A Disease in the Public Mind (16 page)

What is my name, my purpose, or my task?

My name is “
LIBERATOR
”! I propose

To hurl my shafts at freedom's deadliest foes!

My task is hard—for I am charged to save

Man from his brother—to redeem the slave!

The next ten stanzas urged the reader to feel sympathy for the suffering slave. “Art thou a parent?” How would you feel if someone sold your children? “Art thou a brother?” What would you feel if your sister were abused by a slave owner? “Art thou a sister?” How would you feel if you saw your brother shackled in chains? “Art thou a lover?” What would you do if your beloved was torn from your arms? Finally came an appeal:

Aid me, New England, 'tis my hope in you

Which gives me strength my purpose to pursue!

Do you now hear your sister States respond?

With Afric's cries to have her sons unbound?

In the second column, Garrison made his approach to slavery very clear—along with his belief in New England's moral superiority. He had explored publishing
The Liberator
in Washington, DC, but his efforts were “palsied by public indifference.” The experience convinced him that America needed “a revolution in public sentiment.” He had selected Boston for his home base because here he could “lift up the standard of emancipation in the eyes of the nation within sight of Bunker Hill and in the birth place of liberty.”

Then came words that made
The Liberator
explosive: “I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population.” Immediate emancipation with the right to vote. Garrison was rejecting the ideas of almost everyone who had struggled to find a peaceful solution to slavery, above all Thomas Jefferson.

Many people had already objected to “the severity of my language,” Garrison continued on
The Liberator's
first page. He had been denouncing slavery in speeches and newspaper essays in Boston and other cities for more than two years. His answer to these critics was, “Is there not cause for severity?” Grimly he declared, “I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to speak, or write, with moderation.” Would you tell a man “to moderately rescue his wife from the hands
of a ravisher? . . . I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—
AND I WILL BE HEARD
.” This comparison of slavery to rape would become one of his favorite themes.

Adding to the confrontational tone was Garrison's warning that unless slavery was abolished peacefully, there would be a resort to “the sword.” This was all too clear in a poem he published in the first issue:

Though distant to the hour, yet come it must—

Oh hasten it, in mercy, righteous heaven!

When Afric's sons, uprising from the dust,

Shall stand erect—their galling fetters riven. . . .

Wo, if it comes with storm, and blood, and fire

When midnight darkness veils the earth and sky!

Wo to the innocent babe—the guilty sire—

Stranger and citizen alike shall die!

Red-handed Slaughter his revenge shall feed,

And havoc yell his ominous death-cry.

This grisly portrait was followed by a declaration that the editor of
The Liberator
opposed all forms of violence, and sincerely hoped that slavery could be abolished peacefully. The tone, the vocabulary, the attitude that preceded this claim virtually refuted it on the page. This did not mean that William Lloyd Garrison was a hypocrite. He was convinced that immediate abolition was the right policy because God had told him it was. He was equally convinced that God had inspired him to portray slavery as rape, and slaveholders as brutal barbarians.

From the start, some readers saw the fatal flaw in Garrison's approach. Francis Wayland, the president of Brown University, warned him that his “menacing and vindictive attitude toward slaveholders prejudiced their minds against a cool discussion of the subject.” He reminded Garrison of the importance of preserving harmony in the Union. Another critic, a
newspaper editor and erstwhile Garrison friend, suggested he could and should be indicted for sedition. Garrison asked him if he would have the same opinion if he were a whipped and branded slave.

The first issue of
The Liberator
had a press run of four hundred copies. Its readership did not extend beyond the city limits of Boston.
¹

•      •      •

William Lloyd Garrison was indifferent to the way American politics was acquiring a new shape in 1831. Three years earlier, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, had routed John Adams's son, President John Quincy Adams, in his bid for a second term in the White House. John Quincy had been Boston's last hope of national political leadership.

The men of the West, many of them originally Southerners, were joining forces with the South in a new entity called the Democratic Party, which would soon have adherents in New England. Opposing them was the emerging Whig Party, a mix of ex-Federalists and conservative Jeffersonian-Republicans, who chose the name hoping that some voters would remember the days of 1776, when rebel Whigs confronted loyalist Tories in the struggle for independence.

Garrison was unbothered by this new political alignment, which left New England an even weaker minority voice. From the start he reveled in being an outsider. He saw immediate emancipation as a triumph that would make political parties superfluous. “Nothing but extensive revivals of pure religion can save our country,” Garrison wrote in April 1831, suggesting that he saw religion and politics as moral and spiritual opposites. In a prophetic mode, Garrison declared that America's redemption would come when Christian principles had triumphed in every soul. Then voters would change the name of the capital from the slave master Washington to Wilberforce.

Garrison was referring to William Wilberforce, the magnetic British orator and gifted politician who devoted forty years of his life to persuading Parliament to abolish slavery in the West Indies. Here was more evidence of Garrison's almost breathtaking indifference to realistic politics. Less than
twenty years after British troops had burned Washington, DC, Garrison was proposing to rename America's capital after an Englishman!
²

It was by no means the last time Garrison denounced George Washington as a slave owner. He believed that the Father of the Country was writhing in the flames of hell, eternally damned for the sin of slavery.
The Liberator
's editor obviously knew nothing about Washington's emancipation of his slaves or his concern for the durability of the American Union.

Garrison's desire for a society where religion was the dominant force was an almost total repudiation of the principles on which the founders had created the American republic. One of their foremost goals had been the
separation
of religion from politics. They were not hostile to religion. They frequently affirmed its importance in the nation's social fabric. But they did not see it having a role in governance. Their historical awareness of the bloody wars religion had triggered in England and other European nations convinced them that politicized religion would destroy all hope of an enduring American union.

•      •      •

William Lloyd Garrison was born in 1805 in Newburyport, the third largest seaport in Massachusetts. His father, Abijah, was a moderately successful harbor pilot and occasional ship captain. On both sides, the family was Anglo-Canadian, having arrived in the New World in the 1760s and 1770s and settled on the border between Canada and Massachusetts. They had little or no roots in America's founding experience—and no political experience worth mentioning.

Newburyport's prosperity had attracted Abijah Garrison, and for a while he made a good living. But when the warring British and French began seizing American ships at sea, the number of voyages from Newburyport dwindled, leaving Abijah, a newcomer to the town, unemployed. President Thomas Jefferson's embargo was a far worse blow; it destroyed Newburyport's commerce. Abijah began drinking heavily, to the outrage of his sharp-tongued wife. One day in 1808 he walked out of their house on School Street and never returned.

His departure meant three-year-old Lloyd grew up as his mother's son. Fanny Lloyd Garrison was a passionate Baptist who had converted to this emotional faith in defiance of her Anglican father. She implanted in Lloyd a similar belief in the central importance of his relationship with a demanding God. Nothing else—politics, wealth, friendship—came close.

From Fanny, young Lloyd also contracted a fondness for correcting and exhorting the less religious portion of mankind. His mother enjoyed exerting power over people, even when the results—especially in her husband's case—were disastrous. Fanny had no better luck with her older son, James. He too began spending his time in waterfront bars, out of reach of his mother's hectoring tongue. Eventually he went to sea and disappeared from the family.

Fanny Garrison was by no means unusual in making religion the center of her life. Around 1800, Baptist and Methodist preachers began what historians now call “the Second Great Awakening”—a nationwide evangelical revival that swept through the older Protestant churches, putting many of their pastors out of business. This activist faith required a man or woman to prove his or her conversion with good works, preferably in a social cause that needed reform. Lloyd, as his mother called him, had chosen slavery.
³

•      •      •

William Lloyd Garrison's embrace of New England was as rooted in his early life as his religious faith. Too poor even to imagine attending Harvard, he had become a printer's apprentice as a way to acquire at least a semblance of an education. From 1818 to 1825, young Lloyd toiled twelve hours a day in the offices of the
Newburyport Herald
, a newspaper that supported every and any attempt to breathe life into the moribund Federalist Party.

In the
Herald
's files was a veritable history of the party's losing struggle with the supposedly degenerate Jeffersonians, whom the Federalists saw as distorters and corrupters of the noble heritage of presidents George Washington and John Adams. Garrison read with delight and wonder the savage denunciations of Jefferson's party from the acid tongues of Timothy Pickering, Fisher Ames, and other Federalist leaders. Although the older men
made only passing references to slavery, their rhetoric made it easy for the young Garrison to see the “peculiar institution,” as it was beginning to be called, as a key element in the Jeffersonian-Republicans' supposedly immoral system of government.

Garrison also inherited another article of Federalist faith—the conviction that the South was determined to humiliate and injure New England for its resistance to their rule. This, rather than a noble attempt to find an alternative to war, was the motive they imputed for President Jefferson's embargo. Young Garrison had no difficulty accepting this doctrine. He had seen the tragic impact of the embargo on his own family.

Garrison subscribed wholeheartedly to the creed that was enunciated in a Boston newspaper in 1814. “The God of Nature, in his infinite wisdom, has made the people of New England excel every other people that existed in the world.” With such a faith, how could he find fault with the three times that New England had flirted with secession and treason—in the quarrels over the Louisiana Purchase, the embargo, and the War of 1812?

Harrison Grey Otis, a chief organizer of the Hartford Convention, was one of Garrison's heroes. In 1823, Otis ran for governor of Massachusetts on the Federalist ticket. Garrison became his passionate advocate on the
Newburyport Herald.
He filled the paper's columns with invective against Otis's opponents, who were numerous and vocal. The Jeffersonian-Republicans, on their way to becoming Democrats, won in a landslide. Otis did not even carry Essex County, though he managed a majority in Newburyport.

In this election, Garrison found not a little of his voice and style. He did not analyze and refute his opponents' arguments; he denounced them, sneered at them, dismissed them. He found no conflict between this style and his religious beliefs because both nicely complemented the prevailing attitude of New England Federalists. They were inclined to believe in the moral depravity of anyone who disagreed with them.

This attitude was rooted deep in the New England soul, thanks to the sermons they and their ancestors had heard for the previous century. A Puritan preacher's favorite rhetorical form was the “jeremiad,” a shorthand term for style and content inspired by the biblical prophet Jeremiah. Jeremaids
combined lamentation and condemnation of the spiritual and moral shortcomings of a people for their sinfulness and selfishness. Only a handful of mankind, stained by Adam's primary sin, would ever merit salvation.
⁴

•      •      •

In the early years of
The Liberator
, Garrison was often short of cash. He had no money of his own, and his partner, Isaac Knapp, also a former apprentice on the
Newburyport Herald
, had an equally empty wallet. Studying his subscription list, Garrison realized that he had only fifty white readers; the rest were free blacks. Garrison turned to these subscribers for help, and they responded with enthusiasm. James Forten became one of his strongest supporters, giving him serious amounts of money.