Tuesday, December 4, 2018

George Thompson to William Lloyd Garrison, October 22, 1835

THURSDAY AFTERNoon, OCT. 22, 1835.

MY BELovED BRothER GARRISON: The news has reached me of yesterday’s proceedings in Boston. I rejoice that you have escaped the jaws of the lion, and are yet among the living — the living to praise God. To Him let us render our humble acknowledgements. May you be sustained under your present afflictions, and survive to behold the triumph of those principles which you have for some years lived only to advocate! I sympathise with you, and every sufferer in our holy cause, and could almost envy you the honor of having been assailed by a blood-thirsty multitude. Put your trust in that Being who smiles at the wrath of men, and will cause it to advance his glory. After all, what have our enemies done? what have their tar and feathers, their demolitions, their lacerations, scourgings and hangings effected? Have they extinguished the truth? No. Have they shaken our principles? No. Have they proved wrong to be right; falsehood, truth; cruelty, kindness; or slavery, liberty? No. Have they shaken the throne of the Eternal Have they stopped the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, that the cry of the slave cannot enter? No! None of these things have occurred. Our principles live, and are triumphing in every direction. The God of the American slave sits high on his throne, counting the sighs and groans of his people, and will come down to deliver. Abolitionists live, and multiply, and daily wax stronger and stronger in the work of mercy they have laid hold upon, nor can any scourges our enemies can plait, nor any gibbets they can erect, be aught but the emblem of their own infatuation and madness.

I think I see the end of these outbreakings. The opposers of this cause have themselves a bitter lesson to learn. They will rouse a spirit which will speedily turn and rend them, when it is too late to prevent it. Let them make mob-law paramount to all other law, and those respectable instigators will at no distant day be destroyed by the recoil of their own weapons. Our cause advances rapidly, majestically, and gloriously — who can stay its course? I have not time to write more. My heart is with you. As the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, so is my soul to your soul. Your joys, sorrows, perils, persecutions, friends and foes, are mine. May God direct us in this crisis, and enable us with meekness and wisdom to do his perfect will, and cheerfully suffer every thing which awaits us.

Your unalterably attached friend and brother,
GEO. THOMPSON.

SOURCE: Isaac Knapp, Publisher, Letters and Addresses by G. Thompson [on American Negro Slavery] During His Mission in the United States, From Oct. 1st, 1834, to Nov. 27, 1835, p. xii

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