Of course, if his were right, and of that doubt in his mind
there was apparently none, then the positions of all others had to be
wrong. This masterful quality of the man was constantly betrayed in the
acts of his life and felt by his closest friends and associates in the
anti-slavery movement. Quincy, writing to Richard Webb, narrates how, at
the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1843,
Garrison was for removing it to Boston, but that he and Wendell Phillips
were for keeping it where it then was in New York, giving at the same
time sundry good and sufficient reasons for the faith that was in them,
and how, thereupon, "Garrison dilated his nostrils like a war-horse, and
snuffed indignation at us." "If the Boston friends were unwilling to
take the trouble and responsibility," were the petulant, accusative
words put by Quincy into his chief's mouth on the occasion, "then there
was nothing more to be said; we must try to get along as well as we
could in the old way." And how they disclaimed "any unwillingness to
take trouble and responsibility," while affirming "the necessity of
their acting on their own idea."
Another characteristic of the pioneer is touched upon by the same writer
in a relation which he was making to Webb of Garrison's election to the
presidency of the parent society. Says Quincy: "Garrison makes an
excellent president at a public meeting where the order of speakers is
in some measure arranged, as he has great felicity in introducing and
interlocuting remarks; but at a meeting for debate he does not answer so
well, as he is rather too apt, with all the innocence and simplicity in
the world, to do all the talking himself.
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