a fair wind they were speedier than the contemporary steamboats.

There was no doubt that the United States was not only holding its own in economic competition with the rest of the world, but in some respects it was developing more rapidly than other nations. The hopes of the founders of the republic were being realized. Unfortunately, with all these assets, there was a steadily growing liability: the refusal of the North and the South to agree upon the slavery issue.

CHAPTER XXXVI

THE ABOLITIONIST CRUSADE

THE ERA OF REFORM

For the student of history who is interested in human behavior, as well as in economics, politics, and government these same three decades preceding 1860 are full of fascinating material. It was a time of reform, and nothing reveals man as he is like a series of reforms. The period has been called by various titles. One historian describes it as "the intellectual and moral renaissance," another as "the hot-air period in American History." Both characterizations are accurate and apt. It was a time of awakening, in literature and religion, as well as in morals; it was a time of humanitarian reform. Almost every department of life was apparently being examined, for the purpose of making a new evaluation. During this process certain customs, practices, and beliefs were found wanting; these discoveries were followed by reforms, some good, some bad, some merely foolish. James Russell Lowell left a brief but very vivid description of this extraordinary enthusiasm for change.

"Every possible form of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. . . . Everybody had a mission (with a capital M) to attend to everybody-else's business. No brain but had its private maggot, which must have found pitiably short commons sometimes. Not a few inpecunious zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. Some had an assurance of instant millenium so soon as hooks and eyes should be substituted for buttons. Communities were established where everything was to be common but common sense. . . . Many foreign revolutionists out of work added to the general misunderstanding their contribution of broken English in every most ingenious form of fracture. All stood ready at a moment's notice to reform everything but themselves."

Among the more creditable results of this eagerness for objective improvement perhaps the literary movement comes first. Emerson, Hawthorne, Bryant, Lowell, and Whittier were in their prime then, while Cooper and Poe fit into the period in its beginning, and Whit

man and Longfellow at its end. No other period in American History can boast as many writers whose work has survived so long. In this same connection might be mentioned the appearance of the modern newspaper with its interest in affairs of the moment and its facilities for gathering information, together with the innovation known as the editorial page. Of the modern papers the New York Sun was the pioneer. It was followed by the New York Herald, under the guidance of the elder James Gordon Bennett, the Evening Post, under Bryant, the Tribune, Horace Greeley's great paper, and The Times under Raymond. These papers printed news, and in their editorials they presented able comments on public affairs by men who knew how to write. In their eagerness to command the enthusiasm of the public, they sometimes indulged in bitter feuds with each other. Greeley never referred to the Herald by name. In his columns Bennett's paper was always "the Satanic press.' But these little amenities added a touch of spice to the news, and made the papers more readily salable.

In the general ferment religious ideas could not escape an overhauling, and this period was characterized by the partial collapse of old Puritan theology. Not the Puritan spirit, however, it should be noticed. That remained to help on the work of reform. But the approved Puritan dogma, such as predestination and infant damnation, gave way to a religion with something more cheerful to contemplate than an eternity of burning brimstone, or the lasting torment of the non-elect. If, according to the more strictly orthodox, religious reform went beyond the bounds of Christianity into Unitarianism, it passed those of common sense in the Church of the Latter Day Saints. Joseph Smith, fakir or prophet, depending on the point of view, published the Book of Mormon in 1830. After his murder, in 1840, the "Saints" went out into Utah, to open up the country around the Great Salt Lake.

At the same time various leaders were demanding prison reform, labor reform, temperance reform, the abolition of imprisonment for debt, the introduction of women's suffrage and of women's rights generally. Anti-Masonry was only one of the movements designed to overthrow something, while the common anti-profanity leagues were excellent illustrations of the popularity of reform through organization. Probably there were anti-tobacco leagues as well. Acting upon the principle that whatever is, is wrong, every reformer started

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out to cut the world over according to his own pattern. In the beginning abolitionism was but one of the number of schemes designed to make the country better, ranking certainly not as the most important, but along with the temperance and women's rights movements.

It is hard to tell why there should have been so much effervescence at that particular time. Probably the universal zeal was one of the products of the American Revolution. In the thirties and forties the people in charge of affairs had, as children, listened to their grandfathers, as these old veterans retold the stories of the lively days of '76. Brought up in the atmosphere of rebellion, they were filled with a fierce impulse to attack something, anything, no matter what. If they sometimes jousted with windmills, they at least got the satisfaction that comes from activity.

THE ABOLITIONISTS

This may help to account for the emotional atmosphere in which the reformers worked, but it does not make the course of any one of them much clearer. What force drove Garrison to keep up for thirty years that tremendous flood of vituperation, and of passionate, seditious appeals for disunion which characterized his Liberator? The person who could answer that to the satisfaction of the behaviorist and the psychologist could also tell why Wendell Phillips turned his back upon his traditions, social surroundings, and friends, to aid Garrison, and why Theodore Parker, the clergyman, could preach the doctrine of violence and pride himself upon his success in breaking the laws of his country.

It is not enough to say simply that these men were so moved by the wickedness of slavery that they were compelled to work for its destruction. They knew nothing of slavery at first hand, because not one of them ever saw a plantation. Furthermore slavery had been an American institution for over two hundred years when Garrison came along, and never before the nineteenth century had there been such an extraordinary outcry against it as Garrison launched in his Liberator. Probably the extreme abolitionists were driven on by some combination of emotions, stimulated by causes largely within themselves. They happened to be abolitionists because that reform was attracting attention in the section where they lived. It is a fair assumption that if they had been raised in South Carolina or Alabama,

they would have been as active proponents of slavery as John C. Calhoun or William L. Yancey. Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were born within a stone's throw of each other, but one went south and the other into the Northwest.

GARRISON

Garrison's early life had been anything but comfortable and happy. His mother was a woman of strong convictions, shown when she persisted in joining the Baptist Church with the full knowledge that, when she did so, her father would turn her out of her home. She married a young ship captain, of roving disposition and an unfortunate liking for drink. According to one story, when he and some friends were celebrating his return from a long voyage, Mrs. Garrison threw the men bodily out of the house, with their bottles after them. The captain deserted his family after that, leaving home when William Lloyd Garrison was three years old. When the boy was six, his mother went to Baltimore, to get work, leaving him practically an orphan. Naturally a keen-minded lad, he picked up the essential beginnings of an education, and at the age of fifteen became a printer's apprentice, and a contributor to the paper on which he worked. He began his career of reformer first as a temperance advocate. Then, under the influence of Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker abolitionist, he decided to devote his life to the cause of the slave. On January 1, 1831, he published in Boston the first number of The Liberator. In 1835 a mob of unappreciative citizens dragged him through the Boston streets.

Wendell Phillips, the orator, was a genuine New England aristocrat, with the best education which Harvard could provide. In his younger days he was so much of a conservative that, while in college, he led very successfully a movement to prevent the establishment of a students' temperance society. In 1835 he watched the mob drag Garrison through the streets of Boston. Even that spectacle did not arouse him, and it was not until after his marriage, in 1837, that he entered upon his abolitionist career.

Both Garrison and Phillips used the same methods: agitation and propaganda. They aimed to keep constantly before the public the most exceptional and revolting incidents of slavery, in order to arouse the feelings of the people at large. In the first number of The Liberator, Garrison proclaimed his purpose in the following words: