USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Romantic days in old Boston : the story of the city and of its people during the nineteenth century > Part 6
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The speed with which this far-reaching reform was brought about may be credited chiefly to the fact that God raised up for the work two men, Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Gar- rison, who did practically nothing else but agitate their cause until the day had been won. Of Phillips I speak at length in another chapter. Let us here, therefore, pass at once to the simple
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annals of Garrison's great life and to a considera- tion of the conditions which he had to confront as he began his work. For he it was who created, almost single-handed, the moral force which overthrew slavery. When we consider the resistance which he overcame, the result achieved must be regarded, as James Freeman Clarke has pointed out,1 " as an unexampled triumph of pure truth. The slaves held in the Southern States were valued, at the time of the Civil War, at about three thousand millions of dollars. Added to this pecuniary interest was the value of cotton lands, sugar plantations and rice fields cultivated exclusively by slaves. And beside the powerful money motive for maintaining slavery there were the force of custom, the habits engendered by despotism, pride, prejudice and hatred of outside inter- ference. These interests and feelings gradually united the whole South in a determined hos- tility to emancipation; and men professing anti-slavery principles could not live safely in the slaveholding states.
" This united South," continues Dr. Clarke, " had for its allies at the North both the great political parties, the commercial and manu- facturing interests, nearly the whole press, and both extremes of society. Abolition was equally obnoxious in the parlors of the wealthy and to
1 In the Memorial History of Boston.
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the crowd of roughs in the streets, - fashion and the mob being for once united by a common enmity. It was against this immense weight of opposition that the Abolitionists contended; and their strength consisted wholly in the justice of their cause and the enthusiasm which that cause inspired."
Of this enthusiasm Boston was preeminently the breeding-place. Garrison made no mistake in early migrating to the town which had long ago shown itself intolerant of oppression. Even in those early days when many Boston folk held slaves, the sentiment of the people as a whole was opposed to slavery. In 1646 the General Court ordered a negro stolen from Africa and brought to Boston to be sent back to the place from which he had been led away captive. In 1701 the Selectmen of Boston passed a vote requesting the Representatives to " put a period to negroes being slaves." In 1766 and 1767 votes were passed in town-meeting instructing its representatives "That for the total abolishing of slavery among us, That you move for a law to prohibit the importation and purchasing of slaves for the future." In 1770 occurred the case of Prince Boston, who was hired and paid wages by a Quaker in Nantucket, - Elisha Folger; and when his owner brought an action for the recovery of his slave, the jury returned a_verdict against the
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owner, and Prince Boston was manumitted by the magistrates. As for the attitude on this big question of the Bostonians who fought to throw off the yoke of George III it is very well expressed in the words of Samuel Adams who, with the words, " Surry must be free on crossing the threshold of my house," declined to receive ; as property a negro girl offered to his wife as a present.
Cotton Mather, to be sure, had been burdened with no such scruples. There is an entry in his diary of 1706 in which he records that he had " received a singular blessing " in the gift of " a very likely slave," which was " a mighty smile of Heaven upon his family." And at the very time when Adams scorned the gift of a slave, Boston folk of "respectability " were trafficking in men and women - at arm's length. Nor was slavery ever explicitly abol- ished in Massachusetts, though " in the famous Jennison case tried at Worcester in 1781, it was declared that slavery no longer existed." (Justin Winsor, Memorial History of Boston, Volume IV, page 6.)
So there is no doubt that while Boston was a pretty good place for Garrison to choose as his residence, it was not one in which his labors would be thrown away. Joseph T. Buckingham of the Boston Courier had printed two sonnets written in prison by the young Newburyporter
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before the office of the Liberator was opened on Water Street; but that by no means implies that an over-cordial welcome would be ex- tended to a man who had set himself to the task of freeing all the slaves in the land. Too many Boston folk were making a great deal of money out of slavery and its associated activities.
Garrison's father was a sea captain, and his mother was a deeply religious Baptist. Thus heredity had endowed him with strength and personal courage on the one hand, and with deep and fervid religious faith on the other. Three years after Lloyd's birth (on December 10, 1805) the captain-father left his wife and children nevermore to return. It is believed that he found the temptations to intemperance offered by the seaport town of Newburyport more than he could bear, and to avoid disgracing his family, decided to live away from them. Thus it fell out that William Lloyd Garrison was early thrown upon his own resources for a livelihood, - and that his strong-souled mother became to him, while he was a tiny lad, all that two parents might have been. While yet too small comfortably to support the weight of a lapstone, he was apprenticed to a shoemaker, but that occupation proving un- congenial, a place in a printing office was found for him. This work he liked and so graduated,
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at the age of twenty, from an apprenticeship into the position of a self-publishing editor.
The chance of falling in, two years later (1828), with Benjamin Lundy, editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation, set our young journalist in the current which was to bear him on to ever-increasing fame and usefulness. Lundy was an interesting figure, a Quaker, who travelled about from town to town, mostly on foot, carrying a heavy pack containing among other things the head rules, column rules and subscription book of his paper. When he came to a town where he found a printing office he would stop long enough to get out and mail a number of Genius. His writings were aflame with hatred for slavery and de- termination to put it down, and when one of his shabby little sheets found its way to the office in Bennington, Vermont, over which Garrison was now presiding as editor, its burning words inspired that youth to take the first definite step of his thirty years' war against slave-holding. Forthwith he wrote a petition for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, which he sent to all the postmasters in the State of Vermont, begging them to procure signatures thereto. And since, in that day, postmasters enjoyed the privilege of receiving and sending letters free of postage, the petition was quite bulky when it arrived in Congress.
C
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It immediately caused the slave-holding con- stituency to sit up and take notice of - William Lloyd Garrison.
Lundy, naturally, was immensely pleased at the ardor and resourcefulness of his new recruit, and in order to make him an offer of partnership walked all the way from Boston to Bennington, staff in hand and pack on back. The result of this conference was their joint proprietorship for a time of the Genius. The paper was now issued weekly from Baltimore, to which city young Garrison removed.
Garrison believed in immediate emancipation and wrote all his articles to this end, signing them with his initials that they might easily be distinguished from those of Lundy, who believed in getting the slaves emancipated gradually. Inevitably the younger editor soon got the sheet and himself into hot water. Balti- more was one of the principal marts of the domestic slave trade and Francis Todd of New- buryport was the owner of a vessel which now came to that port to take to New Orleans a cargo of eighty-eight slaves. Here was a first-rate case of Northern complicity in the infamous traffic, and Garrison lost no time in vigorously denouncing Todd for his share in a transaction which, as he pointed out, was in no way different in principle from taking a cargo of human flesh on the coast of Africa
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and carrying it across the ocean to market. The law denounced the foreign slave trade as piracy, but the domestic slave trade was every whit as wicked in the sight of God, declared Garrison. A libel suit instituted by Todd fol- lowed hard upon the publication of this article, and as a trial in a slave-holding court before a , slave-holding jury could have but one outcome, Garrison soon found himself in jail for lack of the wherewithal to pay the fifty dollars fine imposed upon him.
Now it was that he wrote the two sonnets which Joseph Buckingham was moved to pub- lish in the Boston Courier. They had been inscribed with a pencil on the walls of the prisoner's cell and were entitled " Freedom of the Mind " and "The Guiltless Prisoner." After seven weeks of confinement Garrison's fine was paid by Arthur Tappan, a leading New York merchant, who had been a reader of the Genius, and who was glad thus to come to the rescue of its plucky junior editor.
To publish a paper of his own was that editor's next adventure. Boston had been decided upon as the background for the experiment not only because it promised as much hos- pitality as any city to such an undertaking but also because Garrison had come to know the place pretty well and to be fond of it during the year or so passed there, in a printing office,
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just after his majority. In the story of his life as told by his children, a wonderful four volume work which, with Johnson's Will- iam Lloyd Garrison and His Times, must be absorbed by all who would understand Garrison in his wholeness, - - we are told that at this earlier period the color and glamour of Boston appealed as strongly to Garrison as to any healthy young man come to the metropolis from a small town. To see at church the lovely face of Miss Emily Marshall, who was renowned the country over for her beauty and charm, he even forsook, temporarily, the Baptist fold of his mother and the very great attraction offered by the preaching of William Ellery Channing and John Pierpont, reformers both. So strongly had the joys of the city impressed itself upon him that, while incarcerated in Balti- more jail, he even wrote some verses about Boston Common during the festival period called " Election Week!"
Election Day and its attendant joys appear to have appealed particularly to the Aboli- tionist mind, very likely because it was " every- body's day; and emphatically the colored people's." The blacks were wont to flock out in great numbers from what was known as "Nigger Hill," the lower part of Joy Street, and Frederick W. G. May, years afterwards, sent to Mrs. Ednah Dow Cheney for repro-
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duction in her Reminiscences a very vivid description of the ensuing festival. " The wooden fence of the Common from Park Street corner to and beyond West Street was lined with booths and stalls where eatables and drinkables were exposed for sale by white and colored salesmen and saleswomen. Even oysters by the saucerful at fo'pence ha'penney (six and a quarter cents) found eager buyers; lobsters, too, and candy by the ton, it seemed to my young eyes; cakes in variety, doughnuts, ginger- nuts; lemonade, spruce beer, ginger beer, etc. One specially delightful feature was the ambula- tory stall, an ordinary handcart . . . , furbished up and fitted with a tilt or hood to shield its delicacies from the sun, dust, etc .; inside were boxes and shelves with the innumerable cakes that the well-bred baker then could furnish, buns with actual currants on them, jumbles, waffles and I know not what else, seed cakes, - I can see and smell them now, - PRESIDENT BISCUIT, etc. These carts would literally cover the field as the tide of mimic war ebbed and flowed. ... These laudable chariots carried baked beans and similar necessities of Boston- Beverly life, - brown bread hot, etc. - their proprietors and motive power being genial old darkey ladies with genuine wool and gay-colored head handkerchiefs in the latest Southern style. This was Nigger 'lection,
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- the colored people very much in evi- dence."
Just here, because of the allusion to " Nigger Hill," it is interesting to give Mrs. Cheney's explanation 1 of the way in which Joy Street got its name. About 1820, when her parents took a house on that thoroughfare it bore the name of Belknap Street. Then as now it ran from Beacon Street to Cambridge Street and was divided by cross streets into three parts " which at that time pretty well represented three grades of society. In the upper part were some of the finest houses and most 'swell ' people in the city. In the middle part were families of good standing, and in this part was our house. The lower part was almost entirely occupied by colored people, who streamed by our house and gave us children that early familiarity with this race which, thank God, has prevented me from having any difficulty in recognizing the ' negro as a man and a brother.' But the upper ten did not relish the idea of giving their ad- dresses on Belknap Street so associated with the despised race, and they petitioned the city government to change the name of their portion to Joy. Of course the middle class are but too prone to mimic the manners of the rich, and they next asked to have their portion renamed. It is a democratic country and therefore the lower
1 Reminiscences of Ednah Dow Cheney.
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portion of the street wished for its Joy also, and so the good old name of Belknap, once belonging to a worthy divine, was given up and has never been used again."1 It is interest- ing to add that Joy Street still represents the " three grades of society."
The Boston Courier had published the sonnets which Garrison wrote while in prison. In the advertising columns of that sheet, therefore, the young reformer - who was now resolved to make a place for himself in Boston - printed, on October 12, 1830, this advertisement:
WANTED. - For three evenings, a Hall or Meeting-house (the latter would be preferred) in which to vindicate the rights of TWO MILLIONS of American citizens who are now groaning in servile chains in this boasted land of liberty; and also to propose just, benevolent, and con- stitutional measures for their relief. As the addresses will be gratuitous, and as the cause is of public benefit, I cannot consent to remunerate any society for the use of its building. If this application fails, I propose to address the citi- zens of Boston in the open air, on the Common.
WM. LLOYD GARRISON. No. 30, Federal Street, Oct. 11, 1830.
Two days later the papers announced that Mr. Garrison would deliver his first lecture, on
1 It survives, however, in Belknap Place which leads off Joy Street.
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Friday evening, October 15, in Julien Hall, at the northwest corner of Milk and Congress Streets. The body which had offered him the hospitality of its headquarters was made up of avowed " infidels," men who had no personal acquaintance with Garrison and no especial sympathy with his cause; men, too, whose sect he had recently denounced in public. It was with deep shame for his Christian brethren, we may be sure, that Garrison accepted their hospitality. While he thanked them for their courtesy he declared his firm belief that slavery could be abolished only through the power of the Gospel and of Christian religion.
A good many prominent Christians were among those who came to hear that lecture in the hall of the " infidels." Dr. Lyman Beecher, then the head of the Orthodox pulpit in Boston, was there. So was Rev. Ezra S. Gannett, a well-known Unitarian divine, Samuel E. Sewall, a young lawyer whose famous ancestor, Judge Samuel Sewall, had been one of the earliest opponents of slavery in America,1 Bronson Alcott, the Concord oracle, and Rev. Samuel J. May, afterwards very distinguished in the anti-slavery movement. Mr. May has thus described the occasion:
" Presently the young man arose, modestly, but with an air of calm determination, and 1 See St. Botolph's Town, p. 282 et seq.
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delivered such a lecture as he only, as I believe, at that time could have written; for he, only, had had his eyes so anointed that he could see that outrages perpetrated upon Africans were wrongs done to our common humanity; he, only, I believe, had had his ears so com- pletely unstopped of 'prejudice against color ' that the cries of enslaved black men and black women sounded to him as if they came from brothers and sisters.
" Never before," declares May, "was I so affected by the speech of any man. When he had ceased speaking I said to those around me: ' That is a providential man; he is a prophet; he will shake our nation to its centre, but he will shake slavery out of it. We ought to know him and we ought to help him. Come, let us go and give him our hands.' . Mr. Sewall and Mr. Alcott went up with me and we intro- duced each other. I said to him: ‘Mr. Garri- son, I am not sure I can endorse all you have said this evening. Much of it requires careful consideration. But I am prepared to embrace you. I am sure you are called to a great work and I mean to help you.' Mr. Sewall cordially assured him of his readiness, also, to cooperate with him. Mr. Alcott invited him to his home. He went and we sat with him until twelve that night, listening to his discourse, in which he showed plainly that immediate, unconditional
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emancipation without expatriation, was the right of every slave and could not be withheld by his master an hour without sin. That night my soul was baptized in his spirit, and ever since I have been a disciple and fellow-laborer of William Lloyd Garrison.
" The next morning, immediately after break- fast, I went to his boarding-house and stayed until two P. M. I learned that he was poor, dependent upon his daily labor for his daily bread and intending to return to the printing business. But, before he could devote himself to his own support, he felt that he must deliver his message, must communicate to persons of prominent influence what he had learned of the sad condition of the enslaved, and the institutions and spirit of the slave-holders; trusting that all true and good men would discharge the obligation pressing upon them to espouse the cause of the poor, the oppressed, the down-trodden. He read to me letters he had addressed to Dr. Channing, Dr. Beecher, Dr. Edwards, the Hon. Jeremiah Mason, and Hon. Daniel Webster, holding up to their view the tremendous iniquity of the land and begging them, ere it should be too late, to interpose their great power in the Church and State to save our country from the terrible calamities which the sin of slavery was bringing upon us. These letters were eloquent, solemn,
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impressive. I wonder they did not produce a greater effect."
Oliver Johnson, who knew Garrison well, and has written very enthusiastically of his life and work, has an explanation to offer as to the " why " of this, and any of us who have had experience with reform movements in which the church is involved will appreciate the truth of what he says. Unhappily, the influences which chiefly sustained slavery were supplied by the people of the North. And these people were the same ones who were supporting in their pulpits the clergy to whom Mr. Garrison had addressed his letters! "The pulpit was thus sorely tempted," comments Mr. Johnson, "to swerve from the laws of humanity and rectitude and become the apologist if not the defender of slavery." Dr. Lyman Beecher, whose daughter was to do more than any other woman in the world to help in the overthrow of slavery, lost a golden opportunity at this juncture of immortality on his own account. Garrison greatly admired Beecher, who was then at the head of the Orthodox pulpit in Boston (though his former church-home on Hanover Street had just been burned and the new building of his society on Bowdoin Street - now known as the Church of St. John the Evangelist - was not yet completed), and in all simplicity and trust he turned to him for
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support. " I have too many irons in the fire
already," was the Doctor's evasive answer. "Then," said Garrison, solemnly, "you had better let all your irons burn than neglect your duty to the slave." Whereupon, not having arguments to offer, Beecher withdrew into his robes of office, as many another priest has done before and since, replying grandiosely, " Your zeal, young man, is commendable, but you are misguided. If you will give up your fanatical notions and be led by us (the clergy) we will make you the Wilberforce of America."
Rev. Samuel J. May, however, was a different type of man and, on the very next Sunday after he had heard Garrison's lectures, he endorsed from the pulpit of Rev. Alexander Young, at Church Green in Summer Street, which he chanced to be supplying, the doctrines which this new prophet had come to preach. In concluding his sermon he said, " I have been prompted to speak thus by the words I have heard during the past week from a young man hitherto unknown, but who is, I believe, called of God to do a greater work for the good of our country than has been done by anyone since the Revolution. I mean William Lloyd Garrison. He is going to repeat his lectures the coming week. I advise, I exhort, I entreat - would that I could compel! - you to go and hear him." It takes a finely sensitized conscience
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to recognize a prophet of righteousness as soon as one has made his acquaintance, and it takes a very high kind of courage to declare to hostile hearers one's belief that they should heed the message of such a man. All honor, therefore, to Samuel J. May, for that he had the heart to feel and the grit to proclaim the advent in Boston of him who had been sent of God expressly to strike the shackles from the lacer- ated limbs of the slave.1
Happily, Garrison had a literary sense as well as a compelling ethical ideal; he stead- fastly refused to call the paper about to be born the Safety Lamp, as suggested by Mr. Sewall, insisting that there be given to it the bold and appropriate title of the Liberator. The first number of the epoch-making sheet appeared on Saturday, January 1, 1831. Even for that day of small things in the publishing line it was an unimpressive sheet, a folio of four pages fourteen inches in length by nine and three-tenths in width, printed after hours in the office of the Christian Examiner in return for its proprietor's services in the day time. At first the title was in black-letter, but, at the end of four months, this form was changed, and by 1850 an engraved head, which well
1 How much " grit " this required may be seen from the fact that a friend of May's father condoled with the old gentleman in all seriousness next day, saying, " I cannot tell you how much I pity you; I hear your son went crazy at Church Green yesterday."
NORTE-
HORSES &
TLE TO 88
THE LIBERATOR.
VOL. I.1 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON AND ISAAC KNAPP, PUBLISHERS. INO. 17.
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS. ] OUR COUNTRY IS THE WORLD-OUR COUNTRYMEN ARE MANKIND.
[SATURDAY, APRIL 23, 1831.
FREEDOM SE
EMANCIPATION
SLAVES
OTHERFAT
THE LIBERATOR
CUR COUNTRY IS THE WORLD-OUR COUNTRYMEN ARE ALL MANKIND.
津 いな学ま す!
THE LIBERATOR.
Dar Caveira is the Worth, our Countrymen are all' fHanfind,
THE SECOND, THIRD, AND FOURTH HEADINGS OF " THE LIBERATOR." THE FIRST WAS PLAIN TYPE.
CHURCH GREEN.
Page 99.
JOY STREET CHURCH, WHERE NEW ENGLAND ANTI- SLAVERY SOCIETY WAS ORGANIZED. Page 105.
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IN OLD BOSTON
repays careful examination, was being used. Hammatt Billings made the final design, which is of exceeding interest to us today in that the whole story of slavery is there told pic- torially. In the background is seen the capitol of the United States, with a flag upon which is inscribed the word "Liberty " floating over the dome. In front is an auctioneer's stand with the sign, " Slaves, horses and other cattle in lots to suit the purchaser," -and a whipping post showing a slave under the lash. Balancing this - in the Billings design - is an allegorical presentation of life among the blacks when Emancipation has been declared. And between stands Christ and his cross with the scripture line, "I come to break the bonds of the op- pressor."
The hardships under which the paper was gotten out during its early years are a classic tale today; but I like to rename them none the less. Garrison slept in his office (the generosity of the Christian Examiner lasted for the first three issues only) with the mailing table for a bed and a book for his pillow. His scanty meals he prepared himself, and he set up with his own hand the articles which he printed, composing them as he went along. In their first issue Garrison and his co-publisher, Isaac Knapp, had announced their determina- tion to print the paper as long as they might be
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