William Lloyd Garrison His Times Author:Oliver Johnson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: in. The First Volume of "The Liberator;" Its Size and Appearance — Scenes in the Office — Distinguished Visitors — Mr. Garrison's Alleged "Bitterness" — Alarm... more » of the Slaveholders — Incitements to Kidnappers — Indifference at the North—The Nat Turner Insurrection — Appeal of "The National Intelligencer" to the North—Mr. Garrison's Defence. Lying open before me as I write is the first volume of "The Liberator," beginning and ending with the year 1831. It was small for that day, but how much more diminutive it looks in comparison with the weekly journals of the present time ! It is a folio of four pages. The page is fourteen inches in length by nine and three- tenths in width. The title at first was in bold-face black-letter, which gave place, at the end of four months, to an engraved head,, with a " pictorial representation" of an auction, at which "slaves, horses and other cattle" are seen offered for sale, and of a whipping-post, at which a slave is receiving punishment. In the background is seen the Capitol of Virginia, with a flag, inscribed with the word "Liberty," floating over the dome. This picture of a scene familiar to every Southern eye was regarded as even worse than Mr. Garrison's "harsh language." At the South it was denounced as incendiary, while influential journals at the North declared that it was abominable thus to outrage the feelings of "our Southern brethren" and incite the slaves to insurrection ! Then, as now, the champions of "conciliation" thought it unpatriotic to drag into light the cruelties practised upon the negroes. For the sake of harmony, and to avert a dissolution of the Union, the disagreeable facts of slavery ought to beconcealed. The Abolitionists were madmen and fools, and utterly devoid of "fraternal feeling" in making such a fuss about ...« less