CHAPTER III.

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