without hesitation and stammering. I trembled in every limb. Lib. 15:75. I am not sure that my embarrassment was not the most effective part of my speech, if speech it could be called. At any rate, this is about the only part of my performance that I now distinctly remember. The audience sympathized with me at once, and, from having been remarkably quiet, became much excited. Mr. Garrison followed me, taking me as his text; and now, whether I had made an eloquent plea in behalf of freedom, or not, his was one, never to be forgotten. Those who had heard him oftenest, and had known him longest, were astonished at his masterly effort. For the time he possessed that almost fabulous inspiration, often referred to but seldom attained, in which a public meeting is transformed, as it were, into a single individuality, the orator swaying a thousand heads and hearts at once, and, by the simple majesty of his all-controlling thought, converting his hearers into the express image of his own soul. That night there were at least a thousand Garrisonians in Nantucket! "1

1 Another eye witness, Parker Pillsbury, reports ('Acts of the A. S. Apostles,' p. 327): "When the young man [Douglass] closed, late in the evening, though none seemed to know nor to care for the hour, Mr. Garrison rose to make the concluding address. I think he never before nor afterwards felt more profoundly the sacredness of his mission, or the importance of a crisis moment to his success. I surely never saw him more deeply, more divinely, inspired. The crowded congregation had been wrought up almost to enchantment during the whole long evening, particularly by some of the utterances of the last speaker, as he turned over the terrible Apocalypse of his experiences in slavery.

"But Mr. Garrison was singularly serene and calm. It was well that he was so. He only asked a few simple, direct questions. I can recall but few of them, though I do remember the first and the last. The first was: 'Have we been listening to a thing, a piece of property, or to a man?' 'A man! a man!' shouted fully five hundred voices of women and men. 'And should such a mau be held a slave in a republican and Christian land?' was another question. 'No, no! never, never!' again swelled up from the same voices, like the billows of the deep. But the last was this: 'Shall such a man ever be sent back to slavery from the soil of old Massachusetts'—this time uttered with all the power of voice of which Garrison was capable, now more than forty years ago. Almost the whole assembly sprang with one accord to their feet, and the walls and roof of the Athenæum seemed to shudder with the 'No, no!' loud and long-continued in the wild enthusiasm of the scene. As soon as Garrison could be heard, he snatched the acclaim, and superadded: 'No!-a thousand times no! Sooner [let] the lightnings of heaven blast Bunker Hill monument till not one stone shall be left standing on another!""

Compare a similar scene in the Boston State House on Jan. 27, 1842 (Lib. 12:26).

CHAP. I.

1841.

Collins, at Mr. Garrison's instance,1 lost no time in securing Mr. Douglass as an agent of the Massachusetts Life of F. Society; and the late "graduate from the 'peculiar institution,' with his diploma written on his back," as Collins used to say, proved an invaluable accession to the apostles of abolition.

Douglass,

p. 217.

Lib. 12:11.

One other glimpse of Mr. Garrison's lecturing at this period must suffice. "We bargained last year,” wrote N. P. Rogers in his Herald of Freedom for October 1, 1841, "with our beloved fellow-traveller Garrison, in the Scottish Highlands, either on Loch Katrine, on board the barge rowed by McFarlan and his three Highlanders, or else as we rode the Shetland ponies from Katrine to Loch Lomond, through 'Rob Roy's country,' and along his 'native heath,' and when we were gazing upward at the mist-clad mountains, that if ever we lived to get home again to our dear New England, we would go and show him New Hampshire's sterner and loftier summits, her Haystacks and her White Hills, and their Alpine passes." Released from the extra care of editing the Standard by the consenting of David Lee and Lydia Maria Child to conduct the new organ of the American Society,2 Rogers in July began to urge his "very brother" to make the trip in question, then far from fashionable or well-known, or well-provided with houses of entertainment. "Forgive me for writing so much," he concluded. "You are the only person, almost, I love to write to well enough to attempt it, and the only one I can't write anything like a merchantable letter to." Such warm affection easily found a sentimental reason for a trip up the Merrimac by two friends, of whom the younger was born at the mouth, and the elder near the sources, of that noble river— thus 1 Lib. 15: 75, from the preface to Douglass's Autobiography. But Edmund Quincy wrote: "I believe I was the first person who suggested to him becoming an A. S. speaker" (MS. Dec. 13, 1845, to R. D. Webb).

2 They reached this conclusion at the close of March, 1841, and it was arranged that both names should appear in the paper, but that Mrs. Child should have immediate charge, removing to New York, while her husband remained on his beet-sugar farm near Northampton, Mass. (MS. Mar. 30, 31, 1841, J. S. Gibbons to W. L. G.).

"native" to both of them. Mr. Garrison, on his part, CHAP. I. fully responded to an invitation which was to gratify also his keen admiration for natural scenery.

This (in the main) pleasure excursion was the first ever undertaken by Mr. Garrison in his own country, and it made a lasting impression upon his memory. It began at Concord, N. H., on August 23, and ended at Conway on August 30; and in that time the Merrimac was ascended to the Franconia Notch, Littleton was visited, Mt. Washington ascended from Fabyan's, and the return made by way of the Crawford Notch. Rogers, in the Herald of Freedom, was the willing and graphic chronicler of the week's jaunt, which was put to anti-slavery account by holding meetings along the route, with little aid and much obstruction from the clergy. In Rogers's native town of Plymouth no meeting-house could be obtained, and recourse was had to a maple grove across the river in Holderness.

"Semi-circular seats, backed against a line of magnificent trees, to accommodate, we should judge, from two to three hundred, though we did not think about numbers, were filled principally with women, and the men who could not find seats stood on the greensward on either hand, and at length, when wearied with standing, seated themselves on the ground. Garrison, mounted on a rude platform in front, lifted up his voice and spoke to them in prophet tones and surpassing eloquence, from half-past three till I saw the rays of the setting sun playing through the trees on his head. It was at his back-but the auditory could see it, if they had felt at leisure to notice the decline of the sun or the lapse of time. They heeded it not, any more than he, but remained till he ended, apparently undisposed to move, though some came from six, eight, and even twelve miles' distance.

1841. Lib. 11:147.

Rogers's Writings, pp. 156, 193.

Cf. Lib. 11:

147, 167.

Aug. 24, 1841.

Writings of N. P. Rogers, p. 160.

"Garrison spoke the better for being driven to the open air. Ibid., p. 162. The injustice and meanness of it aroused his spirit, and the beauty of the scene animated his eloquence. We never heard him speak so powerfully; and as he spoke the more earnestly, the people, from like cause, heard with deeper interest. He scarcely alluded to the miserable jesuitry that excluded us from the synagogue."

Rogers's Writings,

We cannot dilate here on the wonderful horn at FaPP. 184, 190. byan's, waking the echoes of the mountains; on the singing of that air which, along with the name of Rogers, became household in Mr. Garrison's family, "In the Ibid., p. 190. days when we went gypsying," or else of psalms, “in good time and harmony," on the descent of Mt. Washington; or on the visit to the Willey House, where, says Rogers, we wrote brother Garrison's [name] and our own linked together on the wall with a fragment of coal." But the Ibid., p. 177. following incident is too characteristic of the men and the time to be omitted:

Aug. 28, 1841.

Writings, p. 192.

Aug. 25, 1841. Thos. Par

nell Beach, Ezekiel Rogers.

66

"As we rode through the [Franconia] Notch after friends Beach and Rogers, we were alarmed at seeing smoke issue from their chaise-top, and cried out to them that their chaise was afire! We were more than suspicious, however, that it was something worse than that, and that the smoke came out of E. Rogers. friend Rogers's mouth. And it so turned out. This was before we reached the Notch tavern. Alighting there to water our beasts, we gave him, all round, a faithful admonition. For anti-slavery does not fail to spend its intervals of public service in mutual and searching correction of the faults of its friends. E. Rogers. We gave it soundly to friend Rogers-that he, an abolitionist, on his way to an anti-slavery convention, should desecrate his anti-slavery mouth and that glorious Mountain Notch with a stupefying tobacco weed. We had halted at the Iron Works tavern to refresh our horses, and, while they were eating, walked to view the Furnace. As we crossed the little bridge, E. Rogers. friend Rogers took out another cigar, as if to light it when we

At Little

ton, N. H., Aug. 26, 1841.

should reach the fire. Is it any malady you have got, brother E. Rogers. Rogers,' said we to him, 'that you smoke that thing, or is it habit and indulgence merely?' 'It is nothing but habit,' said he gravely; 'or, I would say, it was nothing else,' and he significantly cast the little roll over the railing into the Ammonoosuck. 'A revolution!' exclaimed Garrison, 'a glorious revolution without noise or smoke,' and he swung his hat cheerily about his head.

"It was a pretty incident, and we joyfully witnessed it and as joyfully record it. It was a vice abandoned, a self-indulgence denied, and from principle. It was quietly and beautifully done. We call on any smoking abolitionist to take notice and to take pattern. Anti-slavery wants her mouths for other uses

than to be flues for besotting tobacco-smoke. They may as well almost be rum-ducts as tobacco-funnels. And we rejoice that so few mouths or noses in our ranks are thus profaned. Abolitionists are generally as crazy in regard to rum and tobacco as in regard to slavery. Some of them refrain from eating flesh and drinking tea and coffee. Some are so bewildered that they won't fight in the way of Christian retaliation, to the great disturbance of the churches they belong to, and the annoyance of their pastors. They do not embrace these 'new-fangled notions' as abolitionists - but then one fanaticism leads to another, and they are getting to be mono-maniacs, as the Reverend brother Punchard called us, on every subject."

CHAP. I.

1841.

Cf. ante,

2:423.

George Punchard.

30, 1841.

Herald of Freedom, 7:82, Lib. II: 118.

Rogers's light-heartedness was manifested under difficulties. In January the circulation of the Herald of Freedom had dwindled to some 900, and, the publisher being unable to sustain it, the New Hampshire Society had to take the paper on their hands again. "J. R. French and two other boys," as Quincy wrote to Collins, "print it MS. Jan. for nothing, asking only board and clothes." In July, a frank review of the struggles of paper and editor, made by Rogers in his own columns, showed that very little of his salary had reached him, that much was due him, and that he forgave much.1 Meantime he had given up the law, in which his career might have been brilliant. He had likewise broken with the church at Plymouth, N. H., -"excommunicated" it, as Quincy said, and as was, in- MS. Jan. deed, the fashion of a "come-outer " period. He was, furthermore, in sympathy with that spirit of "no-organization" which we have seen manifested at the ChardonStreet Convention, and which had now to be combated by the abolitionists along with "new organization."

MS. Mar.

14, 1841, Rogers to W. L. G.

30, 1841, to J. A. Collins.

No-organization and come-outerism were twin brothers; protests, both, against pro-slavery clerical and ecclesiastical despotism. But the ranks of the disorganizers were swelled by the followers of Channing, whose dread of Lib. 15: 29; organization was most acute, and belief in the "superior

1 On Sept. 7, 1842, he writes to H. C. Wright (MS.): "To-morrow I must go to my native village to hunt up some means of support, having received only half-a-dozen chairs and a bureau as my first quarter's salary."

ante, 2:56.