The Underground Railroad by William Still (big screen ebook reader TXT) 📕

The character and career of the leader of the movement for immediate emancipation in this country, are too well known to be dwelt on here; nor, in the space at our command, is it possible to give in full those facts of his life which have already appeared in print. His earliest biographer was Mary Howitt; and another even more famous authoress, Mrs. H.B. Stowe, in "Men of Our Times," has stood in the same relation to him, while his life-long friend, Oliver Johnson, has writen the best concise account of him, in "Appleton's New American Cyclopædia."

Mr. Garrison (the Cyclopædia is, on this point, in error) was born December 12, 1804, in Newburyport, Mass., his father, Abijah Garrison, being a ship-captain, trading with the West Indies, and his mother, Fanny Lloyd, a woman of remarkable beauty, as well as piety and force of character. Intemperate habits led the husband and father from home to a solitary and obscure end, leaving his family entirely dependent. William (or as he was always called, Lloyd), was the youngest but one of five children, and had not done with his schooling before he began to contribute to his own support; at first in Lynn, where he was set at shoemaking, at the age of eleven; afterwards in Newburyport, and finally, in 1818, at Haverhill, where he was apprenticed to a cabinet maker. Not finding these trades suited to his taste, the same year he was indentured to Ephraim W. Allen, editor of the "Newburyport Herald," and in the printing-office he completed his education, so far as he was to have any, with such early success, as soon to be an acceptable contributor to his employer's paper, while the authorship of his articles was still his own secret. As soon as his apprenticeship came to a close, in 1826, he became proprietor of the "Free Press," in his native city, but the paper failed of support. Seeking work as a journeyman, in Boston, he was engaged in 1827 to edit, in the interest of "total abstinence," the "National Philanthropist," the first paper of its kind ever published. On a change of proprietors in 1828, he was induced to join a friend in Bennington, Vt., in publishing the "Journal of the Times," which advocated the election of John Quincy Adams for president, besides being devoted to peace, temperance, anti-slavery and other reforms. In this town, Mr. Garrison began his agitation of the subject of Slavery, "in consequence of which there was transmitted to Congress an anti-slavery memorial, more numerously signed than any similar paper previously submitted to that body." It was in Bennington, too, that he received from Benjamin Lundy, who had met him the previous year at his boarding-house in Boston, an invitation to go to Baltimore, and aid him in editing the "Genius of Universal Emancipation."

Baltimore was no strange city to Mr. Garrison. Thither he had accompanied his mother, in 1815, serving as a chore-boy, and he had visited her just before her death, in 1823. He took leave of Boston in the fall of 1829, after having acted as the orator of the day, July 4th, in Park Street church, and surprised his hearers by the boldness of his utterances on the subject of Slavery. The causes of his imprisonment at Baltimore scarcely need to be repeated. For an alleged "gross and malicious libel" on a townsman (of Newburyport) whose ship was engaged in the coastwise slave-trade, and whom he accordingly denounced in the "Genius," he was tried and convicted, and sentenced to pay a fine of $50 and costs. The cell in which he was confined for forty-nine days, and from which he was liberated only by the spontaneous liberality of Arthur Tappan, a perfect stranger to him, he had the satisfaction of reseeking, after the close of the war, in company with Judge Bond, but the prison had been removed.

Compelled to part company with Lundy, to whom he has ever owned his moral indebtedness, Mr. Garrison at length started in Boston, in January 1831, his "Liberator" with little else besides his "dauntless spirit and a press." The difficulties which beset the birth of this paper were never entirely overcome, and its publication was attended, through all the thirty-five years of its existence, with constant struggle and privation, and with personal labor, at the printer's case, and over the forms, which only an iron constitution could have endured. The "Liberator" was the organ of the editor alone, and he gave room in it to the numerous reforms which were, in his mind, only subordinate to abolition. In 1865 the last volume was issued, Mr. Garrison having already, in May, withdrawn from the American Anti-slavery Society, which he had helped to found, in 1833, and of which, as he drew up the Declaration of Sentiments, he may be supposed to have known something of the original aims and proper duration.

In September, 1834, Mr. Garrison was married to Helen Eliza, daughter of the venerable philanthropist, George Benson, of Providence, R.I., who had, even in the previous century, been an active member of a combined anti-slavery and freedmen's aid society in that city. In October, 1835, occurred the Boston riot, led by "gentlemen of property and standing," in which Mr. Garrison's life was imperilled, and which made him once more familiar with the interior of a jail—this time, a place of refuge. In 1832, he went to England, as an agent of the New England Anti-slavery Society, to awaken English sympathy for the anti-slavery movement, and to undeceive Clarkson and Wilberforce and their distinguished associates as to the nature and object of the Colonization Society, as to which he had already had occasion to undeceive himself. His mission was eminently successful in both its aspects, and resulted in the subsequent visits of George Thompson to this country, between whom and himself a strong personal attachment had arisen and has ever since continued. A second visit to England he made as a delegate to the World's Anti-slavery Convention, in which he refused to sit after his female colleagues had been rejected. A third visit, still in behalf of the cause, took place in 1846. Twenty years later—the war over and Slavery abolished—he again went abroad, to repair his health and renew old friendships, and for the first time passed over to the Continent. In England, he was greeted with cordial appreciation and hospitality by all classes. Numerous public receptions of a most flattering character were given to him, but without the effect of causing him to magnify his own merits or to forget the honor due to his associates in the anti-slavery struggle. At the London Breakfast, where John Bright presided, and John Stuart Mill, the Duke of Argyll, and others spoke, he said, when called upon to reply: "I disclaim, with all the sincerity of my soul, any special praise for anything I have done. I have simply tried to maintain the integrity of my soul before God, and to do my duty." In Edinburgh, the "freedom of the city" was conferred upon him with impressive ceremonies—he being the third American ever thus honored. In Paris he was also received with distinction, his special mission to that city being to attend the International Anti-slavery Convention, in the capacity of a delegate from the American Freedman's Union Commission, of which he was first vice-president.

The justice of the war on the part of the North, and its effect on the fate of Slavery at the South, were never subjects of doubt in the mind of Mr. Garrison, and he quickly recognized the force of events which had taken from the abolitionists the helm of direction, and reunited them with their countrymen in the irresistible flood which no man's hand guided, and no man's hand could stay. An agitator from conviction and not from choice, he was only too glad to lay down the heavy burden of a life-time, and retire to well-earned repose, after such a vision of faint hope realized as certainly no other reformer was ever blessed with. He had lived to see the disunion which he advocated on sacred principles, attempted by the South in the name of the sum of all villanies; the uprising of the North; the grand career of Lincoln; the proclamation of emancipation; the arming of the blacks—his own son among their officers; the end of the rebellion; and the consummation of his prayers and labors for the salvation of his country. He had taken part in the ceremonies at the recovery of Sumter, had walked the streets of Charleston, and received floral tokens of the gratitude of the emancipated. To him it seemed as if his work was done, and that he might, without suspicion or accusation, cease to be conspicuous, or to occupy the public attention in any way relating to the past and recalling his part in the anti-slavery struggle. Notoriety, no longer a necessity, was eagerly avoided; and the physical rest which was now enjoined upon him the liberality of his friends having enabled him to secure, he settled down into the quiet life of a private citizen, whose great duty had become to him merely one of the duties which every man owes his country and his race. His sweet temper, his modesty, his unfailing cheerfulness, his rarely mistaken judgment of men and measures; his blameless and happy domestic life, and his hospitality; his warm sympathy with all forms of human suffering—these and other qualities which cannot be enumerated here, will doubtless receive the just judgment of posterity.

As a fitting adjunct to the foregoing sketch, extracts from some of the speeches made at the London breakfast so magnanimously extended to Mr. Garrison in 1867, are here introduced. As presiding officer on the occasion, John Bright, M.P. spoke as follows: