Right and wrong in MassachusettsChapman, Maria Weston
History
Right and wrong in Massachusetts
Chapman, Maria Weston
Antislavery movements -- Massachusetts -- Boston; Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society
[2] “Of Mr. Garrison I will say, as the Pope said of his minion, I
will absolve him of all the sins he ever has committed, or ever will
commit.”--_Speech of Mr. St. Clair in 1837._
[3] A scheme so called, for benefiting the colored race, without giving
offence by the mention of Freedom, or Human Rights.
CHAPTER IV.
THE WARNING.
The task of _such_ an editor, Mr. President, is an arduous and
thankless one. He must shield his friends by movements for which
they will be apt to censure him. He must save the cause by the
very blows from which the apparently judicious will anticipate
its annihilation. He must stand on an eminence from which he can
see what other men cannot see. He must be eyes to the blind,
whose want of eye-sight will lead them to make war upon their
benefactor. He must rouse men from their dangerous sleep, who,
while they begin to see men as trees walking, will murmur because
they are waked, and instead of thanking their deliverer, find
fault with the rudeness that disturbed them, and assume to give
directions when they should be beginning to learn. WILLIAM GOODELL.
Time, which waits for no man, but keeps on, with even foot-fall,
whether witness of right or wrong, frankness and openness, or chicanery
and intrigue, brought round the year 1839.
Mr. Torrey, who had represented his county as crying out for a new
paper, till possibly the echo of his own voice might have led him to
think his testimony true, now found a feeling waking up in Old Essex
that he had not anticipated. The women there, with whom, in the spirit
of a true mussulman, he had, a few months previous, considered it
defilement to sit in Convention, had always been most effectual helpers
of the financial department of the cause. Some of them had been among
the earliest laborers; and, experienced in observing the pertinacity
with which the enemy, from the beginning, had striven to possess
himself of the fortress, by striking down the warder of the gate, were
startled by Mr. Torrey’s great zeal for a new paper. They compared
it with his hatred of the Liberator, so manifest during the clerical
appeal controversy, and took note, from time to time, of the manner in
which he argued this new necessity.
They found that, like the Colonization Society, the necessity had two
faces; one for the real and the other for the pretended abolitionist.
They saw that this “necessity” was founded on prejudice against the
Liberator, as the Colonization Society rests upon prejudice against the
free man of color.
“Oh, surer than suspicion’s hundred eyes,
Is that fine sense, which, to the pure in heart,
By mere oppugnancy of their own goodness,
Reveals the approach of evil.”
They decided to strengthen the Liberator for the coming emergency, and
raised $500 for its support.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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