Man to hail it had also come.

Other men had spoken and written against slavery, and labored for the
freedom of the slave before Garrison had thought upon the subject at
all. Washington and Jefferson, Franklin, Jay, and Hamilton had been
Abolitionists before he was born, but theirs was a divided interest. The
establishment of a more perfect union was the paramount object of their
lives. John Wesley had denounced slavery in language quite as harsh as
Garrison's, but his, too, was a divided interest, the religious revival
of the eighteenth century being his distinctive mission. Benezet,
Woolman, and Lundy were saints, who had yearned with unspeakable
sympathy for the black bondmen, and were indefatigable in good works in
his behalf, but they had not that stern and iron quality without which
reforms cannot be launched upon the attention of mankind. What his
predecessors lacked, Garrison possessed to a marvelous degree--the
undivided interest, the supremacy of a single purpose, the stern stuff
out of which the moral reformer is made, and in which he is panoplied.
They were all his, but there was another besides--immediatism. This
element distinguished the movement against slavery, started by him, from
all other movements begun before he arrived on the stage, for the
emancipation of the slaves in the Union.

This doctrine of immediate as opposed to gradual emancipation, was not
original with Garrison, nor was he the first to enunciate it. More than
a dozen years before he was converted to it, Rev. George Bourne, in "The
Book and Slavery Irreconcilable," had shown that "the system (of
slavery) is so entirely corrupt that it admits of no cure but by a
_total and immediate abolition_. For a gradual emancipation is a virtual
recognition of the right, and establishes the rectitude of the practice.
If it be just for one moment, it is hallowed forever; and if it be
inequitable, not a day should it be tolerated." In 1824, eight years
after the publication of Bourne's book, and five years before Garrison
announced the doctrine in the _Genius_, the Rev. James Duncan maintained
it, in his "Treatise on Slavery," with no uncertainty of sense or
conviction. But neither Bourne nor Duncan had been able to effect an
incarnation of the doctrine, without which the good which it aimed at
could not be achieved. What they failed to effect, it is the glory of
Garrison that he achieved in his own person. He was "_total and
immediate Abolition_" p