Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 4

[23] just discrimination, as far as in our power, leaving those who cannot adopt them entire liberty to criticise or refute them in our columns. . . .

For thirty years, the abolitionists have been faithfully warning the nation that, unless the enslaved were set free, a just God would visit it with tribulation and woe proportional to its great iniquity. Now that their predictions have come to pass, are they to indulge in morbid exclamations against the natural operation of the law of immutable justice, and to see in it no evidence of the growth of conscience, the power of truth, or the approach of the long-wished — for jubilee? Surely, this would be to arraign Infinite Wisdom, to be blind to the progress of events. Surely, emancipation is nearer than when we believed, and the present struggle cannot fail to hasten it mightily, in a providential sense.

It is alleged that the Administration is endeavoring to uphold the Union, the Constitution, and the laws, even as from the formation of the Government; but this is a verbal and technical view of the case. Facts are more potential than words, and events greater than parchment arrangements. The truth is, the old Union is non est inventus, and its restoration, with its pro-slavery compromises, well-nigh impossible. The conflict is really between the civilization of freedom and the barbarism of slavery—between the principles of democracy and the doctrines of absolutism—between the free North and the man-imbruting South; therefore, to this extent hopeful for the cause of impartial liberty. So that we cannot endorse the assertion, that this is “the darkest hour for the slave in the history of American servitude.” No, it is the brightest!

The readers of the Liberator had often had cause for complaint that the editorials from Mr. Garrison's pen were infrequent and irregular, but they were now treated to a stirring blast each week, and there followed successively articles on the cause and cure of the war, the relation of¹ the anti-slavery cause to the war, the offer of General Benjamin F. Butler to suppress slave insurrections (if² any should occur) in Maryland, the bewilderment of mind of the English people in relation to the struggle, and the³ taunts at non-resistance on the part of those who imagined⁴ that the doctrine had been ‘scattered to the wind’ by recent events. The President and Congress were invoked