Garrison took his imprisonment calmly enough, but his old friend, John
G. Whittier, was deeply distressed and appealed to Henry Clay to secure
the release of the "guiltless prisoner." This Clay would probably have
done, but he was anticipated by another friend of Garrison's, Arthur
Tappan, of New York, who sent the money to pay the fine, and the young
agitator was free again, after an imprisonment of forty-nine days. He
had not been idle while in prison, but had prepared a series of lectures
on slavery, which he proceeded at once to deliver. Then, on the first
day of January, 1831, he began in Boston the publication of a weekly
paper called the "Liberator," which he continued for thirty-five years,
until its fight was won and slavery was abolished.
How well that fight was waged history has shown. In his first number he
announced: "I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as
justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, to speak, or write with
moderation. No! No! Tell the man whose home is on fire to give a
moderate alarm; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the
fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a
cause like the present. I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will
not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch--and I will be heard."
And heard he was. The whole land was soon filled with excitement; the
apathy of years was broken. From the south came hundreds of letters
threatening him with death if he did not desist, and the state of
Georgia offered a reward of $5,000 for his apprehension. In the north,
anti-slavery societies were formed everywhere, and the movement grew
with great rapidity, in spite of powerful efforts to crush it. There
were riots everywhere. Garrison was dragged through the streets of
Boston with a rope around his body and his life was saved only by
lodging him in jail; Elijah Lovejoy was slain at Alton, Illinois, while
defending his press; Marius Robinson, an anti-slavery lecturer, was
tarred and feathered in Mahoning County, Ohio; in the cities of the
south, mobs broke into the postoffice and made bonfires of anti-slavery
papers and pamphlets found there. Quarrels and dissension in the
anti-slavery ranks developed in time, but when the Civil War was over,
the leaders of the Republican party united with Garrison's friends in
raising for him the sum of $30,000, and after his death the city of
Boston raised a statue to his memory. Perhaps no better estimate of him
has ever been made than that of John A. Andrew, war governor of
Massachusetts:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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