William Lloyd Garrison Part 11

With the discontinuance of the Liberator Garrison's occupation, from which he had derived a regular though somewhat uncertain income for the support of his family, was gone. He was not in dest.i.tute circ.u.mstances, however, thanks to the generosity of friends, who had already secured him the home in Roxbury, where he spent the remaining years of his life. He had also been one of the legatees under the will of Charles F. Hovey, who left about forty thousand dollars to the anti-slavery cause. But the age of the reformer, he was then sixty, and the state of his health, which was much impaired, together with the helplessness of his wife, made some provision for his and her support, other than the little which he possessed, a matter of anxious thought on the part of himself and his friends. He had given thirty-five years of his life to the public good. His services to his country and to the world were above all price, all money considerations. It was felt that to him who had given so much to the world, the world should in his need make some substantial acknowledgement in return.

Some of his countrymen, accordingly, conceived the plan of a national testimonial to the philanthropist, which should ensure to him during the rest of his life a competence.

A committee having this end in view was organized March 28, 1866, at the house of Dr. Henry I. Bowditch. John A. Andrew, who was its chairman, wrote the address to the public, to which were appended the chief names in the politics and literature of the land. Nearly two years afterward, on March 10, 1868, the committee were able to place in Mr. Garrison's hands the handsome sum of thirty-one thousand dollars with a promise of possibly one or two thousand more a little later. To the energy and devotedness of one man, the Rev. Samuel May, Jr., more than to any other, and perhaps than all others put together, this n.o.ble achievement was due. The pioneer was deeply moved at the high and generous character of the recognition accorded his labors. "Little, indeed, did I know or antic.i.p.ate how prolonged or how virulent would be the struggle," said he in his reply to the committee, "when I lifted up the standard of immediate emanc.i.p.ation, and essayed to rouse the nation to a sense of its guilt and danger. But having put my hands to the plow, how could I look back? For, in a cause so righteous, I could not doubt that, having turned the furrows, if I sowed in tears I should one day reap in joy. But, whether permitted to live to witness the abolition of slavery or not, I felt a.s.sured that, as I demanded nothing that was not clearly in accordance with justice and humanity, sometime or other, if remembered at all, I should stand vindicated in the eyes of my countrymen." The names of John Bright, John Stuart Mill, William E. Foster, and Samuel Morley, among the contributors to the fund, lent to the testimonial an international character.

In May, 1867, Garrison went abroad the fourth time, and traveled in Great Britain and on the Continent. Everywhere that he went he was received as an ill.u.s.trious visitor and as a benefactor of mankind. At a breakfast in London which "was intended to commemorate one of the greatest of the great triumphs of freedom, and to do honor to a most eminent instrument in the achievement of that freedom," and at which were gathered the genius, the wealth, and aristocracy of England and Scotland, John Bright, who presided, welcomed the ill.u.s.trious guest "with a cordiality which knows no stint and no limit for him and for his n.o.ble a.s.sociates, both men and women," and ventured to speak a verdict which he believed would be sanctioned by all mankind, viz., that "William Lloyd Garrison and his fellow-laborers in that world's work-are they not

"On Fame's eternal bead-roll worthy to be filed?"

With the discontinuance of the Liberator Garrison's active career came to a close. But his sympathetic interest in the freedmen, temperance, the cause of women, and in other reformatory enterprises continued unabated. He watched with stern and vigilant eye, and bleeding heart the new rebellion at the South whose purpose was the nullification of the civil and political rights of the blacks, and the overthrow of the military rule of the National Government in the Southern States. He did not see what time has since made clear that a genuine reconstruction of the South, and the ultimate solution of the Southern problem had, in accordance with social laws, to proceed from within, from the South itself, not from without and from Washington. The old fire again burned in his speech as tidings of the violence of the whites and the sufferings of the blacks reached him from the former slave section. Indeed, the last written words of his, addressed to the public, were words in defence of the race to whose freedom he had devoted his life-words which, trumpet-tongued raised anew the rallying-cry of "Liberty and equal rights for each, for all, and for ever, wherever the lot of man is cast within our broad domains!"

True to his grand motto "My country is the world! my countrymen are all mankind," he espoused the cause of the Chinese, and denounced the National policy of excluding them on the ground of race from the republic but a few months before his death. The anti-Chinese movement appeared to him "narrow, conceited, selfish, anti-human, anti-Christian." "Against this hateful spirit of caste," wrote the dying philanthropist, "I have earnestly protested for the last fifty years, wherever it has developed itself, especially in the case of another cla.s.s, for many generations still more contemned, degraded, and oppressed; and the time has fully come to deal with it as an offence to G.o.d, and a curse to the world wherever it seeks to bear sway."

On the same grand principle of human fraternity Mr. Garrison dealt with the questions of trade and tariffs also. He believed in liberty, civil, religious, and commercial. He was in fact a radical free trader on moral and humanitary grounds. "He is the most sagacious political economist," was a remark of his, "who contends for the highest justice, the most far-reaching equality, a close adherence to natural laws, and the removal of all those restrictions which foster national pride and selfishness." And here is another like unto it: "Believing that the interests of the American people in no wise materially differ from those of the people of any other country, and denying the rect.i.tude or feasibility of building ourselves up at their expense by an exclusive policy, obstructing the natural flow of material exchanges, I avow myself to be a radical free trader, even to the extent of desiring the abolition of all custom-houses, as now const.i.tuted, throughout the world. That event is far distant, undoubtedly, but I believe it will come with the freedom and enlightenment of mankind. My faith is absolute that it will prove advantageous to every branch of industry, whether at home or abroad."

The closing years of the reformer's life were years of great bodily suffering. A disease of the kidneys and a chronic catarrh of the head made steady inroads upon the resources of his const.i.tution, made life at times a wheel on which he was racked with physical tortures, all of which he bore with the utmost fort.i.tude and serenity of spirit. "The longer I live, the longer I desire to live," he wrote Samuel J. May, "and the more I see the desirableness of living; yet certainly not in this frail body, but just as it shall please the dear Father of us all." One by one he saw the little band of which he was leader dwindle as now one and now another dropped by the way. And it was he or Mr. Phillips, or both, who spoke the last loving words over their coffins. As the little band pa.s.sed on to the unseen country, a new joy awoke in the soul of the leader left behind, the joy of antic.i.p.ation, of glad reunion beyond the grave. "How unspeakably pleasant it will be to greet them, and to be greeted by them on the other side of the line," it seemed to him as he, too, began to descend toward the sh.o.r.e of the swift, silent river. The deep, sweet love for his mother returned with youthful freshness and force to him, the man of seventy-three years, at the thought of coming again into her presence. A strange yearning was tugging at his heart for all the dear ones gone before. The fond mother, who had watched over his childhood, and the fond wife, who had been the stay of his manhood, were the first two whom he yearned to meet after crossing the river. The joyous thought of his approaching meeting with those white-souled women cheered and comforted the reformer amid excruciating physical sufferings. Worn out by heroic and Herculean labors for mankind and by a complication of diseases, he more and more longed for rest, to go home to beloved ones as he expressed it. To the question, "What do you want, Mr. Garrison?" asked by the attending physician on the day before his death, he replied, weariedly, "To finish it up!" And this he did at the home of his daughter, Mrs. Henry Villard, in New York, in the midst of children and grandchildren, near midnight, on May 24, 1879.

"While that ear could listen," said Wendell Phillips over the ill.u.s.trious champion of liberty as he lay dead in the old church in Roxbury; "While that ear could listen, G.o.d gave what he has rarely given to man, the plaudits and prayers of four millions of victims." But as he lay there he had, besides, the plaudits and praise of an emanc.i.p.ated nation. The plaudits and praise of an emanc.i.p.ated race, mingling melodiously with those of an emanc.i.p.ated nation made n.o.ble music about his bier. In the city, where forty-three years before he was mobbed, the flags floated at half-mast in his honor; and on Beacon Hill, where the Government once desired his destruction, the voice of appreciation was heard and tokens of the State's sorrow met the eye. Great in life great also in death was William Lloyd Garrison.

"Men of a thousand shifts and wiles, look here!

See one straightforward conscience put in p.a.w.n To win a world; see the obedient sphere By bravery's simple gravitation drawn!

Shall we not heed the lesson taught of old, And by the present's lips repeated still, In our own single manhood to be bold, Fortressed in conscience and impregnable will?"