Before the attack on Fort Sumter, Garrison was opposed to coercing the rebel States back into the Union.  He admitted the Constitutional power of the National Government to employ force in maintaining the integrity of the Republic.  “The Federal Government must not pretend to be in actual operation, embracing thirty-four States,” the editor of the Liberator commented, “and then allow the seceding States to trample upon its flag, steal its property, and defy its authority with impunity; for it would then be (as it is at this moment) a mockery and a laughing-stock.  Nevertheless to think of whipping the South (for she will be a unit on the question of slavery) into subjection, and extorting allegiance from millions of people at the cannon’s mouth, is utterly chimerical.  True, it is in the power of the North to deluge her soil with blood, and inflict upon her the most terrible sufferings; but not to conquer her spirit, or change her determination.”

He, therefore, proposed that “the people of the North should recognize the fact that THE UNION IS DISSOLVED, and act accordingly.  They should see, in the madness of the South, the hand of God, liberating them from ‘a covenant with death’ and an ‘agreement with hell,’ made in a time of terrible peril, and without a conception of its inevitable consequences, and which has corrupted their morals, poisoned their religion, petrified their humanity as towards the millions in bondage, tarnished their character, harassed their peace, burdened them with taxation, shackled their prosperity, and brought them into abject vassalage.”

It is not to be wondered at that Garrison, under the circumstances, was for speeding the South rather than obstructing her way out of the Union.  For hardly ever had the anti-slavery cause seen greater peril than that which hung over it during the months which elapsed between Lincoln’s election and the attack on Sumter, owing to the paralyzing apprehensions to which the free States fell a prey in view of the then impending disruption of their glorious Union.  Indeed no sacrifice of anti-slavery accomplishments, policy, and purpose of those States were esteemed too important or sacred to make, if thereby the dissolution of the Union might be averted.  Many, Republicans as well as Democrats, were for repealing the Personal Liberty Laws, and for the admission of New Mexico as a State, with or without slavery, for the enforcement of the Fugitive State Law, for suppressing the right of free speech and the freedom of the press on the subject of slavery, and for surrendering the Northern position in opposition to the extension of slavery to national Territories, in order to placate the South and keep it in the Union.  Nothing could have possibly been more disastrous to the anti-slavery movement in America than a Union saved on the terms proposed by such Republican leaders as William H. Seward, Charles Francis Adams, Thomas Corwin, and Andrew G. Curtin.  The Union, under the circumstances, was sure death to the slave, in disunion lay his great life-giving hope.  Therefore his tried and sagacious friend was for sacrificing the Union to win for him freedom.