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Updated: August 17, 2024
Edmund Quincy said the Union was 'a confederacy with crime, that 'the experiment of a great nation with popular institutions had signally failed, that 'the Republic was not a model but a warning to the nations; that 'the whole people must be either slaveholders or slaves; that the only escape for 'the slave from his bondage was over the ruins of the American Church and the American State: and it was the unalterable purpose of the Garrisonians to labor for the dissolution of the Union."
Many of his beautiful letters to Miss Anthony have been preserved. In speaking of political cowardice and corruption, he says: "Were it not for the thunder and lightning of the Garrisonians to purify the moral atmosphere, we would all sink into perdition together."
But, except among the little band of Garrisonians and their sympathizers, his position did not relieve him from the disabilities attaching to his color. The feeling toward the negro in New England in 1841 was but little different from that in the State of Georgia to-day. Men of color were regarded and treated as belonging to a distinctly inferior order of creation.
In proof of this, I may say, that having been submitted to the attention of the Garrisonians in print, in March, it was repeated before them at their business meeting in May the platform, par excellence, on which they invite free fight, a l'outrance, to all comers.
While this supported the claim of the Garrisonians that the Constitution did sanction slavery and protect the slaveholder, yet the majority of the anti-slavery people were not ready to accept the doctrine of "immediate and unconditional emancipation, even at the cost of a dissolution of the Union."
Four years or more, from 1837 to 1841, he struggled on, in New Bedford, sawing wood, rolling casks, or doing what labor he might, to support himself and young family; four years he brooded over the scars which slavery and semi-slavery had inflicted upon his body and soul; and then, with his wounds yet unhealed, he fell among the Garrisonians a glorious waif to those most ardent reformers.
Covey, and to wrench himself from the embrace of the Garrisonians, and which has borne him through many resistances to the personal indignities offered him as a colored man, sometimes becomes a hyper-sensitiveness to such assaults as men of his mark will meet with, on paper.
The Garrison party, to which he still adhered, did not want a colored newspaper there was an odor of caste about it; the Liberty party could hardly be expected to give warm support to a man who smote their principles as with a hammer; and the wide gulf which separated the free colored people from the Garrisonians, also separated them from their brother, Frederick Douglass.
The Garrisonians, with their usual plain speaking, did not hesitate to say what they thought of Douglass. Their three papers, the Liberator, the Standard, and the Freeman, assailed Douglass fiercely, and charged him with treachery, inconsistency, ingratitude, and all the other crimes so easily imputed to one who changes his opinions.
The leading events of the day were discussed in no uncertain tones. All were Garrisonians and believed in "immediate and unconditional emancipation." In 1850 the Fugitive Slave Law was passed and all the resources of the federal government were employed for its enforcement. Its provisions exasperated the Abolitionists to the highest degree.
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