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A committee from our convention went with me, and we arrived in Lima at the Garrisonian tent meeting on the last day. Several thousand persons were assembled, and the first business after our arrival was the reading of a resolution, in which Garrison and his fellow laborers were declared as the true ministers of the Gospel, in connexsion with a fatal blow to the ministers of other sects.
The only type of abolition known in South Carolina was that of the extreme Garrisonian agitators, and it furnished at least a shadow of excuse for mob violence in the North and for complete suppression of discussion in the South. To encourage slaves to cut the throats of their masters was far from being a rhetorical figure of speech in communities where slaves were in the majority.
The Methodists denounced the Garrisonian societies as no-government, no-Sabbath, no-church, no-Bible, no-marriage, women's rights societies."
These items may suffice, to make known the infallible Pope, the Garrisonian Liberator, although I could write many volumes of extroardinary spirit manifestations in public and private meetings with members of that party, while I was endeavoring to deliver them from the shackles of the infernal Holiness and his armies.
When the Republican leader, William H. Seward, spoke in Rochester, of "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces," he was expressing only what Garrisonian abolitionists, like Susan, always had recognized.
He held to the Garrisonian doctrine that the pro-slavery Constitution of the United States was a "league with death and a covenant with hell," maintained that anti-slavery men should not vote under it, and advocated the separation of the free States as the only means of preventing the utter extinction of freedom by the ever-advancing encroachments of the slave power.
Nevertheless, entertaining the views he did, Douglass was able to support the measures which sought to oppose slavery through political action. In August, 1848, while his Garrisonian views were as yet unchanged, he had been present as a spectator at the Free Soil Convention at Buffalo.
His subject was the Religion of the Country, to which he was paying his respects in genuine Garrisonian fashion. Belief in Jesus in the United States had no vital influence on conduct or character. The chief religious denominations were in practice pro-slavery, they had uttered no protest against the national sin.
It was a notable gathering of apostolic spirits "mainly composed of comparatively young men, some in middle age, and a few beyond that period." They had come together from ten of the twelve free States, which fact goes to show the rapid, the almost epidemic-like spread of Garrisonian Abolitionism through the North.
However, he either did not think of it, or preferred to hold fast to his former friends, though he little knew how little they cared for him, and he continued for ten years longer to lecture on Toussaint and talk moral-suasion, riding hard on the Garrisonian formula. It seems like small business when we recollect the work that Seward and Sumner and Chase were doing meanwhile.
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