[In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1889, Schouler characterizes Garrison as a fanatical agitator whose radical methods demonstrated a complete lack of regard for constitutional law.]

This new abolition movement at the North did not, like the Quaker one of former days, respect constitutional bounds and seek mild persuasion of the white master who held the local law in his hands. It boldly proclaimed that the laws of nature were paramount to a human institution; it preached freedom as of divine right and in defiance, if need be, of the enslaver. But in law-respecting communities like ours all such agitation bruised itself like a bird against the solid wall of the federal constitution, which, wisely or unwisely, surrounded the institution and sanctioned its existence within certain State confines. Antipathy to weaker men and races, and a dogged attachment to property as something with which none others are to interfere, save as their own property may be injured by it, are two strong traits of the Anglo-Saxon. He has a conscience, domestic virtue, and a restraining common sense to be influenced; but of woman herself Shakespeare's Petruchio talked like an Englishman rather than an Italian of his day, when he said, “I will be master of what is mine own.” And such was our slaveholder's response to the abolitionist when menaced where he stood. Pride and blind interest banded the southern masters in bristling defiance; patriots of all sections felt the constraint of the written law, and then abolitionism slid into an angry tirade against the constitution as a covenant with death and agreement with hell, and its creed became “no union with slaveholders,”—in a word, disunion, because instant and legalized abolition was impossible. We shall see in the angry years that follow southern secessionists and northern abolitionists standing upon essentially the same platform, though at opposite ends, both demanding that the American Union be broken up.

The boldest exponent of this new anti-slavery school, the pioneer and arch-agitator of immediate abolition, of conscience above the constitution, was William Lloyd Garrison. … With merciless severity, he arraigned the frozen apathy of the North and the prostitution of the South on the slavery question; he could not tolerate scruples on behalf of the written law; all doughfaces, apologists, and timeservers he wrote down as traitors and cowards, and unhesitatingly he declared slavery to be a crime and the slaveholder himself a criminal. “I am in earnest,” were his words, confessing his own severity; “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard.” …

Garrison soon found northern sympathizers, some of whom were ready to devote wealth and social influence to this new crusade; and among his earliest personal friends were Sewall and Ellis Gray Loring, of Boston, and the generous Tappan brothers, of New York. With the publication of the Liberator, the idea was put forth of organizing anti-slavery societies upon its aggressive platform; and Garrison looked to the abolitionists of England, whose work for the British colonies was greatly advanced by means of such associations. But here the practical obstacles were very great. Bible, tract, missionary, and temperance societies absorbed the zeal of thousands who were bent on doing good but dared not touch the plague-spot. Dr. Channing, New England's great leader of liberal thought, was a timid and critical observer, though slowly bracing himself to be outspoken as the friend of the slave; Webster wished for the constitution as it was, and the Union unimpaired; and Everett, as little of a soldier as ever breathed, offered to buckle on the knapsack, shoulder a musket, and march to the aid of his southern brethren, whenever their lives should be jeopardized by a slave uprising. Such influences dominated the vicinity. Not until the close of 1831 did the first of these new anti-slavery societies take initial steps, which led, early in the new year, to its organization on a dark and stormy night in the humble school-room of a colored Baptist church. Twelve persons, all white, subscribed their names and united as the “New England Anti-Slavery Society.” A national association, known as the “American Anti-Slavery Society,” was organized later. Ancillary societies sprang up rapidly at the North, though often dropping apart and recombining differently, since free-thinkers and disorganizers are not held easily to any plan of co-operation. None of their leaders, at all events, could command public opinion sufficiently to institute any real reform. But by lashing the Union into fury the abolitionists urged forward their cause; sleep was murdered when their harsh fire-bells startled the air. The early course of these societies showed indeed the radical difficulty they labored under of devising some plan, fair and feasible, for promoting their ends. They tended to anarchy, incendiarism, in all their actions; they sent not peace, but a sword. Garrison himself was a bomb-thrower, openly assaulting the constitution, because he saw it a strong prison-house. He tried in vain to induce freemen to abstain from buying slave-produced cotton and tobacco; instead of denouncing the crime of slavery, to identify the planter as a criminal, man-stealer, oppressor, pirate; to treat the constitution as a compact absolutely void for its guilt. None outside his small circle would embrace such tenets; to the constitution all true Americans clung as the ark of the covenant. But the new agitators were not long in sending a broadside into the American Colonization Society, now crippled with debt and seeking funds from the English abolitionists. Hastening abroad, as an emissary of the associations he had organized, Garrison, at the critical moment, assaulted that society so brilliantly on British soil as to destroy its prestige forever: the British philanthropists renounced its support, the great Wilberforce shortly before his death setting the example.

It was this same year that the great cause of emancipation in the British West Indies, to which Wilberforce, Clarkson, and their associates had so long directed their persevering efforts, triumphed in the passage of an act of Parliament. It provided a sort of preliminary apprentice system for the negroes, and compensation to their former owners. That statute which struck the fetters from eight hundred thousand colored people close to our Atlantic coast produced a profound impression upon our citizens, both South and North. In the glow of the moment, the Garrisonians, eager to infuse the British anti-slavery zeal into their own cause, committed a great indiscretion. They inflamed our sensitive community both by their unpatriotic comparisons, and by assuming to import foreign anti-slavery orators, as if to force the southern bulwark with the aid of the nation whose interference was of all foreign powers the most intolerable. Great Britain's abolition cause differed greatly from ours; hers was in a distant colony, ours at home; there insular opinion impressed a legislature competent to decree anything; and there, too, the freedom was not granted without terms considerate to the master, which our moralists scorned to imitate; for to recompense our slaveholder, so Garrison proclaimed, would be paying a thief for giving up stolen property and acknowledging his crime to be no crime.

The conflict thus violently opened did not cease in this Union until slavery was crushed by the heel of fratricidal war. The immediate fruit, at such a time, of inflammatory appeal on the one hand and slave insurrection on the other was mob outrage in northern cities, where the excitement most centred; and though, as in most mobs, the ignorant and vicious gained the upper hand, there was not wanting in these anti-slavery riots a sterling patriotism, which meant in its blind way to put down the wild anarchists, as they seemed to be, who were trying to subvert the pillars upon which rested the American fabric and the salvation of society. Bands of rowdies, during the turbulence of 1834 in Philadelphia and New York, broke up abolition meetings, attacked the presses, and threatened the persons of the chief agitators; they rampaged the negro quarters of the city, doing wanton mischief. But by 1835 the popular feeling against these “apostles of fanaticism” was exasperated by their own blind course of action. They had hired George Thompson, a British lecturer of imprudent speech, to harangue northern multitudes for immediate emancipation, a cause which northern States were powerless to effect peaceably. They had deluged the South with incendiary pamphlets, whose tendency, whether they so meant it or not, was to excite the slaves to rise against their masters. This latter appeal to terrorism was the device of the American Anti-Slavery Society, which set aside a large sum of money to circulate gratuitously their seditious writings where it was death to distribute them openly. Tracts and periodicals printed expressly for this purpose, with pictures even more inflammatory than the text they illustrated,—the master with scourge in his hand and his victim at his feet,—were struck off by the thousand, some printed on cheap muslin handkerchiefs, and deposited in the mails for the South. The best anti-slavery statesmen, such as Adams, have believed that the purpose was incendiary; and though agitators denied that they intended more than to reach the conscience of southern legislatures, this denial was not accepted; denying that they sent such documents to the slaves, they tacitly confessed mailing them to free blacks. The grave charge, never explicitly denied by them, that this was an experiment to terrify the master by kindling a new insurrection among the blacks, was made and reiterated by our whole people, and the abolitionists were deterred from trying such methods again. It was a foolish experiment; for, as white men handled the mails, the leather bags were sure to belch out this dangerous matter. A package of these tracts discovered at Philadelphia was taken to the middle of the Delaware river and sunk there. In Charleston the mail-pouches were emptied of such contents, and three thousand citizens gathered by night to see a bonfire made of the documents and the chief men of the anti-slavery societies hung and burned in effigy. A Richmond meeting invoked the interference of the Postmaster-General to stop the delivery of such infamous matter, and adjured all Union brethren at the North to repress the societies issuing them “by strong yet lawful means.” The North was not mute in this emergency. Meetings in New York, and in most other large cities, were held to denounce all Southampton methods of emancipation. In Boston's Faneuil Hall Mayor Lyman presided at a meeting of respectable citizens, who were addressed by Seth Sprague and Harrison Gray Otis. Instead of purging himself of suspicion, Garrison, in his paper, turned tauntingly upon this meeting: the cradle of liberty, he said, has become the refuge of slavery. This incensed the citizens more than ever against him; and it so happened that George Thompson, his imported friend, now upon his inflammatory tour, said in one of his intemperate speeches that southern slaves ought, or at least had a right, to cut the throats of their masters. Boston was becoming too hot to hold these two men. While Garrison kept out of the city, a double gallows was set up for a warning before his house; and when, a few weeks later, the British disturber was announced by posters to address a women's anti-slavery meeting by day in the busiest quarter of the city, a crowd which quickly swelled from a hundred to five thousand persons gathered about the building, which stood on the east side of Washington street, a little below the old State House, at that time occupied as the City Hall. It was early in the afternoon. Thompson, the chief object of their rage, did not arrive; and, increasing in turbulence with their numbers, the mob forced the women's meeting to adjourn. Still besieging the entrance to this building, they next turned their thoughts to the editor of the Liberator, who was known to be inside. Garrison fled by the rear, but, being caught, was led unresistingly from the back yard through a crooked lane into State street, a rope about his body and his clothing partly torn. While his captors were irresolute what to do with him, many proposing that he should be ducked in the frog-pond, a few stalwart men in the crowd, who pitied his plight and were unwilling that their own fellow-citizen should take the punishment intended for an English brawler, managed to hustle Garrison into the City Hall opposite, where, on the advice of the mayor, whom his press had been abusing, he consented to be put into a close carriage and driven through the crowd to the jail, where he remained all night, as if under arrest, and was then released. Escaping further violence by this stratagem, he left Boston secretly the next day, self-exiled for a season, though issuing his newspaper from that city as before. Thompson, the lecturer, warned in good season by the angry aspect of his audiences, suddenly disappeared, cutting his tour short, and was smuggled out of the United States in a sailing-vessel.

Such were the early episodes which gave Garrison and his fellow-apostles a picturesque place in our annals, though the worst sufferers for the cause at present were the poor negroes their zeal had befriended. Subsiding now into smoother and more legitimate channels of influence, and dividing, moreover, among themselves upon the ways and means of agitation, they were soon favored by the current of events, though untractable theorists to the last. They were not actors in affairs, but agitators, critics, come-outers, coiners of cutting epithets, who scourged men in public station with as little mercy as ever the slave-driver did his victim, less pleased that their work was being done than displeased because it was not done faster. Their political blunders widened the chasm between North and South, and their constant instigation was to throttle that law which was the breath of our being, to trample down the Union rather than convert, constrain, or conquer slavery behind the shield of the constitution. This was because of their fanaticism. Not one leader of this school ever took a responsible part in affairs, or co-operated in lawful and practical measures for promoting the reform they caressed in their preaching. But whatever interpretation this crusade for immediate abolition might admit of, it could have no effect South, unless by terrifying the masters in the slave States, those robbers and man-stealers, who—strange paradox—were under the municipal law no robbers, no criminals at all. It did not terrify, but it hardened them; and wounded pride made them more determined than ever to maintain their system, come what might,—to rivet it more firmly upon the Union, or else to leave the Union and set up for themselves. In the North, however, the anti-slavery cause grew and continued to grow, for the agitators were felt to be in earnest and morally right. This early violence was regretted; it reacted favorably to abolition, and the abolitionists might scold and censure henceforth under the license of free discussion. The chief “apostle and martyr of emancipation,” though ceasing not to irritate, was molested no more at home; and Boston, the seat of Whig sobriety, was spared those grosser scenes of riot and destruction which disgraced the Jacksonian cities in these turbulent years. The Liberator still forged its thunderbolts, and, though social disdain long pursued Garrison and his friends, embittered by the caustic severity of their pen and speech, their moral firmness gained sympathizers, as it always does: their one idea was abstractly right. The essential gain of all this was to awaken the northern conscience from its long sleep, and force up opinion to the healthier plane of conforming the human decree to the divine; as for the slave, the negro, he rose to be an object of sentiment, rarely seen, little comprehended, never studied on his plantation surroundings, and personal or race sympathy had nothing scarcely to do with raising up champions for him. Garrison had the spirit of prophecy, nor was he wholly mistaken when, on taking up his parable, he wrote, “Posterity will bear testimony that I was right.” Better this agitation, though it sent a two-edged sword, than the poisonous lethargy before it; better a quarter-century of sharp collision, followed by the desperate struggle for the mastery, than another century of corrupt growth and bonded misalliance. Hate-producing as were the winged words of these agitators, no gentler purgative, perhaps, could have done the work; for in all moral reforms, as philosophy teaches us, and wherever God's image becomes distorted in the mirror of human custom, change works in a progressive cycle: fearless reproof brings persecution of the reprover, persecution brings sympathy, sympathy leads to reaction, and reaction to reformation. But too complex were the agencies which now began working out the slave's salvation for any one man or set of men to appropriate them. Whether one shall admire most the bold denunciator, whose speech irritates thought into action, or the enlightened statesman, who accomplishes for reform all that his age will admit and respects the limitations of social ordinance, or the grim warrior who wins the fight, his temperament must decide. History should do justice to all; and, though timid and truckling at times, that public conscience is not to be despised which long struggled between moral obligation and loyalty until loyalty itself opened the means of escaping the curse.