William Lloyd Garrison by Archibald H. Grimke

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[Illustration: Wm. Lloyd Garrison]

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

_THE ABOLITIONIST_

BY ARCHIBALD H. GRIMKE, M.A.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Grimke, Archibald Henry, 1849-1930.

William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist.

Reprint of the 1891 ed. published by Funk & Wagnalls, New York.

1. Garrison, William Lloyd, 1805-1879.

Reprinted from the edition of 1891, New York First AMS edition published
in 1974

_To Mrs. Anna M. Day, who has been a mother to my little girl, and a
sister to me, this book is gratefully and affectionately dedicated, by_

_The Author_.

PREFACE.

The author of this volume desires by way of preface to say just two
things:--firstly, that it is his earnest hope that this record of a hero
may be an aid to brave and true living in the Republic, so that the
problems knocking at its door for solution may find the heads, the
hands, and the hearts equal to the performance of the duties imposed by
them upon the men and women of this generation. William Lloyd Garrison
was brave and true. Bravery and truth were the secret of his marvelous
career and achievements. May his countrymen and countrywomen imitate his
example and be brave and true, not alone in emergent moments, but in
everyday things as well.

So much for the author's firstly, now for his secondly, which is to
acknowledge his large indebtedness in the preparation of this book to
that storehouse of anti-slavery material, the story of the life of
William Lloyd Garrison by his children. Out of its garnered riches he
has filled his sack.

HYDE PARK, MASS., May 10, 1891.

CONTENTS.

Dedication III

Preface V

CHAPTER I.

The Father of the Man 11

CHAPTER II.

The Man Hears a Voice: Samuel, Samuel! 38

CHAPTER III.

The Man Begins his Ministry 69

CHAPTER IV.

The Hour and the Man 92

CHAPTER V.

The Day of Small Things 110

CHAPTER VI.

The Heavy World is Moved 118

CHAPTER VII.

Master Strokes 133

CHAPTER VIII.

Colorphobia 157

CHAPTER IX.

Agitation and Repression 170

CHAPTER X.

Between the Acts 192

CHAPTER XI.

Mischief Let Loose 208

CHAPTER XII.

Flotsam and Jetsam 233

CHAPTER XIII.

The Barometer Continues to Fall 242

CHAPTER XIV.

Brotherly Love Fails, and Ideas Abound 263

CHAPTER XV.

Random Shots 292

CHAPTER XVI.

The Pioneer Makes a New and Startling Departure 306

CHAPTER XVII.

As in a Looking Glass 319

CHAPTER XVIII.

The Turning of a Long Lane 335

CHAPTER XIX.

Face to Face 356

CHAPTER XX.

The Death-Grapple 370

CHAPTER XXI.

The Last 385

Index 397

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.

CHAPTER I.

THE FATHER OF THE MAN.

William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, December
10, 1805. Forty years before, Daniel Palmer, his great-grandfather,
emigrated from Massachusetts and settled with three sons and a daughter
on the St. John River, in Nova Scotia. The daughter's name was Mary, and
it was she who was to be the future grandmother of our hero. One of the
neighbors of Daniel Palmer was Joseph Garrison, who was probably an
Englishman. He was certainly a bachelor. The Acadian solitude of five
hundred acres and Mary Palmer's charms proved too much for the
susceptible heart of Joseph Garrison. He wooed and won her, and on his
thirtieth birthday she became his wife. The bride herself was but
twenty-three, a woman of resources and of presence of mind, as she
needed to be in that primitive settlement. Children and cares came apace
to the young wife, and we may be sure confined her more and more closely
to her house. But in the midst of a fast-increasing family and of
multiplying cares a day's outing did occasionally come to the busy
housewife, when she would go down the river to spend it at her father's
farm. Once, ten years after her marriage, she had a narrow escape on one
of those rare days. She had started in a boat with her youngest child,
Abijah, and a lad who worked in her household. It was spring and the St.
John was not yet clear of ice. Higher up the river the ice broke that
morning and came floating down with the current. The boat in which Mary
Garrison and her baby rode was overtaken by the fragments and wrecked.
The mother with her child sought refuge on a piece of ice and was driven
shoreward. Wrapping Abijah in all the clothes she could spare she threw
him ashore. She and the lad followed by the aid of an overhanging willow
bough. The baby was unharmed, for she had thrown him into a snow-bank.
But the perils of the river gave place to the perils of the woods. In
them Mary Garrison wandered with her infant, who was no less a personage
than the father of William Lloyd Garrison, until at length she found the
hut of a friendly Indian, who took her in and "entertained her with his
best words and deeds, and the next morning conducted her safely to her
father's."

The Palmers were a hardy, liberty-loving race of farmers, and Joseph
Garrison was a man of unusual force and independence of character. The
life which these early settlers lived was a life lived partly on the
land and partly on the river. They were equally at home with scythe or
oar. Amid such terraqueous conditions it was natural enough that the
children should develop a passion for the sea. Like ducks many of them
took to the water and became sailors. Abijah was a sailor. The
amphibious habits of boyhood gave to his manhood a restless, roving
character. Like the element which he loved he was in constant motion. He
was a man of gifts both of mind and body. There was besides a strain of
romance and adventure in his blood. By nature and his seafaring life he
probably craved strong excitement. This craving was in part appeased no
doubt by travel and drink. He took to the sea and he took to the cup.
But he was more than a creature of appetites, he was a man of sentiment.
Being a man of sentiment what should he do but fall in love. The woman
who inspired his love was no ordinary woman, but a genuine Acadian
beauty. She was a splendid specimen of womankind. Tall she was, graceful
and admirably proportioned. Never before had Abijah in all his
wanderings seen a creature of such charms of person. Her face matched
the attractions of her form and her mind matched the beauty of her face.
She possessed a nature almost Puritanic in its abhorrence of sin, and in
the strength of its moral convictions. She feared to do wrong more than
she feared any man. With this supremacy of the moral sense there went
along singular firmness of purpose and independence of character. When a
mere slip of a girl she was called upon to choose between regard for her
religious convictions and regard for her family. It happened in this
wise. Fanny Lloyd's parents were Episcopalians, who were inclined to
view with contempt fellow-Christians of the Baptist persuasion. To have
a child of theirs identify herself with this despised sect was one of
those crosses which they could not and would not bear. But Fanny had in
a fit of girlish frolic entered one of the meetings of these low-caste
Christians. What she heard changed the current of her life. She knew
thenceforth that God was no respecter of persons, and that the crucified
Nazarene looked not upon the splendor of ceremonies but upon the
thoughts of the heart of His disciples. Here in a barn, amid vulgar
folk, and uncouth, dim surroundings, He had appeared, He, her Lord and
Master. He had touched her with that white unspeakable appeal. The
laughter died upon the fair girlish face and prayer issued from the
beautiful lips. If vulgar folk, the despised Baptists, were good enough
for the Christ, were they not good enough for her? Among them she had
felt His consecrating touch and among them she determined to devote
herself to Him. Her parents commanded and threatened but Fanny Lloyd was
bent on obeying the heavenly voice of duty rather than father and
mother. They had threatened that if she allowed herself to be baptised
they would turn her out of doors. Fanny was baptised and her parents
made good the threat. Their home was no longer her home. She had the
courage of her conviction--ability to suffer for a belief.

Such was the woman who subsequently became the wife of Abijah Garrison,
and the mother of one of the greatest moral heroes of the century.
Abijah followed the sea, and she for several years with an increasing
family followed Abijah. First from one place and then another she glided
after him in her early married life. He loved her and his little ones
but the love of travel and change was strong within him. He was ever
restless and changeful. During one of his roving fits he emigrated with
his family from Nova Scotia to the United States. It was in the spring
of 1805 that he and they landed in Newburyport. The following December
his wife presented him with a boy, whom they called William Lloyd
Garrison. Three years afterward Abijah deserted his wife and children.
Of the causes which led to this act nothing is now known. Soon after his
arrival in Newburyport he had found employment. He made several voyages
as sailing-master in 1805-8 from that port. He was apparently during
these years successful after the manner of his craft. But he was not a
man to remain long in one place. What was the immediate occasion of his
strange behavior we can only conjecture. Possibly an increasing love for
liquor had led to domestic differences, which his pleasure-loving nature
would not brook. Certain it was that he was not like his wife. He was
not a man in whom the moral sense was uppermost. He was governed by
impulse and she by fixed moral and religious principles. He drank and
she abhorred the habit. She tried first moral suasion to induce him to
abandon the habit, and once, in a moment of wifely and motherly
indignation, she broke up one of his drinking parties in her house by
trying the efficacy of a little physical suasion. She turned the company
out of doors and smashed the bottles of liquor. This was not the kind of
woman whom Abijah cared to live with as a wife. He was not the sort of
man whom the most romantic love could attach to the apron-strings of any
woman. And in the matter of his cup he probably saw that this was what
he would be obliged to do as the condition of domestic peace. The
condition he rejected and, rejecting it, rejected and cast-off his wife
and family and the legal and moral responsibilities of husband and
father.

Bitter days now followed and Fanny Garrison became acquainted with grief
and want. She had the mouths of three children to fill--the youngest an
infant at her breast. The battle of this broken-hearted woman for their
daily bread was as heroic as it was pathetic. She still lived in the
little house on School street where Lloyd was born. The owner, Martha
Farnham, proved herself a friend indeed to the poor harassed soul. Now
she kept the wolf from the door by going out as a monthly nurse--"Aunt
Farnham" looking after the little ones in her absence. She was put to
all her possibles during those anxious years of struggle and want. Even
Lloyd, wee bit of a boy, was pressed into the service. She would make
molasses candies and send him upon the streets to sell them. But with
all her industry and resource what could she do with three children
weighing her down in the fierce struggle for existence, rendered tenfold
fiercer after the industrial crisis preceding and following the War of
1812. Then it was that she was forced to supplement her scant earnings
with refuse food from the table of "a certain mansion on State street."
It was Lloyd who went for this food, and it was he who had to run the
gauntlet of mischievous and inquisitive children whom he met and who
longed for a peep into his tin pail. But the future apostle of
non-resistance was intensely resistant, we may be sure, on such
occasions. For, as his children have said in the story of his life:
"Lloyd was a thorough boy, fond of games and of all boyish sport.
Barefooted, he trundled his hoop all over Newburyport; he swam in the
Merrimac in summer, and skated on it in winter; he was good at sculling
a boat; he played at bat and ball and snowball, and sometimes led the
'Southend boys' against the Northenders in the numerous conflicts
between the youngsters of the two sections; he was expert with marbles.
Once, with a playmate, he swam across the river to 'Great Rock,' a
distance of three-fourths of a mile and effected his return against the
tide; and once, in winter, he nearly lost his life by breaking through
the ice on the river and reached the shore only after a desperate
struggle, the ice yielding as often as he attempted to climb upon its
surface. It was favorite pastime of the boys of that day to swim from
one wharf to another adjacent, where vessels from the West Indies
discharged their freight of molasses, and there to indulge in stolen
sweetness, extracted by a smooth stick inserted through the bung-hole.
When detected and chased, they would plunge into the water and escape to
the wharf on which they had left their clothes." Such was the little man
with a boy's irrepressible passion for frolic and fun. His passion for
music was hardly less pronounced, and this he inherited from his mother,
and exercised to his heart's content in the choir of the Baptist Church.
These were the bright lines and spots in his strenuous young life. He
played and sang the gathering brood of cares out of his own and his
mother's heart. He needed to play and he needed to sing to charm away
from his spirit the vulture of poverty. That evil bird hovered ever over
his childhood. It was able to do many hard things to him, break up his
home, sunder him from his mother, force him at a tender age to earn his
bread, still there was another bird in the boy's heart, which sang out
of it the shadow and into it the sunshine. Whatever was his lot there
sang the bird within his breast, and there shone the sun over his head
and into his soul. The boy had unconsciously drawn around him a circle
of sunbeams, and how could the vulture of poverty strike him with its
wings or stab him with its beak. When he was about eight he was parted
from his mother, she going to Lynn, and he, wee mite of a man, remaining
in Newburyport. It was during the War of 1812, and pinching times, when
Fanny Garrison was at her wit's end to keep the wolf from devouring her
three little ones and herself into the bargain. With what tearing of the
heart-strings she left Lloyd and his little sister Elizabeth behind we
can now only imagine. She had no choice, poor soul, for unless she
toiled they would starve. So with James, her eldest son, she went forth
into the world to better theirs and her own condition. Lloyd went to
live in Deacon Ezekiel Bartlett's family. They were good to the little
fellow, but they, too, were poor. The Deacon, among other things, sawed
wood for a living, and Lloyd hardly turned eight years, followed him in
his peregrinations from house to house doing with his tiny hands what he
could to help the kind old man. Soon Fanny Lloyd's health, which had
supported her as a magic staff in all those bitter years since Abijah's
desertion of wife and children, began in the battle for bread in Lynn,
to fail her. And so, in her weakness, and with a great fear in her heart
for her babies, when she was gone from them into the dark unknown
forever, she bethought her of making them as fast as possible
self-supporting. And what better way was there than to have the boys
learn some trade. James she had already apprenticed to learn the mystery
of shoemaking. And for Lloyd she now sent and apprenticed him, too, to
the same trade. Oh! but it was hard for the little man, the heavy
lapstone and all this thumping and pounding to make a shoe. Oh! how the
stiff waxen threads cut into his soft fingers, how all his body ached
with the constrained position and the rough work of shoemaking. But one
day the little nine-year-old, who was "not much bigger than a last," was
able to produce a real shoe. Then it was probably that a dawning
consciousness of power awoke within the child's mind. He himself by
patience and industry had created a something where before was nothing.
The eye of the boy got for the first time a glimpse of the man, who was
still afar off, shadowy in the dim approaches of the hereafter. But the
work proved altogether beyond the strength of the boy. The shoemaker's
bench was not his place, and the making of shoes for his kind was not
the mission for which he was sent into the world. And now again poverty,
the great scene-shifter, steps upon the stage, and Fanny Lloyd and her
two boys are in Baltimore on that never-ending quest for bread. She had
gone to work in a shoe factory established by an enterprising Yankee in
that city. The work lasted but a few months, when the proprietor failed
and the factory was closed. In a strange city mother and children were
left without employment. In her anxiety and distress a new trouble, the
greatest and most poignant since Abijah's desertion, wrung her with a
supreme grief. James, the light and pride of her life, had run away from
his master and gone to sea. Lloyd, poor little homesick Lloyd, was the
only consolation left the broken heart. And he did not want to live in
Baltimore, and longed to return to Newburyport. So, mindful of her
child's happiness, and all unmindful of her own, she sent him from her
to Newburyport, which he loved inexpressibly. He was now in his eleventh
year. Very happy he was to see once more the streets and landmarks of
the old town--the river, and the old house where he was born, and the
church next door and the school-house across the way and the dear
friends whom he loved and who loved him. He went again to live with the
Bartletts, doing with his might all that he could to earn his daily
bread, and to repay the kindness of the dear old deacon and his family.
It was at this time that he received his last scrap of schooling. He
was, as we have seen, but eleven, but precious little of that brief and
tender time had he been able to spend in a school-house. He had gone to
the primary school, where, as his children tell us, he did not show
himself "an apt scholar, being slow in mastering the alphabet, and
surpassed even by his little sister Elizabeth." During his stay with
Deacon Bartlett the first time, he was sent three months to the
grammar-school, and now on his return to this good friend, a few more
weeks were added to his scant school term. They proved the last of his
school-days, and the boy went forth from the little brick building on
the Mall to finish his education in the great workaday world, under
those stern old masters, poverty and experience. By and by Lloyd was a
second time apprenticed to learn a trade. It was to a cabinetmaker in
Haverhill, Mass. He made good progress in the craft, but his young heart
still turned to Newburyport and yearned for the friends left there. He
bore up against the homesickness as best he could, and when he could
bear it no longer, resolved to run away from the making of toy bureaus,
to be once more with the Bartletts. He had partly executed this
resolution, being several miles on the road to his old home, when his
master, the cabinetmaker, caught up to him and returned him to
Haverhill. But when he heard the little fellow's story of homesickness
and yearning for loved places and faces, he was not angry with him, but
did presently release him from his apprenticeship. And so the boy to his
great joy found himself again in Newburyport and with the good old
wood-sawyer. Poverty and experience were teaching the child what he
never could have learned in a grammar-school, a certain acquaintance
with himself and the world around him. There was growing within his
breast a self-care and a self-reliance. It was the autumn of 1818, when,
so to speak, the boy's primary education in the school of experience
terminated, and he entered on the second stage of his training under the
same rough tutelage. At the age of thirteen he entered the office of the
Newburyport _Herald_ to learn to set types. At last his boy's hands had
found work which his boy's heart did joy to have done. He soon mastered
the compositor's art, became a remarkably rapid composer. As he set up
the thoughts of others, he was not slow in discovering thoughts of his
own demanding utterance. The printer's apprentice felt the stirrings of
a new life. A passion for self-improvement took possession of him. He
began to read the English classics, study American history, follow the
currents of party politics. No longer could it be said of him that he
was not an apt pupil. He was indeed singularly apt. His intelligence
quickened marvelously. The maturing process was sudden and swift. Almost
before one knows it the boy in years has become a man in judgment and
character. This precipitate development of the intellectual life in him,
produced naturally enough an appreciable enlargement of the _ego_. The
young eagle had abruptly awakened to the knowledge that he possessed
wings; and wings were for use--to soar with. Ambition, the desire to
mount aloft, touched and fired the boy's mind. As he read, studied, and
observed, while his hands were busy with his work, there was a constant
fluttering going on in the eyrie of his thoughts. By an instinct
analogous to that which sends a duck to the water, the boy took to the
discussion of public questions. It was as if an innate force was
directing him toward his mission--the reformation of great public
wrongs. At sixteen he made his first contribution to the press. It was a
discussion of a quasi-social subject, the relation of the sexes in
society. He was at the impressionable age, when the rosy god of love is
at his tricks. He was also at a stage of development, when boys are
least attractive, when they are disagreeably virile, full of their own
importance and the superiority of their sex. In the "Breach of the
Marriage Promise," by "An Old Bachelor," these signs of adolescence are
by no means wanting, they are, on the contrary, distinctly present and
palpable. But there were other signs besides these, signs that the youth
had had his eyes wide open to certain difficulties which beset the
matrimonial state and to the conventional steps which lead to it, and
that he had thought quite soberly, if not altogether wisely upon them.
The writer was verdant, to be sure, and self-conscious, and partial in
his view of the relations of the sexes, but there was withal a serious
purpose in the writing. He meant to expose and correct what he conceived
to be reprehensible conduct on the part of the gentler sex, bad feminine
manners. Just now he sees the man's side of the shield, a few years
later he will see the woman's side also. He ungallantly concludes "to
lead the '_single life_,' and not," as he puts it, "trouble myself about
the ladies." A most sapient conclusion, considering that this veteran
misogynist was but sixteen years old. During the year following the
publication of this article, he plied his pen with no little
industry--producing in all fifteen articles on a variety of topics, such
as "South American Affairs," "State Politics," "A Glance at Europe,"
etc., all of which are interesting now chiefly as showing the range of
his growing intelligence, and as the earliest steps by which he acquired
his later mastery of the pen and powerful style of composition. In a
letter addressed to his mother about this time, the boy is full of
Lloyd, undisguisedly proud of Lloyd, believes in Lloyd. "When I peruse
them over" (_i.e._ those fifteen communications to the press), "I feel
absolutely astonished," he naively confesses, "at the different subjects
which I have discussed, and the style in which they are written. Indeed
it is altogether a matter of surprise that I have met with such signal
success, seeing I do not understand _one single rule of grammar_, and
having a very inferior education." The printer's lad was plainly not
lacking in the bump of approbativeness, or the quality of
self-assertiveness. The quick mother instinct of Fanny Garrison took
alarm at the tone of her boy's letter. Possibly there was something in
Lloyd's florid sentences, in his facility of expression, which reminded
her of Abijah. He, too, poor fellow, had had gifts in the use of the
pen, and what had he done, what had he come to? Had he not forsaken wife
and children by first forsaking the path of holiness? So she pricks the
boy's bubble, and points him to the one thing needful--God in the soul.
But in her closing words she betrays what we all along suspected, her
own secret pleasure in her son's success, when she asks, "Will you be so
kind as to bring on your pieces that you have written for me to see?"
Ah! was she not every inch a mother, and how Lloyd did love her. But she
was no longer what she had been. And no wonder, for few women have been
called to endure such heavy burdens, fight so hopelessly the battle for
bread, all the while her heart was breaking with grief. Disease had made
terrible inroads upon her once strong and beautiful person. Not the
shadow of the strength and beauty of her young womanhood remained. She
was far away from her early home and friends, far away from her darling
boy, in Baltimore. James, her pride, was at sea, Elizabeth, a sweet
little maiden of twelve, had left her to take that last voyage beyond
another sea, and Abijah, without one word of farewell, with the silence
of long years unbroken, he, too, also! had hoisted sail and was gone
forever. And now in her loneliness and sorrow, knowing that she, too,
must shortly follow, a great yearning rose up in her poor wounded heart
to see once more her child, the comfort and stay of her bitter life. And
as she had written to him her wish and longing, the boy went to her, saw
the striking change, saw that the broken spirit of the saintly woman was
day by day nearing the margin of the dark hereafter, into whose healing
waters it would bathe and be whole again. The unspeakable experience of
mother and son, during this last meeting is not for you and me, reader,
to look into. Soon after Lloyd's return to Newburyport a cancerous tumor
developed on her shoulder, from the effects of which she died September
3, 1823, at the age of forty-five. More than a decade after her death
her son wrote: "She has been dead almost eleven years; but my grief at
her loss is as fresh and poignant now as it was at that period;" and he
breaks out in praise of her personal charms in the following original
lines:

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