Chapter 6: ‘the genius of Universal emancipation.’—1829-30.
Garrison advocates, on his own responsibility and under his own signature, the doctrine of immediate emancipation, and causes a ruinous decline in the patronage of the genius. for denouncing the transfer of slaves between Baltimore and New Orleans, in a ship belonging to Francis Todd, of Newburyport, he is indicted for libel by the Grand Jury,American slavery, according to John Wesley, was1 ‘the vilest that ever saw the sun.’ In an eloquent passage of his Park-Street address, Mr. Garrison had briefly pictured the awful features of the system, and had recounted the list of wrongs and outrages which the slaves, if they were to imitate the example of the Revolutionary fathers and rise in revolt, might present to the world as their justification, after the manner of the Declaration of Independence. The invasion of African soil, the kidnapping of the natives, the indescribable horrors of the middle passage, the brutal treatment of the slaves, the abrogation of the marriage institution, the cruel separation of families, the miseries of the domestic slavetrade, and the absolute power over the life, property2 and person of his slaves accorded and insured to the master by the laws of the slave States, were all touched upon; but it was not to these alone that Garrison was keenly alive. We have already seen, in his address at Park Street, that he fully appreciated the political 3 advantage given to the South by the clause of the Constitution which permitted her to add three-fifths of her slave population to the number of her free inhabitants, in fixing the basis of representation in the lower house of Congress. He showed that the free States, with a free population more numerous by nearly one hundred per cent. than that of the slave States, had only 121 representatives
