Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 3

You say it is on the Bible you ground all your hopes of the¹ liberties, not only of the slave, but of the whole human race. How does it happen, then, that, in a nation professing to place as high an estimate upon that volume as yourself, and denouncing as infidels all who do not hold it equally sacred, there are three millions and a half of chattel slaves, who are denied its possession, under severe penalties? Is not slavery sanctioned by the Bible, according to the interpretation of it by the clergy generally, its recognized expounders? What, then, does the cause of bleeding humanity gain by all this veneration for the book?

My reliance for the deliverance of the oppressed universally is upon the nature of man, the inherent wrongfulness of oppression, the power of truth, and the omnipotence of God— using every rightful instrumentality to hasten the jubilee.

Mrs. Stowe's line of argument will seem, to the readers of the present narrative from the beginning, somewhat anachronistic, as if (which was the truth) proceeding from one who knew nothing of Mr. Garrison's theological evolution, either in its hyperorthodox source or in the causes which led to his spiritual emancipation–such, for example, as are implied in the passage just reproduced. This was not to be learned by a single summer's study of the Liberator.

The friendly meeting at Andover cannot be exactly dated, but it probably took place in the second week of December. ‘I was dreadfully afraid of your father,’ Mrs. Stowe has since said to one of Garrison's children;² but the conference under her roof dispelled that feeling forever. His spirit captivated her as it had done many another of like prejudices. ‘You have,’ she wrote to him on December 12, 1853, ‘a remarkable tact at conversation.’³⁴