USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 4 > Part 30
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Garrison never let go of the fundamental principle that slavery and genuine democratic government were incompati- ble. This conviction he fortified by a journalistic instinct that placed him alongside James Gordon Bennett as an origi- nator of journalistic methods, and beside Horace Greeley in his skill at enraging his opponents. The key to his amazing publicity was that he had an unerring sense of what was news. He compelled his enemies to quote him and thus to widen his propaganda. The obscure newspaper man became a national figure.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS IN CONGRESS
Meanwhile the vexed subject began more and more to in- ject itself into the National Legislature at the Capital. There the events leading to the annexation of Texas and war with Mexico were set in train; there the acts of the Massachusetts antislavery extremists were roundly denounced and watched
ANTISLAVERY PETITIONS IN CONGRESS 325
with never-failing alarm, disapprobation, and bitterness by the Southerners, who dominated Congress and the presidency.
Around one noble Massachusetts figure a storm raged steadily for nearly twenty years. John Quincy Adams, ex- President of the United States, set an admirable example of public service by entering Congress after his retirement from the White House and serving as a Representative until (February 23, 1848) he fell dying upon the floor of the House. For the extremists in Boston he had at first little or no use, and to the last he could not find himself in sympathy with the strange causes which they linked to their demand for emancipation. August 18, 1835, he wrote in his diary: "There is a small, shallow, and enthusiastic party preaching the aboli- tion of slavery upon the principles of extreme democracy ; but the democratic spirit and the popular feeling is everywhere against them."
He himself was opposed to immediate emancipation; he even would not vote for the abolition of slavery in the Terri- tory of Florida or the District of Columbia, though he was ready to present petitions asking for the removal of the Capital from the District to some other site and to vote for that re- moval. He had cried out years before (1820) : "O! if but one man could arise with a genius capable of comprehending, a heart capable of supporting, and an utterance capable of communicating those eternal truths which belong to the ques- tion,-to lay bare in all its nakedness that outrage upon the goodness of God, human slavery." Although he did not hesi- tate to denounce the Abolitionists-until the whirligig of time made him welcome and seek their support-he was himself anathema to the slaveholders, notwithstanding the fact that his approach to the problem in Congress was much more as a champion of political and constitutional rights, and especially of the right of the American people to petition their congres- sional rulers, than as an opponent of slavery.
ANTISLAVERY PETITIONS IN CONGRESS
When he offered fifteen antislavery petitions (December 12, 1831) for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia,
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there was little or no excitement in the House. A repetition of the offering (February 4, 1833) revealed great uneasiness. Mason, of Virginia, declared that, if this sort of thing con- tinued, the end would be the abolition of slavery in the United States. Two years later the House declined to refer these petitions to the Committee on the District of Columbia, but laid them on the table. Still Adams persisted. January 7, 1836, Senator John C. Calhoun moved that two of these petitions relating to slavery in the District of Columbia be not received by the Senate. The debate raged for two months, when the motion was rejected; the petitions were received, and. their request scorned. By May 26, 1836, the lower House had gone so far as to vote that all petitions relating to slavery should be laid on the table without being printed or referred to a committee. "I hold the resolution to be," said Mr. Adams, "a direct violation of the Constitution of the United States, the rules of this House, and the rights of my constituents"-and he therefore refused to vote upon it. This gag rule was reenacted in the House in 1837, but in nowise did it deter John Quincy Adams from his almost daily pastime of offering petitions.
ATTEMPT TO CENSURE ADAMS
The climax came February 6, 1837, when the Massachusetts statesman asked leave to present a petition purporting to be from twenty-two slaves. The House burst into a storm of rage unparallelled in its history, which lasted three days. Adams was held to be a base "defiler of the House." He was threatened with prison for this incitement to insurrection; that he be censured at the bar by the Speaker was an almost unanimous demand. He took it with curious calm and, after the Southerners had for some time unloaded their abuse and threats, declared that they might punish him as severely as they pleased, but that they must permit him to set them right on one or two points. He had not offered the petition, but had merely asked for a ruling on it, as it was not a petition for the abolition of slavery, but one against abolition, the twenty- two slaves wishing to continue in chains! The speaker there- after, a New York member, more than intimated that Adams
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was far gone in his second childhood. The second declared that Adams had only injured his cause, since he had "irritated almost to madness" his opponents, for his amusement. Inten- tional or otherwise, the presentation of that petition remains the best and most effective practical joke in the history of Congress. It aroused widespread indignation on both sides, and more than ever drew attention to the determination of Congress that Americans should not raise with their official representatives any questions bearing on slavery.
The Massachusetts legislature voted in this year against the congressional gag resolutions. Other States went on record, and petitions doubled and redoubled. In 1837-1838 the peti- tions bore no less than 200,000 signatures. Adams himself wrote on April 19, 1837 : "In the South it [slavery] is a per- petual agony of conscious guilt and terror attempting to dis- guise itself under sophistical argumentation and braggart men- aces." Indeed, the South by its violence and by this trampling underfoot of constitutional law was the best advertiser of the antislavery propaganda. Meanwhile, Adams became for once the hero of the abolitionists, whose extremists forgot for the moment that he was a Whig and opposed immediate emanci- pation. He was visited by many of the "fanatics," as they cheerfully called themselves-Birney, Garrison, Jackson, Whittier, Goodell, the Grimkés, and Benjamin Lundy. Their aid he both welcomed and sought in his contests in his district. He remained, however, opposed to separate political action, as he was outspoken against the annexation of Texas until it seemed to him hopeless to fight any longer. None the less, he drifted steadily toward the disunion attitude of the extreme abolitionists.
MASSACHUSETTS ABOLITIONISTS
Gradually other men of prominence joined the cause. Ed- mund Quincy, like Wendell Phillips, spoke out when Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered at Alton, Illinois, by a proslavery mob because he published an antislavery paper. Ellis Gray Loring, another man of highest Boston social position, and Francis Jackson, together with Edmund Quincy, called a meet-
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ing to protest against the Lovejoy murder, which filled Faneuil Hall with the despised abolitionists-the mayor now consent- ing. Both Phillips and Quincy were sons of former mayors of Boston. Quincy's father was also President of Harvard College ; he made every social sacrifice to join the abolitionists, and became one of its most successful leaders, joining Garri- son in his advocacy of non-resistance to force. Whatever he and Garrison and others could do to make it clear that they were opposed to forcible liberation they did. Loring, who was a distinguished lawyer, lost a large number of his numerous clients when he threw himself into the cause, and severed many pleasant and valuable social ties. "No one of the Boston circle of abolitionists was more beloved for his amiable spirit, or more trusted for judgment and integrity." To him, per- haps, more than to anyone else, was due the necessary financial support of the Liberator. In every one of its crises he was at the forefront to raise funds, for that journal was supported with difficulty.
Henry G. Chapman and his brilliant wife, Maria Weston Chapman, had early joined the Massachusetts abolitionists "against the earnest remonstrances of their pastor, Dr. William Ellery Channing, and under the condemnation of all their friends and acquaintances." So, too, did David Lee Child and his wife, Lydia Maria Child. Nevertheless, there were never enough of these converts to make the abolitionists fashionable, or to endanger their Spartan virtues by making their cause popular. To the end they were anathema to folk of their own kind; with some, even as late as when emancipa- tion came to make the freeing of the slave a matter of national rightdoing.
THE LITERARY ABOLITIONISTS
Nor did the approval of the cause by literary lights, such as Whittier, Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Russell Lowell, lend sanctity to it. Lowell, beginning in 1840, labored unceasingly for the cause, contributing in all more than fifty antislavery articles, besides much very effective verse. "The aim of the true reformer." he wrote in his first
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contribution, "is not only to put an end to Negro slavery in America ; he is equally the sworn foe of tyranny throughout the world."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, though critical at first of "abolition bigots," became by 1840 a warm adherent of the cause. In 1844 he noted Garrison in his diary as "so masterly an agent for good. I cannot speak of that gentleman without respect." . As late as 1851 Emerson was hissed and howled at by part of his audience when he spoke against the Fugitive Slave Law in Cambridge City Hall. Still another intellectual recruit was Professor Charles Follen of Harvard College, a former Ger- man revolutionist. To his advocacy of immediate abolition was attributed the failure of the college to renew his ap- pointment when his professorship lapsed.
Like Emerson, the Rev. John G. Palfrey was at first luke- warm, although he had emancipated fifty slaves who came to him by inheritance; but the fight for Texas aroused him, as it did Charles Francis Adams and Charles Sumner. Though Palfrey was then Secretary of State of Massachusetts, he offered ringing resolutions at a meeting on November 4th, 1845, at which was formed a committee to oppose the annexa- tion of Texas. This meeting marked the political debut of Sumner. Later, as Congressman, Palfrey did much to take the place left vacant by the death of John Quincy Adams.
Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch was in sympathy with the Garrisonian abhorrence of force and of political action. "As an orator he was unsurpassed in fluency, logical strictness and fervor, lacking only the measure of time and space." Tall of figure, of noble countenance, his dress was unconventional, his beard very long and flowing. To reinforce the regular speakers, Frederick Douglas, the foremost and ablest of the escaped slaves, was called in, as were other fugitives who could tell their tales from the platform, or show scarred backs or other evidences of ill treatment.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS AND CHARLES SUMNER
Of the other apostles, Sumner became steadily more effec- tive as the years after 1845 passed, finally entering the Senate
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in December, 1851. William Ellery Channing at first seemed to the radical Garrisonian abolitionists timid, compromising, and really of help to the proslavery cause. Channing was extremely cautious, and preferred to attack a wrong as a wrong rather than the individuals responsible. Nevertheless he had a wide following; and when he declared for disruption of the Union rather than annexation of Texas, his voice carried far. As to Theodore Parker, there was no question at any time where or how he stood. He "touched, quickened, and inspired thousands of minds," and was a lofty pulpit figure in a period when the Christian church in America was all but entirely faithless to its tenets.
As such recruits came in, as the people of Massachusetts, like those of all other States, became more and more stirred, as the slavery issue became predominant, the Bay State move- ment made rapid strides. May 1, 1838, there were 222 societies in Massachusetts, and funds sufficient for the expenses of a large group of antislavery propagandists and for shipping antislavery circulating libraries. There were 2,000 such societies in the free States by 1840. By 1838 six of the twenty-eight Methodist conferences were permeated by the abolition doctrine, and fully one thousand Methodist clergy- men were counted as adherents to the cause. State after State took political action against proslavery lawlessness and aggrandisement, and political conventions began to go on record on this all-dividing issue.
ANTISLAVERY FINANCE
The financing of this unpopular cause was never easy, yet at times the response was surprising to the abolitionists them- selves. In New England a chief source of revenue was in the numerous fairs. Of these the Massachusetts (later National) Antislavery Bazaar, instituted in 1834, usually held in Faneuil Hall, was the social event of the year in the abolition move- ment. Gifts for it came from England and Europe, and often forty or fifty New England towns were represented. The evenings were distinguished by addresses given by the various leaders. In 1845 a committee of thirty women, headed by
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Maria Weston Chapman, issued a little four-page paper, The National Anti-Slavery Bazaar Gazette, announcing the "great event." A special feature of these bazaars was the publication and sale for the cause of "The Liberty Bell," a volume of contributed poems and articles, usually edited by William Lloyd Garrison, with a portrait of one of the leaders as frontispiece.
To the State abolition treasury came gifts from outside of Massachusetts, notably from such rich men as Gerrit Smith, of Peterboro, New York, an owner of 376,000 acres of land, and Arthur Tappan, of New York City. Still it is not sur- prising that the treasurer of the Massachusetts society ac- counted for only $2,036.74 in 1834. By 1839 this sum had risen to $10,883.45 ; in 1849 the amount was $6,188.02. With these small sums, the society made a prodigious amount of noise. Its paid and unpaid lecturers made every possible sacrifice and frequently went hungry. Salaries were of the lowest. In all branches of the work, in all the several abolition camps, there was remarkable devotion and great unselfishness. New England was at this time deeply interested in forums, lyceums, and debates on public platforms, and Massachusetts had an extraordinarily intelligent citizenship to appeal to, for out of 250,000 native adults it had but 1,000 illiterates.
NATIONAL ANTISLAVERY SOCIETY
As for the National Antislavery Society, founded December 4th, 1833, it financed itself largely by levying upon the State societies, notably Massachusetts. As early as 1835 its annual budget called for $30,000, chiefly for the employment of field agents, the free distribution of journals and other printed matter, and the organizing of new societies-in 1836 they were formed at the rate of nearly one every day. Of this $30,000, $14,500 was raised at the annual convention in May, while $4,000 more came from the New England Anti-Slavery Society's Convention, at which Isaac Winslow electrified the assembly by presenting a thousand-dollar bill. The high- water mark of the national society's budget was $47,000 in 1840. As for the specifically abolition press, to which a con-
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siderable portion of these sums were devoted, it grew rapidly in numbers. This period was in a way the golden age of American journalism, since the low costs of printing a weekly -and the radical abolition papers were exclusively weeklies- made it possible for any daring spirit, with some to help him, to issue his own organ. These papers, of course, represented varying viewpoints; and some, like the Massachusetts Aboli- tionist, were founded expressly to offset and attack Garrison's Liberator.
ADVANCE IN PUBLIC SENTIMENT (1835-1840)
The outlook for the cause was so encouraging by 1836 as to lead Charles Sumner to write to Dr. Francis Lieber, "We are becoming Abolitionists at the North fast." Still there was much discrimination, contumely, and violence to face, which scarcely ended until the Civil War. Sumner was him- self hooted and hissed at Harvard in 1848. A casual report at the end of 1835 reads thus: "Brother Phelps has been mobbed in Worcester County. . . Rev. Mr. Grosvenor has been mobbed in Worcester County. . . Charles Stuart has been mobbed in the western part of the State of New York. . . Rev. George Storrs has been mobbed (according to law) in New Hampshire." In 1837 not a single meeting house or hall of any size could be obtained for the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. It met in the loft of a hotel stable, which enabled Garrison to declare, "Aboli- tion today, as on every day, stands upon a stable foundation."
The legislature granted, however, the use of the House of Representatives for a single evening session of the society. The House upheld John Quincy Adams and denounced the Federal House of Representatives for its violation of the right of petition, and soon thereafter it granted the right of trial by jury to fugitive slaves. In the face of reaction and bitter- ness, there was thus steady progress in Massachusetts.
CLERICAL OPPOSITION (1835-1837)
This political advance was accompanied by increasingly bitter dissensions among the abolitionists themselves. The
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Liberator's refusal to ally itself with any political movement or party, while calling on all abolitionists to vote against all in public life who showed proslavery sympathies, alienated those who felt that political action afforded the only hope of emancipation for the slaves. The Liberator's bitter criticisms of the churches and clergy aroused equally bitter resentment. Dr. Channing at the beginning of 1837 denounced the aboli- tionists in these words: "Their writings have been blemished by a spirit of intolerance, sweeping censure, and rash injurious judgment." To which Garrison retorted, "A million letters like this would never emancipate a single slave, but rather rivet his fetters more strongly."
In the middle of July, 1837, there appeared a pastoral letter from the General Association of Massachusetts to the orthodox Congregational churches under its charge, with the purpose of closing these churches to antislavery speakers and of barring especially the lectures of the sisters Grimké, two Southern women, daughters of a judge of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, former slaveholders, who came to live and work for abolition in the North.
This pastoral letter was soon (August 2) followed by an "Appeal to Clerical Abolitionists," signed by five clergymen headed by the Rev. Charles Fitch of Boston, directed against the Garrisonian "abuse of gospel ministers and excellent Christians" for failure to speak out and the demand of the extremists that antislavery notices must be read by any minister to whom they were handed. This in turn brought out a third "Appeal" from the abolitionists of the Andover Theo- logical Seminary. This document dwelt especially upon the abolition attacks on the gospel ministers, criticizing their "un- settling the domestic economy, removing the landmarks of society and unhinging the machinery of government," and finally, their encouragement of "public lectures by females"- then an incredibly wicked blow at the very foundations of society, certain to unsex all women if continued.
Laymen like Lewis Tappan, who wrote to Garrison protest- ing that he had not "been sufficiently kind and Christlike," joined the protests. The editor's nonresistance seems to have hurt him little, his championing the emancipation of women a
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great deal. Besides being charged with infidelity, atheism, and a desire to destroy the churches, he was accused of advo- cating free love, communism, etc.
NEW RECRUITS (1837-1845)
These debates as to whether Garrison was a fit leader and whether he should or should not be removed from his editor- ship were interrupted by the murder of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, already mentioned. This reduction of the whole question of the personal liberty of all individuals down to the fate of one individual, who was murdered for abolition publications in a free State, stirred the whole country. Besides winning Wendell Phillips and Edmund Quincy as active re- cruits for the abolition propaganda, this crime roused the secular journals to the gravity of the proslavery attacks upon the freedom of the American press and other constitutional rights. It also induced Dr. Channing to join with some of the more militant abolitionists at the great Boston protest meeting in Faneuil Hall. At this the attorney-general of Massachusetts, James T. Austin, delivered a dissenting address which stirred Wendell Phillips to one of his greatest flights of oratory.
From that time on events outside of New England more and more engrossed the interest of antislavery men and the abolitionists, and brought to many who did not wish to be drawn into the struggle a realization that the fight was no longer only a battle for freedom for the slave, but had become also a combat for the constitutional right of the American citizen to speak in public and to write with complete liberty. It was thus a double fight which the antislavery men and the abolitionists were waging; in this phase of their militancy they could unite and agree.
VIOLENCE OF GARRISON (1837-1840)
In other directions the schisms among them became more pronounced. It was not only that Garrison would not approve of the resort to political methods and that he sponsored other
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From a photograph
Courtesy of Harvard College Library
WENDELL PHILLIPS
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NEW RECRUITS
reform movements besides antislavery. He was given to censorious rebuking of other antislavery men who could not see eye to eye with him as to methods, and felt it his duty to show up what he considered the fallacies of other means of attack. That he was usually justified by the more distant event nowise mitigated the wrath he aroused. He vigorously opposed by name, as "unfit representatives of abolition," such friends as Gerrit Smith, William Goodell, and Myron Holley in central New York, and James G. Birney and others who were bent on a political antislavery movement and actually started the Liberty Party, as later he denounced Cassius M. Clay, the Kentucky abolitionist, for taking part in the slave- holders' war against Mexico. The Liberty and Free-soil Parties were targets for his broadsides as long as they existed.
Naturally there were reprisals. Thus at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts society, January 23rd, 1839, there was a determined though unsuccessful attempt to depose Mr. Gar- rison and to substitute another organ for the Liberator, follow- ing attacks upon him in the Middlesex and Cambridge societies. This was sponsored by Henry B. Stanton, Rev. Amos A. Phelps, Rev. Alanson St. Clair, and Rev. Charles T. Torrey (destined to die in a Baltimore jail while under a long sentence for running off slaves. )
Stanton opposed Garrison because of his nonresistance, his refusal to vote at any election or to countenance political action, but the latter was sustained by an overwhelming vote (180 to 24). The opposition at once proceeded to found a new weekly as a rival to the Liberator, the Massachusetts Abolitionist, to be edited by Henry B. Stanton and John G. Whittier. This was followed by a break with the New York executive committee of the national society, which had been alienated by Garrison's reply to the "Clerical Appeal" and his refusal to go to the polls. February 13, 1839, it notified the Massachusetts society that their financial arrangements were at an end and that thenceforth it would send its own financial agents into the State. At the quarterly meeting of the Massa- chusetts society its management was again upheld, by a vote of 142 to 23, in its controversy with the national society.
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RIVAL SOCIETIES (1839-1840)
The inevitable result was a struggle for control, and the founding of a rival Bay State organization, "The Massa- chusetts Abolition Society." At a national convention of abolitionists held in Albany, July 31, 1839, the Garrisonians were outvoted and their leader withdrew, but out of the gather- ing came only tame resolutions looking toward political action.
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