William Lloyd Garrison: Speech Relating to the Execution of John Brown

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

On December 2, 1859, on the day that the abolitionist John Brown was hanged, Garrison delivered a speech in Boston, lamenting his death. This document conveys the collapse of Garrison's pacifist/perfectionist convictions and his sudden embrace of slave rebellion. After delivering these new opinions, he could no longer maintain his posture as a reforming perfectionist and found it increasingly easy to mix in the politics of the Civil War. The catalyst for Garrison's change of mind was John Brown's abortive raid on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in late 1859, after which he was tried and executed as a traitor. In the longer view, Garrison, like many other abolitionists, had increasingly flirted with violence ever since 1850, when, at slaveholders' insistence, Congress had passed a harsh new fugitive slave law requiring U.S. citizens, including all northerners, to assist in the recapture of black escapees. Throughout the decade, black and white abolitionists united to protect fugitives from federal marshals, sometimes through mob action and occasionally by taking up arms. Meantime, violent conflicts in Kansas over slavery's possible extension into that territory added significantly to the atmosphere of confrontation.

As Garrison's speech makes clear, he, like many other abolitionists, saw himself as reenacting the struggles of 1776, when the “revolutionary fathers” embraced violence to face down compounding tyranny. As Garrison explains, Brown acted boldly as a latter-day George Washington or John Hancock when “striking a blow for freedom” by shedding slaveholders' blood. He was, Garrison insists, anything but a traitor, insurrectionist, and murderer. “If you believe in the right of assisting men to fight for freedom who are of your own color—(God knows nothing of color or complexion.…)—then you must cover, not only with a mantle of charity, but with the admiration of your hearts, the effort of John Brown,” he avers. How could Garrison have fallen so quickly from his perfectionist pacifism? As the document makes plain, he found Brown's violence appealing, and hence he resorted to tortured rationalizations. Brown, he argues, initially intended “nothing offensive, nothing aggressive,” seeking only to supply weapons to slaves for use in their own self-defense. When next Brown's “humanity overpowered his judgment” and he began firing on his enemies, admirable motives justified his course. By this time Garrison continues to maintain that he still was a nonresistant even while announcing that he is “prepared to say, ‘Success to every slave insurrection in the South, and in every slave country.’”

When characterizing Brown as a hero, Garrison echoed many other militant abolitionists, black and white alike. Yet while most Republicans agreed with Abraham Lincoln that Brown was insane and his conduct unconscionable, Garrison's descent from perfectionism left him increasingly willing to support this new Republican Party. Although he continued to advocate northern disunion during the 1861 secession crisis, once Union troops mustered, Garrison embraced war. Henceforth he would act as the Republicans' harsh but loyal critic and never again as a “universal reformer.”