William Lloyd Garrison eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 394 pages of information about William Lloyd Garrison.

William Lloyd Garrison eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 394 pages of information about William Lloyd Garrison.
in Baltimore.  Then Garrison frankly unburdened himself and declared his decision to conduct his campaign against the national iniquity along the lines of immediate and unconditional emancipation.  The two on this new radicalism did not see eye to eye.  But Lundy with sententious shrewdness and liberality suggested to the young radical:  “Thee may put thy initials to thy articles and I will put my initials to mine, and each will bear his own burden.”  And the arrangement pleased the young radical, for it enabled him to free his soul of the necessity which was then sitting heavily upon it.  The precise state of his mind in respect of the question at this juncture in its history and in his own is made plain enough in his salutatory address in The Genius of Universal Emancipation.  The vow made in Bennington ten months before to devote his life to philanthrophy, and the dedication of himself made six months afterward to the extirpation of American slavery, he solemnly renews and reseals in Baltimore.  He does not hate intemperance and war less, but slavery more, and those, therefore, he formally relegates thenceforth to a place of secondary importance in the endeavors of the future.  It is obvious that the colonization scheme has no strong hold upon his intelligence.  He does not conceal his respect for it as an instrument of freedom, but he puts no high value on its utility.  “It may pluck a few leaves,” he remarks, “from the Bohon Upas, but can neither extract its roots nor destroy its withering properties.  Viewed as an auxiliary, it deserves encouragement; but as a remedy it is altogether inadequate.”  But this was not all.  As a remedy, colonization was not only altogether inadequate, its influence was indirectly pernicious, in that it lulled the popular mind into “a belief that the monster has received his mortal wound.”  He perceived that this resultant indifference and apathy operated to the advantage of slavery, and to the injury of freedom.  Small, therefore, as was the good which the Colonization Society was able to achieve, it was mixed with no little ill.  Although Garrison has not yet begun to think on the subject, to examine into the motives and purposes of the society, it does not take a prophet to foresee that some day he will.  He had already arrived at conclusions in respect of the rights of the colored people “to choose their own dwelling place,” and against the iniquity of their expatriation, which cut directly at the roots of the colonization scheme.  Later the pro-slavery character of the society will be wholly revealed to him.  But truth in the breast of a reformer as of others must needs follow the great law of moral growth, first the blade, then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear.  It is enough that he has made the tremendous step from gradual to immediate and unconditional emancipation on the soil.

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William Lloyd Garrison from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.