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BOOK REVIEWS The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, Volume I: I will be Heard. (1822-1835). Edited by Walter M. Merrill. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. Pp. xxx, 616. $20.00. ) A decade that has witnessed a growing confrontation with the malignancy of racism has naturally seen a revival of scholarly interest in William Lloyd Garrison, whose life and time suffered from the same affliction. John L. Thomas and Walter M. Merrill began the re-evaluation of the early sixties. Aileen Kraditor recently presented the most persuasive case for Garrisonian means and ends. In the publication of these papers Belknap Press has given us the rich and variegated source material of America's foremost abolitionist. With a facsimile of the first page of The Liberator decorating its covers and copiously-annotated references to men and events cited in the letters, the editor and publisher should be congratulated on providing so useful a volume to the increasing list of documentary collections that emanate from our university presses. Not unexpectedly, the contents of this volume stimulate the reader to examine Garrison in his own perspective. What does one make of this man who at age nineteen could write Andrew Jackson urging that he retire from the presidential race because he was unfit for the office, or who later warned John Quincy Adams upon his election to the House of Representatives to "Beware, lest this pliant disposition lead you astray from the path of duty." Then there are those more personal idiosyncrasies that critics and apologists have wrestled with for years. In the opening pages of this collection we have Garrison signing himself as AN OLD BACHELOR fretting that "women in this country are too much idolised and flattered." But as his courtship with Helen Benson waxes strong, his "Dearest Helen!" soon becomes "My Chosen One." And even the editor must provide a cautionary footnote to his surprising exhortation: "Let our rich capitalists beware how they grind the face of die poor." Yet, evident continuities in his thought make for a certain consistency. Here is the young newcomer to Boston attending a Federalist caucus to nominate Harrison Gray Otis and then bemoaning how that once great party had deserted its organizing principle to wallow in the interest politics produced by the tariff question. In later antislavery years, Garrison is again castigating the "politics of this nation" as "corrupt, proscriptive, and even ferocious"; but his prescription for the case is once more a 340 party based on "one great object." What he thought the country needed was "a christian party . . . not made up of this or that sect . . . but of all God and keep his commandments, and . . . desire to seek judgment and relieve the Oppressed." Perhaps that Garrison would be a moral man in politics made him one of America's historic moral agitators. Embarked on that course, he enunciated a program that combined die grim rigidity of moral condemnation widi an optimistic hope that once man had overcome his ignorance he could be made to see die light. His denunciation of the atiieism of the American republic formed the base of his general criticism of her institutions. It was not merely that "we are a vain people, and our love of praise is inordinate," imagining the republic is "immortal." The "practical infidelity" of the American people meant that they had "no fear of God before their eyes" and assumed the "eternal prerogatives of Jehovah." Garrison was appalled "at the daring front and rapid growth of atheism" and believed that "tiiere is malice enough in this nation to crucify the Lord of glory, were he to come on earth at the present time." But despite all this, the object was to gain a "public sentiment enlightened and consolidated" which could as easily destroy slavery as Garrison thought it could intemperance. The "problem in all cases of reform" was not so much the "magnitude of the evil to be overcome" but simply "the hostility or ignorance or lukewarmness " of the people. To underscore this romantic faith in an enlightened public opinion, Garrison added that "all . . . they need is correct information ... for their hearts are really full of sympathy for the oppressed." For all his grim...

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