John Jay Chapman, William Lloyd Garrison

[154] they be admitted to equal fellowship or not? Manifestly they must be so admitted. Yet to do this identified the cause of Abolition with the theory of Woman's Rights, a conclusion most repugnant to many excellent Anti-slavery people. There must follow, then, a multiplication of sects; this was one of the logical necessities of the situation.

Now there was no person in the Abolition camp who understood these matters from a philosophic point of view. The New Organizationists were struggling to keep the cause pure, to keep it from being mixed up with other causes and ideas, such as Woman's Rights, Non-resistance, etc. Garrison was also struggling to keep the cause pure; to prevent it from being diluted, and from falling into the hands of sectarians, Presbyterians, Methodists, etc. In 1840 we find the Garrisonians chartering a steamboat, and taking several hundred men and women from Massachusetts, in order to “carry” the annual meeting in New York City for his ideas. Jay seems to have understood that the confusion was past cure, though he did not quite perceive that it was inevitable. His personal course was to resign from the Anti-slavery organizations when they veered away from Constitutional