1844. Lib. 14:9, 19, 37, 39, 198.

CHAP. IV. promise sacred, and its abolition not to be entertained. This irrefragable argument for disunion demonstrated likewise the essential barrenness of the final victory of Mr. Adams's contention for the rescinding of the gag-rule against anti-slavery petitions to which South Carolina Lib. 14:206. responded that if Congress should next attempt antislavery legislation, the Federal compact would be at an end.

Lib. 14:202; 15:7, 26, 27.

Lib. 15:7;

201.

She was already proving it at an end, as far as Northern rights were concerned. The State of Massachusetts had sent one of its most respectable citizens, Samuel Hoar of Concord, a lawyer and ex-Congressman, to Charleston, to test in the Federal courts the validity of the South Caroante, p. 92. lina law of December 19, 1835, providing for the jailing of colored seamen arriving at her ports. The transmission of Mr. Hoar's credentials by the Governor of South Lib. 14:198, Carolina to the State Legislature produced, in the Senate, resolutions pronouncing the mission a gross insult, and promising resistance to an adverse decision of the Federal courts. The press reverberated with like menaces, inLib. 14:198. timating that South Carolina would anticipate a conflict with the United States by making one directly with Massachusetts-"the Fort Moultrie State" against "the Bunker Hill State." Calhoun's organ, the South Carolinian, hoped no lawyer would take a fee from Mr. Hoar. Lib. 14:202. Both branches of the Legislature called upon the Governor Lib. 14:202. to expel him; and, this patriotic duty having been begun Lib. 15:9. by his hotel-keeper, nothing remained for Mr. Hoar but to flee the State, which he did, under escort the company

MS. Dec. 14, 1844.

of his daughter more than the gray hairs of this man of sixty-six insuring him from summary violence. "I am in hopes," wrote Edmund Quincy to Richard Webb, "that Massachusetts will at last be kicked into some degree of spirit. I don't know that anything is left for her but reprisals.1 But slavery has n't left her pluck enough for that, I fancy "- the melancholy truth.

1 Mr. Hoar himself, in a letter on the Latimer case in 1842 (ante, p. 66), referred to the law of Louisiana ordering the arrest of any colored man

Lib. 14:127,

129, 144, 147,

195; 17:158.

132.

Other Massachusetts citizens were equally in need and equally devoid of protection at this moment. There was Lib. 14:147. honest Jonathan Walker of Harwich, sea-captain, caught in July, 1844, by the U. S. steamer General Taylor, with sundry slaves aboard as voluntary passengers from the Federal Territory of Florida to the Bahama Islands; taken back in irons to Pensacola and there jailed, chained to a ringbolt for fifteen days; afterwards put in the pillory for an hour, and pelted with rotten eggs; finally, by order of a Federal court, branded on the right hand with "S. Lib. 15: 115, S." for slave-stealer-lucky to escape at length with his life. There was also the Rev. Charles T. Torrey, who, two years before, being a newspaper correspondent in Washington, had exercised his Constitutional right to visit Annapolis to report a slaveholders' convention, was recognized, nearly lynched, and, upon his room at the tavern being searched, arrested for his temporary security, but on trial was released on bail. This treatment led him to engage in several hazardous attempts to run slaves off from the border States, and in June, 1844, he was again in a Maryland jail-this time in Baltimore-on a charge that shut out every prospect of local mercy or Federal intervention.

Jan. 12, 1842;

Life of Torrey, pp. 91

104; Lib. 12:10, 14.

Life of TorLib. 14: 107,

rey, p. 126;

14:107,

119.

Ante, 1:174.

Lib. 14:119.

Mr. Garrison, on the happening of this fatal misfortune to his old enemy, banished all resentment, remembering those in bonds as bound with them—all the more because the same prison had once held himself. He professed his readiness "to espouse his [Torrey's] cause as though he were my bosom friend,” helping pecuniarily with his mite, and by arousing public sympathy and indignation. He Lib. 14: 126. entering the State from another State, and asked, why, then, might not every free State imprison every incoming native of a slaveholding State (Lib. 12: 177). He reached Charleston on Nov. 28, 1844; his colleague, Henry Hubbard of Pittsfield, Mass., delegated to Louisiana, arrived in New Orleans Dec. 1, and was likewise expelled, but less fiercely (Smith's "History of Pittsfield,' p. 405; and Lib. 15: 2, 9, 14, 17, 25). See the law enacted by the South Carolina Legislature to prevent the recurrence of like missions: “An Act to provide for the punishment of persons disturbing the peace of this State, in relation to slaves and free persons of color" (Lib. 15: 14; 18: 65), and a similar one by Louisiana (Lib. 15: 17, 25).

1844.

CHAP. IV. was as good as his word. On August 19, 1844, Torrey wrote from Baltimore jail to Elias Smith,1 saying, "To Lib. 14:147. Mr. Garrison, personally, I feel greatly indebted for the magnanimous part he has taken "; and on November 29 to J. Miller McKim of Philadelphia, the medium of gifts in money from the colored and white people of that vicinity:

MS. Nov.

29, 1844.

"I have been thinking, all summer, of addressing Garrison a long letter for the Press, and I communicated my intention to our Boston friends. They urged, that I might revive old sores, now healed; that my private intercourse might do all the good such a letter could; and that, in prison, I ought not to risk the recurrence of unpleasant feelings among my friends, of either the 'Old' or 'New' organizations, some of whom, on both sides, would needs be offended by the views of one who told both plainly their faults-faults that pride, still, might make a few leaders loath to acknowledge.2 And then, as my views Ante, 2:318. on the 'confounded woman question' are materially modified, so far as it is connected with our cause, I might hurt the feelings of my personal friends. These ideas made me delay. Then came my two months' prostrating sickness, and now, my trial, in which I suppose you and all my kind friends in Philadelphia feel a deep interest."

1 A former Methodist minister, at this time an anti-slavery lecturer, and very intimate with Mr. Garrison, to whom he wrote from Galveston, Texas, July 13, 1866, apropos of the fund then being raised for the latter's support: "My dear old friend, I have nothing to give, but I have the memory of obligations for kindnesses received at your hands which, if I had thousands, I could scarcely repay. When an exile from my home, more than twentythree years ago, and living temporarily in Cambridgeport, you were a friend and brother most precious. You sympathized in my misfortunes and poverty; and, later, in Boston, you sheltered my little family in your own house, while I struggled, as I never did before, to find them bread. You shared with us your own bounty, and your excellent and noble wife was a companion and friend to mine. Your patience and kindness to all who sought your door for relief - your open-handed, large-hearted charityyour gentleness in the family, and your cheerful song as you came in and went out before us, are, and ever will remain, green in my memory. Alas! how little the world knew of the heart of that man whom they reviled as the offscourings of all things!" (MS.)

2 Compare the letter to Elias Smith cited above. Torrey was well-advised, considering how far his old associates lagged behind the Garrisonian abolitionists in exciting public sympathy on his behalf, or in turning his case to anti-slavery account (Lib. 14:147).

1844.

MS. Oct.

I, 1844, W. L. G. to H. C. Wright.

23, 27, 67.

Mr. Garrison's activity as a speaker, from Maine to CHAP. IV. Pennsylvania, was very great in the year under review, until the trouble in his side compelled him to withdraw Lib. 14:170; temporarily from the lecture field. As usual, slavery was not his sole topic, but, as occasion offered, he gave addresses on Peace, Worship, the Church, the Ministry, the Sabbath, the Condition and the Rights of Woman. He took part in the Sunday lectures at Amory Hall, Boston, which Lib. 14:19, were a sort of adjourned Chardon-Street Convention, having among his colleagues R. W. Emerson,1 Adin Ballou, Charles A. Dana, and Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose. He spoke with Wendell Phillips before a legislative committee at Lib. 14:23. the State House in favor of the abolition of the death penalty, and again at a special meeting in Boston in December. He was cheered by the memorable split in Lib. 14: 58, the Methodist denomination, on the question of episcopal slaveholding, when, in the language of Governor Hammond of South Carolina, the "patriotic Methodists of the South dissolved all connection with their brethren of the North"-a foreshadowing of the greater disunion in store for the two sections.

Towards the close of the year, the Garrison family was blessed with a girl,2 much longed for by her parents.

1 This year witnessed a closer connection than hitherto between Emerson and the abolitionists. We read in Cabot's Memoirs of him (2: 430) the following extract from his Journal for 1844: "The haters of Garrison have lived to rejoice in that grand world movement which, every age or two, casts out so masterly an agent for good. I cannot speak of that gentleman without respect. I found him the other day in his dingy office." To which his editor adds: "He went to Garrison's office, perhaps, to concert for a meeting which the abolitionists held in the Concord Court-house on the 1st of August in this year (1844) to celebrate the anniversary of the liberation of the slaves in the British West Indies. Emerson delivered the address." See Lib. 14:127, 129, 146. No church was to be had for this humane service. 2 Helen Frances Garrison, born Dec. 16, 1844, and named for her mother and paternal grandmother. "You know they have a little daughter," wrote Ann Phillips to Elizabeth Pease. "Garrison is tickled to death with it" (MS. Jan. (?), 1845). "We shall demand for her the rights of a human being, though she be a female," wrote the happy father to Mrs. Louisa Loring (MS. Jan. 11, 1845).

Lib. 15:3.

91, 94, 113, 125, 134.

J. M. Ham

mond.

Lib. 14: 201.

Lib. 15:19.

1845.

FORM

CHAPTER V.

TEXAS.-1845.

NORMAL assent to the Disunion doctrine was given, with a will, by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Jan. 24-26, Society at its annual meeting in January, 1845. As a consequence of this action, Ellis Gray Loring resigned his place on the Board of Officers. "Poor Garrison," Lib. 15:19. exulted the Boston Post, "who appears to be broken down, mentally and physically, has taken such a rabid course that he is driving from him some of those who have heretofore been his most active supporters." Mr. Loring hastened to notify this Democratic sheet that the alienation was not personal:

Lib. 15:19.

Feb. 5-7, 1845; Lib. 15:33.

"Not concurring in the 'disunion' doctrines adopted by the Society, I thought I should misrepresent it by remaining an officer; but it is painful to me to have it intimated that an honest difference on a single point of duty could drive Mr. Garrison and me asunder. On other points we coöperate; and never, during the fourteen years in which I have been honored by his friendship, have I felt for him a deeper attachment and respect.1 I cannot accept even an implied compliment at the expense of one whose past services and present value to the cause of human freedom I feel to be unequalled."

Elsewhere, the Liberator's cry, "No Union with Slaveholders!" (now printed weekly at the head of the paper) was caught up and re-echoed in the abolition ranks — by the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, in February; by a vast majority of the Eastern Pennsylvania

1 On Jan. 11, Mr. Garrison acknowledged a New Year's gift of twenty dollars from Mrs. Loring, renewing one of the year before (MS.).