long to perfect his doctrine of immediate emancipation, by coupling it with an equally immediate policy of withdrawal from all part and parcel in the support of a blood-stained Government. In the domain of individual conscience, the success of both the doctrine and the policy was instantaneous. Nothing more remained to extinguish absolutely the responsibility of the Garrisonian abolitionists for the enslavement of their countrymen. They alone of the entire population of the United States had washed their hands of slavery, historically and in time present; at the South or at the North; in the area cursed by it when the Revolutionary fathers made their compact, or in any subsequent or possible extension of it; intrenched in State and local legislation, or in the Constitution of the United States. All other considerations yielded to this religious purification of themselves before their Creator. But anti-slavery disunion is seldom weighed in its Ministers and Members of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the New England and New Hampshire Conferences,"] can now present myself its stern assailant. For its existence I did, and would, apologize; but never for its extension. I would deal gently with the hereditary sin of its being; but I abhor the stupendous volitional crime of its propagandism" (Whedon's Essays, Reviews, and Discourses.' New York, 1887, 1:28). 1 "You that prate of Disunion, do you not know that Disunion is Revo. lution?' asks Mr. Webster. Yes, we do know it, and we are for a revolution - a revolution in the character of the American Constitution" (Speech of Wendell Phillips at Faneuil Hall, Dec. 29, 1846. Lib. 17:7). own scales. Critics who waive the sub-sacredness of the Lib. 14:45. Constitutional obligations,- binding "in honor and in justice," to use Webster's words,- and tolerate the revolutionary view in order to expose its impracticability, deny that the agitation for peaceful separation could ever have attained its object. This prophecy-for it is nothing more neglects altogether the rôle of the South in the settlement of the question; and it is certainly conceivable that the spread of disinterested abolitionism at the North might have induced the slaveholding States to withdraw without violence. Be this as it may, there was but one of two ways to purge the North of its complicity with slavery either to dissolve the Union as Mr. Garrison proposed, or to eradicate the pro-slavery compromises from the Constitution. The impossibility of the latter course has been forever settled by the fact of the Rebellion, which was kindled long before there was the remotest possibility of disturbing the status quo of 1787. Moreover, no party ever seriously aimed to undo the compromises, so that still we may ask for a more practical policy than Mr. Garrison's, which in fact had no rival, being rootand-branch as no other was. Half-way measures, like half-way principles and men, abounded, but all came to naught. Substituting hindsight for foresight, we can now see that there was, in the very nature of the Government, an irrepressible conflict, tending to produce either rupture or a homogeneous public sentiment with regard to slavery, whether for or against. To a rupture it was to come, and the Garrisonian abolitionists must have the credit, as practical men, of being the first to put themselves in line with the inevitable. It has absurdly been said, in depreciation of them, that they wished the North to withdraw in peace, whereas the South made a bloody exit; as if such evidence of the nature of the partnership did not justify their prevision and their mode of avoiding all the cost and misery of the civil war. But indeed on this head they stand in the peculiar position of being charged, both 1844. at the North and at the South, with having criminally CHAP. IV. brought on the war, while the Republican Party (as heir and assign of the Liberty and Free Soil parties) assumes all the credit of putting an end to slavery, by arms. The pertinent question is, Which of the political party policies from 1844 to 1860 triumphed? And the answer must be, None; while the Garrisonian ideal of immediate emancipation through the overthrow of the pro-slavery compromises call it disunion or a reconstruction of the old Union-was that in whose realization the nation now rejoices with thanksgiving. In the meantime, the unassailable logic of the abolition position made Mr. Garrison's "No Union with Slaveholders!" the criterion of every party professing opposition to slavery. In this respect its value cannot be over-estimated, while we know that, in the desperate counsels of the Slave Power, the hopes of peace through fresh compromises, to be extorted by the threat of forcible disunion, were dampened by the spectacle of this "saving remnant" of irreconcilables whose leader was Garrison, and whose organs the Liberator and the Standard. See the S. Carolina Or. dinance of Secession. For the moment the consolidation of the abolitionists as disunionists made little sensation. The country was absorbed in a more than usually exciting Presidential contest, in which a vote for James K. Polk was equivalent to instructions for the admission of Texas, a vote for Henry Clay was no obstacle to the same consummation, and a vote for Birney was virtually a vote for Polk. Everywhere at the North, Democratic legislators who had joined in unpartisan protests against annexation, Lib. 14:102. were unblushingly retracting them. The Democratic press of the New England and Middle States had as a body gone over to the Administration on the subject of Lib. 14:173. Texas. Polk had been nominated expressly to finish the Lib. 14:94. task begun by Tyler, and received the endorsement of South Carolina, whose delegates took no part in the Convention in order to reserve liberty of action in case Van Buren (a nominal anti-annexationist) should be chosen. Lib. 14:71, 72. MS. Sept. Lib. 14:95. The Upshur-Calhoun treaty with Texas, lost in the Senate, was to be reinstated at the polls. The monster mass meetings of both parties, all over the country, absorbed public attention, and caused the Massachusetts abolitionists to curtail their labors in the field till after the election. In New Hampshire it was otherwise, but there an obstacle was encountered domestic to the abolition ranks. 22, 1844, E. Quincy to R.D. Webb. MS. F. Douglass, S. S. Foster, Spear, C. L. N. P. Rogers. Ante, p. 23. Abby Kelley to W. L. Garrison. FRANKLIN, N. H., Sept. 26, 1844. You may not be aware of the fact that we are trying to upturn some of the hard soil of New Hampshire. Douglass, Pillsbury, Foster, Spear, Jane E. Hitchcock of Oneida, N. Y., and myself are in the field, and Remond and, perhaps, White will soon be here. The State has been most wofully neglected for some two years past, and this, with no-organization, has well nigh hedged up our way to immediate great usefulness. Bro. Rogers gives no word of cheer, blows no bugle rallying-cry for the efforts now being put forth. He cannot, with his views of carrying forward reforms. He don't like this coming forth as agents from a Board or Executive Committee. He thinks it will do but little if any good. This I presume is his feeling from what I have heard him say. It is on this ground that I account for his silence when we are striving to move the State. One clear note from his shrill clarion would thrill the State; but as he Lib. 14:159. gives it not, will not you notice the fact that we are here, and by that means remind him that he is silent? Perhaps you may awaken him to do some little word. All the agents, I believe, are in the Society. The New Hampshire Board Rogers and French wish to wink it out of sight - have entered into an arrangement with the Executive Committee to supply the largest possible amount of funds to sustain the agency while in this State. We hope to meet the entire expense, though we shall find it difficult, as some of those who have stood in the forefront of the battle, are in sympathy with Bro. Rogers on the question of organizations. And, again, this affair of the Herald is a most trying and soul-sickening affair. It has been a long time kept dark by the Board, in hopes that French might be brought to do the fair and manly thing; but after a year's trial J. R. French. employ of the American for there is one, though |