A

Garrison's Abolitionism was of the most radical character. It went the
whole length of the humanity of the colored race, and all that that
implied. They were, the meanest members, whether bond or free, his
brothers and his sisters. From the first he regarded them as bone of his
bone and blood of his blood, as children with him of a common father.
Poor and enslaved and despised to be sure, wronged by all men, and
contemned by all men, but for that very reason they were deserving of
his most devoted love and labor. He never looked down upon them as
wanting in any essential respect the manhood which was his. They were
men and as such entitled to immediate emancipation. They were besides
entitled to equality of civil and political rights in the republic,
entitled to equality and fraternity in the church, equality and
fraternity at the North, equality and fraternity always and everywhere.
This is what he preached, this is what he practiced. In not a single
particular was he ever found separating himself from his brother in
black, saying to him "thus far but no farther." He never drew the line
in public or private between him and the people whose cause was his
cause--not even socially. He went into their homes and was in all things
one with them. He forgot that he was white, forgot that they were black,
forgot the pride of race, forgot the stigma of race too in the tie of
human kinship which bound him to them. If he had what they did not
possess, the rights of a man, the civil and political position of a man
in the State, the equality of a brother in the church, it could not make
him feel better than they, it filled him instead with a righteous sense
of wrong, a passionate sympathy, a supreme desire and determination to
make his own rights the measure of theirs.

"I lose sight of your present situation," he said in his address before
Free People of Color, "and look at it only in futurity. I imagine myself
surrounded by educated men of color, the Websters, and Clays, and
Hamiltons, and Dwights, and Edwardses of the day. I listen to their
voice as judges and representatives, and rulers of the people--the whole
people." This glowing vision was not the handiwork of a rhetorician
writing with an eye to its effect upon his hearers. The ardent hope of
the reformer was rather the father of the golden dream.

This practical recognition of the negro as a man and a brother was the
exact opposite of the treatment which was his ter