Ah! he himself confessed that all were against his return to Baltimore.  But his love of the slave was stronger than the strength of the temptation.  He put all these selfish objections behind him.  As he has recorded the result of this experience:  “Opposition served only to increase my ardor, and confirm my purpose.”  Strange and incomprehensible to his fellows is the man who prefers “persecution, reproach, and poverty” with duty, to worldly ease and honor and riches without it.  When a man appears in society who is not controlled by motives which usually govern the conduct of other men he becomes at first an object of pity, then of contempt, and, lastly, of hate.  Garrison we may be sure at the end of this visit had made rapid transit from the first to the second of these stages in the esteem of his generation.

His experience was not all of this deplorable kind.  He left Baltimore without the money required to pay his way North, depending literally upon the good God to provide for him the necessary means to complete his journey.  And such help was more than once providentially afforded the young apostle of liberty.  At New York, when he did not know how he was to go farther for want of means, he met a Mr. Samuel Leggett who gave him a pass on the “splendid steamboat President.”  It seems that this friend in his need had read with indignation the story of his trial.  The bread which he had scattered from his prison on the waters of public sentiment had thus returned to him after many days in the timely assistance of a sympathetic soul.  And then, again, when he was in Boston in sore distress for a little money, suddenly, beautifully, the desire of his heart was satisfied.  But let him tell the incident in his own touching way.  His face was turned toward Baltimore:  “But how was I to return?” he asks.  “I had not a dollar in my pocket, and my time was expired.  No one understood my circumstances.  I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.  My friends were prodigal of pity, but of nothing else.  In the extremity of my uneasiness, I went to the Boston post-office, and found a letter from my friend Lundy, inclosing a draft for $100 from a stranger and as a remuneration for my poor inefficient services in behalf of the slaves!” The munificent stranger was Ebenezer Dole, of Hallowell, Maine.  Money thus acquired was a sacred trust to this child of Providence.  “After deducting the expenses of traveling,” he goes on to say, “the remainder of the above-named sum was applied in discharging a few of the debts incurred by the unproductiveness of the Genius.”

Garrison returned to Baltimore, but he did not tarry long in that slave-ruled city.  Todd’s suit against him was tried after his departure, and the jury soothed the Newburyport merchant’s wounded pride with a verdict for a thousand dollars.  He never attempted, however, to enforce the payment of the same being content probably with the “vindication,” which his legal victory gave him.