Howard Zinn on Race by Howard Zinn

Author:Howard Zinn [Zinn, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 978-1-60980-334-6
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

THE ABOLITIONISTS

There is no denying the anger, the bitterness, the irascibility of the abolitionists. William Lloyd Garrison, dean of them all, wrote in blood in the columns of the Liberator and breathed fire from speakers’ platforms all over New England. He shocked people: “I am ashamed of my country.” He spoke abroad in brutal criticism of America: “I accuse the land of my nativity of insulting the majesty of Heaven with the greatest mockery that was ever exhibited to man.” He burned the Constitution before several thousand witnesses on the lawn at Framingham, calling it “source and parent of all other atrocities—a covenant with death and an agreement with hell” and spurred the crowd to echo “Amen!”

He provoked his opponents outrageously, and the South became apoplectic at the mention of his name.

South Carolina offered $1,500 for conviction of any white person circulating the Liberator, and the Georgia legislature offered $500 for the arrest and conviction of Garrison. Garrison’s wife feared constantly that reward-seekers would lie in wait for her husband on his way back from a meeting and snatch him off to Georgia.

Wendell Phillips, richer, and from a distinguished Boston family, was no softer. “Don’t shilly-shally, Wendell,” his wife whispered to him as he mounted the speakers’ platform, and he never did. The anger that rose in him one day in 1835 as he watched Boston bluebloods drag Garrison through the streets never left him, and it remained focused on what he considered America’s unbearable evil—slavery. “The South is one great brothel,” he proclaimed.

Gradualism was not for Phillips. “No sir, we may not trifle or dally … Revolution is the only thing, the only power, that ever worked out freedom for any people.” The piety of New England did not intimidate him: “The American church—what is it? A synagogue of Satan.” He scorned patriotic pride: “They sell a little image of us in the markets of Mexico, with a bowie knife in one side of the girdle, and a Colt’s revolver in the other, a huge loaf of bread in the left hand, and a slave whip in the right. That is America!”

Phillips did not use the language of nonresistance as did Garrison. On that same green where Garrison burned the Constitution, Phillips said: “We are very small in numbers; we have got no wealth; we have got no public opinion behind us; the only thing that we can do is, like the eagle, simply to fly at our enemy, and pick out his eyes.” And: “I want no man for President of these States … who has not got his hand half clenched, and means to close it on the jugular vein of the slave system the moment he reaches it, and has a double-edged dagger in the other hand, in case there is any missing in the strangulation.”

But even Garrison and Phillips seem moderate against the figure of John Brown, lean and lusty, with two wives and twenty children, filled with enough anger for a regiment of agitators, declaring personal war on the institution of slavery.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.