Francis Jackson to N. P. Rogers.
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necessary to its regular maintenance, and asked, ‘Shall we disband?’
Rogers replied, but did not abate his doctrine in the Herald of Freedom, and, later, advocated direct contributions to anti-slavery agents, rather than1 through the general treasury.
In a word, the divorce in sympathy and cooperation between himself and the Board of Managers (his employers) as a Board was complete.2
Meantime, his prospective son-in-law, John R. French, had set up a baseless claim to the ownership of the Herald, which Rogers espoused, and, pending the Society's endeavors to assert its rights and recover control of its organ, at about the date of Miss Kelley's private letter Rogers fell3 deathly ill. Mr. Garrison's promptly expressed condolence was accompanied by his first reference in the Liberator to the difference between the Society and its printer, who, he4 said, was bound to refute the facts which the Board of Managers, through S. S. Foster, had presented without as yet eliciting any denial.
Rogers, already wounded by the5 strictures on his no-organization views, saw in this impartial and forbearing expression ‘suspicions’ concerning himself, and called them “the fatal shot in the side of our struggling bark.”
Lib. 14.191. French, on his part, defying the Board,6 took his appeal to the Society at its meeting in the autumn.
2 ‘Dear Rogers is still driving his inimitable pen with railway speed, though I think he occasionally runs off the track, and sometimes mistakes a molehill for a mountain. He now avows unmitigated hostility to every organized society, and regards a president or chairman as an embryo Caligula or Nero’ (Ms. Oct. 1, 1844, W. L. G. to H. C. Wright). ‘Honest Francis Jackson, presiding over an anti-slavery meeting, is transformed in his eyes into a truculent slaveholder, with a scourge in one hand and a branding-iron in the other. The Mass. A. S. Society looks to him like the despotism of Nicholas or Dr. Francia. The church and clergy even are allowed to rest in comparative quietness while he follows his crusade against chairmen, business committees, and societies’ (Ms. Sept. 22, 1844, E. Quincy to R. D. Webb).
3 Ms. Oct. 30, 1844, Rogers to F. Jackson.
5 Ms. Oct. 30, 1844, Rogers to F. Jackson.
7 Ms., rough draft.
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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