Right and wrong in MassachusettsChapman, Maria Weston
History
Right and wrong in Massachusetts
Chapman, Maria Weston
Antislavery movements -- Massachusetts -- Boston; Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society
Resolved, That the course pursued by the Board of Managers of the
Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, in relation to the difficulty
now existing between that Board and the Executive Committee of the
Parent Society, meets our hearty approval.
Wendell Phillips now renewed the offer of harmonious co-operation.
Resolved, That we are ready harmoniously to co-operate with the
Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society, in the
collection of funds within this Commonwealth, provided they will
act with us under the arrangement of June last.
Hereupon the long-denied and painfully-concealed hostility to the
Massachusetts Society burst forth, and the attempts to cast out Mr.
Garrison, or to sink the Society with him, were renewed. Mr. Tappan
saw no reason why the Committee should expect to receive the money
at all, unless by taking the matter entirely out of the hands of the
Massachusetts Society. The Managers could offer no better guarantee
than at first.
“We _can_--we _do_ offer a better guarantee,” replied Wendell Phillips.
“We are in a far better condition to meet this pledge, than before. The
political campaign in the Fourth District is at an end, and will no
longer absorb the funds, or the energies of the agents. We are stronger
as a Board; we have a new General Agent; we are awake, throughout the
State, to the emergency.”
Mr. Stanton seemed to suppose that membership in the Massachusetts
Society implied an obligation never to change one’s views on other
subjects; for he read extracts from the Liberator, proving that Mr.
Garrison had changed his opinions as to the principles of civil
government, since the first establishment of that paper. Rev. George
Allen burst into vehement invective. “I am ready,” said he, pointing
to Mr. Garrison, “to attack the wolf in his very den, with the
bleeding relics of his mangled victims yet between his teeth.” Mr.
Birney, to the utter astonishment of the meeting, descended to the
proscriptive ground first assumed by Mr. Stanton, and intimated that no
non-resistant could consistently or honorably remain a member of the
Anti-Slavery Society.
Men’s minds went back to the days of the clerical appeal, when Birney,
then an editor in Ohio, had been tried and found wanting. That
deficiency, so long veiled with silent and brotherly care by those whom
he yielded up to the enemy, now defied concealment. He proclaimed his
sympathy and knowledge with that of the N. Y. Committee, in the recent
plottings. “WE felt the need of this new paper in Massachusetts.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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