William Lloyd Garrison: “Address to the Friends of Freedom and Emancipation in the United States”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Garrison’s “Address to the Friends of Freedom and Emancipation in the United States,” which he published in May 1844 in the Liberator, summarizes the arguments supporting his most controversial political doctrine, that the free North must secede from the slave South and that abolitionists were morally compelled to withhold their allegiance from the Constitution of the United States. By 1844, in Garrison's view, the federal Union had clearly proved an irredeemably tainted arrangement that guaranteed the continuing oppression of the enslaved. Therefore, he enjoins all abolitionists, “secede … from the government. Submit to its exactions, but pay it no allegiance, give it no voluntary aid. Fill no offices under it. Send no Senators or Representatives to the national or State Legislature.”

On one level, Garrison's demand that there be “NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS” represented a logical culmination of the perfectionist views he had been exploring since the 1830s. In addition to denying the authority of churches and clergy, the idea that true Christians must now also withhold their allegiance to the state while submitting peacefully to its minimal requirements constituted his fullest vision of “universal reform.” Sanctified people could actually conduct their lives according to the governance of God, Garrison contends, and liberate themselves from the coercive political demands of the unsanctified majority.

By propounding these doctrines Garrison established himself as an originator of civil disobedience doctrines advocated later by the Russian writer and pacifist Leo Tolstoy, the American Transcendentalist author Henry David Thoreau, the German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. At the same time, as the document eloquently confirms, “NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS” was rooted in Garrison's bitter response to the hostility that he and his associates continued to experience. But most important was Garrison's heartfelt conviction that “three million” enslaved persons continue to be “crushed under the American Union!” Only by personally withdrawing from that Union and struggling peacefully to overthrow it would abolitionists sustain hope of abolishing slavery. Garrison's fundamental concern remained what it had always been—the liberation of the enslaved.

Obviously, Garrison's contention that the slaves would be emancipated only if the South were allowed to go its own way was logically dubious. At the same time, northern disunionism inspired rebuttals that developed enormous influence as the sectional conflict went forward. Dissenting responses from influential legal theorists such as Salmon P. Chase, that the Constitution was actually a document that barred slavery's westward expansion, were ultimately adopted by Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party.