There was always in the South, prior to 1831, an active and freely expressed emancipation sentiment. But there was not enough of it to influence legislation. In all but three or four of these States, emancipation was made difficult by laws which, among other conditions, required that slaves after being freed should leave the State.
Emancipation in the North had not been completed in 1830. Professor Ingram, president of the Royal Irish Academy, says in his "History of Slavery," London, 1895, p. 184: "The Northern States—beginning with Vermont in 1777 and ending with New Jersey in 1804—either abolished slavery or adopted measures to effect its gradual abolition within their boundaries. But the principal operation of (at least) the latter change was to transfer Northern slaves to Southern markets."
There had been in 1820 an angry discussion in Congress about the admission of Missouri—with or without slavery—which was finally settled by the Missouri Compromise. This dispute over the admission of Missouri is often said to have been the beginning of the sectional quarrel that finally ended in secession; but the controversy over Missouri and that begun by the "New Abolitionists" in 1831 were entirely distinct. They were conducted on different plans.
In the Missouri controversy the only questions were as to the expediency and constitutionality of denying to a new State the right to enter the Union, with or without slavery, as she might choose. The entire dispute was settled to the satisfaction of both sections by an agreement that States thereafter, south of 36° 30', might enter the Union with or without slavery; and nobody denied, during all that discussion about Missouri, or at any time previous to 1831, that every citizen was bound to maintain the Constitution and all laws passed in pursuance of it, including the fugitive slave law.
"The North submitted at that time (1828) to the obligations imposed upon it by the fugitive slave-catching clause of the Constitution and the fugitive slave law of 1793."[20] So say the biographers of William Lloyd Garrison for the purpose of establishing, as they afterwards do, their claim that Garrison conducted a successful revolt against that provision of the Constitution. What strengthens the statement that the North in 1828 submitted without protest to the "fugitive slave-catching clause of the Constitution," is that the Compromise Act of 1820 contained a provision extending the fugitive slave law over the territory made free by the act, while it should continue to be territory, and until there should be formed from it States, to which the existing law would automatically apply. Every subsequent nullification of the fugitive slave laws of the United States, whether by governors or state legislatures, was therefore a palpable violation of a provision that was of the essence of the Missouri Compromise.
The South was content with the Missouri Compromise, and from that date, 1820, until the rise of the "New Abolitionists," slavery was in all that region an open question. Judge Temple says in his "Covenanter, Cavalier, and Puritan," p. 208: "In 1826, of the 143 emancipation societies in the United States, 103 were in the South."
The questions for Southern emancipationists were: How could the slaves be freed, and in what time? How about compensation to owners? Where could the freed slaves be sent, and how? And, if deportation should prove impossible, what system could be devised whereby the two races could dwell together peacefully? These were indeed serious problems, and required time and grave consideration.
"Who can doubt," says Mr. Curtis, to quote once more his "Life of Buchanan," "that all such questions could have been satisfactorily answered, if the Christianity of the South had been left to its own time and mode of answering them, and without any external force but the force of kindly, respectful consideration and forebearing Christian fellowship?"[21]
But this was not to be.
On the first day of January, 1831, there came out in Boston a new paper, The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison, editor. That was the beginning, historians now generally agree, of "New Abolitionism." The editor of the new paper was the founder of the new sect.
Benjamin Lundy was a predecessor of Garrison, on much the same lines as those pursued by the latter. Lundy had previously formed many Abolition societies. The Philanthropist of March, 1828, estimated the number of anti-slavery societies as "upwards of 130, and most of them in the slave States, and of Lundy's formation, among the Quakers."[22] But Garrison became the leader and Lundy the disciple.
Garrison was a man of pleasing personal appearance, abstemious in habits, and of remarkable energy and will power. He was a vigorous and forceful writer. Denunciation was his chief weapon, and he had "a genius for infuriating his antagonists." The following is a fair specimen of his style. Speaking of himself and his fellow-workers as the "soldiers of God," he said: "Their feet are shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.... Hence, when smitten on one cheek they turn the other also, being defamed they entreat, being reviled they bless," etc. And on that same page,[23] and in the same prospectus, showing how he "blesses" those who, as he understands, are outside of the "Kingdom of God," he says: "All without are dogs and sorcerers, and ... and murderers, and idolaters, and whatsoever loveth a lie."
Mr. Garrison had no perspective, no sense of relation or proportion. In his eye the most humane slave-holder was a wicked monster. He had a genius for organization, and a year after the first issue of The Liberator he and his little body of brother fanatics had grown into the New England Anti-Slavery Society.
The new sect called themselves for a time the "New Abolitionists," because their doctrines were new. The principles upon which this organization was to be based were not all formulated at once. The key-note was sounded in Garrison's "Address to the Public" in the first number of The Liberator:
I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population. I shall be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice on this subject. I do not wish to think or speak or write with moderation.
In an earlier issue, after denouncing slavery as a "damning crime," the editor said: "Therefore my efforts shall be directed to the exposure of those who practise it."
The substance of Garrison's teachings was that slavery, anywhere in the United States, was the concern of all, and that it was to be put down by making not only slavery but also the slave-holder odious. And, further, it was the slave, not the slave-owner, who was entitled to compensation.
Thus the distinctive features of the new crusade were to be warfare upon the personal character of every slave-holder and the confiscation of his property. It was, too, the beginning of that sectional war by people of the North against the existence of slavery in the South, which, as we have seen, was deprecated by Dr. Channing in his letter three years before to Mr. Webster.
The new sect began by assailing slavery in States other than their own, and very soon they were openly denouncing the Constitution of their country because under it slavery in those sections was none of their business; and of course they repudiated the Missouri Compromise absolutely, the essence of that compromise being that slavery was the business of the States in which it existed.
It was a part of their scheme to send circulars depicting the evils of slavery broadcast through the South; and they were sent especially to the free negroes of that section.
"In 1820," says Dr. Hart in his "Slavery and Abolition," "at Charleston (South Carolina), Denmark Vesey, a free negro, made an elaborate plot to rise, massacre the white population, seize the shipping in the harbor, and, if hard pressed, to sail away to the West Indies. One of the negroes gave evidence, Vesey was seized, duly tried, and with thirty-four others was hanged."[24]
This plot, so nearly successful, was fresh in the minds of Southerners when the Abolitionists began their programme, and naturally, the South at once took the alarm—an alarm that was increased by the massacre, in the Nat Turner insurrection, of sixty-one men, women, and children, which took place in Virginia seven months after the first issue of The Liberator. One of Turner's lieutenants is stated to have been a free negro. This insurrection the South attributed to The Liberator. Professor Hart says a free negro named Walker had previously sent out to the South, from Boston, a pamphlet, "the tone of which was unmistakable," and that "this pamphlet is known to have reached Virginia, and may possibly have influenced the Nat Turner insurrection."[25]
If this surmise be correct, knowledge that Walker, a free negro, had been responsible for the Turner insurrection, would have lessened neither the guilt of the Abolitionists nor the fears of the Southerners.
But in 1832 Abolition agitation and the fears of insurrection had not as yet entirely stifled the discussion of slavery in the South. A debate on slavery took place that year in the Virginia Assembly, the immediate cause of which was no doubt the Turner insurrection. The members of that body had not been elected on any issue of that character. The discussion thus precipitated shows, therefore, the state of public opinion in Virginia on slavery. Of this debate a distinguished Northern writer says:[26]
"In the year 1832 there was, nowhere in the world, a more enlightened sense of the wrong and evil of slavery than there was among the public men and people of Virginia."
In the Assembly of that year Mr. Randolph brought forward a bill to accomplish gradual emancipation. Mr. Curtis continues:
"No member of the House defended slavery.... There could be nothing said anywhere, there had been nothing said out of Virginia, stronger and truer in deprecating the evils of slavery, than was said in that discussion, by Virginia gentlemen, debating in their own legislature, a matter that concerned themselves and their people."
The bill was not pressed to a vote, but the House, by a vote of 65 to 38, declared "that they were profoundly sensible of the great evils arising from the condition of the colored population of the Commonwealth and were induced by policy, as well as humanity, to attempt the immediate removal of the free negroes; but that further action for the removal of the slaves should await a more definite development of public opinion."
Mr. Randolph, who was from the large slave-holding county of Albemarle, was re-elected to the next assembly.
But when the early summer of 1835 had come the fear of insurrection had created such wide-spread terror throughout the whole South that every emancipation society in that region had long since closed its doors; and now the Abolitionists were sending South their circulars in numbers. Many were sent to Charleston, South Carolina,[27] where fifteen years before[28] the free negro, Denmark Vesey, had laid the plot to massacre the whites, that had been discovered just in time to prevent its consummation.
The President, Andrew Jackson, in his next message to Congress, December, 1835, called their "attention to the painful excitement produced in the South by attempts to circulate through the mails inflammatory appeals addressed to the passions of the slaves, in prints and in various sorts of publications calculated to stimulate them to insurrection and produce all the horrors of a servile war."
The good people of Boston were now thoroughly aroused. They had from the first frowned on the Abolition movement. Garrison was complaining that in all the city his society could not "hire a hall or a meeting-house." The Abolition idea had been for a time thought chimerical and therefore negligible. Later, civic, business, social, and religious organizations had all of them in their several spheres been earnest and active in their opposition; now it seemed to be time for concerted action.
In Garrison's "Garrison" (vol. I, p. 495), we read that "the social, political, religious and intellectual élite of Boston filled Faneuil Hall on the afternoon of Friday, August 3, 1835, to frame an indictment against their fellow-citizens."
This "indictment" the Boston Transcript reported as follows:
Resolved, That the people of the United States by the Constitution under which, by the Divine blessing, they hold their most valuable political privileges, have solemnly agreed with each other to leave to their respective States the jurisdiction pertaining to the relation of master and slave within their boundaries, and that no man or body of men, except the people of the governments of those States, can of right do any act to dissolve or impair the obligations of that contract.
Resolved, That we hold in reprobation all attempts, in whatever guise they may appear, to coerce any of the United States to abolish slavery by appeals to the terror of the master or the passions of the slave.
Resolved, That we disapprove of all associations instituted in the non-slave-holding States with the intent to act, within the slave-holding States, on the subject of slavery in those States without their consent. For the purpose of securing freedom of individual thought they are needless—and they afford to those persons in the Southern States, whose object is to effect a dissolution of the Union (if any such there may be now or hereafter), a pretext for the furtherance of their schemes.
Resolved, That all measures adopted, the natural and direct tendency of which is to excite the slaves of the South to revolt, or of spreading among them a spirit of insubordination, are repugnant to the duties of the man and the citizen, and that where such measures become manifest by overt acts, which are recognizable by constitutional laws, we will aid by all means in our power in the support of those laws.
Resolved, That while we recommend to others the duty of sacrificing their opinions, passions and sympathies upon the altar of the laws, we are bound to show that a regard to the supremacy of those laws is the rule of our conduct—and consequently to deprecate all tumultuous assemblies, all riotous or violent proceedings, all outrages on person and property, and all illegal notions of the right or duty of executing summary and vindictive justice in any mode unsanctioned by law.
The allusion in the last resolution is to a then recent lynching of negroes in Mississippi charged with insurrection.
In speaking to these resolutions, Harrison Gray Otis, a great conservative leader, denounced the Abolition agitators, accusing them of "wishing to 'scatter among our Southern brethren firebrands, arrows, and death,' and of attempting to force Abolition by appeals to the terror of the masters and the passions of the slaves," and decrying their "measures, the natural and direct tendency of which is to excite the slaves of the South to revolt," etc.
Another of the speakers, ex-Senator Peleg Sprague, said (p. 496, Garrison's "Garrison") that "if their sentiments prevailed it would be all over with the Union, which would give place to two hostile confederacies, with forts and standing armies."
These resolutions and speeches, viewed in the light of what followed, read now like prophecy.
It is a familiar rule of law that a contemporaneous exposition of a statute is to be given extraordinary weight by the courts, the reason being that the judge then sitting knows the surrounding circumstances. That Boston meeting pronounced the deliberate judgment of the most intelligent men of Boston on the situation, as they knew it to be that day; it was in their midst that The Liberator was being published; there the new sect had its head-quarters, and there it was doing its work.
Quite as strong as the evidence furnished by that great Faneuil Hall meeting is the testimony of the churches.
The churches and religious bodies in America had heartily favored the general anti-slavery movement that was sweeping over all America between 1770 and 1831, while it was proceeding in an orderly manner and with due regard to law.
In 1812 the Methodist General Conference voted that no slave-holder could continue as a local elder. The Presbyterian General Assembly in 1818 unanimously resolved that "slavery was a gross violation of the most precious and moral rights of human nature," etc.
These bodies represented both the North and the South, and this paragraph shows what was, and continued to be, the general attitude of American churches until after the Abolitionists had begun their assault on both slavery in the South and the Constitution of the United States, which protected it. Then, in view of the awful social and political cataclysm that seemed to be threatened, there occurred a stupendous change. We learn from Hart that Garrison "soon found that neither minister nor church anywhere in the lower South continued (as before) to protest against slavery; that the cloth in the North was arrayed against him; and that many Northern divines vigorously opposed him." Also that Moses Stuart, professor of Hebrew in Andover Theological Seminary; President Lord, of Dartmouth College, and Hopkins, the Episcopal bishop of Vermont, now became defenders of slavery. "The positive opposition of churches soon followed."
And then we have cited, condemnations of Abolitionism by the Methodist Conference of 1836, by the New York Methodist Conference of 1838, by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, by the American Home Missionary Society, the American Bible Society, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the Baptists. See for these statements, Hart, pp. 211-12.
The import of all this is unmistakable; and this "about-face" of religious organizations on the question of the morality of slavery has no parallel in all the history of Christian churches. Its significance cannot be overstated. It took place North and South. It meant opposition to a movement that was outside the church and with which religion could have no concern, except in so far as it was a vital assault upon the State, and the peace of the State. To make their opposition effective the Christians of that day did this remarkable thing. They reversed their religious views on slavery, which the Abolitionists were now assailing, and which they themselves had previously opposed. They re-examined their Bibles and found arguments that favored slavery. These arguments they used in an attempt to stem an agitation that, as they saw it, was arraying section against section and threatening the perpetuity of the Union.
United testimony from all these Christian bodies is more conclusive contemporaneous evidence against the agitators and their methods than even the proceedings of all conservative Boston at Faneuil Hall in August, 1835.
This new attitude of the church toward slavery meant perhaps also something further—it meant that slavery, as it actually existed, was not then as horrible to Northerners, who could go across the line and see it, which many of them did, as it is now to those whose ideas of it come chiefly from "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
In view of this phenomenal movement of Northern Christians it is not strange that Southern churches adhered, throughout the deadly struggle that was now on, to the position into which they had been driven—that slavery was sanctioned by the Bible—nor is it matter of wonder that, as Professor Hart makes prominent on p. 137, "not a single Southern man of large reputation and influence failed to stand by slavery."
Historians of to-day usually narrate without comment that nearly all the American churches and divines at first opposed the Abolitionists. It illustrates the courage with which the Abolitionists stood, as Dr. Hart delights to point out, "for a despised cause." They assuredly did stand by their guns.
Later, another change came about in the attitude of the churches. In 1844 the Abolitionists were to achieve their first victory in the great religious world. The Methodist Church was then disrupted, "squarely on the question whether a bishop could own slaves, and all the Southern members withdrew and organized the Methodist Episcopal Church, South." Professor Hart, p. 214, says of this: "Clearly, the impassioned agitation of the Abolitionists had made it impossible for a great number of Northern anti-slavery men to remain on terms of friendship with their Southern brethren."
That great Faneuil Hall meeting of August 31, 1835, was followed some weeks later by a lamentable anti-Garrison mob, which did not stand alone. In the years 1835, 1836, and 1837 a great wave of anti-Abolition excitement swept over the North. In New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Alton (Illinois), and many other places, there were anti-Abolition riots, sometimes resulting in arson and bloodshed.
The heart of the great, peace-loving, patriotic, and theretofore happy and contented North, was at that time stirred with the profoundest indignation against the Abolitionists. Northern opinion then was that the Abolitionists, by their unpatriotic course and their nefarious methods, were driving the South to desperation and endangering the Union. If the North at that time saw the situation as it really was, the historian of the present day should say so. If, on the other hand, the people of both the North and South were then laboring under delusions, as to the facts that were occurring among them, those of this generation, who are wiser than their ancestors, should give us the sources of their information. To know the lessons of history we must have the facts.[29]
In 1854, at Framingham, Massachusetts, the Abolitionists celebrated the Fourth of July thus: Their leader, William Lloyd Garrison, held up and burned to ashes, before the applauding multitude, one after another, copies of
1st. The fugitive slave law.
2d. The decision of Commissioner Loring in the case of Burns, a fugitive slave.
3d. The charge to the Grand Jury of Judge Benjamin R. Curtis in reference to the effort of a mob to secure a fugitive slave.
4th. "Then, holding up the United States Constitution, he branded it as the source and parent of all other atrocities, 'a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,' and consumed it to ashes on the spot, exclaiming, 'So perish all compromises with tyranny! And let all the people say, Amen!' A tremendous shout of 'Amen!' went up to heaven in ratification of the deed, mingled with a few hisses and wrathful exclamations from some, who evidently were in a rowdyish state of mind, but who were at once cowed by the popular feeling."[30]
The Abolitionist movement was radical; it was revolutionary. When an accredited teacher of history, in one of the greatest of our universities, writes a volume on "Abolition and Slavery," why should he restrict himself in comment, as Dr. Hart thus does in his preface? The book is "intended to show that there was more than one side to the controversy, and that both the milder form of opposition called anti-slavery and the extreme form called Abolition, were confronted by practical difficulties which to many public men seemed insurmountable."
Why should not the historian, in addition to pointing out the "difficulties" encountered by these extremists, show how and why the people of that day condemned their conduct?
Condonation of the Abolitionists, and a proper regard for the Constitution of the United States, cannot be taught to the youth of America at one and the same time.
The writer has been unable to find any of the incendiary pamphlets that had proved so inflammatory. He has, however, before him a little anonymous publication entitled "Slavery Illustrated in its Effects upon Woman," Isaac Knapp, Boston, 1837. It was for circulation in the North, being "Affectionately Inscribed to all the Members of Female Anti-Slavery Societies," and it is only cited here as an illustration of the almost inconceivable venom with which the crusade was carried on to embitter the North against the South. It is a vicious attack upon the morality of Southern men and women, and upon Southern churches. None of its charges does it claim to authenticate, and it gives no names or dates. One incident, related as typical, is of two white women, all the time in full communion with their church, under pretence of a boarding-house, keeping a brothel, negro women being the inmates.
In the chapter entitled "Impurity of the Christian Churches" is this sentence: "At present the Southern Churches are only one vast consociation of hypocrites and sinners."
The booklet was published anonymously, but at that time any prurient story about slavery in the South would circulate, no matter whether vouched for or not.
Not stronger than the proceedings of a great non-partisan public meeting, or than the action of religious bodies, but going more into detail as to public opinion in the South and the effect upon it of Abolition agitation, is the evidence of a quiet observer, Professor E. A. Andrews, who, in July, 1835, had been sent out as the agent of "The Boston Union for the Relief and Improvement of the Colored Race." His reports from both Northern and Southern States, consisting of letters from various points, constitute a book, "Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade," Boston, 1836.
July 17, 1835, from Baltimore, Professor Andrews reports that a resident clergyman, who appears to have his entire confidence, says, among other things, "that a disposition to emancipate their slaves is very prevalent among the slave-holders of this State, could they see any way to do so consistently with the true interest of the slave, but that it is their universal belief that no means of doing this is now presented except that of colonizing them in Africa."
From the same city, July 17, 1835, he writes, p. 53: "In this city there appears to be no strong attachment to slavery and no wish to perpetuate it."
Again, on p. 95: "There is but one sentiment amongst those with whom I have conversed in this city, respecting the possibility of the white and colored races living peaceably together in freedom, nor during my residence at the South and my subsequent intercourse with the Southern people, did I ever meet with one who believed it possible for the two races to continue together after emancipation.... When the slaves of the South are liberated they form an integral part of the population of the country, and must influence its destiny for ages—perhaps forever."
From Fredericksburg, Virginia, Professor Andrews writes:
Since I entered the slave-holding country I have seen but one man who did not deprecate wholly and absolutely the direct interference of Northern Abolitionists with the institutions of the South. "I was an Abolitionist," has been the language of numbers of those with whom I have conversed; "I was an Abolitionist, and was laboring earnestly to bring about a prospective system of emancipation. I even saw, as I believed, the certain and complete success of the friends of the colored race at no distant period, when these Northern Abolitionists interfered, and by their extravagant and impracticable schemes frustrated all our hopes.... Our people have become exasperated, the friends of the slaves alarmed, etc....[31] Equally united are they in the opinion that the servitude of the slaves is far more rigorous now than it would have been had there been no interference with them. In proportion to the danger of revolt and insurrection, have been the severity of the enactments for controlling them and the diligence with which the laws have been executed."
From a private letter, written at Greenville, Alabama, August 30, 1835, by a distinguished lawyer, John W. Womack, to his brother, we quote:
The anti-slavery societies in the Northern and Middle States are doing all they can to destroy our domestic harmony by sending among us pamphlets, tracts, and newspapers—for the purpose of exciting dissatisfaction and insurrection among our slaves.... Meetings have been held in Mobile, in Montgomery, in Greensboro, and in Tuscaloosa, and in different parts of all the Southern States. At these meetings resolutions have been adopted, disclaiming (sic) and denying the right of the Northern people to interfere in any manner in our internal domestic concerns.... It is my solemn opinion that this question (to wit, slavery) will ultimately bring about a dissolution of the Union of the States.
It should be remembered that in 1832 the massacre in Santo Domingo of all the whites by the blacks was fresh in mind. It had occurred in 1814—after manumission—and had produced, especially in the minds of statesmen and of all observers of the many signs of antagonism between the two races, a profound and lasting impression.
The fear that the races, both free, could not live together was in the mind of Thomas Jefferson, of Henry Clay, and of every other Southern emancipationist. And deportation, its expense, and the want of a home to which to send the negro—here was a stumbling-block in the way of Southern emancipation.
Indeed, the incompatibility of the races was an appalling thought in the minds of Southerners for the whole thirty years of anti-slavery agitation. It was even with Abraham Lincoln, and weighed upon his mind when, at last, in 1862, military necessity placed upon his shoulders the responsibility of emancipating the Southern slaves. Serious as was the responsibility, the question was not new to him. When Mr. Lincoln said, in his celebrated Springfield speech in 1858, "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free," and added that he did not expect the government to fail, he certainly expected that emancipation in the South was coming; and, of course, he thought over what the consequences might be.
In that same debate with Douglas, in his speech at Charleston, Illinois, Mr. Lincoln said: "There is a physical difference between the white and black races, which, I believe, will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality."
In his memorial address on Henry Clay, in 1852, he had said: "If, as the friends of colonization hope, the present and coming generations of our countrymen shall by some means succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery, and at the same time in restoring a captive people to their long lost father-land, ... it will, indeed, be a glorious consummation. And if to such a contribution the efforts of Mr. Clay shall have contributed ... none of his labors will have been more valuable to his country and his kind."
In his famous emancipation proclamation he promised "that the effort to colonize persons of African descent upon this continent or elsewhere, with the consent of the government existing there, will be continued."
It must have been with a heavy heart that the great President announced the failure of all his efforts to find a home outside of America for the freedmen, when he informed Congress in his December message, 1862, that all in vain he had asked permission to send the negroes, when freed, to the British, the Danish, and the French West Indies; and that the Spanish-American countries in Central America had also refused his request. He could find no places except Hayti and Liberia. He even made the futile experiment of sending a ship-load to a little island off Hayti.[32] Hume, in "The Abolitionists," tells us that Mr. Lincoln for a time considered setting Texas apart as a home for the negroes—so much was he disturbed by this trouble.
Southerners, save perhaps a few who were wise enough to foresee what the consequences might be, were deeply gratified when they read (1835-1838) of the violent opposition in the North to the desperate schemes of the Abolitionists. Surely these mobs fairly represented public opinion, and that public opinion certainly was a strong guaranty to the South of future peace and security.
But the Abolitionists themselves were not dismayed. They may have misread, indeed it is certain they did misunderstand, the signs of the times. Garrison in his Liberator took the ground—as do his children in their life of him, written fifty years later—that the great Faneuil Hall meeting of August 31, 1835, which they themselves declare represented "the intelligence, the wealth, the culture, and the religion of Boston," was but an indication of the "pro-slavery" sentiment then existing. In reality it was just what it purported to be—an authoritative condemnation, not of the anti-slavery opinions, but of the avowed purposes and methods of the new sect. The mobbing of Garrison and the sacking of his printing office in Boston on September 26th, however, and the lawless violence to Abolitionists that followed the denunciations of that despised sect by speakers, and by the public press, in New York, in Philadelphia, in Cincinnati, and elsewhere in the North, proved disastrous in the extreme.
While that great wave of anti-Abolition feeling was sweeping over that whole region from East to West, there were many good people who deluded themselves with the idea that this new sect with its visionary and impracticable ideas was being consigned to oblivion, but in what followed we have a lesson that unfortunately some of our people have not yet fully learned. Mob law in any portion of our free country, where there is law with officers to enforce it, is a mistake, a mistake that is likely to be followed sooner or later by most disastrous results. The mobs that marked the beginning of our Revolution in 1774 were legitimate; they meant revolt, revolt against constituted authorities. But where a mob does not mean the overthrow of government, where it only means to substitute its own blind will for the arm of the law, not good but evil—it may be long deferred, but evil eventually—is sure to follow. When mobs assailed Abolitionists because they threatened the peace and tranquillity of the country, evil followed swiftly.
Violent and harsh treatment of these mischievous agitators almost everywhere in the North, and the heroism with which they endured ignominy and insult, brought about a revulsion of public sentiment. To understand the philosophy of this, read two extracts from the writings of that great, and universally admired, pulpit orator, Dr. William E. Channing of Boston, the first written sometime prior to that August meeting:
The adoption of the common system of agitation by the Abolitionists has not been justified by success. From the beginning it has created alarm in the considerate, and strengthened the sympathies of the Free States with the slave-holder. It has made converts of a few individuals, but alienated multitudes. Its influence at the South has been almost wholly evil. It has stirred up bitter passions, and a fierce fanaticism, which have shut every ear and every heart against its arguments and persuasions. These efforts are more to be deplored, because the hope of freedom to the slave lies chiefly in the dispositions of his master. The Abolitionist proposed indeed to convert the slave-holder; and for this end he approached them with vituperation, and exhausted upon them the vocabulary of reproach. And he has reaped as he sowed.... Perhaps (though I am anxious to repel the thought) something has been lost to the cause of freedom and humanity.[33]
These were Dr. Channing's opinions of the Abolitionists prior to August, 1835, and he seems to have kept silent for a time after the mobbing that followed that great Faneuil Hall meeting; but a year later, when many other things had happened along the same line, he spoke out in an open letter to James G. Birney, an Abolitionist editor who had been driven from Cincinnati, and whose press, on which The Philanthropist was printed, had been broken up. In that letter, p. 157, supra, speaking of course not for himself alone, Dr. Channing says:
I think it best ... to extend my remarks to the spirit of violence and persecution which has broken out against the Abolitionists throughout the whole country. Of their merits and demerits as Abolitionists I have formerly spoken.... I have expressed my fervent attachment to the great end to which they are pledged and at the same time my disapprobation, to a certain extent, of their spirit and measures.... Deliberate, systematic efforts have been made, not here and there, but far and wide, to wrest from its adherents that liberty of speech and the press, which our fathers asserted in blood, and which our National and State Governments are pledged to protect as our most sacred right. Its most conspicuous advocates have been hunted and stoned, its meetings scattered, its presses broken up, and nothing but the patience, constancy and intrepidity of its members has saved it from extinction.... They are sufferers for the liberty of thought, speech and press; and in maintaining this liberty, amidst insult and violence, they deserve a place among its honorable defenders.
Still admitting that "their writings have been blemished by a spirit of intolerance, sweeping censure, and rash, injurious judgment," this great man now threw all the weight of his influence on the side of the Abolitionists, because they were the champions of free speech. Their moral worth and steady adherence to their ideas of non-resistance he pointed to admiringly, and it must always be remembered to their credit that the private lives of Garrison and his leading co-workers were irreproachable. Indeed, the unselfish devotion of these agitators and their high moral character were in themselves a serious misfortune. They soon attracted a lot of zealots, male and female, who became as reckless as they were. And these out-and-out fanatics were not themselves office-seekers. What they feared, they said, was that a "lot of soulless scamps would jump on to their shoulders to ride into office";[34] and there really was the great danger, as appeared later.
In the results that followed the mobbing of Abolitionists in the North, from 1834 to 1836, is to be found another lesson for those voters of this day who can profit by the teachings of history. The violent assaults on the Abolitionists by the friends of the Constitution and the Union constituted an epoch in the lives of these people. It gave them a footing and a hearing and many converts.
We have already noted some wonderful and instructive changes in the tide of events set in motion by the radical teachings of the New Abolitionists. The churches, as has been shown, to save the country, North and South, changed their attitude on slavery itself. Dr. Channing, who had opposed the methods of the Abolitionists, became, as many others did with him, when mobs had assailed these people, their defender and eulogist, because they were martyrs for the sake of free speech; and now we are to see in John Quincy Adams another change, equally notable, a change that was to make Mr. Adams thenceforward the most momentous figure, at least during its earlier stages, in the tragic drama that is the subject of our story.
Elected to the House of Representatives after the expiration of his term as President, Mr. Adams was not in sympathy with the methods of the Abolitionists. Indeed, prior to December 31, 1831, he had shown as little interest in slavery as he did when on that day in presenting to the House fifteen petitions against slavery he "deprecated a discussion which would lead to ill-will, to heart-burning, to mutual hatred ... without accomplishing anything else."[35]
The petitions presented by Mr. Adams were referred to a committee.
The Southerners had not then become so exasperated as to insist on Congress refusing to receive Abolition petitions. But multiplying these petitions was a ready means of provoking the slave-holders, and soon petitions poured in from many quarters, couched, most of them, in language, not disrespectful to Congress but provoking to slave-holders.
Unfortunately, the lower house of Congress on May 26, 1836, which was while mobs in the North were still trying to put down the Abolitionists, passed a resolution that all such petitions, etc., should thereafter be laid upon the table, without further action. Adams voted against it as "a direct violation of the Constitution of the United States." The Constitution forbids any law "abridging the freedom of speech ... or the right ... to petition the government for a redress of grievances." The resolution to lay all anti-slavery petitions on the table without further action was passed, "with the hope that it might put a stop to the agitation that seemed to endanger the existence of the Union." But it had the opposite effect. It soon became known as the "gag resolution," and was, for years, the centre of the most aggravating discussions that had, up to that time, ever occurred in Congress. Mr. Adams in these debates became, without, it seems, ever having been in full sympathy with the agitators, thenceforward their champion in Congress, and so continued until the day of his death in 1848.
The Abolitionists were happy. They were succeeding in their programme—making the Southern slave-holder odious by exasperating him into offending Northern sentiment.
In 1840 there were 200 Abolition societies, with a membership of over 200,000. Agitation had created all over the North a spirit of hostility to slavery as it existed in the South, and especially to the admission of new slave States into the Union. In 1840 the struggle over the application of Texas for admission into the Union had already, for three years, been mooted. Objections to the admission of the new State were many, such as: American adventurers had wrongfully wrested control of the new State from Mexico; boundary lines were unsettled; war with Mexico would follow, etc.; but chiefly, Texas was a slave State, which was, in the South, a strong reason for annexation. There were, however, many sound and unanswerable arguments for the admission of the new State, just such as had influenced Jefferson in purchasing the Louisiana territory: Texas was contiguous, her territory and resources immense.
On the issue thus joined the first great gun had been fired by Dr. Channing, who, though still more moderate than some, might now be classed as an Abolitionist. August 1, 1837, he wrote a long open letter to Henry Clay against annexation, and in that letter he said:
To me it seems not only the right but the duty of the Free States, in case of the annexation of Texas, to say to the slave-holding States, "We regard this act as the dissolution of the Union; the essential conditions of the National Compact are violated."[36]
This was very like the pronunciamento already made by Garrison—"no union with slavery."
The underlying reasons that controlled Southern statesmen in this contest over Texas, and the motives that animated them in the fierce battles they fought later for new slave States, are thus stated by Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, of New England.[37]
It should in justice be remembered that the effort at that period to enlarge the area of slavery was an effort on the part of the South, dictated by a desire to remain in the Union, and not to accept the issue of an inherent incompatibility of a political union between slave-holding and non-slave-holding States.
In 1840 the first effort for the annexation of Texas, by treaty, was defeated in the Senate.
If the Southerners had been as ready to accept the doctrine of an inherent incompatibility between slave and free States as were Dr. Channing and those other Abolitionists who were now declaring for "no union with slave-holders," they would at once have seceded and joined Texas; but the South still loved the Union, and strove, down to 1860, persistently, and often passionately, for power that would enable it to remain safely in its folds.
Texas was finally admitted in 1845, after annexation had been passed on by the people in the presidential election of 1844. In that election Clay was defeated by the Abolitionists. Because Clay was not unreservedly against annexation the Abolitionists drew from the Whigs in New York State enough votes, casting them for Birney, to defeat Clay and elect Polk; and now Abolitionism was a factor in national politics.
The two great national parties were the Democrats and the Whigs, the voters somewhat equally divided between them. For years both parties had regarded the Abolitionists precisely as did the non-partisan meeting at Faneuil Hall, in August, 1835—as a band of agitators, organized for the purpose of interfering with slavery where it was none of their business; and both parties had meted out to this new and, as they deemed it, pestilent sect, unstinted condemnation. But at last the voters of this despised cult had turned a presidential election and were making inroads in both parties. Half a dozen Northern States, in which in 1835 "no protest had been made against the fugitive slave law of 1793," had already passed "personal liberty laws" intended to obstruct and nullify that law. And now it was "slave-catchers" and not Abolitionists who were being mobbed in the North.
Boston had reversed its attitude toward the Abolitionists. On May 31, 1849, the New England Anti-Slavery Society was holding its annual convention in that very Faneuil Hall where, in 1835, Abolitionism had been so roundly condemned; and now Wendell Phillips, pointing to one of two fugitive slaves, who then sat triumphantly on the platform, said, "amid great applause, ... 'We say that they may make their little laws in Washington, but that Faneuil Hall repeals them, in the name of the humanity of Massachusetts.'"[38]
Poets headed by Whittier and Longfellow, authors like Emerson and Lowell, and orators like Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips, had joined the agitators, and all united in assaulting the fugitive slave law. The following, from James Russell Lowell's "Biglow Papers," No. 1, June, 1840, is a specimen of the literature that was stirring up hostility against slavery and the "slave-catcher" in the breasts of many thousands, who were joining in an anti-slavery crusade while disdaining companionship with the Abolitionists: