Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost AdvocatesJohnson, Helen Kendrick
History
Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates
Johnson, Helen Kendrick
Women -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
Mr. Garrison said: "We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human
government. We can allow no appeal to patriotism to revenge any national
insult or injury." Again he said: "If a nation has no right to defend
itself against foreign enemies, no individual possesses that right in his
own case.... As every human government is upheld by physical strength, and
its laws are enforced at the point of the bayonet, we cannot hold office.
We therefore exclude ourselves from every legislative and judicial body,
and repudiate all human politics, worldly honors, and stations of
authority."
Ralph Waldo Emerson says: "They withdraw themselves from the common labors
and competitions of the market and the caucus.... They are striking work,
and calling out for something worthy to do.... They are not good citizens,
not good members of society; unwilling to bear their part of the public
burdens. They do not even like to vote. They filled the world with long
beards and long words. They began in words, and ended in words."
Charles Sumner said: "An omnibus-load of Boston abolitionists has done
more harm to the Anti-slavery cause than all its enemies."
Angelina Grimké, writing at this time to Mr. Weld, said: "What wouldst
thou think of the 'Liberator' abandoning abolitionism as a primary object,
and becoming the vehicle of all these grand principles?"
In his published volume "Anti-slavery Days," James Freeman Clarke says of
the first Garrison Anti-slavery society: "There was no such excitement to
be had anywhere else as at these meetings. There was a little of
everything going on in them. Sometimes crazy people would come in and
insist on taking up the time; sometimes mobs would interrupt the smooth
tenor of their way; but amid all disturbance each meeting gave us an
interesting and impressive hour. I think that some of the Garrisonian
orators had the keenest tongues ever given to man. Stephen S. Foster and
Henry C. Wright, for example, said the sharpest things that were ever
uttered. Their belief was, that people were asleep, and the only thing to
be done was to rouse them; and to do this it was necessary to cut deep and
spare not. The more angry people were made, the better." Again, in the
same volume, he says, after describing the political Anti-slavery party:
"While these political anti-slavery movements were going on, the old
abolitionists, under the lead of Garrison, Phillips, and others, had
decided to oppose all voting and all political efforts under the
Constitution. They adopted as their motto, 'No union with slaveholders.'
Their hope for abolishing slavery was in inducing the North to dissolve
the Union. Edmund Quincy said the Union was 'a confederacy with crime,'
that 'the experiment of a great nation with popular institutions had
signally failed,' that 'the Republic was not a model but a warning to the
nations;' that 'the whole people must be either slaveholders or slaves;'
that the only escape for 'the slave from his bondage was over the ruins of
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