Garrison was never able to see the Liberty party, and for that matter Wendell Phillips, Edmund Quincy, and others of the old organization leaders could not either, except through the darkened glass of personal antagonisms growing out of the schism of 1840.  It was always, under all circumstances, to borrow a phrase of Phillips, “Our old enemy, Liberty party.”  And, as Quincy naively confesses in an article in the Liberator pointing out the reasons why Abolitionists should give to the Free-soil party incidental aid and comfort, which were forbidden to their “old enemy, Liberty party,” the significant and amusing fact that the latter was “officered by deserters.”  Ay, there was indeed the rub!  The military principle of the great leader forbade him to recognize deserters as allies.  Discipline must be maintained, and so he proceeded to maintain the anti-slavery discipline of his army by keeping up a constant fusillade into the ranks of the deserter band, who, in turn, were every whit as blinded by the old quarrel and separation, and who slyly cherished the modest conviction that, when they seceded, the salt of old organization lost its savor, and was thenceforth fit only to be trampled under the Liberty party’s feet.  Without doubt, those old Abolitionists and Liberty party people belonged to the category of “humans.”

The scales of the old grudge dropped from Garrison’s eyes directly the Free-Soil party loomed upon the political horizon.  He recognized at once that, if it was not against the slave, it was for the slave; apprehended clearly that, in so far as the new party, which, by the way, was only the second stage in the development of the central idea of his old enemy, Liberty party, as the then future Republican party was to be its third and final expression, apprehended clearly I say that, in so far as the new party resisted the aggressions and pretensions of the slave-power, it was fighting for Abolition—­was an ally of Abolitionism.

In the summer of 1848, from Northampton, whither he had gone to take the water cure, Garrison counseled Quincy, who was filling the editorial chair, in the interim, at the Liberator office, in this sage fashion:  “As for the Free-Soil movement, I feel that great care is demanded of us disunionists, both in the Standard and the Liberator, in giving credit to whom credit is due, and yet in no case even seeming to be satisfied with it.”  In the winter of 1848 in a letter to Samuel May, Jr., he is more explicit on this head.  “As for the Free-Soil movement,” he observes, “I am for hailing it as a cheering sign of the times, and an unmistakable proof of the progress we have made, under God, in changing public sentiment.  Those who have left the Whig and Democratic parties for conscience’s sake, and joined the movement, deserve our commendation and sympathy; at the same time, it is our duty to show them, and all others, that there is a higher position to be attained by