William Lloyd Garrison, the AbolitionistGrimké, Archibald Henry
History
William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist
Grimké, Archibald Henry
Garrison, William Lloyd, 1805-1879
The madman and his keepers were quite vanquished on the first day of the
convention by the wit, repartee, and eloquence of Frederick Douglass,
Dr. Furness, and Rev. Samuel R. Ward, whom Wendell Phillips described as
so black that "when he shut his eyes you could not see him." But it was
otherwise on the second day when public opinion was "regulated," and
free discussion overthrown by Captain Rynders and his villainous gang,
who were resolved, with the authors of the compromise, that the Union as
it was should be preserved.
But, notwithstanding the high authority and achievements of this noble
band of patriots and brothers, Garrison's detestation of the Union but
increased, and his cry for its dissolution grew deeper and louder. And
no wonder. For never had the compact between freedom and slavery seemed
more hateful than after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill. The
state of panic which it created among the colored people in the free
States will form, if ever written down, one of the most heartrending
chapters in human history. Hundreds and thousands fled from their homes
into the jaws of a Canadian winter to escape the jaws of the
slave-hounds, whose fierce baying began presently to fill the land from
Massachusetts to Ohio. It made no difference whether these miserable
people had been always free or were fugitives from slavery, the terror
spread among them all the same. The aged and the young turned their
backs upon their homes and hurried precipitately into a strange country.
Fathers with wives and children dependant upon them for their daily
bread, were forced by the dread of being captured and returned to
bondage to abandon their homes and loved ones, sometimes without so much
as a touch of their hands or a tone of their voices in token of
farewell. Perhaps on his way to work in the morning some husband or son
has caught a glimpse among the faces on the street of one face, the
remembrance of which to the day of death, he can never lose, a face he
had known in some far away Southern town or plantation, and with which
are connected in the poor fellow's brain the most frightful sufferings
and associations. Crazed at the sight, with no thought of home, of the
labors which are awaiting him, oblivious of everything but the abject
terror which has suddenly taken possession of him, he hastens away to
hide and fly, fly and hide, until he reaches a land where slave-hounds
enter not, and panting fugitives find freedom. Wendell Phillips tells of
an old woman of seventy who asked his advice about flying, though
originally free, and fearful only of being caught up by mistake. The
distress everywhere was awful, the excitement indescribable. From Boston
alone in the brief space of three weeks after the rescue of Shadrach,
nearly a hundred of these panic stricken creatures had fled. The whole
number escaping into Canada Charles Sumner placed as high as six
thousand souls. But in addition to this large band of fugitives, others
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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