Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/215

 The Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters 205 combining the two, pointed out a way to the establishment of the rights of man under the Constitution and within the Union. While, in a general way, much historical interest attaches to the utterances and educational influence of those three men during the period under discussion, the future political attitude of Wisconsin, then nascent, was deeply affected by them. To this subject, therefore, I propose to devote some space ; for, deserving attention, I am not aware that it has heretofore received it. In doing so I cannot ignore the fact of my own descent from one of the three I have named ; but I may say in my own extenuation that John Quincy Adams was indisputably a considerable public character in his time, and when I, a descendant of his, undertake to speak of that time historically, I must, when he comes into the field of discussion, deal with him as best I may, assigning to him, as to his contemporaries, the place which, as I see it, is properly his or theirs. Moreover, I will freely acknowledge that an hereditary affiliation, if I may so express it, was not absent from the feeling which impelled me to accept your call. However much others had forgotten it, I well remembered that more than half a century ago, in the days of small things, it was in this region, as in central New York and the Western Reserve, that the seed cast by one from whom I claim descent fell in the good ground where it bore fruit an hun- dred fold. Recurring, then, to the three men I have named as voicing sys- tematically a message of special significance in connection with the phase of political evolution, or of development if that word is pre- ferred, then going on,— Garrison's message was distinctly moral and humanitarian. In a sense, it was reactionary, and violently so. In it there was no appeal to patriotism, no recognition even of nationality. On the contrary, in the lofty atmosphere of humani- tarianism in which he had his being, I doubt if Garrison ever in- haled a distinctively patriotic breath ; while he certainly denounced the Constitution and assailed the Union. He saw only the moral wrong of slavery, its absolute denial of the fundamental principle of the equality of men before the law and before God ; and the world became his, — where freedom was there was his country. To arouse the dormant conscience of the community by the fierce and unceasing denunciation of a great wrong was his mission ; and he fulfilled it : but, curiously enough, the end he labored for came in the way he least foresaw, and through the very instrumentality he had most vehemently denounced, — it came within that Union which he had described as a compact with death, and under that Constitu- tion which he had arraigned as a covenant with hell. Yet Garri-