Mr. Garrison said: "We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government. We can allow no appeal to patriotism to revenge any national insult or injury." Again he said: "If a nation has no right to defend itself against foreign enemies, no individual possesses that right in his own case.... As every human government is upheld by physical strength, and its laws are enforced at the point of the bayonet, we cannot hold office. We therefore exclude ourselves from every legislative and judicial body, and repudiate all human politics, worldly honors, and stations of authority."
Ralph Waldo Emerson says: "They withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus.... They are striking work, and calling out for something worthy to do.... They are not good citizens, not good members of society; unwilling to bear their part of the public burdens. They do not even like to vote. They filled the world with long beards and long words. They began in words, and ended in words."
Charles Sumner said: "An omnibus-load of Boston abolitionists has done more harm to the Anti-slavery cause than all its enemies."
Angelina Grimké, writing at this time to Mr. Weld, said: "What wouldst thou think of the 'Liberator' abandoning abolitionism as a primary object, and becoming the vehicle of all these grand principles?"
In his published volume "Anti-slavery Days," James Freeman Clarke says of the first Garrison Anti-slavery society: "There was no such excitement to be had anywhere else as at these meetings. There was a little of everything going on in them. Sometimes crazy people would come in and insist on taking up the time; sometimes mobs would interrupt the smooth tenor of their way; but amid all disturbance each meeting gave us an interesting and impressive hour. I think that some of the Garrisonian orators had the keenest tongues ever given to man. Stephen S. Foster and Henry C. Wright, for example, said the sharpest things that were ever uttered. Their belief was, that people were asleep, and the only thing to be done was to rouse them; and to do this it was necessary to cut deep and spare not. The more angry people were made, the better." Again, in the same volume, he says, after describing the political Anti-slavery party: "While these political anti-slavery movements were going on, the old abolitionists, under the lead of Garrison, Phillips, and others, had decided to oppose all voting and all political efforts under the Constitution. They adopted as their motto, 'No union with slaveholders.' Their hope for abolishing slavery was in inducing the North to dissolve the Union. Edmund Quincy said the Union was 'a confederacy with crime,' that 'the experiment of a great nation with popular institutions had signally failed,' that 'the Republic was not a model but a warning to the nations;' that 'the whole people must be either slaveholders or slaves;' that the only escape for 'the slave from his bondage was over the ruins of the American Church and the American State:' and it was the unalterable purpose of the Garrisonians to labor for the dissolution of the Union." Freeman Clarke goes on to say: "Wendell Phillips said on one occasion, 'Thank God, I am not a citizen of the United States.' As late as 1861 he declared the Union a failure, and argued for the dissolution of the Union as 'the best possible method of abolishing slavery.' If the North had agreed to disunion and had followed the advice of Phillips, 'To build a bridge of gold to take the slave States out of the Union,' slavery would probably be still existing in all the Southern States. At all events, it was not abolished by those who wished for disunion, but by those who were determined at all hazards and by every sacrifice to maintain the Union."