ery
different temper from Channing's or his own--William Lloyd Garrison, a
young man educated in a printing-office, fearless, enthusiastic, and
energetic in the highest degree. Quickly won to the emancipation idea,
and passing soon to full belief in immediate and uncompensated
liberation, he allied himself with Lundy as the active editor of the
_Genius_, while the older man devoted himself to traveling and
lecturing. The _Genius_ at once became militant and aggressive. The
incidents which constantly fell under Garrison's eye--slave auctions and
whippings--fanned the fire within him. One day, for example, a slave
came into the office, told his story, and showed the proofs. His master
had lately died, leaving him his freedom, which was to be legally
effected in a few weeks; but in the meantime the overseer under whom he
worked, displeased at his way of loading a wagon, flogged him with a
cowhide so severely that his back showed twenty-seven terrible gashes.
Garrison appealed to the master's heirs for redress, but was repelled
with contumely. Presently he assailed an old fellow-townsman in
Newburyport, Mass., because a ship he owned had been employed to
transport a cargo of slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans. The
denunciation was unmeasured; the ship-owner brought suit, and as some
points in the article were not sustained by the evidence, Garrison was
fined $100. Unable to pay he went to jail, bearing his captivity with
courage and high cheer, till Arthur Tappan, a New York merchant and a
leader in the anti-slavery cause, paid his fine and released him. The
_Genius_ being ruined, Garrison transferred his field of labor to
Boston, where, at the beginning of 1831, he started the weekly
_Liberator_. He and his partner, Isaac Knapp, did all the work of every
kind, living principally on bread and water, and with only six hours a
week, and those at midnight, for Garrison to write his articles. The
paper's motto was: "Our country is the world, our countrymen are all
mankind." In his salutatory Garrison wrote: "I will be as harsh as truth
and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think
or speak or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on
fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife
from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate
her babe from the fire into which it has fallen,--but urge me not to use
moderation in a cause like the present.
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