tions on the floor of both
branches of Congress. On every side there rose up witnesses to the
vastness of the revolution which had taken place, and to the fact that
the great Abolitionist was no longer esteemed an enemy of the Republic
but one of its illustrious citizens. This was evinced in a signal and
memorable manner a little later when the National Government extended to
him an invitation to visit Fort Sumter as its guest on the occasion of
the re-raising over it of the Stars and Stripes. He went, and so also
went George Thompson, his lifelong friend and coadjutor, who was the
recipient of a similar invitation from the Secretary of War.

This visit of Mr. Garrison, taken in all its dramatic features, is more
like a chapter of fiction, with its strange and improbable incidents and
situations, than a story of real life. The pioneer entered Georgia and
trod the streets of Savannah, whose legislature thirty-three years
before had set a price upon his head. In Charleston he witnessed the
vast ruin which the war had wrought, realized how tremendous had been
the death-struggle between Freedom and Slavery, and saw everywhere he
turned that slavery was beaten, was dead in its proud, rebellious
center. Thousands upon thousands of the people whose wrongs he had made
his own, whose woes he had carried in his soul for thirty-five years,
greeted him, their deliverer, in all stages of joy and thanksgiving.
They poured out at his feet their overflowing love and gratitude. They
covered him with flowers, bunches of jessamines, and honeysuckles and
roses in the streets of Charleston, hard by the grave where Calhoun lay
buried. "'Only listen to that in Charleston streets!' exclaimed
Garrison, on hearing the band of one of the black regiments playing the
air of 'Old John Brown', and we both broke into tears," relates Rev.
Theodore L. Cuyler, who stood by the side of the pioneer that April
morning under the spire of St. Michael's church.

"The Government has its hold upon the throat of the monster, slavery,"
Mr. Garrison assured an audience of nearly four thousand freedmen, "and
is strangling the life out of it." It was even so. Richmond had fallen,
and Lee had surrendered. The early and total collapse of the rebellion
was impending. The Government was, indeed, strangling the life out of it
and out of slavery, its cause and mainspring. The monster had, however,
a crowning horror to add to a long list of horrors before fetching its
last