Archibald H. Grimke, William Lloyd Garrison the Abolitionist

[349] wholly out of the question with Garrison, he, nevertheless, refused to condemn the men with whom it was otherwise. Here he was anything but a fanatic. All that he required was that each should be consistent with his principles. If those principles bade him resist the enforcement of the Black Bill, the apostle of non-resistance was sorry enough, but in this emergency, though he possessed the gentleness of the dove, he also practised the wisdom of the serpent. That truth moves with men upon lower as well as higher planes he well knew. It is always partial and many-colored, refracted as it is through the prisms of human passion and prejudice. If it appear unto some minds in the red bar of strife and blood, so be it. Each must follow the light which it is given him to discern, whether the blue of love or the red of war. Great coadjutors, like Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Dr. Henry I. Bowditch, were for forcible resistance to the execution of the law. So were the colored people. Preparations to this end went on vigorously in Boston under the direction of the Vigilance Committee. The Crafts escaped the clutches of the slave-hunters, so did Shadrach escape them, but Sims and Burns fell into them and were returned to bondage.

From this time on Wendell Phillips became in Boston and in the North more distinctly the leader of the Abolition sentiment. The period of pure moral agitation ended with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. That act opened a new era in the movement, an era in which non-resistance had no place, an era in which a resort to physical force in settlement of sectional differences, the whole trend of things were