[In the following excerpt, Rhodes considers Garrison's work in relation to slave uprisings of the 1830s, and presents an assessment of his impact on mid-nineteenth-century American politics.]

In August of this year (1831) occurred the Nat Turner insurrection in Virginia, which seemed to many Southerners a legitimate fruit of the bold teaching of Garrison, although there was indeed between the two events no real connection. But this negro rising struck terror through the South and destroyed calm reason. The leader, Nat Turner, a genuine African of exceptional capacity, knowing the Bible by heart, prayed and preached to his fellow-slaves. He told them of the voices he heard in the air, of the visions he saw, and of his communion with the Holy Spirit. An eclipse of the sun was a sign that they must rise and slay their enemies who had deprived them of freedom. The massacre began at night and continued for forty-eight hours; women and children were not spared, and before the bloody work was checked sixty-one whites were victims of negro ferocity. The retribution was terrible. Negroes were shot, hanged, tortured, and burned to death, and all on whom suspicion lighted met a cruel fate. In Southampton County, the scene of the insurrection, there was a reign of terror, and alarm spread throughout the slave States.

This event, and the thought that it might be the precursor of others of the same kind, account for much of the Southern rage directed against Garrison and his crusade. Nor, when we reflect on the sparsely settled country, the wide distance between plantations—conditions that made a negro insurrection possible—and when we consider what it was for planters to have hanging over their heads the horrors of a servile war, will it seem surprising that judicial poise of temper was impossible when Southerners discussed the work of Garrison. They regarded it as an incitement for their slaves to revolt. But they did injustice to Garrison, for Nat Turner had never seen a copy of the Liberator, and the paper had not a single subscriber south of the Potomac. Nor did Garrison ever send a pamphlet or paper to any slave, nor advocate the right of physical resistance on the part of the oppressed. He was a non-resistant, and did not believe that force should be used to overturn legal authority, even when unjustly and oppressively exercised. The assertion that slavery is a damning crime is one thing; the actual incitement of slaves to insurrection is another. The distinction between the two was not appreciated at the South. Stringent laws were made against the circulation of the Liberator, and vigilance committees sent their warnings to any who were supposed to have a part in spreading its doctrines. In North Carolina Garrison was indicted for a felony, and the legislature of Georgia offered a reward of five thousand dollars for the arrest and conviction of the editor or publisher. One voice went abroad from public officials, popular meetings, and from the press of the South, demanding that the governor of Massachusetts or the mayor of Boston should suppress the “infernal Liberator.”

The people of Virginia had often struggled to free themselves from the coils of slavery, and the Nat Turner insurrection furnished the occasion for another attempt. At the following session of the Legislature a proposition was made to inquire into the expediency of some plan of gradual emancipation. In the debate that took place on the subject, the evil of slavery was characterized in terms as strong as an abolitionist could have used. The alarm excited all over the South by the negro rising in Southampton County was not, one member explained, from the fear of Nat Turner, but it was on account of “the suspicion eternally attached to the slave himself—a suspicion that a Nat Turner might be in every family, that the same bloody deed might be acted over at any time, and in any place; that the materials for it were spread through the land, and were always ready for a like explosion.”

But a majority of the House of Representatives, in which the project was discussed, could not be had for ordering an inquiry, and the further consideration of the subject was indefinitely postponed. It has sometimes been asserted that had not the abolitionist agitation begun, this Virginia movement would have resulted in the gradual emancipation of slaves in that state; but there is, in truth, no reason for thinking that anything more would have come of it than from previous abortive attempts in the same direction. On many pages of Virginia history may one read of noble efforts by noble men towards freeing their State from slavery. But the story of the end is a repeated tale; the seeds sown fell among thorns, and the thorns sprung up and choked them.

Meanwhile Garrison and his little band continued the uphill work of proselyting at the North, and especially in Boston. Merchants, manufacturers, and capitalists were against the movement, for trade with the South was important, and they regarded the propagation of abolition sentiments as injurious to the commercial interests of Boston. Good society turned the back upon the abolitionists. Garrison had no college education to recommend him to an aristocracy based partly upon wealth and partly upon culture. The churches were bitterly opposed to the movement. Oliver Johnson, one of the early disciples of Garrison, relates that several times his efforts were in vain to persuade some one among a dozen white clergymen of Boston to open an anti-slavery meeting with prayer, and he was in each case forced at last to accept the services of a negro preacher from “Negro Hill.” The position of the church was well expressed by a noted clergyman, who attributed the sin of slavery to a past generation, and assigned the duty of emancipation to future generations. The abolitionists, however, gradually gained ground. The year 1833 was for them one of grateful memory. Then, at Philadelphia, the American Anti-slavery Society was organized by delegates who made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in numbers. The Declaration of Sentiments, drawn up by Garrison, was a paper worthy of the earnest and intelligent people who were its signers. It referred to the immortal Declaration adopted in the same city fifty-seven years before, and, as the strongest abolition argument that could be made, quoted the phrase “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It denounced slavery in vigorous terms, yet conceded that Congress had no right to interfere with it in the States; and while condemning the employment of material force in any way to promote abolition, the signers pledged themselves to use moral means, so far as lay in their power, to overthrow the execrable system of slavery. This was not an inflammatory and seditious appeal; the delegates were men of good character, pure morals, and were law-abiding citizens; yet it was necessary for the police to guard the convention hall against threatened mob violence. The meeting was regarded by all Southern people, and by nearly all at the North, in much the same way as we should now look upon an assemblage of anarchists. …

Excitement about the abolition movement characterized the year 1835. Numerous public meetings and the press of the South demanded almost with one voice that the abolitionists must be put down or they would destroy the Union. A suspension of commercial intercourse with the North was even suggested. The Charleston post-office was forcibly entered and a large number of tracts and papers sent there by the American Anti-slavery Society were seized; the next night these papers and effigies of Garrison and other abolitionists were burned in the presence of a large number of spectators. On a false alarm of a projected slave rising in Mississippi, several white men and negroes were hanged by vigilance committees. The wrath of the Southern people against the abolitionists was reflected at the North, and the feeling grew that the imputation of abolition ideas to the whole Northern community must be repelled. As the Liberator could not be suppressed, nor anti-slavery meetings prohibited by law, recourse was had to mob violence. Attacks upon abolitionists had previously been common, and this sort of warfare culminated in the year 1835. A ferocious anti-negro riot took place at Philadelphia. Rev. Samuel May, a devoted abolitionist and adherent of Garrison, was mobbed at Haverhill, Mass., the home of Whittier, and five times afterwards at different places in Vermont. A disgraceful anti-slavery riot occurred at Utica, N. Y. In Boston, on the same day, a mob, variously estimated at from two thousand to five thousand, including many gentlemen of property and influence, broke up a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-slavery Society. Garrison, one of the men against whom the mob directed its fury, had escaped from the hall in which the ladies were assembled, but he was seized and dragged bareheaded through the streets, subjected to indignity and insult, and his life was threatened. The mayor and police finally rescued him from the hands of the rioters, and put him in jail as a protection against further violence.

Yet the work of converting and creating Northern sentiment went on. In spite of misrepresentation, obloquy, and derision, the abolitionists continued to apply moral ideas and Christian principles to the institution of slavery. The teachings of Christ and the Apostles actuated this crusade, and its latent power was great. If one looks for its results merely to the numbers of congressmen chosen by the abolitionists, to the vote received by presidential candidates distinctively theirs, or even to the number of members enrolled in the anti-slavery societies, only a faint idea of the force of the movement will be gained. The influence of the Liberator cannot be measured by its subscribers, any more than the French revolutionists of 1789 can be reckoned as of no greater number than the readers of The Social Contract. If Rousseau had never lived, said Napoleon, there would have been no French Revolution. It would be historical dogmatism to say that if Garrison had not lived, the Republicans would not have succeeded in 1860. But if we wish to estimate correctly the influence of Garrison and his disciples, we must not stop with the enumeration of their avowed adherents. We must bear in mind the impelling power of their positive dogmas, and of their never-ceasing inculcation on those who were already voters and on thinking youths who were to become voters, and who, in their turn, prevailed upon others. We must picture to ourselves this process of argument, of discussion, of persuasion, going on for twenty-five years, with an ever-increasing momentum, and we cannot resist the conviction that this anti-slavery agitation had its part, and a great part too, in the first election of Lincoln. It was due to Garrison and his associates that slavery became a topic of discussion at every Northern fireside. Those who had heard the new doctrine gladly tried to convince their family and their friends; those who were but half convinced wished to vanquish their doubts or have put to rest the rising suspicion that they were partners in a great wrong; those who stubbornly refused to listen could not fail to feel that a new force had made its appearance, with which a reckoning must be made. Slavery could not bear examination. To describe it was to condemn it. There was a certain fitness, therefore, in the demand of the Southerners that the discussion of slavery in any shape should be no longer permitted at the North.

But in what a state of turpitude the North would have been if it had not bred abolitionists! If the abolitionists had not prepared the way, how would the political rising of 1854-60 against the slave power have been possible? It is true that many ardent Republicans who voted for Lincoln would have repudiated the notion that they were in any way influenced by the arguments of Garrison and his associates. And it is equally true that in 1835 the average Northern man satisfied himself by thinking slavery in the abstract a great evil, but that, as it existed in the South, it was none of his concern; he thought that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men” a good doctrine to be preached on Sunday, and “all men are created equal” a fit principle to be proclaimed on the Fourth of July; but he did not believe that these sentiments should be applied to the social condition of the South. But that was exactly the ground on which the abolitionists planted themselves, and, by stirring the national conscience, they made possible the formation of a political party whose cardinal principle was opposition to the extension of slavery, and whose reason for existence lay in the belief of its adherents that slavery in the South was wrong.