Chapter 3

THE MAN BEGINS HIS MINISTRY.

Some time in August, 1829, Garrison landed in Baltimore, and began with Lundy the editorship of _The Genius of Universal Emancipation_. Radical as the Park Street Church address was, it had, nevertheless, ceased to represent in one essential matter his anti-slavery convictions and principles. The moral impetus and ground-swell of the address had carried him beyond the position where its first flood of feeling had for the moment left him. During the composition of the address he was transported with grief and indignation at the monstrous wrong which slavery did the slaves and the nation. He had not thought out for himself any means to rid both of the curse. The white heat of the address destroyed for the instant all capacity for such thinking. "Who can be amazed, temperate, and furious--in a moment? No man. The expedition of his violent love outran the pauser reason" He had accepted the colonization scheme as an instrument for removing the evil, and called on all good citizens "to assist in establishing auxiliary colonization societies in every State, county, and town"; and implored "their direct and liberal patronage to the parent society." He had not apparently, so much as dreamed of any other than gradual emancipation. "The emancipation of all the slaves of this generation is most assuredly out of the question," he said; "the fabric which now towers above the Alps, must be taken away brick by brick, and foot by foot, till it is reduced so low that it may be overturned without burying the nation in its ruins. Years may elapse before the completion of the achievement; generations of blacks may go down to the grave, manacled and lacerated, without a hope for their children." He was on the Fourth of July a firm and earnest believer in the equity and efficacy of gradualism. But after that day, and some time before his departure for Baltimore, he began to think on this subject. The more he thought the less did gradualism seem defensible on moral grounds. John Wesley had said that slavery was the "sum of all villainies"; it was indeed the sin of sins, and as such ought to be abandoned not gradually but immediately. Slave-holding was sin and slaveholders were sinners. The sin and sinner should both be denounced as such and the latter called to instant repentance, and the duty of making immediate restitution of the stolen liberties of their slaves. This was the tone ministers of religion held every where toward sin and sinners, and this should be the tone held by the preachers of Abolition toward slavery, and slaveholders. To admit the principle of gradualism was for Abolition to emasculate itself of its most virile quality. Garrison, consequently rejected gradualism as a weapon, and took up instead the great and quickening doctrine of immediatism. Lundy did not know of this change in the convictions of his coadjutor until his arrival in Baltimore. Then Garrison frankly unburdened himself and declared his decision to conduct his campaign against the national iniquity along the lines of immediate and unconditional emancipation. The two on this new radicalism did not see eye to eye. But Lundy with sententious shrewdness and liberality suggested to the young radical: "Thee may put thy initials to thy articles and I will put my initials to mine, and each will bear his own burden." And the arrangement pleased the young radical, for it enabled him to free his soul of the necessity which was then sitting heavily upon it. The precise state of his mind in respect of the question at this juncture in its history and in his own is made plain enough in his salutatory address in _The Genius of Universal Emancipation_. The vow made in Bennington ten months before to devote his life to philanthrophy, and the dedication of himself made six months afterward to the extirpation of American slavery, he solemnly renews and reseals in Baltimore. He does not hate intemperance and war less, but slavery more, and those, therefore, he formally relegates thenceforth to a place of secondary importance in the endeavors of the future. It is obvious that the colonization scheme has no strong hold upon his intelligence. He does not conceal his respect for it as an instrument of freedom, but he puts no high value on its utility. "It may pluck a few leaves," he remarks, "from the Bohon Upas, but can neither extract its roots nor destroy its withering properties. Viewed as an auxiliary, it deserves encouragement; but as a remedy it is altogether inadequate." But this was not all. As a remedy, colonization was not only altogether inadequate, its influence was indirectly pernicious, in that it lulled the popular mind into "a belief that the monster has received his mortal wound." He perceived that this resultant indifference and apathy operated to the advantage of slavery, and to the injury of freedom. Small, therefore, as was the good which the Colonization Society was able to achieve, it was mixed with no little