Garrison Again, and Again: A Review Article

GARRISON AGAIN, AND AGAIN: A Review Article Louis Fitter ? It surely merits notice that almost a hundred years after William Lloyd Garrison closed down The Liberator, serving notice that its work was done, two lengthy and hard-worked biographies should appear in derogation of him and his achievements.1 Almost nine hundred pages of scholarly writing with the message that Garrison is not worth writing about! For I cannot see that such "new" details as our two authors have to offer add significantly to the torrents of details and printed matter in the area which are already available. Indeed, a major puzzle is to distinguish the two works as separate entities. Mr. Merrill is less discriminating in his choice of materials than is Mr. Thomas. Mr. Merrill too often sets down data—about Garrison's private life, about his activities as a controversialist, even about such matters as the cost of overseas travel—simply because he happens to have the data on hand. He tells us that his study was "inspired by [his] discovery and acquisition of an extensive group of manuscripts relating to Garrison"; but it may be stated at the outset that his new materials add little to what are literally mountains of materials left by Garrison and his earnest and long-living and fluent coadjutors. Mr. Thomas hews more soberly and more closely to The Liberator and to Garrison's attitudes and relationships. Little more than the above distinguish the authors in their view of Garrison as a fatal figure in abolition. Merrill clings more directly to theses which will be examined below, but his judgments of Garrison as florid, vain, self-seeking, calculating, and capable of fraud tally with those of Thomas. For what it is worth, Merrill's conclusions are a bit more personal, a bit more vague. Through "passionate, selfrighteous , sometimes indiscriminate exhortation and abuse," Garrison had become "a symbol of the prophetic New England conscience." I for one am not clear on the meaning of these phrases, and I have pondered long and to little purpose Merrill's final thought, that "the 1 Against Wind and Tide: A Biography of William Lloyd Garrison, by Walter M. Merrill (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963. Pp. xvi, 391. $8.75); The Liberator: WiUiam Lloyd Garrison, by John L. Thomas (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963. Pp. viii, 502. $8.50). 70CIVIL WAR HISTORY insubstantial dream of evil overthrown had become the fabric of reality." Mr. Thomas is at least clearer: Garrison was responsible for the atmosphere of moral absolutism which caused the Civil War and freed the slave. And further: "For the failure of his generation to achieve the racial democracy which the Civil War made possible he must be held accountable. He made the moral indictment of slavery which precipitated the war, but he lacked the understanding and sustaining vision to lead his countrymen toward the kind of democratic society in which he believed." II In coping with substantial works of the kind we have here, it becomes a problem in accuracy and communication to decide upon essential points which will bear the brunt of the argument, and transmit it to the reader. Historians must know, then, that there has been a kind of professional meeting of minds with respect to Garrison. It is this fact which has raised the question of the usefulness and purpose of the Merrill and Thomas writings. Professors have agreed that Garrison was a detriment to the antislavery movement. They have honored the so-called Barnes Thesis which established this point in modern times. A recent anthology of abolitionist writings, in effect controverting the thesis, though judiciously prepared, has been all but ignored by the profession.2 Yet there were patent difficulties embodied in the late Gilbert H. Barnes's The Antislavery Impulse (1933) which should have at least stirred lively debates. In effect, Barnes contrasted Garrison, as a brawling, offensive, schismatic force in American Ufe and antislavery politics, with Theodore D. Weld, whose papers had fallen into his hands, and whom he held, in one of his Dictionary of American Biography sketches, to have been one of the greatest statemen of his age, and the central figure in antislavery...