In his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in 1829, David Walker called for the immediate end of slavery. Lundy condemned Walker’s book because of Walker’s willingness to embrace violence as a means of destroying slavery. Garrison, however, was less critical. “It is not for the American people, as a nation, to denounce it as bloody or monstrous,” Garrison said. Garrison reminded readers that colonists violently took up arms to shoot and kill the British and win a war of freedom. “Mr. Walker but pays them in their own coin, but follows their own creed, but adopts their own language. … If any people were ever justified in throwing off the yoke of their tyrants, the slaves are that people.”122 After reading Bourne, Heyrick, and Walker, Garrison embraced immediate emancipation and rejected the idea of colonization—sending free blacks and slaves back to Africa—as dangerous and wrong.
Garrison’s partnership with Lundy concluded after six months. In that time, the Genius of Universal Emancipation suffered serious financial losses as the result of a libel suit filed against Garrison. Garrison accused merchant Francis Todd of Newburyport of transporting slaves on ships that Todd owned. During the course of the trial, Garrison proved that Todd in fact transported slaves. It made no difference. In the slave state of Maryland, the jury quickly returned a verdict of guilty. The judge fined Garrison fifty dollars plus costs, bringing the total fine to seventy dollars, and sentenced him to six months in the Baltimore jail beginning on April 17, 1830.123 Lundy published Garrison’s report of his trial and imprisonment, and he visited Garrison at the jail every day.124
Garrison received many visitors, sent many letters, and wrote protests on the prison walls. “The tyranny of the court has triumphed over every principle of justice, and even over the law—and here I am in limbo,” Garrison said.125 He spoke with escaped slaves who were held at the jail and befriended the warden, who allowed him to dine with his family. “True it is, I am in prison, as snug as a robin in his cage; but I sing as often, and quite as well, as I did before my wings were clipped,” Garrison wrote.126
For Benjamin Lundy, Garrison’s imprisonment meant the end of the Genius of Universal Emancipation as a weekly newspaper. As a result of “scanty patronage” and threats of more lawsuits, Lundy announced plans to scale back to a monthly publication.127 Shortly thereafter, Lundy received a letter from New York businessman Arthur Tappan. “I have read the sketch of the trial of Mr. Garrison with that deep feeling of abhorrence of slavery,” Tappan wrote. “If one hundred dollars will give him his liberty, you are hereby authorized to draw on me for that sum, and I will gladly make a donation of the same amount to aid you and Mr. Garrison in re-establishing the Genius of Universal Emancipation.”128 With Tappan’s gift, Lundy paid Garrison’s fine, and the sympathetic warden assisted in his early release from prison. On June 5, 1830, Garrison walked out of the Baltimore Jail after serving forty-nine days of his six-month sentence.129
Despite Arthur Tappan’s hope that Lundy and Garrison would continue their partnership, their differences in style and approach convinced them to go separate ways. In a farewell to their readers, Lundy praised Garrison’s “strict integrity, amiable deportment, and virtuous conduct.” Garrison added, “We shall ever remain one in spirit and purpose.”130 Garrison had no regrets. “In all my writings I have used strong, indignant, vehement language, and direct, pointed, scorching reproof,” Garrison said. “I have nothing to recall.”131
While in jail, Garrison resolved to dedicate his life to the eradication of slavery. “Everyone who comes into the world should do something to repair its moral desolation, and to restore its pristine loveliness,” Garrison wrote. “He who does not assist, but slumbers away his life in idleness, defeats one great purpose of his creation.”132 On his release, Garrison began a lecture tour to raise money for a new newspaper.
City officials and leaders in Boston did not rejoice when Garrison returned to the city in 1830. He tried to reserve a hall in Boston for a speech, but everyone he contacted refused his request. As a last resort, he announced plans for a speech on the Boston Common. The prospect of a large and unruly gathering on the Common changed the minds of city leaders. They quickly issued an invitation for the free use of Julien Hall, and Garrison accepted.133
Boston’s abolitionist community turned out to hear Garrison on October 15, 1830. The audience included John Tappan, brother of Arthur Tappan; Moses Grant, a prominent local merchant in the paper business who was active in the temperance movement; attorney Samuel E. Sewall; and a number of ministers, including Lyman Beecher and Samuel Joseph May, a Unitarian minister from Brooklyn, Connecticut. Garrison discussed the “sinfulness of slave-holding” and “the duplicity of the Colonization Society.” He also said, “Immediate, unconditional emancipation is the right of every slave and the duty of every master.”134
Garrison’s speech had a powerful effect. “That is a providential man; he is a prophet; he will shake our nation to its center, but he will shake slavery out of it,” May said. “We ought to know him, we ought to help him.”135 May came from a prominent Boston family and had graduated from the Harvard Divinity School. He assisted at churches in Boston and New York City before accepting a call to a church in Brooklyn, Connecticut. Garrison, May, Amos Alcott, and Samuel Sewall gathered at Alcott’s home after the speech. “Mr. Garrison, I am not sure that I can indorse all you have said this evening,” May said. “Much of it requires careful consideration. But I am prepared to embrace you. I am sure you are called to a great work, and I mean to help you.”136
May recalled an incident from the summer of 1821, when he and his sister traveled from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore to visit friends and relatives. While riding in a public stagecoach, they saw a row of black men chained together in handcuffs walking behind a wagon, and young children in another wagon, lying on straw. “My first thought was that they were prisoners,” May said. “Scarcely had I uttered the words, when the truth flashed … They are slaves.”137 May recalled that another passenger, a southerner, noticed May’s reaction: “It is bad. It is shameful. But it was entailed upon us. What can we do?”138
May had agreed to preach at the Summer Street Church in Boston as a favor to a minister who was away and decided to change the focus of his sermon to slavery. “It is our prejudice against the color of these poor people that makes us consent to the tremendous wrongs they are suffering,” May said.139 He concluded with a dramatic call to either end slavery or break up the United States. “Tell me not that we are forbidden by the Constitution of our country to interfere in behalf of the enslaved. … If need be, the very foundations of our Republic must be broken up … It cannot stand, it ought not to stand, it will not stand, on the necks of millions of men. For God is just, and his justice will not sleep forever.”140
The congregation reacted with bewilderment and outrage that rippled through the rows of parishioners. May acknowledged the response at the end of the service, but did not apologize. “Everyone present must be conscious that the closing remarks of my sermon have caused an unusual emotion throughout the church,” May said. “I am glad. Would to God that a deeper emotion could be sent throughout our land.”141 A woman who approached May after the service told him, “Mr. May, I thank you. What a shame it is that I, who have been a constant attendant from my childhood in this or some other Christian church, am obliged to confess that today, for the first time, I have heard from the pulpit a plea for the oppressed, the enslaved millions in our land.”142
Not everyone who heard Garrison’s speech had the same positive reaction as Samuel May. Moses Grant, the paper merchant, rejected Garrison’s call for immediate emancipation and declined to help.143 John Tappan strongly supported colonization and told his brother