Chapter 6
The Labor
Question
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God speed the hour, the glorious
hour,
When
none on earth
Shall exercise a lordly power
Nor in a tyrant's presence
cower,
But all to Manhood's stature
tower
By
equal birth!
--
William Lloyd Garrison,
"The Triumph of Freedom."
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Garrison
lived for thirteen years after the close of the war, and he continued to take an
active interest in the freedmen, in woman's rights, in temperance, free trade
and other reforms. He protested against the exclusion of the Chinese from
America, believing that the yellow man is a brother as well as the black.
"No suitable occasion for bearing peace and non-resistance testimonials was
neglected" by him, as his biographers tell us. He opposed the introduction
of military drill into the public schools, and his conversation so impressed a
young Japanese student who was preparing himself in America for the army of his
country that on his return home he refused to serve for conscience' sake, and
was duly cast into prison.
It
is not without regret that we must record Garrison's insensibility to the claims
of the working classes outside the ranks of the slaves. Their condition was
placed before him by a correspondent in 1875, but it did not appeal to him. He
seemed to think that the ballot (which, by the way, he considered it wrong to
make use of) was an all-sufficient remedy for their ills, and that the laboring
man held his fate in his own hands. "You express the conviction," he
adds, "that the present relation of capital to labor is 'hastening the
nation to its ruin,' and that if some remedy is not applied it is difficult to
see 'how a bloody struggle is to be prevented!' I entertain no such fears. Our
danger lies in sensual indulgence, in a licentious perversion of liberty, in the
prevalence of intemperance, and in whatever tends to the demoralization of the
people." In the same strain might a Southern planter have answered Lundy in
the twenties! Garrison was only a fallible mortal after all, but surely he had
already deserved well enough of his kind for us to overlook the natural
conservatism of his old age. It is not everyone that can preserve to the end the
freshness and alertness of vision of his youth, a quality which distinguished
Wendell Phillips from his colleagues and outweighed the trivial defects of his
character.
The
workingman, it should be said in this connection, at one time at least had shown
his devotion to the cause of the slave, and placed all Abolitionists under
lasting obligations. In 1863 a friend writing to Garrison from England says:
The
working classes also have proved to be sound to the core, wherever their opinion
has been tested. Witness the noble demonstration of Manchester operatives the
other day, when three thousand of these noble sons of labor (many of whom were
actual sufferers from the cotton famine) adopted by acclamation an address to
President Lincoln sympathizing with his proclamation. A friend of mine who was
present on the occasion tells me that the heartiness and enthusiasm of the
workingmen was something glorious; that he heard them say to one another that
they would rather remain unemployed for twenty years than get cotton from the
South at the expense of the slave. Mr. Thompson has been in other parts of
Lancashire, and the meetings he has addressed have been attended with the same
results. Our experience in London has been equally satisfactory. It would have
done you good if you had ... attended the great meeting of the working classes
which we held on the 31st of December -- the eve of freedom.
Mr.
Thompson himself corroborated this account in a letter written a month later:
On
New Year's Day I addressed a crowded assembly of unemployed operatives in the
town of Heywood, near Manchester, and spoke to them for two hours about the
slave-holders' Rebellion. They were united and vociferous in the expression of
their willingness to suffer all the hardships consequent upon a want of cotton,
if thereby the liberty of the victims of Southern despotism might be promoted.
All honor to the half million of our working population in Lancashire, Cheshire
and elsewhere, who are bearing with heroic fortitude the grievous privations
which your war has entailed upon them! The four millions of slaves in America
have no sincerer friends than the lean, pale-faced idle people, who are
reconciled to their meager fare and desolate homes by the thought that their
trials are working out the deliverance of the oppressed children of your
country. Their sublime resignation, their self-forgetfulness, their observance
of law, their whole-souled love of the cause of human freedom, their quick and
clear perception of the merits of the question between North and South, and
their appreciation of the labor question involved in the "irrepressible
conflict," are extorting the admiration of all classes of the community and
are reading the nation a valuable lesson.
