deeply impressed by the good Quaker’s zeal and devotion, and he resolved to join him and devote himself thereafter to the work of abolishing slavery.
In pursuance of this plan he went to Baltimore in the autumn of 1829, and thenceforth the Genius was published weekly, under the joint editorship of the two men. It was understood, however, that Garrison would do most of the editorial work, while Lundy would spend most of his time in lecturing and procuring subscribers. On one point the two editors differed radically, Lundy being the advocate of gradual and Garrison of immediate emancipation. The former was possessed with the idea that the negroes, on being emancipated, must be colonized somewhere beyond the limits of the United States; the latter held that they should be emancipated on the soil of the country, with all the rights of freemen. In view of this difference it was agreed that each should speak on his own individual responsibility in the paper, appending his initial to each of his articles for the information of the reader. It deserves mention here that Garrison was then in utter ignorance of the change previously wrought in the opinions of English abolitionists by Elizabeth Heyrick’s pamphlet in favour of immediate, in distinction from gradual emancipation. The sinfulness of slavery being admitted, the duty of immediate emancipation to his clear ethical instinct was perfectly manifest. He saw that it would be idle to expose and denounce the evils of slavery, while responsibility for the system was placed upon former generations, and the duty of abolishing it transferred to an indefinite future. His demand for immediate emancipation fell like a tocsin upon the ears of slaveholders. For general talk about the evils of slavery they cared little, but this assertion that every slave was entitled to instant freedom filled them with alarm and roused them to anger, for they saw that, if the conscience of the nation were to respond to the proposition, the system must inevitably fall. The Genius, now that it had become a vehicle for this dangerous doctrine, was a paper to be feared and intensely hated. Baltimore was then one of the centres of the domestic slave trade, and upon this traffic Garrison heaped the strongest denunciations. A vessel owned in Newburyport having taken a cargo of slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans, he characterized the transaction as an act of “domestic piracy,” and avowed his purpose to “cover with thick infamy” those engaged therein. He was thereupon prosecuted for libel by the owner of the vessel, fined $50, mulcted in costs, and, in default of payment, committed to gaol. His imprisonment created much excitement, and in some quarters, in spite of the pro-slavery spirit of the time, was a subject of indignant comment in public as well as private. The excitement was fed by the publication of two or three striking sonnets, instinct with the spirit of liberty, which Garrison inscribed on the walls of his cell. One of these, Freedom of Mind, is remarkable for freshness of thought and terseness of expression.
John G. Whittier, the Quaker poet, interceded with Henry Clay to pay Garrison’s fine and thus release him from prison. To the credit of the slaveholding statesman it must be said that he responded favourably, but before he had time for the requisite preliminaries Arthur Tappan, a philanthropic merchant of New York, contributed the necessary sum and set the prisoner free after an incarceration of seven weeks. The partnership between Garrison and Lundy was then dissolved by mutual consent, and the former resolved to establish a paper of his own, in which, upon his sole responsibility, he could advocate the doctrine of immediate emancipation and oppose the scheme of African colonization. He was sure, after his experiences at Baltimore, that a movement against slavery resting upon any less radical foundation than this would be ineffectual. He first proposed to establish his paper at Washington, in the midst of slavery, but on returning to New England and observing the state of public opinion there, he came to the conclusion that little could be done at the South while the non-slaveholding North was lending her influence, through political, commercial, religious and social channels, for the sustenance of slavery. He determined, therefore, to publish his paper in Boston, and, having issued his prospectus, set himself to the task of awakening an interest in the subject by means of lectures in some of the principal cities and towns of the North. It was an up-hill work. Contempt for the negro and indifference to his wrongs were almost universal. In Boston, then a great cotton mart, he tried in vain to procure a church or vestry for the delivery of his lectures, and thereupon announced in one of the daily journals that if some suitable place was not promptly offered he would speak on the common. A body of infidels under the leadership of Abner Kneeland (1774–1844), who had previously been in turn a Baptist minister and the editor of a Universalist magazine, proffered him the use of their small hall; and, no other place being accessible, he accepted it gratefully, and delivered therein (in October 1830) three lectures, in which he unfolded his principles and plans. He visited privately many of the leading citizens of the city, statesmen, divines and merchants, and besought them to take the lead in a national movement against slavery; but they all with one consent made excuse, some of them listening to his plea with manifest impatience. He was disappointed, but not disheartened. His conviction of the righteousness of his cause, of the evils and dangers of slavery, and of the absolute necessity of the contemplated movement, was intensified by opposition, and he resolved to go forward, trusting in God for success.
On the 1st of January 1831, without a dollar of capital, and without a single subscriber, he and his partner Isaac Knapp (1804–1843) issued the first number of the Liberator, avowing their “determination to print it as long as they could subsist on bread and water, or their hands obtain employment.” Its motto was, “Our country is the world—our countrymen are mankind”; and the editor, in his address to the public, uttered the words which have become memorable as embodying the whole purpose and spirit of his life: “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.” Help came but slowly. For many months Garrison and his brave partner, who died long before the end of the conflict, made their bed on the floor of the room, “dark, unfurnished and mean,” in which they printed their paper, and where Mayor Harrison Gray Otis of Boston, in compliance with the request of Governor Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina, “ferreted them out” in “an obscure hole,” “their only visible auxiliary a negro boy.” But the paper founded under such inauspicious circumstances exerted a mighty influence, and lived to record not only President Lincoln’s proclamation of emancipation, but the adoption of an amendment to the constitution of the United States for ever prohibiting slavery. It was the beginning and the nucleus of an agitation that eventually pervaded and filled every part of the country. Other newspapers were afterwards established upon the same principles; anti-slavery societies, founded upon the doctrine of immediate emancipation, sprang up on every hand; the agitation was carried into political parties, into the press, and into legislative and ecclesiastical assemblies; until in 1861 the Southern states, taking alarm from the election of a president known to be at heart opposed to slavery though pledged to enforce all the constitutional safeguards of the system, seceded from the Union and set up a separate government.
Garrison sought the abolition of slavery by moral means alone. He knew that the national government had no power over the system in any state, though it could abolish it at the national capital, and prohibit it in the territories. He thought it should bring its moral influence to bear in favour of abolition; but neither he nor his associates ever asked Congress to exercise any unconstitutional power. His idea was to combine the moral influence of the North, and pour it through every open channel upon the South. To this end he made his appeal to the Northern churches and pulpits, beseeching them to bring the power of Christianity to bear against the slave system, and to advocate the rights of the slaves to immediate and unconditional freedom. He was a man of peace, hating war not less than he did slavery; but he warned his countrymen that if they refused to abolish slavery by moral power a retributive war must sooner or later ensue. The conflict was irrepressible. Slavery must be overthrown, if not by peaceful means, then in blood. The first society
