The Individualists by Matt Zwolinski;John Tomasi;

Author:Matt Zwolinski;John Tomasi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

Garrison’s abolitionism arose from the uncompromising primacy of God-given law over government-given law.

In an 1833 address in Philadelphia, Garrison argued that every individual has a God-given, inalienable right to liberty. “To invade [that liberty] is to usurp the prerogative of Jehovah.” Why? Because God created us as self-owners: “Every man has a right to his own body—to the products of his own labor—to the protection of law—and to the common advantages of society.”15 As Garrison explained elsewhere, slavery was a sin precisely because it rebelled against God: the institutions of slavery destroyed the God-given agency of the enslaved. God meant every individual to live and love freely, and to fully enjoy the fruits of their own labor. Lewis Perry describes the Garrisonian outlook: “When a man presumed to claim he owned another man, he competed with God for control and government over mankind. He tried to make his slave accountable to himself instead of to God.”16 Since it was wrong for anyone to financially benefit from slavery, it would be doubly wrong for a slaveholder to receive financial compensation as part of a settlement to end that unjust arrangement. According to Garrison, “freeing the slave is not depriving them of their property, but of restoring it to its rightful owner; it is not wronging the master, but righting the slave—restoring him to himself.” As a result: “if compensation is to be given at all, it should be given to the outraged and guiltless slaves, and not to those who have plundered and abused them.”17 As Perry summarizes Garrison’s position: “Slavery, government, and violence were considered identical in principle. All were sinful invasions of God’s prerogatives; all tried to set one man between another man and his rightful ruler.”18

In 1833, Garrison joined with Arthur Tappan and Frederick Douglass to found the American Anti-Slavery Society. But differences of opinion soon emerged. Garrison’s idea of the Government of God, for reasons just sketched, led him to a position of extreme “nonresistance.” Believing that Christians must renounce all use of force, Garrison rejected politics (read: coercion) as a means of abolishing slavery, even to the point of refusing to vote for anti-slavery candidates. The only properly Christian approach was moral persuasion. Garrison rejected the idea of seeking abolition within the existing political order and insisted that the U.S. Constitution was an irredeemably racist document. At a meeting in Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1854, Garrison and a group of abolitionists gathered to protest the return of a runaway slave named Anthony Burns. When it was his turn to speak, Garrison held aloft a copy of the Constitution, decrying it as “a covenant with death and an agreement from hell.” Then Garrison set the Constitution afire, declaring, “So perish all compromises with tyranny!”19

Other abolitionists embraced Garrison’s Government of God and the strict anti-governmentalism it implied. Closely affiliated with England’s nascent Manchester School and Richard Cobden’s Anti-Corn Law League, Henry C. Wright was an extreme individualist and voluntaryist who denied the legitimacy of government:

States and nations are to

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