A Weakness for Utopias

THE LIBERATOR (502 pp.)--John L. Thomas--Little, Brown ($8.50).

William Lloyd Garrison has been cast by historians as the great Abolitionist, a role he warmly welcomed. In point of fact, Garrison was only the best publicized of the abolitionists, as this biography--the most objective yet written--makes clear. John L. Thomas, assistant history professor at Harvard, shows that the vituperative Garrison was less a leader of the abolitionists than an eccentric outcast who gave the whole movement a taint of fanaticism it did not deserve. Despite his dedication, in the end Garrison was more hindrance than help in ultimately freeing the Negro slaves.

Garrison emerges from this biography as a classic case of the closed mind. He was so sure of his divine mission that he never bothered to sort out his ideas. Consequently, he was always contradicting himself without noticing it. He oscillated between extreme positions, never coming to rest at a practical one. Before the Civil War, he was an all-out pacifist; once it began, he was hell-bent on the destruction of the South. At a time when Utopian nostrums were the fad, Garrison fell for them all: religious perfectionism, phrenology, Graham bread (as a cure for neuroses), water cures, spiritualism.

Mountains of Ice. Garrison was born in Newburyport, Mass., in 1805, the second son of a Baptist mother and ne'er-do-well father. He early felt the call to serve God and humanity. At 13, he was hired by a newspaper, and before long he was writing editorials denouncing the sins of the world. "Slowly the young man was mastering the difficult art of avoiding argument," writes Thomas. "He simply was not happy with ideas." But he occasionally was moved to verse:

What makes a chill penury prevail,

Makes widows moan and orphans wail,

And fills the poor house and the jail?

'Tis whisky.

Eventually Garrison ran up against a sin that was worse than drink: slavery. All his other concerns were sidelined while he concentrated on this one. Moving from newspaper to newspaper, he impudently courted libel suits with his inflammatory editorials against slaveowners and traders. Convicted in one case, he spent 49 days in jail. Urged by a fellow abolitionist to calm down, Garrison snapped: "I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt." In 1831 he launched his newspaper, The Liberator, which so infuriated the South that the Georgia legislature offered $5,000 reward to anyone who brought them Garrison.

Road to Secession. At first Garrison was hated almost as much in the North by a people content to let the South keep its "peculiar institution." He was heckled when he spoke, and sometimes mobbed. But when the South, 25 years before the Civil War, began to make arbitrary arrests and to stamp out other civil liberties in its efforts to preserve slavery. Northern opinion turned abolitionist. Instead of welcoming the converts, Garrison quarreled with them. While other abolitionists interpreted the Constitution as an anti-slavery document,* Garrison denounced the Constitution as a "covenant with death," and in the most theatrical gesture of his career burned a copy of it at a mass meeting. "By 1837," writes Thomas, "antislavery had reached a crossroad. One road led into the broad highway of American political reform . . . that connected with the continuity and conservative tradition of American life. The other road was a highroad of moral idealism, which cut directly across the conservative pattern of American society to revolution, secession and civil war. This was the road Garrison chose." Thomas, apparently, belongs to the "unnecessary war" school of historians and implies that the conservative "broad highway" would have brought an end to slavery without bloodshed, though the process would have taken a little longer.

Garrison thought in such absolute terms that once the slaves were "freed" by the Civil War, he washed his hands of them. Other abolitionists, like Wendell Phillips, understood that the battle for Negro rights had only begun. But when the Negroes slipped back into peonage in the South, Garrison scarcely noticed. Of Garrison's role in the postwar period, Thomas comments: "The tragedy was that to the citizens of the North who were finally ready to listen to an antislavery hero he had nothing to say.''

* Despite the fact that Article I, in determining a state's representation, declares that a slave should be counted as three-fifths of a man.

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