[Gutenberg 14555] • William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist

Excerpt: ...of Otis and Sprague was in his sternest vein. He is sure after reading them that, " there is more guilt attaching to the people of the free States from the continuance of slavery, than those in the slave States." At least he is ready to affirm upon the authority of Orator Sprague, " that New England is as really a slaveholding section of the republic as Georgia or South Carolina." Sprague, he finds, "in amicable companionship and popular repute with thieves and adulterers; with slaveholders, slavedealers, and slavedestroyers;... with the disturbers of the public peace; with the robbers of the public mail; with ruffians who insult, pollute, and lacerate helpless women; and with conspirators against the lives and liberties of New England citizens." To Otis who was then nearly seventy years of age Garrison addressed his rebuke in tones of singular solemnity. It seemed to him that the aged statesman had transgressed against liberty "under circumstances of peculiar criminality." "Yet at this solemn period," the reprobation of the prophet ran, "you have not scrupled, nay, you have been ambitious, to lead and address an excited multitude, in vindication of all imaginable wickedness, embodied in one great system of crime and blood--to pander to the lusts and desires of the robbers of God and his poor--to consign over to the tender mercies of cruel taskmasters, multitudes of guiltless men, women, and children--and to denounce as an 'unlawful and dangerous association' a society whose only object is to bring this nation to repentance, through the truth as it is in Jesus." These audacious and iconoclastic performances of the reformer were not exactly adapted to turn from him the wrath of the idol worshipers. ...