Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.Stowe, Harriet Beecher
History
Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
United States -- Biography; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Biography
A Southern magistrate, trembling for the institutions of his country,
wrote a somewhat dictatorial appeal to the mayor of Boston, Harrison
Gray Otis, to suppress that paper. Mr. Otis wrote in reply, that having
ferreted out the paper and the editor, he found that his office was an
obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, his supporters
a few insignificant persons of all colors--from which he argued that
there was no occasion for alarm, even though the obscure paper should
prove irrepressible. Very differently, however, thought the South.
Every mail brought to Garrison threats of assassination, and letters
whose mingled profanity and obscenity can only be described as John
Bunyan describes the discourse of Apollyon, "He spake as a dragon." The
Governors of one or two States set a price upon his head. The Governor
of Georgia, in terms somewhat more decent, offered five thousand
dollars to any one who should arrest and bring to trial under the laws
of that State, the editor or publisher of the _Liberator_. Many of Mr.
Garrison's friends, deeming his life in danger, besought him to wear
arms. He was, however, from religious conviction, a non-resistant of
evil, interpreting with literal strictness the Saviour's directions on
that subject; and so committed his life simply to the good providence
of God.
On January 1, 1832, he secured the co-operation of eleven others, who,
with himself, organized the American Anti-Slavery Society upon the
principle of immediate emancipation. Affiliated associations sprang
up all over the country--books, tracts, lectures, all the machinery
of moral agitation, began active movement. He went to England as agent
for the Emancipation Society, to hold counsel with the men who had
pioneered the same work successfully in England. He was warmly received
by Wilberforce, Brougham, Clarkson, and their associates, and succeeded
in opening their eyes to the entire inefficiency of the Colonization
Society as a substitute for the great duty of immediate emancipation,
so that Wilberforce, with eleven of his coadjutors, issued a protest
against it, not as in itself considered, but as it had been made a
shield to the consciences of those who deferred their immediate duty to
the slave on the ground of this distant and precarious remedy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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