Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 1

[456] had gone as it could only go at that anti-Republican epoch in Massachusetts, he took the colored voters of the district to task for having supported Abbott Lawrence. He had, he said, never attempted to bias their minds on any points, religious or political. He had avoided their special meetings in order to leave them independent. He had no political bias in his present reprimand. He belonged to no party in particular, but to all in general; he was not deceived or influenced by names, but governed by principles. National politics were now corrupt, proscriptive, and ferocious. He cordially detested Jacksonism in principle and practice, ‘nor,’ added Mr. Garrison, ‘do I think much better of its antagonist, Whiggism. The organs of each are marked for their slander, vituperation, and baseness.’ The Whig party the colored voters ‘should dread and oppose more than any other.’ It was in close alliance with the South, and had incited all the pro-slavery mobs of the past summer through its presses, the New York Courier and Enquirer and Commercial Advertiser, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington Intelligencer, the Boston Commercial Gazette. Whigs, with Henry Clay at their head, were the leaders in the colonization crusade. They had made a cat's-paw of the colored voters, who thus only incurred Democratic hatred for nothing.

Later, Mr. Garrison, on being remonstrated with for¹ these admonitions, gave warning that slavery was going to be made a political question: ‘The immediate Eman-Cipation of the slaves in the District of Columbia and the Territories is to be made A test at the Ballot-Boxes, in the choice of representatives in Congress’; and ‘no man who is a slaveholder will receive the votes of conscientious and consistent abolitionists for any station in the gift of the people—especially for the Presidency of the United States.’²