_The Genius of Universal Emancipation_, the American Convention, or
national assembly of the old State societies for the abolition of
slavery, fell into desuetude. It was as if Providence was clearing the
debris of an old dispensation out of the way of the new one which his
prophet was beginning to herald, as if guarding against all possibility
of having the new wine, then soon to be pressed from the moral vintage
of the nation, put into old bottles. The Hour for a new movement against
slavery had come, and with its arrival the Man to hail it had also come.

Other men had spoken and written against slavery, and labored for the
freedom of the slave before Garrison had thought upon the subject at
all. Washington and Jefferson, Franklin, Jay, and Hamilton had been
Abolitionists before he was born, but theirs was a divided interest. The
establishment of a more perfect union was the paramount object of their
lives. John Wesley had denounced slavery in language quite as harsh as
Garrison's, but his, too, was a divided interest, the religious revival
of the eighteenth century being his distinctive mission. Benezet,
Woolman, and Lundy were saints, who had yearned with unspeakable
sympathy for the black bondmen, and were indefatigable in good works in
his behalf, but they had not that stern and iron quality without which
reforms cannot be launched upon the attention of mankind. What his
predecessors lacked, Garrison possessed to a marvelous degree--the
undivided interest, the supremacy of a single purpose, the stern stuff
out of which the moral reformer is made, and in which he is panoplied.
They were all his, but there was another besides--immediatism. This
element distinguished the movement against slavery, started by him, from
all other movements begun before he arrived on the stage, for the
emancipation of the slaves in the Union.

This doctrine of immediate as opposed to gradual emancipation, was not