William Lloyd Garrison was a fiery abolitionist, one whose rhetoric stirred a nation to combat the evils of slavery.
Yet his elitist, reformist moralizing bordered on the tyrannical, undermining the cause he championed because he championed a cause, not people, not realities.
Demagogues who harangue us because they believe that they are doing us a service can be the greatest blackguards, can be the greatest threats to freedom, even when they cry out such lofty phrases like:
"You can not possibly have a broader basis for government than that which includes all the people, with all their rights in their hands, and with an equal power to maintain their rights."
Yet for a man so committed to liberty, at least in word, how come he chose to separate himself from the political process? His intense loathing of the peculiar institution was so great, that Manichean morality debased the very systems of government which had permitted this nation to be born, however imperfect.
Garrison is a puritan-stock reformer, one for whom "the perfect would become the enemy of the good." Yet let us not forget the motive behind the Constitution:
"In order to form a more perfect union."
Not divine, not without flaws, but better than what the American had to contend with in the past. No matter how close one may strive for a perfect society, a free society will never necessarily be a just one.
That is not to say that slavery was a not detestable evil, but rather one that needed to be eradicated using liberal means. Some of the Founding Fathers and Framers of the Constitution owned slaves, but they still signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Afterwards, some released their slaves, other pressed for their release after the decease, and even those who compromised their beliefs in practice held out that one day the nation would be free for everyone, all men treated as created equal.
In the mean time, "perfect-as-enemy-of-the-good" Garrison denounced everything that even indirectly linked or supported slavery. His first words in "The Liberator":
"I will be as harsh as truth, and uncompromising as justice… I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard."
Truth is not harsh. In fact, truth without loving, seeking the voluntary well-being of another, is fraud.
Justice is compromising, recognizing the scarcity and frailty of human kind. Even though the Law of Mose, for example, demanded that anyone who bore false witness, stole, or even worked during the Sabbath would be killed by stoning. Yet David the King, who committed adultery with the otherwise married Bathsheba, then conspired to have her lawful husband killed, lied about the affair, dishonored his parents dishonored God, yet he appealed to God's mercy, above the stringent standards of the law. After the prophet Nathan had held him accountable for his wrong, he then assured him that David would not die. Mercy, indeed, was greater than sacrifice. One would argue that here, justice was compromised — rather, it was fulfilled.
"I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse. . ."
Who gave Garrison this authority? Who made him the lawgiver? Did he not know that to fail in one point of the law was to fail in every one, and that no one is righteous, no not one? Mankind by his own efforts will ever equivocate, vacillate, and sell out (consider the apostle Peter, who denied his Lord three times after swearing he would die with Christ).
". . .and I will be heard."
Garrison uses the passive voice, yet actively promotes himself. What was to be heard? What are we supposed to be heeding? In all (uncompromising) truth, Garrison;s turn as heated-up hater of slavery was a grandiloquent monologue of self-righteousness, the perverse notion that the people of the United States must agitate for change in order to be redeemed, made right with God.
Yet such folly is not what the gospel teaches:
"That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." (Romans 10:9)
We are not saved by works, even trying to help people get free. We are saved by the ever-giving gift of grace from God.
Indeed, people had just about enough of William Lloyd Garrison, whose oppressive self-righteous may have hurt the cause of manumission.
Even the black people whom he claimed to champion began to be disillusioned. Treating many former slaves like children or youth who needed to be mentored, Garrison put off many fellow, more mellow freedom fighters, like Frederick Douglass, one who openly broke with Garrison because he favored working with the system in place rather than demonizing the entire government and nation and people.
In no way, therefore, was Garrison an enlightened abolitionist, but a demagogue who wanted to trumped his own good works in accordance with the scandalous doctrine of predestinational Calvinism, which from the outset dooms many to eternal damnation and an elect to irresistible grace.
Such heresy was not only out of sync with the Good News, but is turned away many who genuinely despised slavery, but would not also despise mankind or enslave him with morality in the process.