half a heart—as if we were treading on
forbidden ground? No, indeed, but earnestly,
fearlessly, as becomes men, who are determined to clear
their country and themselves from the guilt of oppressing
God’s free and lawful creatures.”
About the same time he began to make his assaults on
the personal representatives of the slave-power in
Congress, cauterizing in the first instance three
Northern “dough-faces,” who had voted
against some resolutions, looking to the abolition
of the slave-trade and slavery itself in the District
of Columbia. So while the South thus early was
seeking to frighten the North from the agitation of
the slavery question in Congress, Garrison was unconsciously
preparing a countercheck by making it dangerous for
a Northern man to practice Southern principles in
the National Legislature. He did not mince his
words, but called a spade a spade, and sin, sin.
He perceived at once that if he would kill the sin
of slave-holding, he could not spare the sinner.
And so he spoke the names of the delinquents from the
housetop of the Journal of the Times, stamping
upon their brows the scarlet letter of their crime
against liberty. He had said in the October before:
“It is time that a voice of remonstrance went
forth from the North, that should peal in the ears
of every slaveholder like a roar of thunder....
For ourselves, we are resolved to agitate this subject
to the utmost; nothing but death shall prevent us
from denouncing a crime which has no parallel in human
depravity; we shall take high ground. The alarm
must be perpetual.” A voice of remonstrance,
with thunder growl accompaniment, was rising higher
and clearer from the pen of the young editor.
His tone of earnestness was deepening to the stern
bass of the moral reformer, and the storm breath of
enthusiasm was blowing to a blaze the glowing coals
of his humanity. The wail of the fleeing fugitive
from the house of bondage sounded no longer far away
and unreal in his ears, but thrilled now right under
the windows of his soul. The masonic excitement
and the commotion created by the abduction of Morgan
he caught up and shook before the eyes of his countrymen
as an object lesson of the million-times greater wrong
daily done the slaves. “All this fearful
commotion,” he pealed, “has arisen from
the abduction of one man. More than two
millions of unhappy beings are groaning out their
lives in bondage, and scarcely a pulse quickens, or
a heart leaps, or a tongue pleads in their behalf.
’Tis a trifling affair, which concerns nobody.
Oh! for the spirit that rages, to break every fetter
of oppression!” Such a spirit was fast taking
possession of the writer.