more, the capital city of the Slave State
of Maryland.

Northern Abolitionism was, however, quite a different thing. It owed its
inception to William Lloyd Garrison, one of those enthusiasts who
profoundly affect history solely by the tenacity with which they hold to
and continually enforce a burning personal conviction. But for that
tenacity and the unquestionable influence which his conviction exerted
upon men, he would be a rather ridiculous figure, for he was almost
every sort of crank--certainly a non-resister, and, I think, a
vegetarian and teetotaller as well. But his burning conviction was the
immorality of Slavery; and by this he meant something quite other than
was meant by Jefferson or later by Lincoln. When these great men spoke
of Slavery as a wrong, they regarded it as a social and political wrong,
an evil and unjust system which the community as a community ought as
soon as possible to abolish and replace by a better. But by Garrison
slave-holding was accounted a personal sin like murder or adultery. The
owner of slaves, unless he at once emancipated them at whatever cost to
his own fortunes, was by that fact a wicked man, and if he professed a
desire for ultimate extinction of the institution, that only made him a
hypocrite as well. This, of course, was absurd; fully as absurd as the
suggestion sometimes made in regard to wealthy Socialists, that if they
were consistent they would give up all their property to the community.
A man living under an economic system reposing on Slavery can no more
help availing himself of its fruits than in a capitalist society he can
help availing himself of capitalist organization. Obviously, unless he
is a multi-millionaire, he cannot buy up all the slaves in the State and
set them free, while, if he buys some and treats them with justice and
humanity, he is clearly making things better for them than if he left
them in the hands of masters possibly less scrupulous. But, absurd as
the thesis was, Garrison pushed it to its wildest logical conclusions.
No Christian Church ought, he maintained, to admit a slave-owner to
communion. No honest man ought to count a slave-owner among his friends.
No political connection with slave-owners was tolerable. The Union,
since it involved such a connection, was "a Covenant with Death and an
Agreement with Hell." Garrison publicly burnt the Constitution of the
United States in the streets of Boston.

Abolitionist propaganda of this kind w