American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with Julie Roy Jeffrey, part 3 of 5

I don't really have a favorite example of his abrasiveness, he was so shockingly abrasive, so much of the time that it's hard to choose one moment. I've come more and more over time to focus in on this abrasiveness, and I think it's the least agreeable, for me, the least agreeable side of Garrison. I mean, is there anything that, for an audience that doesn't know him at all, would kind of illustrate that? Nothing, in particular, but what I would say is that he always defended the violence of his language by saying that his cause was important and the sin was great, and that the sin would not yield to general words and general persuasion. And in that

he was probably correct, and he gained a huge amount of attention because of what some people considered his rest recklessly, fanatic speech. Sometimes it works, and a lot of people, it seems that a lot of people read, were very fond of him. Yes, many people believed that Garrison was a true friend, which was true as long as you stayed on the right side of Garrison, but in private most people agree that he was a loving husband, a loving father, charming host, and a very gentle man. So it's as if there was this distinct break between the private Garrison and the public Garrison. Right. Yeah, it's interesting, because as you say, he could barely seem to restrain himself when he was writing the editorial tarats or something. It seems that he was, when you read Garrison, that he was seized by great emotions when

he wrote, and many of the emotions were ones of fury and anger. And I think it shows how truly moved he was by what he felt was a serious evil in American society that was capable of bringing the whole nation down with it. And so by one of the ugliest instances, which you alluded to earlier, is kind of final break up with Douglass or, and what, it says by 1853 or so, what was the breaking point? What was the last straw, when the last straw is? Between Garrison and Douglass, what? Oh, I'm not sure what exactly the last straw is, but they disagreed. Not only in terms of the role of politics and the movement, but on the meaning of the constitution. And Garrison made his views on the constitution extremely clear in a very

dramatic incident in 1854. The scene was an anti-slavery picnic on July 4th and framing him. This was something that was quite common in anti-slavery circles. You'd have a picnic on July 4th or 5th if you disapproved of celebrating on the 4th. And on August 1st, which was the anniversary of freeing the slaves in the British West Indies. At the picnic, there was an American flag hung upside down with black crape around it, which again sets the mood. And Garrison used this event to illustrate his contempt for what he considered to be a pernicious document, founding document, as well as other examples of pro-slavery deeds and actions. And the first thing he did was to take a copy of the fugitive slave act and burn it in front of the crowd and urge them to say, amen, amen.

And then he took two legal decisions that condoned slavery and burned them in front of the crowd. And finally, he took a copy of the Constitution. This was the high point or low point, depending on your point of view, and burned it in front of the crowd and everyone cried out, amen, amen. And this constitution he felt was a basis for all of the other falsities in the American political system. Very nice. I was very nice. And I wonder if you're also laying out the economy with the declaration, because he's devoted to the declaration of independence, but the way those two documents serve us touched on for the movement. The Constitution was, well, a waitress, let me think for a second. The Constitution was a problem for many abolitionists because of the compromises that they felt had been made

to support slavery. And during this period, some of the notes that surrounded the actual drafting of the Constitution were published for the first time. And for someone like Garrison, they seemed to prove that the founding fathers had been willing to make great compromises to ensure the acceptance of the Constitution and the South. And another feature that some abolitionists found very problematic was the three-fifth clause that actually gave representation to the South for some of their slaves. And in some abolitionist circles, this compromise was seen as the reason why the South controlled the political system, because that's what abolitionists believed. The declaration of independence was a document that someone like Frederick Douglass often used because of the broad promises that were made for life liberty and the pursuit

of happiness. And someone like Douglass argued that these promises were meaningful and should be extended to African Americans. And they did not accept the notion that the founding fathers had kind of mysteriously, and in backroom deals, supported the slavery of blacks forever. And so the pact with death is the compromise, not original vision. What was Garrison's role jumping ahead to 58? We talked about herndon's visit. What was Garrison's role in preparing the ground for Lincoln and the Republicans? Well, Garrison himself, I think, would have probably not seen himself as preparing the ground.

But in fact, the abolitionist movement that targeted slavery as the national problem prepared the way for the Republican Party, for the disintegration of the two-party system, without someone like Garrison who for decades had been arguing against slavery and urging immediate emancipation, it's hard to see how Lincoln's political career on the national level could have even taken place. Even though Lincoln himself was not an abolitionist, he certainly recognized that slavery was a moral problem for the nation. And I'm not sure that that realization, even from someone who wasn't an abolitionist, would have been possible without someone like Garrison for so many years, defying norms and values that supported the slave system.

And while we're looking at that kind of big picture, what role did Garrison play in Garrison and the abolitionist, for that matter, in bringing on the Civil War? Well, what role the abolitionist played in bringing on the Civil War is always a question that everybody disagrees with. I'll get you to start again. All right, it's hard to say exactly what role the abolitionists played in bringing on the Civil War. The abolitionists themselves and their memoirs, after the Civil War firmly believed that it was their activities that had brought the slavery issue to the attention of the nation and that they were responsible for the coming of the conflict. Other historians see other issues as important, the issue of union, but I think it is safe to say without the moral agitation of the abolitionists for 30 years that if there had been a Civil War, it would have been quite different in character.

And maybe at a different time, I guess. Yes, and the sense that the North was abolitionized, that it was a foreign place, that it was very different from the South, which is the sense that I think Southerners had by the 1850s. This sense of the differentness of the North was partly due to the abolitionist campaign. Did Garrison re-evaluate his complete renunciation of politics? Garrison was in a peculiar position with the rise of the Republican Party. He felt that it was a good sign that things had changed, that there was perhaps a turning point in the campaign against slavery, but he was very wary of actually becoming involved in party politics himself. He preferred to stay on the outside and to be the gadfly of the Republican Party. But even so modest a rethinking of the position between someone like Garrison and

politics was too strong for some to stomach. Abbie Kelly, for example, a prominent female abolitionist and her husband, Stephen Foster, thoroughly disagreed with Garrison's more moderate position towards politics and felt that abolitionists should still stay entirely away from the political realm and continue only in their moral work. Now, what did Garrison make of Harper's Ferry? You know, he's were politics. He's re-evaluating politics. Violence is becoming more and more part of the scene. What did you make of Harper's Ferry? Well, Harper's Ferry was, I think, a very hard moment for Garrison because he disapproved of violence. And of course, what John Brown had tried to do was to bring slavery to the national conscience through an act of violence. When John Brown was executed, there was a mass

meeting in Boston and Garrison delivered a very contradictory speech at that meeting that I think reflects the kinds of complications that John Brown's violence posed for him. First of all, he said that John Brown wasn't an outlaw, that he was acting in the tradition of revolutionary forefathers and that his execution was wrong. And then he would not go on to applaud slave insurrection. And he later claimed that applauding insurrection in the South was not a contradiction in terms because he was only imagining a slave insurrection, not inciting a slave insurrection. But it shows that how he was grappling with a changed situation, the inconsistencies, the seeming approval of slave insurrection as a way to

resolve the issue, the praise of John Brown, who had broken the law and carried violence into the South, all of these were things that I think Garrison himself would not have imagined being able to say 10 or 15 years earlier. So he hasn't made the journey, but he's left his, he's become more to a little bit of the scene. He's become more cognizant of the role of real events in determining events in the future. And I think he recognized that this was at John Brown's, what he would consider martyred and was really a turning point. As most of the North did, I mean, it was a moment where Northerners really confronted the power and the commitment of Southern states to defend their way of life. And so like the emergence of the Republican party, Garrison

was confronting some things that suggested that the future was going to take a very different path than the past. Right. What did Garrison feel at the outbreak of war? I know, most of these work questions, I'm not really prepared for. I am prepared for the January 63, the emancipation. Now, why would Garrison have had doubts about whether Lincoln was going to come through? Well, I think Garrison always had doubts about Lincoln. And most abolitionists said whether Lincoln was going to pull through and whether he would change the purpose of the war to emancipation from just the offensive union. But in 1863, Garrison had plenty of reason to be wary of Lincoln. In December of 1862, Lincoln had delivered an address in which

he proposed three new constitutional amendments. And one of them would provide for federal compensation for any state that established a system of gradual emancipation so that the slaves would be free by 1900. And Garrison thought this was utter lunacy. He thought the president had lost his mind. Now, I doubt that Lincoln himself was really proposing these in all seriousness. I suspect it was a political ploy to prepare the way for a more sturdy emancipation proclamation. But Garrison was always just somewhat suspicious of Lincoln and his motives. That's a fascinating one. I mean, I guess, just as an aside, I've been wondering about this, that Lincoln basically is giving them a month to stop the war, give up, come up

with a plan and slavery. And we'll pass these constitutional amendments, too. Yeah, right, right. And then we can have, by 1900, slaves driving motorcars. I think that Lincoln, I mean, I know Lincoln's scholar, but it seems to me that he did these things on several locations, proposing something that was really not going to happen as a way of preparing for something that he was really prepared to do. Right, right. The more mysterious one is almost when he has that group of freedmen to the White House in August and kind of blames them for the war, really. I mean, I guess, how did, well, maybe, did the Sun, a few words about the Sun, when his son enlisted. Yeah, yeah. How did Garrison feel about the former? Of course, Garrison as a pacifist was somewhat dismayed when his son decided to join the army

and he tried to reason with him and persuade him to not take this step, but he also had respect for his son's convictions. And so in the end, decided that whatever his son decided, he would accept. Right. And was it, did he explicitly confront his own pacifism, or was it really just kind of a washing of the, no washing of the hands, but a resignation that his son had his own? Well, I could answer this as a parent. I think he probably, he certainly wasn't, wasn't turning his own back on his own pacifist convictions, but I think he also realized that he could not force his son to do what he would have him do. And so his son was an adult, and he had to accept that as a morally developed person, that person had it right to make

his own decision. Right, right. My son is one and I can't force him to do anything. Yeah, if you have a child, you know that that's true. I want, yeah, can you describe that scene as garrison toward Charleston? Um, garrison's tour of Charleston was probably the apotheosis of his long reform life. He was invited as a guest of the federal government, and he was treated as a great celebrity as he toured through Charleston, and saw the destruction wrought by the war, saw for it sumpter, was greeted as one of the, the, the, the great figures, um, who would help bring about emancipation as he talked with freed blacks. This, this was the moment with all its hoopla that was not meaningful just because he was being hailed as a hero, but because

he really feel felt that his cause was vindicated and won. Right, right. And I, I guess the chronology is kind of tragic, as, as he's giving this speech in the church that, um, the Lincoln's, you know, at the moment of his triumph that, uh, that Lincoln's been shot. Yeah, yeah. That's one of those amazing historical moments in irony that garrison is speaking to, to admiring crowds and Lincoln as being assassinated. Um, why, why did, why was there a difference of opinion, you know, when garrison wants to shut down the liberator, or, or wants to shut down the, uh, anti-slavery society and does shut down the liberator in 65, why, why do he and his, uh, colleagues see it differently? There was a lot of, of disagreement, uh, after the Civil War about the future of anti-slavery

societies, future of anti-slavery newspapers and what the responsibility was of, of abolitionist to freed, um, the freed people. Some people like garrison firmly believe that with emancipation their job was over and that if they wanted to work for the betterment of freed slaves, they would do it in other organizations. Um, other people very vigorously, vigorously disagreed and felt that true freedom for slaves would be a long time, a coming and that anti-slavery organizations had to, um, continue their work and be watchdogs for black freedoms. And, um, this is, uh, something that, uh, wait, this disagreement is an interesting one because it was garrison who had argued that you had to change people's minds and hearts

of slavery was to end. Slavery had come to an end through conflict and the southerners hearts and minds were not truly changed. Yet it was garrison who seemed to feel that his job was over. Um, other people realized that although slavery had come legally to an end that hearts and minds take a long time, uh, to change and they believe that they should continue their commitment to the freed people for whatever length of time it might take. In the end, most abolitionist groups did disband and in contrast, English abolitionist groups continued after their campaigned end slavery was over and they could continue to work as lobbying groups to print, um, material, um, that was appropriate to their general, um, position against slavery of, of many kinds. And in America, with the end of all organized anti-slavery, there were no, there was no money to print materials as reconstruction came

to an end. There was no money for lobbying Congress. So it was kind of a sad conclusion to the abolitionist campaign, in my view. Mm-hmm. It, I mean, it's interesting that, that Douglass is among those who, that they reverse positions that Douglass is among those who is advocating still a moral revolution and, uh, and, of course, uh, Douglass is, um, arguing for the necessity for the, for the moral revolution. And I think he's keenly aware as a black man of what hasn't been done. Whereas perhaps Garrison is a white man, so more clearly what had been done. And so, felt it was appropriate to just draw the curtains on the abolitionist formal, organized abolitionist movement. Mm-hmm. It also just seems like he's ready to retire. Yes, yes, yes. He was actually, uh, asked to write his autobiography and he accepted

the, um, advance and just sort of didn't have the energy or the enthusiasm for it, so I didn't turn back the advance. How does ARP Carden have done? Um, pulling back to look at the pick, the big picture again, um, what, what impacted, uh, Garrison have on our history? Garrison made abolitionism the moral issue of the antebellum period. There were other reform movements, of course, but there were none that were so radical. There were none that were so powerfully organized. There were none that were so, that were so devoted to propagandizing on a mass scale, their position. And, uh, Garrison may have been an absolutist and a purist and someone who wasn't willing to compromise. I think all of that is true, but he was also someone who would not, uh, accept defeat. He would

not retire when the going got tough. He would keep the cause in front of the American people, no matter what the personal consequences might be for him. Great. That was terrific. Thank you. So, why don't we take a couple of minutes? We can reset our brains and, uh, we'll, we'll do it in the green and green. Oh.