USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 4 > Part 29
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For those who interpret all history in economic terms, the antislavery struggle now seems inevitable, for its causation was economic as well as humanitarian. New England both profited and suffered, though indirectly, by Eli Whitney's invention in 1793 of the cotton gin, as did the South. In the first decades of the nineteenth century the rich and prosperous citizens of Massachusetts profited by their trade with the slave States, and looked with indifference upon the waning of what had been a promising movement, both north and south, toward the emancipation of the blacks. For example, there had been three important antislavery societies founded as early as 1780, of which that in Pennsylvania was the most active. Massachusetts not only had her cotton mills and cloth industry, her vessels in the coastwise trade, but also her clip- per ships carrying cotton in its natural and fabricated condi-
313
BENJAMIN LUNDY
tion across the seas. More than that, some of her citizens were by no means above the rich profits which came from the illicit and incredibly inhuman and villainous slave trade, which most of the powers by that time outlawed on all the seas. New England's complicity in slavery was beyond ques- tion. As a realization of this interest came after some years, the abolitionists more and more divided their fire between the slavery promoters of the State and the Southerners who held men and women in bondage.
When the revolt in the church came on, the question of its attitude towards slavery, like the abolition furor itself, seemed a great outrage to the rest of the pulpits, to the press, and to an overwhelming majority of the public. Why must the good name of the State be tarnished by a movement which, without restraint of language, denounced the conductors of the Re- public and soon the Republic itself, which spread doctrines of hate and dissension against all who lived below Mason and Dixon's Line? That the chief offenders outside the church were of obscure origin; that they were not foreign-born agita- tors but Americans of old stock; that they refused to be silenced by denunciation, contempt, threats of imprisonment, and even mob violence-all that only added fuel to the flames of resentment. This the officials of the State shared with the members of the best clubs; they freely denounced those who were disturbing the domestic peace, who were setting a sec- tion against a section, who were inflaming Americans against Americans. They, the successors of the men who died so that there should be no taxation without representation and fought for self-government in the land, found in the black skins of the slaves complete reason why the principles of liberty and brotherhood and self-government, and the right to the bodies of one's wife and children as well as to one's own, did not apply to the men and women who were daily sold on the same auction blocks with horses and cattle.
BENJAMIN LUNDY
As it fell, a native of Newburyport became the forefront of the offending. This challenging person was William
.
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ANTISLAVERY CRISIS
Lloyd Garrison, born December 10, 1805, son of a sea captain, who had to leave school at the age of thirteen to become an apprentice in the office of the Newburyport Herald. Just why there should have been born in him, rather than in some one else, an all-controlling determination to purge the United States of slavery, is one of those mysteries of the human soul which must always remain inexplicable.
To the sufferings of the slave his heart was early attuned, but the impulse to devote himself wholly to the slavery issue came from without-from one Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker, who had observed the workings of slavery and the interstate traffic in blacks at close range. With amazing devotion and self-sacrifice, Lundy, a man of delicate frame, dedicated his small means, acquired in the saddlery trade, and his whole life to the cause of abolition. He denied himself the society of wife and children, while he ranged from one end of the country to the other and visited Mexico and Haiti.
Here and there he acquired a subscriber to his irregularly appearing Genius of Universal Emancipation. Everywhere he sought out those who like himself had freed themselves from all color prejudice, who believed that the teachings of the Scriptures, the Ten Commandments, and the doctrines of Jesus were unaffected in their application by the color of an individual's skin. Between 1826 and 1828 this apostle cov- ered twenty-four hundred miles in nineteen States, upwards of sixteen hundred of them on foot, "from the Green Mountains of Vermont to the banks of the Mississippi." During these wanderings he held fifty public meetings. As a contemporary said, he "multiplied antislavery societies in every quarter, put every petition in motion relative to the extinction of slav- ery in the District of Columbia, everywhere awakened the slumbering sympathies of the people. ... Rivers and moun- tains vanish in his path; midnight finds him wending his solitary way over an unfrequented road; the sun is anticipated in his rising. Never was moral sublimity of character better illustrated."
AW Els an & Co.Boston,
From a photograph by Rockwood, N. Y., 1874
Courtesy of the Author
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
315
FOUNDING OF THE LIBERATOR
GARRISON'S CONNECTION WITH LUNDY
Seriously deaf, Lundy was not a good speaker and could not hold or interest an audience, yet "he never spoke in vain." In March, 1828, he met Garrison at the boarding house in which the latter lived, and fired him to his life's task. Gar- rison, despite his youth, had already been connected as editor and publisher with three newspapers. He readily joined Lundy as a partner in the publishing of the Genius of Uni- versal Emancipation in Baltimore itself, the first number of their joint editorship appearing September 2, 1829, and the last, with which the Genius ceased publication as a weekly, on March 5, 1830. With Mr. Garrison's accession to the staff, it entered upon troubled waters. His advocacy of immediate unconditional emancipation, his assaults upon the American Colonization Society, which promised to end slavery by send- ing the Negroes back to Africa or elsewhere, his fiery uncom- promising language, and his attacks upon individuals by name rapidly reduced the subscription list of the newspaper.
Six weeks after the suspension of the weekly Genius, Gar- rison entered Baltimore jail a prisoner, having been sentenced to pay a fine of fifty dollars and costs for libeling Francis Todd and Nicholas Brown of Newburyport. Their fellow townsman had denounced them in the Genius for transporting seventy- five slaves from Annapolis, Maryland, to New Orleans, which he said was a bad way "to illustrate New England humanity and morality." According to Garrison, men who partici- pated in the slave trade should be "sentenced to solitary confinement for life"; they were "the enemies of their own species-highway robbers and murderers." For this accusation Garrison, being entirely without means, spent seven weeks in jail. Then his fine and the costs were paid by a rich mer- chant of New York, Arthur Tappan, who for a considerable time thereafter became one of Mr. Garrison's stanchest sup- porters and financial backers.
FOUNDING OF THE Liberator (1831)
The failure of the Genius only stimulated in Mr. Garrison the determination to go on with a weekly of his own. That
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ANTISLAVERY CRISIS
he was penniless, unknown, without social position or influ- ence, and with scarcely a moneyed supporter, that he had no capital but his pen and his use of fiery language, deterred him not at all. The encouragement of a few friends sufficed ; and on January 1, 1831, in Boston, he and a new partner, Isaac Knapp, began the publication of the Liberator. This became in many respects one of the most powerful and suc- cessful journals ever published in the United States, although it never made money and its edition never ran beyond four thousand copies. For the first few months, Garrison and Knapp slept on the floor of their composing room and sub- sisted "chiefly upon bread and milk, a few cakes and a little fruit, obtained from a baker's shop opposite and a petty cake and fruit shop in the basement"-and they were often hungry. Being a skilled journeyman, Mr. Garrison, who was then twenty-six years old, did his own typesetting. For years he composed his editorials at the case, putting them directly into type without first committing them to paper, and he performed the actual printing and the addressing and mailing. He borrowed the money for his equipment, but he had not a single subscriber when he completed his first issue; and the arrival of $54 for twenty-seven Philadelphia subscriptions in advance seemed like manna from Heaven.
When indignant protests as to the Liberator and its fiery contents began to reach Mayor Harrison Gray Otis of Boston, that worthy had to admit that he had never heard of the youth- ful editor or his paper. He made an investigation, and then wrote to the governors of Virginia and Georgia that city officers "had ferretted out the paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a few very insignificant persons of all colors." The Mayor was sure that this "new fanaticism" was not likely to win converts "among the respectable classes of our people." He lived to admit his grave error of judg- ment; the city over which he presided erected a monument fifty years later to the editor in his "obscure hole." This letter of Mayor Otis moved James Russell Lowell to write a poem on William Lloyd Garrison containing these stirring stanzas :
317
CHARACTER OF THE LIBERATOR
"In a small chamber, friendless and unseen, Toiled o'er his types one poor, unlearned young man; The place was dark, unfurnitured and mean; Yet there the freedom of a race began. * * O Truth! O Freedom! how are ye still born In the rude stable, in the manger nursed ! What humble hands unbar those gates of morn Through which the splendors of the New Day burst!"
CHARACTER OF THE Liberator
The published correspondence made whole sections of the country acquainted with his doctrine before his fellow towns- men were aware of his existence. The State of Georgia took the Liberator seriously, for the legislature, December 26, 1831, paid Garrison the unique and extraordinary compli- ment of offering a reward of $5,000 for his arrest and conviction, or those of any persons circulating the Liberator within the limits of that State. A grand jury at Raleigh, North Carolina, had already (in October) indicted Garrison and Knapp for the felony of circulating the Liberator in North Carolina.
So long as reforms are to be achieved and reformers to achieve them, there will be continuing debate as to which of two methods is the wiser; whether to use only polite phrases and by wounding no one's feelings to keep cool the tempers of all parties to a controversy, so as to make possible calm and quiet reasoning together; or whether the proper journalistic weapons are the rapier and the sledgehammer. Some histor- ians have believed that Garrison's methods were the wrong ones; and they lay at his and Horace Greeley's doors the chief responsibility for the resort to arms in 1861, because of their "intemperate" language. The other school believes that the hour produced the right men and the right method; and that emancipation of the slaves would have been postponed for decades if the Garrison school had been less harsh and more charitable in its expressions.
Garrison himself adapted Charles James Fox's words in
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ANTISLAVERY CRISIS
the salutatory of the first issue of the Liberator and said. "On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation." He then added his own declaration: "I am in earnest-I will not equivocate-I will not excuse-I will not retreat a single inch-AND I WILL BE HEARD." The charge that he was retarding the cause of emancipation by the coarseness of his invective and the precipitancy of his measures he always vehemently denied.
GARRISONIAN PRINCIPLES (1831-1861)
Perhaps Garrison was wrong, but it is a fact that few, if any, great reforms have been achieved save when some persons burned within and fairly flamed their indignation at the wrong to which they addressed themselves. It is rare, too, when such souls appear, that they can either restrain their words or be certain always to weigh every event in just scales and to do complete justice to every one whom they assail. In any case it is undeniable that with Garrison's appearance upon the scene the Massachusetts antislavery movement was galvanized into life and became at once highly disturbing and incendiary. It is also true that the violence of his writings caused lasting schisms in the ranks of the abolitionists, as did also some of his religious views and some of the other radical causes which he espoused, as well as his refusal to put the abolition move- ment into politics. Some of his warmest supporters were alienated from time to time by the scorching vigor of his denunciation of individuals, of the church, and of the national government ; they wished him to leave individuals alone and to concentrate on the slavery system.
The founding in Boston on January 14, 1835, of the Ameri- can Union for the Relief and Improvement of the Colored Race was an attempt on the part of some of the abolition ele- ments affiliated with the Colonization Society to abolish slavery by exerting "a kind moral influence upon the community." In place of the "universal and immediate abolition" demanded by the Garrisonians, this short-lived society with the long name urged that slavery be abandoned "with the least possible
319
WOMEN'S RIGHTS
delay." Similarly, there was formed in 1835 a Cambridge Anti-Slavery Society of dissenters from Mr. Garrison's violence of language; it lived only about a year. Some later schisms and bolts were more serious and more lasting.
Garrison did not originate the doctrine of immediate and unconditional emancipation. That had been advocated before his time by the Rev. George Bourne in 1815, and by the Rev. James Duncan, of Vevay, Indiana, in 1824. But he nailed this banner to his mast and refused every suggestion of a compro- mise.
WOMEN'S RIGHTS
To his major crusade he added advocacy of temperance, women's rights, and international peace, the corner stone of the latter campaign being nonresistance-the refusal to de- fend one's self against violence or take up arms at the behest of one's government or State. Every one of these causes, and his liberal views as to the Sabbath, drove supporters away from him.
It is impossible at this date to understand the bitterness of feeling aroused by the admission of women to the antislavery work and meetings. Thus, when the New England Anti- Slavery Convention met in Boston on May 30, 1838, six ortho- dox clergymen of high standing and one important layman had their names struck from the rolls because of their hot in- dignation that any one should so contravene the prescription of God and the primary dictates of a civilized society in per- mitting women to appear in public meeting with men and to degrade themselves by speaking from the platform and debat- ing from the floor. The editor of the Christian Mirror insinu- ated that "it was disreputable for a woman to be closeted with two men in committee"; and the Rhode Island Congregational Association unanimously refused to receive a memorial from an abolitionist convention in Boston on the sole ground that it came from an "unscripturally. women-ruled convention." The poet Whittier, though an ardent abolitionist, was one of the most scandalized.
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ANTISLAVERY CRISIS
NEW ENGLAND ANTISLAVERY SOCIETY (1832-1837)
Besides rousing people to feel deeply and passionately with or against him, Garrison gave a practical side to the anti- slavery campaign, despite his idealism and his refusal to com- promise. With twelve others, white and black, he formed in Boston, on January 6, 1832, the New England Anti-Slavery Society. "We have met tonight," he said, "in this obscure school house; our members are few and our influence limited ; but, mark my prediction, Faneuil Hall shall ere long echo with the principles we have set forth. We shall shake the Nation by their mighty, power."
To the new society flocked the few who, like Benjamin C. Bacon, had early espoused the abolition cause. Bacon had served as office agent and secretary of the "Anti-Slavery Depository." From that moment on the Garrisonians pressed for a National Anti-Slavery Society until one was organized in Philadelphia amid almost unanimous "public contempt and odium." It adopted, on December 5, 1833, the declaration of principles drafted by the editor of the Liberator. Before this event, in 1833 he visited England to bring the American antislavery movement into close touch with the British, which, then under the leadership of Wilberforce and Clarkson, was well on its way to the emancipation of the West Indian negroes (August 1, 1834). Ever thereafter the British abolitionists gave aid and comfort to the leaders of the struggle in Massa- chusetts.
Thus officially launched, the movement grew apace. It drew to it fanatics and cranks-it was at an antislavery con- vention that Maria Weston Chapman exclaimed: "The good Lord uses instruments for His purpose I would not touch with a fifty-foot pole"-but also men and women of extra- ordinarily fine character and entirely selfless purpose. The very dangers they faced bound them together; for years Garrison never knew, when he left home in the morning, whether he would live to return. Still more were they tied to one another by the spiritual exaltation that comes when one gives one's life unselfishly to the cause of others. Quakers many of them, theirs was a marvelous serenity of spirit. Some
6
After a mezzotint by Sartin
Courtesy of the Author
After a daguerrotype
Courtesy of the Author
BENJAMIN LUNDY
MARIA WESTON
CHAPMAN
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PROSLAVERY OPPOSITION
of the earliest recruits were the Rev. Samuel J. May, of Brooklyn, Connecticut, and later of Leicester, Massachusetts, whose service to the cause was priceless; Samuel E. Sewall and A. Bronson Alcott; Moses Brown, of Providence ; General Samuel C. Fessenden, of Portland, Maine, the father of the distinguished Senator William Pitt Fessenden; and John Greenleaf Whittier, of Haverhill, whose first poems Mr. Garrison had published when editor of the Newburyport Free Press.
With these as a nucleus, the Massachusetts group grew rapidly ; soon it won men and women of high social position, who cheerfully sacrificed their status on the altar of liberty. In Pennsylvania those of corresponding sentiments gave aid and comfort; in Vermont, which Garrison visited in 1828- 1829, he was allowed by the Bennington Journal of the Times to plead emancipation. In Maine, and above all in the Western Reserve of Ohio, kindred spirits arose in ever-growing num- bers and established successful stations of the Underground Railroad. By December, 1837, no less than two hundred abolition societies were in existence. The conscience of the nation began to awake; against desperate odds the battle was on.
PROSLAVERY OPPOSITION (1835)
With every day that it was waged, the proslavery element predominant in Massachusetts made itself increasingly felt, and drifted more toward forcible repression and mob violence. The "best citizens" of Boston in a meeting at Faneuil Hall, on August 21, 1835, denounced the Anti-Slavery Society and all interference with the South and its "peculiar institution." Ex-Senator Peleg Sprague, Richard Fletcher, and Harrison Gray Otis were the speakers, with the mayor, Theodore Lyman, Jr., in the chair. The orators were bitter in their excoriation of the fanatics, who, it was stated, unfortunately could not be prosecuted because there were no laws covering their offences. Men like Edward Everett demanded such legislation.
They deprecated violence, yet their implications were plain. George Thompson, the brilliant English orator, who
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ANTISLAVERY CRISIS
had come to the United States to speak for immediate aboli- tion, received especially severe castigation, with the admo- nition to return home. The determination to stamp out this brand of unsettling sedition was manifest in this new meeting. Yet four years later the city authorities themselves were compelled to open Faneuil Hall to the abolitionists, at whose first meeting in the actual "Cradle of Liberty" Peleg Sprague's father spoke.
Meanwhile proslavery violence had broken out all over the country and began to have its effect in Massachusetts. In Charleston, South Carolina, a mob of three thousand persons burned copies of antislavery publications, taken from the mail by connivance of the local postmaster, whose lawless acts were officially sanctioned by the Postmaster General, Amos Kendall, himself a Massachusetts man. In Mississippi several persons were lynched by mobs who suspected them of being abolition emissaries. A reward of five thousand dollars for the head of Arthur Tappan was offered on the New York Stock Ex- change. In Massachusetts, George Thompson was mobbed at Lynn and at Abington, and narrowly escaped a mob at Con- cord, where Whittier was pelted with mud and stones, while Samuel J. May was greeted with a "shower of brickbats" at Haverhill. The latter procedure became almost the order of the day at all antislavery meetings.
September 17, 1835, saw the erection of a double gallows, for himself and George Thompson, in front of Garrison's house in Boston. Public discussion of schemes to abduct both of these men and deliver them to the South, and offers of re- wards of $20,000 for their persons showed the length to which Southern sentiment was willing to go. Finally, the Boston Centinel declared that Thompson would never be allowed to address another meeting in this country. The Boston Transcript called him the "vagabond," the "wandering insurrectionist."
THE GARRISON MOB (1835)
October 21, 1835, the crisis came. Thompson and Garrison were both scheduled to speak on that day at a meeting of the
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THE GARRISON MOB
Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. A placard widely circu- lated beforehand offered a money reward for personal violence to Thompson.
This was the work of two highly respected merchants in business on Central Wharf. It had its effect and produced what has ever since been known as the "broadcloth mob," because it contained, as the Commercial Gazette reported the next day, "many gentlemen of property and influence,"-and also many graduates of Harvard College. The mob, which numbered several thousand, rendered the women's meeting impossible. Thompson was out of town; Garrison left, and retired to the adjoining office of the Liberator. Mayor Lyman appeared and begged the mob to disperse, assuring it that Mr. Thompson was not in Boston. He then ordered the as- sembled women to leave. They did so in procession with complete calmness, passing through the howling, taunting, and vituperative mob. "As far as we could look either way," wrote Maria Weston Chapman, "the crowd extended-evi- dently of the so-called 'wealthy and respectable'; 'the moral worth', the 'influence and standing.' We saw the faces of those we had, till now, thought friends. . . . "
To appease the mob, Mayor Lyman then had the antislavery office sign on the wall of the building torn down and thrown to it. That merely inflamed the crowd. Garrison, on the ad- vice of friends, sought to escape through a house in the rear. He was caught, a rope was coiled around his waist, and he would have fared ill had not he been seized by three or four strong men who dragged him to the mayor's office for safe- keeping. Afraid that the mob, which had followed the prey, would wreck his office, the mayor took the course of commit- ting Garrison to the city jail for the crime of "unlawfully, riotously and routously assembling, disturbing and breaking the peace" and because he "a riot did cause and make"! The mob nearly took him from the sheriff as he was driven to the jail, where he was released, to leave the city for a few weeks at the earnest solicitation of the city authorities and his friends.
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ANTISLAVERY CRISIS
SUPPORTERS OF GARRISON
This episode made friends for the "traitors." Dr. Henry I. Bowditch, who witnessed the mob, "from that moment became an abolitionist" and subscribed for the Liberator; so did Charles Sumner. The Liberator's circulation took a big leap upwards. Wendell Phillips, also an indignant eyewitness, did not join the movement publicly for a year and a half. Then he became its matchless orator, sacrificing his profession (the law), his high social position, the public honors which were unquestionably awaiting him, and all the worldly ambition which his private means, his extraordinary gifts, his hand- some and fascinating personality surely warranted. The truest and most generous of friends to Garrison-whose funeral oration he pronounced-Phillips had no reservations in throwing himself into the conflict in which he repeatedly imperilled his life. An aristocrat to the finger tips, he became that most hated of social agitators, a traitor to his class and social group. But he found no difficulty in affiliating with the motley army of abolitionists, and none earned a deeper approbation or more earnest devotion.
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