Chapter 1: 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 [12] 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.i 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 [13] 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 [14] 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 convictionability 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 [15] 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 [16] 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 brokenhearted 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. [17] 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 [18] 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 [19] 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 selfsupporting. 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 sceneshifter, 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 [20] 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 qear 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 [21] 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 selfcare 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 [22] 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 selfimprovement 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. [23] 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 [24] 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, [25] 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:
She was the masterpiece of womankind-[26]In shape and height majestically fine;
Her cheeks the lily and the rose combined;
Her lips — more opulently red than wine;
Her raven locks hung tastefully entwined;
Her aspect fair as Nature could design;
And then her eyes! so eloquently bright!
An eagle would recoil before her light.
The influence of this superb woman was a lasting power for truth and righteousness in the son's stormy life. For a whole year after her death, the grief of the printer's lad over his loss, seemed to have checked the activity of his pen. For during that period nothing of his appeared in the Herald. But after the sharp edge of his sorrow had worn off, his pen became active again in the discussion of public men and public questions. It was a period of bitter personal and political feuds and animosities. The ancient Federal party was in articulo mortis. The death-bed of a great political organization proves oftentimes the graveyard of lifelong friendships. For it is a scene of crimination and recrimination. And so it happened that the partisans of John Adams, and the partisans of John Adams's old Secretary of State, Timothy Pickering, were in 1824 doing a thriving business in this particular line. Into this funereal performance our printer's apprentice entered with pick and spade. He had thus early apenchant for controversy, a soldier's scent for battle. If there was any fighting going on he proceeded directly to have a hand in it. And it cannot be denied that that hand was beginning to deal some manly and sturdy blows, whose resound was heard quite distinctly beyond the limits of his birthplace. His communications appeared now, not only in the Herald, but in the Salem Gazette as well. Now it was the AdamsPickering controversy, now the discussion of General Jackson as a presidential candidate, now the state of the country in respect of parties, now the merits of “American writers,” which afforded his 'prentice hand the requisite practice in the use of the pen. He [27] had already acquired a perfect knowledge of typesetting and the mechanical makeup of a newspaper. During his apprenticeship he took his first lesson in the art of thinking on his feet in the presence of an audience. The audience to be sure were the members of a debating club, which he had organized. He was very ambitious and was doubtless looking forward to a political career. He saw the value of extempore speech to the man with a future, and he wisely determined to possess himself of its advantage. He little dreamt, however, to what great use he was to devote it in later years. There were other points worth noting at this time, and which seemed to prophecy for him a future of distinction. He possessed a most attractive personality. His energy and geniality, his keen sense of humor, his social and bouyant disposition, even his positive and opinionated temper, were sources of popular strength to him. People were strongly drawn to him. His friends were devoted to him. He had that quality, which we vaguely term magnetic, the quality of attaching others to us, and maintaining over them the ascendency of our character and ideas.
In the midst of all this progress along so many lines, the days of his apprenticeship in the Herald office came to an end. He was just twenty. With true Yankee enterprise and pluck, he proceeded to do for himself what for seven years he had helped to do for another-publish a newspaper. And with a brave heart the boy makes his launch on the uncertain sea of local journalism and becomes editor and publisher of a real, wide-awake sheet, which he calls the Free Press. The paper was independent in politics and [28] proved worthy of its name during the six months that Garrison sat in the managerial chair. Here is the tone which the initial number of the paper holds to the public: “As to the political course of the Free Press, it shall be, in the widest sense of the term, independent. The publisher does not mean by this, to rank amongst those who are of everybody's and of nobody's opinion; . . . nor one of whom the old French proverb says: Il ne soit sur quel pied danser. [He knows not on which leg to dance.] Its principles shall be open, magnanimous and free. It shall be subservient to no party or body of men; and neither the craven fear of loss, nor the threats of the disappointed, nor the influence of power, shall ever awe one single opinion into silence. Honest and fair discussion it will court; and its columns will be open to all temperate and intelligent communications emanating from whatever political s:r;rce. In fine we will say with Cicero: ‘Reason shall prevail with him more than popular opinion.’ They who like this avowal may extend their encouragement; and if any feel dissatisfied with it, they must act accordingly. The publisher cannot condescend to solicit their support.” This was admirable enough in its way, but it was poor journalism some will say. And without doubt when judged by the common commercial standard it was poor journalism. In this view it is a remarkable production, but in another aspect it is still more remarkable in that it took with absolute accuracy the measure of the man. As a mental likeness it is simply perfect. At no time during his later life did the picture cease to be an exact moral representation of his character. It seems quite [29] unnecessary, therefore, to record that he proceeded immediately to demonstrate that it was no high sounding and insincere declaration. For in the second number, he mentions with that singular serenity, which ever distinguished him on such occasions, the discontinuance of the paper on account of matter contained in the first issue, by ten indignant subscribers. “Nevertheless,” he adds, “our happiness at the loss of such subscribers is not a whit abated. We beg no man's patronage, and shall ever erase with the same cheerfulness that we insert the name of any individual. . . . Personal or political offence we shall studiously avoid-truth never.” Here was plainly a wholly new species of the genus homo in the editorial seat. What, expect to make a newspaper pay and not beg for patronage? Why the very idea was enough to make newspaperdom go to pieces with laughter. Begging for patronage, howling for subscribers, cringing, crawling, changing color like the chameleon, howling for Barabbas or bellowing against Jesus, all these things must your newspaper do to prosper. On them verily hang the whole law and all the profits of modern journalism. This is what the devil of competition was doing in that world when William Lloyd Garrison entered it. It took him up into an exceedingly high mountain, we may be certain, and offered him wealth, position, and power, if he would do what all others were doing. And he would not. He went on editing and publishing his paper for six months regardful only of what his reason approved-regardless always of the disapproval of others. Not once did he palter with his convictions or juggle with his self-respect for the [30] sake of pelf or applause. His human horizon was contracted, to be sure. It could hardly be otherwise in one so young. His world was his country, and patriotism imposed limits upon his affections. “Our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country,” was the ardent motto of the Free Press. The love of family comes, in the order of growth, before the love of country; and the love of country precedes the love of all mankind. “First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear,” is the great law of love in the soul as of corn in the soil. Besides this contraction of the affections, there was also manifest in his first journalistic venture a deficiency in the organ of vision, a failure to see into things and their relations. What he saw he reported faithfully, suppressing nothing, adding nothing. But the objects which passed across the disk of his editoral intelligence were confined almost entirely to the surface of things, to the superficies of national life. He had not the ken at twenty to penetrate beneath the happenings of current politics. Of the existence of slavery as a supreme reality, we do not think that he then had the faintest suspicion. No shadow of its tremendous influence as a political power seemed to have arrested for a brief instant his attention. He could copy into his paper this atrocious sentiment which Edward Everett delivered in Congress, without the slightest comment or allusion. “Sir, I am no soldier. My habits and education are very unmilitary, but there is no cause in which I would sooner buckle a knapsack on my back, and put a musket on my shoulder than that of putting down a servile insurrection at the South.” [31] The reason is plain enough. Slavery was a terra incognito to him then, a book of which he had not learned the A B C. Mr. Everett's language made no impression on him, because he had not the key to interpret its significance. What he saw, that he set down for his readers, without fear or favor. He had not seen slavery, knew nothing of the evil. Acquaintance with the deeper things of life, individual or national, comes only with increasing years, they are hardly for him who has not yet reached his majority. Slavery was the very deepest thing in the life of the nation sixty-four years ago. And if Garrison did not then so understand it, neither did his contemporaries, the wisest and greatest of them so understand it. The subject of all others which attracted his attention, and kept his editorial pen busy, was the claim of Massachusetts for indemnity from the general government, for certain disbursements made by her for the defence of her sea-coast during the war of 1812. This matter, which forms but a mere dust point in the perspective of history, his ardent young mind mistook for a principal object, erected into a permanent question in the politics of the times. But the expenditure of enormous energies upon things of secondary and of even tertiary importance, to the neglect of others of prime and lasting interest, is supremely human. He was errant where all men go astray. But the schoolmaster of the nation was abroad, and was training this young man for the work he was born to do. These six months were, therefore, not wasted, for in the university of experience he did ever prove himself an apt scholar. One lesson he had learned, which he never needed to [32] relearn. Just what that lesson was, he tells in his valedictory to the subscribers of the Free Press, as follows: “This is a time-serving age; and he who attempts to walk uprightly or speak honestly, cannot rationally calculate upon speedy wealth or preferment.” A sad lesson, to be sure, for one so young to learn so thoroughly. Perhaps some reader will say that this was cynical, the result of disappointment. But it was not cynical, neither was it the result of disappointment. It was unvarnished truth, and more's the pity, but truth it was none the less. It was one of those hard facts, which he of all men, needed to know at the threshold of his experience with the world. Such a revelation proves disastrous to the many who go down to do business in that world. Ordinary and weak and neutral moral constitutions are wrecked on this reef set in the human sea. Like a true mariner he had written it boldly on his chart. There at such and such a point in the voyage for the golden fleece, were the rocks and the souldevouring dragons of the way. Therefore, oh! my soul, beware. What, indeed, would this argonaut of the press take in exchange for his soul? Certainly not speedy wealth nor preferment. Ah! he could not praise where he ought to reprobate; could not reprobate where praise should be the meed. He had no money and little learning, but he had a conscience and he knew that he must be true to that conscience, come to him either weal or woe. Want renders most men vulnerable, but to it, he appeared, at this early age, absolutely invulnerable. Should he and that almost omnipotent inquisitor, public opinion, ever in the future come into collision upon any principle [33] of action, a keen student of human nature might forsee that the young recusant could never be starved into silence or conformity to popular standards. And with this stern, sad lesson treasured up in his heart, Garrison graduated from another room in the school-house of experience. All the discoveries of the young journalist were not of this grim character. He made another discovery altogether different, a real gem of its kind. The dragnet of a newspaper catches all sorts of poets and poetry, good, bad, and indifferent-oftener the bad and indifferent, rarely the good. The drag-net of the Free Press was no exception to this rule; but, one day, it fetched up from the depths of the hard commonplaces of our New England town life a genuine pearl. We will let Mr. Garrison tell the story in his own way:
Going up-stairs to my office, one day, I observed a letter lying near the door, to my address; which, on opening, I found to contain an original piece of poetry for my paper, the Free Press. The ink was very pale, the handwriting very small; and, having at that time a horror of newspaper original poetry-which has rather increased than diminished with the lapse of time-my first impulse was to tear it in pieces, without reading it; the chances of rejection, after its perusal, being as ninety-nine to one; . . . but summoning resolution to read it, I was equally surprised and gratified to find it above mediocrity, and so gave it a place in my journal. . . . As I was anxious to find out the writer, my post-rider, one day, divulged the secret, stating that he had dropped the letter in the manner described, and that it was written by a [34] Quaker lad, named Whittier, who was daily at work on the shoemaker's bench, with hammer and lapstone, at East Haverhill. Jumping into a vehicle, I lost no time in driving to see the youthful rustic bard, who came into the room with shrinking diffidence, almost unable to speak, and blushing like a maiden. Giving him some words of encouragement, I addressed myself more particularly to his parents, and urged them with great earnestness to grant him every possible facility for the development of his remarkable genius.
Garrison had not only found a true poet, but a true friend as well, in the Quaker lad, John Greenleaf Whittier. The friendship which sprang up between the two was to last during the lifetime of the former. Neither of them in those days of small things could have possibly by any flight of the imagination foreseen how their two lives, moving in parallel lines, would run deep their shining furrows through one of the greatest chapters of human history. But I am anticipating, and that is a vice of which no good storyteller ought to be guilty. So, then, let me incontinently return from this excursion and pursue the even tenor of my tale.
Garrison had stepped down from his elevated position as the publisher and editor of the Free Press. He was without work, and, being penniless, it behooved him to find some means of support. With the instinct of the bright New England boy, he determined to seek his fortunes in Boston. If his honesty and independence put him at a disadvantage, as publisher and editor, in the struggle for existence, he had still his trade as a compositor to fall back upon [35] As a journeyman printer he would earn his bread, and preserve the integrity of an upright spirit. And so without a murmur, and with cheerfulness and persistency, he hunted for weeks on the streets of Boston for a chance to set types. This hunting for a job in a strange city was discouraging enough. Twice before had he visited the place, which was to be his future home. Once when on his way to Baltimore to see his mother, and once afterward when on a sort of pleasure tramp with three companions. But the slight knowledge which he was able to obtain of the town and its inhabitants under these circumstances did not now help him, when from office to office he went in quest of something to do. After many failures and renewed searchings, he found what he was after, an opportunity to practice his trade. Business was dull, which kept our journeyman printer on the wing; first at one and then at another printing office we find him setting types for a living during the year 1827. The winning of bread was no easy matter; but he was not ashamed to work, neither was he afraid of hard work. During this year, he found time to take a hand in a little practical politics. There was in July, 1827, a caucus of the Federal party to nominate a successor to Daniel Webster in the House of Representatives. Young Garrison attended this caucus, and made havoc of its cut and dried programme, by moving the nomination of Harrison Gray Otis, instead of the candidate, a Mr. Benjamin Gorham, agreed upon by the leaders. Harrison Gray Otis was one of Garrison's early and particular idols. He was, perhaps, the one Massachusetts politician whom the young Federalist had placed on a [36] pedestal. And so on this occasion he went into the caucus with a written speech in his hat, eulogistic of his favorite. He had meant to have the speech at his tongue's end, and to get it off as if on the spur of the moment. But the speech stayed where it was put, in the speaker's hat, and failed to materialize where and when it was wanted on the speaker's tongue. As the mountain would not go to Mahomet, Mahomet like a sensible prophet went to the mountain. Our orator in imitation of this illustrious example, bowed to the inevitable and went to his mountain. Pulling his extempore remarks out of his hat, he delivered himself of them to such effect as to create quite an Otis sentiment in the meeting. This performance was, of course, a shocking offence in the eyes of those, whose plans it had disturbed. With one particular old fogy he got into something of a newspaper controversy in consequence. The “consummate assurance” of one so young fairly knocked the breath out of this Mr. Eminent Respectability; it was absolutely revolting to all his “ideas of propriety, to see a stranger, a man who never paid a tax in our city, and perhaps no where else, to possess the impudence to take the lead and nominate a candidate for the electors of Boston!” The “young gentleman of six months standing,” was not a whit abashed or awed by the commotion which he had produced. That was simply a case of cause and effect. But he seemed in turn astonished at his opponent's evident ignorance of William Lloyd Garrison. “It is true,” he replied, with the proud dignity of conscious power, “it is true that my acquaintance in this city is limited. I have sought none. Let me assure him, however, [37] that if my life be spared, my name shall one day be known to the world-at least to such extent that common inquiry shall be unnecessary. This, I know will be deemed excessive vanity-but time shall prove it prophetic.” To the charge of youth he makes this stinging rejoinder, which evinces the progress he was making in the tournament of language: “The little, paltry sneers at my youth by your correspondent have long since become pointless. It is the privileged abuse of old age-the hackneyed allegation of a thousand centuries-the damning crime to which all men have been subjected. I leave it to metaphysicians to determine the precise moment when wisdom and experience leap into existence, when, for the first time, the mind distinguishes truth from error, selfishness from patriotism, and passion from reason. It is sufficient for me that I am understood.” This was Garrison's first experience with “gentlemen of property and standing” in Boston. It was not his last, as future chapters will abundantly show.
