William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist by Archibald H. Grimke
page 67 of 356 (18%)
page 67 of 356 (18%)
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every one must feel who is capable of appreciating the blessings of
liberty," and thereupon notified Lundy to draw upon him for one hundred dollars if that amount would give the young editor his liberty. The fine and costs of court were accordingly paid and just forty-nine days after entering Baltimore jail a prisoner, Garrison recovered his freedom. The civil action of Todd against him was still pending. Nothing daunted Garrison went North two days after his discharge to obtain certain evidence deemed important by his counsel to his defence. He took with him an open letter from Lundy looking to the renewal of the weekly _Genius_ under their joint control. Prior to Garrison's trial the paper had fallen into great stress for want of money. Lundy and he had made a division of their labors, the latter doing the editorial and office work, while the former traveled from place to place soliciting subscriptions and collecting generally the sinews of war. But the experiment was not successful from a business standpoint. For as Garrison playfully observed subsequently: "Where friend Lundy could get one new subscriber, I could knock a _dozen_ off, and I did so. It was the old experiment of the frog in the well, that went two feet up and fell three feet back, at every jump." Where the income of the paper did not exceed fifty dollars in four months and the weekly expenditure amounted to at least that sum, the financial failure of the enterprise was inevitable. This unhappy event did actually occur six weeks before the junior editor went to jail; and the partnership was formally dissolved in the issue of the _Genius_ of March 5, 1830. But when Arthur Tappan made his generous offer of a hundred dollars to effect Garrison's release, he made at the same time an offer of an equal amount to aid the editors in reëstablishing the _Genius_. This proposition led to hopes on the part of the two friends to a renewal of their partnership in the cause of emancipation. And so Garrison's visit to the North was taken advantage of to test the disposition of Northern philanthropy to support |
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