Sixtieth Birthday

Dec. 14, 1865 

Writing to Wendell Phillips Garrison:  “Accept my grateful acknowledgments for your filial epistle on my becoming a ‘sexagenarian’, in the completion of my sixtieth year … It gives me joy to receive this tribute of your affection and gratitude, because it emanates from a heart that was never guilty of insincerity.  As, in the order of time and in the course of nature, I must decrease and you increase, my prayer is that you may exceed me in all things wherein I may have been of any benefit to my fellow-men, especially to the sacred cause of liberty, which, in its utmost scope, comprehends all things concerning human destiny… ”   1

1 Letters of William Lloyd Garrison – Volumes I – VI