The marriage occurred September 4, 1834, and the next day the pair set up housekeeping in “Freedom’s Cottage,” on Bower street, Roxbury.  The young housekeepers were rich in every good thing except money; and of that commodity there was precious little that found its way into the family till.  And money was indispensable even to a philanthropist, who cared as little for it as did Garrison.  He had never in his twenty-eight years experienced the sensation which a bank account, however small, gives its possessor.  He had been toiling during the last three years in a state of chronic self-forgetfulness, and of consequence in a state of chronic inpecuniosity.  He had never been careful of what he got—­was careful only of what he gave.  For himself he was ready to subsist on bread and water and to labor more than fourteen hours at the case to make the issue of the Liberator possible.  But surely he could not put “a fair ladye” on such limited commons even for the sake of his cause.  The laborer is worthy of his hire, and an unworldly minded reformer ought to be supplied with the wherewithal needful to feed, clothe, and house himself and those dependent upon him.  Some such thought shaped itself in Garrison’s mind as his circumstances grew more and more straitened, and his future as the head of a family looked more and more ominous.  Anxiety for the morrow pressed heavily upon him as his responsibilities as a breadwinner hugged closer and closer his everyday life.  Poverty ceased to be the ordinary enemy of former years, whom he from the lookouts of the unconquerable mind used to laugh to scorn; it had become instead a cruel foe who worried as by fire the peace of his soul.

There was the Liberator?  The Liberator as a moral engine was a marvelous success; but the Liberator as a money-maker was a most dismal failure.  If its owners had possessed only common aptitude for business the failure need not have been so complete, indeed the enterprise might have been crowned with a moderate degree of success.  But never were two men more entirely lacking in the methods, which should enter into ventures of that character, than were Garrison and Knapp.  Garrison was unfortunate in this respect but it seems that Knapp was more so.  Neither took to book-keeping, and neither overcame his serious deficiency in this regard.  The consequence was that the books kept themselves, and confusion grew upon confusion until the partners were quite confounded.  Garrison naively confesses this fault of the firm to his brother-in-law thus:  “Brother Knapp, you know, resembles me very closely in his habits of procrastination.  Indeed I think he is rather worse than I am in this respect!”