PROVIDENCE, Jan., 1855.

MR. EDITOR:—We live in a time that tries men's souls; when the advocates of great principles are not judged by their loud pretension, nor long and eloquent speeches, but by their life's practice; the ever present question being, what are their acts, and do they accord with the high sounding morality of platform and pulpit? We sit and listen to the reformer's bold eloquence, to his finely spun rhetoric, and to his warm denunciations of hypocrisy and guilt; but we feel sad where the reflections [sic] rises, that but little of what we here professed is supported by the dignity of corresponding practice.

We attended several sittings of the Anti-Slavery Convention held during the past week in our city; some of the speeches were good and may effect something; but I fear the Convention has done itself serious harm in trying to take care of a "sick man" who is at present on their hands. What I allude to is this: just before the close of the afternoon session of the last day, Mr. Geo. Downing of this city, in stating the cases of proscription to which our race is subject in this community, made reference to Mr. FairbanksFairbanks, Asa

Asa Fairbanks (1795-1876) was active in Rhode Island and national reform circles. He served as a vice president for the American Anti-Slavery Society from 1846 to 1864 and as a delegate to the national Free Democrat convention held in Pittsburgh in 1852. In 1853 he represented Rhode Island at the Whole World's Temperance Convention held in New York City. Fairbanks drew criticism from some in abolitionist circles when he refused to allow African American abolitionists to speak at a meeting held in Providence in January 1855. Washington (D.C.) National Era, 5 August 1852; FDP, 27 May 1852, 9 September 1853, 19 May 1854, 23 February, 2 March 1855. His wife, Anna Fairbanks (1797-1870), was a hardworking abolitionist organizer in the city. Both were agents for the Underground Railroad. American Anti-Slavery Society, Platform of the American Anti-Slavery Society and Its Auxiliaries (New York, 1855), 6; idem, Platform of the American Anti-Slavery Society and Its Auxiliaries (New York, 1860), 6; Lorenzo Sayles Fairbanks, Genealogy of the Fairbanks Family in America, 1633-1897 (Boston, 1897), 491; Van Broekhoven, Devotion of These Women, 174. ' course of lectures as being proscriptive, on the grounds that lecturers belonging to one proscribed race were not on the list of the course, for the reason as stated by Mr. F. himself; that it would injure the enterprise in a pecuniary point of view, which reason was thought unbecoming an anti-slavery man; when, very much to our surprise, Mr. GarrisonGarrison, William Lloyd

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was the foremost white abolitionist of the nineteenth century and was credited with the discovery of Douglass as a speaker at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reform before Benjamin Lundy offered the young journalist the opportunity to write for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks. However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 188589); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 7:168-72. (who, by the way, seems to enjoy the exclusive right to be impolite to any one who attempts an expression of opinion in his presence) rose, interrupted Mr. Downing, and called Mr. Fairbanks' attention to the remarks being made, adding that the statement was monstrous and incredible; nevertheless, this same monstrous and incredible statement was made and proved to be true, and that, too, in spite of Mr. S. S. Foster's nonsense, or the insulting language and plastic sophistry of Wm. L. Garrison, who, upon this occasion, went beyond all bounds in defense of the trembling sinner before them.

Now, what is the fact? The conduct of this Mr. Fairbanks was approved by the leading spirits of the convention—his directing Geo. T. Downing to a "good seat in the corner" of Railroad Hall, when central and front seats were vacant, as well as his excluding talent and worth from his lists, for no other reason than the one given above. Mr. Garrison's defense of his client had no other basis than this: that plaintiff had no business entering [as a colored man] charges when it was not his wishes to be proscribed as a colored man. This is a dodge unworthy of the great head of the Cornhill office.—Mr. Downing's complaint was not treatment as a colored man, but as a MAN; while the substance of the charge against Mr. Fairbanks was, that he did not treat him as a man; that his standard of regard is not the moral and intellectual worth of the individual, but that he makes distinctions unbecoming an anti-slavery man. Our conclusion is that our race must look above and beyond organizations, dying of obesity, for redemption from the curses of hate and caste, to those higher and nobler fields of anti-slavery work unknown to the noisy declaimer, who does his only work on the platform, and who, Ophelia like, knows not, nor loves not, the up struggling race which the iniquity of this despotic government has made so obnoxious to Anglo-Saxon tastes. We must rise above that low sympathy which is unassociated with respect for character. We must reach a deeper current of thought and sympathies—rely more upon individual energy in unassociative capacities—more upon the thorough education of the species and the developments of science, and with unbiased intellects join with a braver determination the moving columns of civilization and refinement.

G. P. I.