William Lloyd Garrison and Antislavery Unity: A Reappraisal

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON AND ANTISLAVERY UNITY: A Reappraisal Bertram Wyatt-Brown A recent book on current racial tensions is entitled Who Speaks for the Negro? One thing is certain: insofar as historical figures are concerned , it is not William Lloyd Garrison.1 Seldom in American history has any figure been so thoroughly lambasted, by historians and nonhistorians alike, as the founder of the abolitionist crusade. A popular journalist has called the contents of his Liberator "obscene, the sort of self-intoxicated invective that made Senator Bilbo notorious"; and a widely-used college textbook bluntly refers to him as "wayward" and "neurotic."2 Other scholars have not been much kinder. Despite recent changes in the treatment of abolitionism, Garrison more often than not is still distrusted and sometimes damned,3 and the cause he !Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York, 1965); see, for instance, Warren's interview (p. 274) with Judge Hastie, who said: "There are certain stages . . . when persons like [Garrison] represent the spark to a movement and we can recognize their value as that, without having a necessary admiration for the intemperate, even violent, personality. . . ." This paper was presented at the May, 1966, meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Cincinnati. It is an amplification of the last third of a paper presented to the Society for Religion in Higher Education, Notre Dame University, August, 1963. 2J. C. Furnas, The Road to Harpers Ferry (New York, 1959), p. 307; Richard Hofstadter, William Miller, Daniel Aaron, The American Republic (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1959), I, 463. 3 Louis Filler, book review, Journal of American History, LH (1965), 625, notes the lack of a Garrison chapter in Duberman's collection, Antislavery Vanguard (see below); see also Filler, "Garrison, Again and Again: A Review Article,'' Civil War History, Xl (1965), 70; "Professors have agreed that Garrison was a detriment to the movement." Unfavorable views of Garrison's agitational methods are found in: Stanley M. EIkins, Slavery, A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959), Ch. IV; Howard R. Floan, The South in Northern Eyes, 1831 to 1861 (Austin, 1958), pp. 1-10; Hazel Catherine Wolf, On Freedom's Akar, The Martyr Complex in the Abolition Movement (Madison, 1952), pp. 18-31; John L. Thomas, The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison, A Biography (Boston, 1963), a most successful effort but not sympathetic; less critical but perhaps less stimulating is Walter M. Merrill's Against Wind and Tide: A Biography of William Uoyd Garrison (Cambridge, 1963); Arnold Whitridge, No Compromise! The Story of the Fanatics Who Paved the Way to the Civil War (New York, 1960), pp. 7-11, 85-148; Oliver P. Chitwood, Rembert W. Patrick, Frank Owsley, and H. C. Nixon, The American People: A D CIVIL WAR HISTORY began goes marching on quite well without him. Since it is hard to make a hero of a Yankee editor with a nasal twang, steel-rimmed glasses, and a gift for making enemies, Abraham Lincoln has preempted most of the glory and, indeed, most of the monuments. For the Negro rights movement today, who needs a spokesman from history remembered for his disruptive influence in the cause he served? According to some historians, Garrison's attacks on enemies and friends alike had grown so boisterous by 1840 that he had not only wrecked the movement's cohesiveness, but, by a process of self-combustion had exploded his own authority, too.4 Other historians have condemned the abolitionists generally and Garrison in particular for being too limited in approach, even, perhaps, insufficiently egalitarian. According to one scholar, Garrison's myopic leadership carried his followers into a labyrinth of religious perfectionism, a fruitless wandering in the byways of extraneous reforms, moral absolutes, and pietistic dreams. As a result, in 1861, the North tragically went to war without a clear moral path to follow toward racial harmony, a path which he could have helped to find. Thus, when emancipation came, he had nothing left to say.5 To lay the racial failures of the Civil War generation at the feet of Garrison is not altogether fair, but there is no doubt that his philosophy of agitation was romantic, bizarre, and...