USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880, Vol. III > Part 53
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slavery was a divine institution according to natural and revealed religion, not opposed to the law of love; that it was a wholesome institution, which ought to be extended ; that it was right to do away with those political bar- riers which prevented it from going into Northern Territories and Northern States; that it was not slaveholders, but the opposers of slavery who de- served condemnation ; and that he, President Lord, would himself cheerfully own slaves if it were convenient or necessary. John Henry Hopkins, Epis- copal Bishop of the Diocese of Vermont, also published a book in 1857, in which he began by giving a false definition of slavery, making it only serf- dom, and ignoring the chief evils of the system. He declared, in opposi- tion to the facts in the case, that the condition of a slave was preferable to that of a free colored man, and in many respects superior to that of the white laborer in the Northern States. He denied that Christianity was op- posed to slavery ; and declared that " the color of the African race forms an insuperable obstacle to its elevation and civilization in this country." He even went so far as to think the African slave-trade, with all its horrors, was sent by the providence of God to bring the colored people to this country, where they might be taught Christianity, and then sent back in mass to Africa to civilize that continent. He seemed to forget that the Christian training they received was chiefly a knowledge of how to raise cotton and sugar, and that an excellent lady had recently been sent to prison for teaching them to read and write, this action of hers being made criminal by the laws of the Southern States. He defended the course of the South in this long struggle, declaring that the South was right and the North wrong. "The spirit of en- croachment," said he, " is all on the side of the North," adding that the North was seeking to excite the slaves against their owners. This last asser- tion was not true, for the most ultra Abolitionists never passed a resolution or published a tract with any such purpose. But after having shown to his own satisfaction that the slave-trade was ordained by God, that slavery was a divine institution, and that the slaves were the happiest laboring population on earth, the Bishop proposed that they should all be bought by the United States, at a cost of about sixty millions of dollars annually, and be sent to Africa, with what object and for what purpose it was very difficult to discover.
To these two clerical defenders of slavery was joined Dr. Nehemiah Adams, a distinguished Orthodox divine of Boston, who has therefore a place in the history of this discussion. Going down to South Carolina in 1854, and spending three months there, he came back and published a book called A South-Side View of Slavery. The substance of it was that he had found slavery an exceedingly pleasant institution ; the slaves very happy ; and he had been told by many Southern gentlemen that they were not ill- treated, and had no wish to be free. Dr. Adams went on with the usual argu- . ments to prove slavery a divine institution, reproved the Abolitionists, and added a few delicate hints of the advantage which might come from the re- vival of the slave-trade and the extension of slavery in the United States.
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Is it wonderful that the Abolitionists, struggling against such odds in what they believed the cause of him who came to " preach deliverance to the captives," became rather angry and bitter when they saw themselves opposed by such influential teachers of Christian morals?
As if all these opponents were not enough, Mr. Garrison found himself obliged to resist and oppose a false friend, in the form of the American Col- onization Society. This association was formed Dec. 31, 1816, and in 1821 purchased the territory in Western Africa known as Liberia. Of this society Henry Clay was the president; and one of its professed objects was to pro- mote emancipation by providing a home in Africa to which freedmen could be sent. There were those who claimed that slavery in the United States could thus be abolished, by sending, at an enormous expense, the total annual increase of the colored people to Africa. Many intelligent people were so far misled as to encourage this absurd enterprise of sending the whole laboring population of the South from the country where their work was needed to one where it was not needed. The Colonization Society was encouraged by many Southern slaveholders as a means of getting rid of the free colored people among them, who were regarded as dangerous to the institution of slavery; and it was supported at the North on the opposite ground of being a method by which slavery might be gradually abolished. Mr. Garrison exposed the fallacy of this hope, and helped to undeceive those who had been misled by it.
It was in the year 1844 that Garrison and the Garrisonian Abolitionists took the ground of "No union with slaveholders." In their original declaration, adopted in 1833, they had plainly stated that the Constitution of the United States pledged the people of the free States to assist in putting down a slave-insurrection, and to return the fugitive to slavery ; but ten years passed by before they deduced from this fact the logical necessity of the dissolution of the Union. Their argument now was that the Constitution of the United States was a pro-slavery document, and that every man who consented to vote or act under it was pledged thereby to support slavery whenever called on to do so. It was the Union of the North with the South which enabled the slavcholders to maintain the sys- tem and keep down the slaves. Therefore, by simply supporting the Union we were supporting slavery. The Union, therefore, ought to be dis- solved, and this should be the object of all true Abolitionists.
Many, however, of the most earnest opposers of slavery hesitated at this point, and declined to follow Mr. Garrison. They contended that if there were pro-slavery clauses in the Constitution, its spirit and influence were antislavery, and that the organic basis of the Union was not the Constitu- tion but the Declaration of Independence. They maintained that the laws of the free States were also unjust in many things, and commanded what was wrong, and that the only way to escape this kind of compromise with evil would be to go out of the world; but they added that we were thus
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THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT IN BOSTON.
only passively connected with wrong-doing, and that when called upon to assist actively in returning fugitives, we had a right to refuse, under our allegiance to the higher law of Universal Right. They also said that in practice nothing was gained by the doctrine of disunion. Before you could induce the North to dissolve the Union, you must convince the majority of the people of the free States that slavery was a sin; and when you had convinced them of that they would not dissolve the Union, but by means of the Union would put an end to slavery. The slaveholders, always wise in their generation, desired to dissolve the Union, because they knew that when they were an independent slaveholding community they could better defend and protect this institution. Those who were opposed to slavery ought, therefore, it was said, to maintain the Union and not to dissolve it.
The result proved that this position was the true one. Slavery was finally abolished by the war which was begun in order to defend the Union. It was abolished not by those who wished to destroy the Union, but by those who were determined to preserve it. If the Garrisonians had suc- ceeded in convincing the Northern people that it would be good and right to separate from the South and give up the Federal Union, there would have been no conflict. The Southern States would have been allowed to secede, and slavery would not have been abolished as a result of the war. It might have come to an end at last, in some other way; but certainly not then, and probably not for a long time.
Therefore, while the Garrisonian Abolitionists refused to vote or to take part in public affairs, political Antislavery parties were also formed by those who wished political action in the interests of freedom. The first of these was the Liberty Party, begun in New York in 1840, by Myron Holley, Alvan Stewart, and Gerrit Smith, who called a convention in Albany, at which James G. Birney, a Kentucky Abolitionist, was nominated for Pres- ident. Casting only seven thousand votes in that Presidential campaign, at the next, in 1844, they had sixty thousand, and their vote probably defeated Mr. Clay, for whom, however, many of the party had voted in order to pre- vent the annexation of Texas, which soon followed Mr. Polk's election. Salmon P. Chase now became one of the chief leaders of this body; but this party was merged in 1848 in the Free-Soil party, which was formed by a secession of Antislavery voters from the Democrats and Whigs. The Democrats had nominated for President General Cass, who had openly op- posed the Wilmot proviso, which excluded slavery from all territory ac- quired from Mexico. This caused, especially in New York, a secession from the Democratic party of men like William C. Bryant, Preston King, John A. Dix, and John Van Buren. They were called Barn-burners by their opponents, who charged them with wishing to destroy the Democratic party in order to rid themselves of its evils, as a man might burn his barn to rid himself of rats. On the nomination of General Taylor as the Whig candi- date a similar but larger secession went from the Whig party. Those of Massachusetts met in convention at Worcester and adopted a platform, the
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
basis of which was the Wilmot proviso. Daniel Webster, who had declared the nomination of General Taylor " one not fit to be made," was visited in Boston by Henry Wilson and Charles Allen, members of the convention, and expressed his approval of the platform and his strong desire to see a political movement which would maintain the rights of the North; but he did not believe the new party would succeed in doing this. The South had ruled too long, he said, and had too much power to be defeated.
The Free-Soil State Convention of Massachusetts met in Boston, Sept. 6, 1848. Among others, Charles Sumner spoke on this occasion, and re- ported resolutions and an address to the people. This new party cast, at the Presidential election in November, two hundred and ninety thousand votes, with no hope of success, but simply to maintain a principle. Charles Sumner, who thus assisted in the formation of the Free-Soil party, was one of the noblest contributions made by Boston to the Antislavery cause. Born in Boston, Jan. 6, 1811 ; educated at the Boston Latin School; a stu- dent of law in Boston, after graduating at Harvard College, he was admitted to the Suffolk Bar in 1834. After his return from his tour in Europe he first took an active part in the Antislavery discussion in the matter of the " Creole." In 1841, some slaves taken on this American brig, bound from Virginia to New Orleans, freed themselves on the voyage and took the vessel to Nassau, where they were liberated. Daniel Webster, then Secre- tary of State, addressed a letter to our Minister at the Court of St. James, and claimed that the owners and officers of the vessel ought, by the comity of nations, to be assisted in maintaining their authority over the vessel and all on board, - in other words, that the English Government should arrest and return fugitives from slavery. Dr. Channing immediately wrote a pamphlet, in which he complained that Mr. Webster's letter " maintained morally unsound and pernicious doctrines fitted to deprave the public mind, and tending to commit the free States to the defence and support of slav- ery." He consulted Charles Sumner on some of the legal points before its publication. When Dr. Channing's position was attacked in the journals Sumner came at once to its defence, insisting on the purely local and ex- ceptional character of slavery, - a theme which he expanded, ten years later, in his first Antislavery speech in the Senate, entitled " Freedom Na- tional, Slavery Sectional." He was at this time interested in the work of Garrison, subscribed for his paper, attended many of the Antislavery meet- ings, but declined joining their society, as he disapproved their methods. He could not admit that the Constitution of the United States was " a cove- nant with death and an agreement with hell," and believed that it was by means of the Union, and not outside of it, that slavery would be abolished. The event proved him to be right in this view. His first public appearance in Boston in the Antislavery conflict was in the Faneuil Hall meeting of November, 1845, called to oppose the admission of Texas into the Union. In 1846 he addressed the meeting in Faneuil Hall, on the occasion of the abduction of a fugitive who had escaped from New Orleans in a ship
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THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT IN BOSTON.
belonging to John H. Pearson. The slave escaped from the vessel, was pursued and captured on shore, was forcibly held against law in the waters
CHARLES SUMNER.I
of Massachusetts, and sent back to slavery in the barque " Niagara." The meeting to protest against this inhuman proceeding was presided over by
! [This cut follows a photograph by Brady, taken about 1869. It has once before been en- graved in Every Saturday, and was furnished by Sumner's friend and biographer, Edward L. l'ierce, who kindly gives the following statement regarding other likenesses of Mr. Sumner : -
1. A crayon drawing by Eastman Johnson, made in 1846, held by the artist to be a good
likeness, but others express a doubt. It is owned by Longfellow, and is engraved in Pierce's Memoir, vol. ii. 2. A large daguerreotype, by Southworth & llawes, in 1853, owned by Mr. Pierce, and engraved in Memoir, vol. i. 3. A claguerreotype taken a few months later, owned by Mrs. W. S. Robinson. 4. A Crayon by W. W. Story, made for Lord Morpeth in 1854: now
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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
John Quincy Adams, who, in a feeble and tremulous voice said : "Fifty years ago I attended a meeting in this place, over which Elbridge Gerry presided, who, apologizing for his age and infirmities, declared that if he had but one day to live he would have been present. That event was the taking out of an American frigate certain seamen by a British man-of-war." Mr. Adams said that he appeared in that hall for the same reason, and in defence of the same principle. Dr. Samuel G. Howe stated the facts. John A. Andrew, secretary of the meeting, offered the resolutions. Charles Sumner, Stephen C. Phillips, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Parker spoke. On this occasion Andrew and Parker first publicly associated themselves with Sumner in Boston in a cause in which they stood by his side during so many years; and no three men have done more to illustrate the character
at Castle Howard; lithographed by S. W. reviews, -Galaxy, December, 1877 ; Westminster Chandler before the drawing went to England ; photographed at York since Sumner's death, and of this Mr. Pierce has a copy. 5. A portrait in oils by M. Wight, in 1856; given to the Boston Public Library in 1874; has been engraved. 6. A portrait by Wellman Morrison, painted in 1856 ; was given to Harvard College in 1874 by Oliver C. Everett, and is now in Gore Hall. 7 A photograph by Black in 1869; engraved in Sumner's Works. 8. Warren of Cambridge took several photographs about 1870-71 ; one stand- ing, one sitting with a cane, one holding a French newspaper, and one reproduced in the Memorial published by the city in 1874. 9. A photograph by Allen & Rowell, the last ever taken, made late in 1873; is reproduced in the Memorial vol- ume printed by the State in 1874, and has been engraved by the Treasury Department at Wash- ington. The photographers have also issued it enlarged. 10. A portrait by Edgar Parker. II. A portrait by William M. Hunt, not from life, but following Allen & Rowell's photograph. 12. A full-length portrait by -, taken about 1873 for Hayti, of which there is a copy at Wormley's in Washington. 13. The earliest representation of any kind is Crawford's bust of him, taken in 1839, now in the Art Museum. See Memoir, ii. 94, 265. 14. Milmore's bust of him, now at the State House, is called good; but a repetition of it, which the State gave to George William Curtis, is better. 15. Various busts and statues of him were produced in plas- ter, etc., at the time of the competition for his bronze statue, erected in 1878 in the Public Garden, for which Thomas Ball's design was adopted.
The authoritative account of Sumner's life has been well begun by his friend and one of his literary executors, already referred to, Edward L. Pierce, who published in 1877 two volumes of Memoir and Letters, coming down to 1845, when Sumner was just on the threshold of his public career. This Memoir occasioned various
Review, January, 1878 ; Edinburgh Review, Jan- uary, 1878; North American Review, 1878, by George F. Hoar ; International Review, January, 1878, " Sumner's Place in History," by B. Perley Poore. Until this biography is completed, wc must depend, apart from the general histories of his times, upon hasty compilations, occasioned by his death in 1874, like C. E. Lester's Life and Public Services of Charles Sumner, Phelps's Life of Charles Sumner, and Elias Nason's Life and Times of Charles Sumner. More valuable are Carl Schurz's culogy before the City Govern- ment in Boston, making part of a Memorial pub- lished by the City; James Frecman Clarke's paper in his Memorial and Biographical Sketches ; recollections by his secretary, A. B. Johnson, pub- lished in Scribner's Monthly, vols viii .- x .; and a eulogy by G. W. Curtis before the State author- ities, printed in a Memorial by the State. The speeches occasioned by his death, delivered in Congress, are preserved in a Memorial issued by the two Houses. The colored representative from South Carolina, R. B. Elliot, delivered an ora- tion before the colored citizens of Boston in Fancuil Hall, which is also the chief feature of another Memorial volume. Mr. Pierce also printed " A Senator's Fidelity Vindicated" in the North American Review, July, 1878. There are letters of his, during his public life, in Weiss's Theodore Parker. Laugel treats of him in his Grandes Figures Historiques. Mrs. M C. Ames, in her Outlines of Men, etc., gives an account of his home. He left his library and collection of autographs to Harvard College Library, and an account of this Summer Collection has been printed by that Library. Theodore Parker formed a scrap-book of newspaper-cuttings con- cerning Sumner, and this is in the Public Library, together with a special collection of newspapers' taking note of his death, and other memorials of him. . A view of the monument over Sumner's grave at Mount Auburn is given in the Harvard Register, July, 1881 .- ED.]
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THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT IN BOSTON.
of Boston in its devotion to human liberty than they. Of Andrew we shall shortly have occasion to speak; but we must now briefly describe the Anti- slavery work done in Boston by Theodore Parker.
Theodore Parker was not born in Boston, but in Lexington, Mass., in 1810. His veins were filled with the blood of Puritans and Revolutionary patriots. An earnest student, a great scholar, devoted, like Dr. Channing, to ideas, -like Dr. Channing he laid aside his dearest literary projects to obey the call of conscience and divine duty. That call led him to give a large part of his time, thought, energy, and heart to the Abolition move- ment. He first began to take a public part in it in 1845, and from that time till his death he was always in the front ranks of the Antislavery work. In- timate and familiar with Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and their body, a fre- quent speaker on their platform, he was equally intimate with the leaders of the political Antislavery parties. He was in correspondence with Charles Sumner, John P. Hale, Salmon P. Chase, James G. Birney, Horace Mann, John G. Palfrey, William H. Seward, Gerrit Smith. After coming to Boston, in 1845, he preached every Sunday to great audiences in the Melodeon and Music Hall; and in his sermons discussed with fiery ardor every event bear- ing on the great topics of Slavery and Freedom. Thus he spoke of the an- nexation of Texas, the rendition of fugitive slaves, the war with Mexico, and all the assaults of the slave-power on the cause of human liberty. He spoke repeatedly in Faneuil Hall; published many pamphlets, essays, speeches, and sermons; lectured on slavery through all the free States, and once in Delaware; aided the fugitives to escape, and sheltered them in his house; was a member of the vigilance committees; and wrote many letters to public men concerning their duties in this relation. He did not agree with Garrison in his opposition to the Union; he regarded the Union as an instrument by which slavery would be abolished; and in this he showed his rare sagacity. Thus, from 1845 until his fatal attack in 1859, he was a power in Boston to move public opinion in opposition to slavery, and to bear aloft the standard of human freedom.
During all this struggle fugitives from slavery were constantly arriving from the South, and telling the same tale of their sufferings from slavery, and their various methods of escaping. One man had been packed in a box, and so brought through by the freight company as goods. He afterward went by the name of Box Brown, and told his thrilling tale on many an Antisla- very platform. Another got under the guards of a Southern steamer bound for Philadelphia, and clung for many hours to the vessel, though every heavy roll buried him under the sea. Ellen Craft, a light mulatto woman, escaped disguised as a young Southern planter, bringing her husband with her in the character of her body servant. Father Henson, a man of much talent and character, told a long tale of his trials and adventures in escaping from Kentucky. These personal narrations thrilled the audiences, and brought home to them the real horrors and miseries of the system. But among those nurtured into eloquence by wrong, none equalled Frederick Douglass. Men VOL. 111. - 50.
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listened with wonder to a speaker, of the first class of orators, who had been born and raised a slave; and the old argument that the slaves were
1
not qualified for freedom seemed ridiculous wherever his clear, strong argu- ments and his powerful appeals were heard.
1 [This likeness of Theodore Parker follows a photograph kindly loaned by Wendell Phillips, Esq., and copied from one taken for Miss Hunt about 1856 or 1857. Miss Caroline C. Thayer owns the same on porcelain, in which the expres- sion is softer and more satisfactory. By the will of Mrs. Parker, who is recently deceased, Story's bust and Cheney's crayon of Parker have come to the Public Library. This bust is engraved in vol. ii. of Weiss's Life of Parker. Milmore's bust, much liked by Parker's friends, is still in the artist's studio. The authoritative account is the Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, issued by John Weiss in 1864, in two volumes.
A condensed narrative is a review of this in the North American Review, April, 1859, by O. B. Frothingham, who in 1874 published his Theodore Parker : A Biography, which may be supplemented by the chapter on " Theodore Parker, the Preacher," in Frothingham's Tran- scendentalism in New England. Mr. Frothingham also supplied an introduction, and Miss 11. E. Stevenson a biographical sketch, to Parker's Discourse on Matters Pertaining to Religion, 1876. A little book, The Life and Teachings of Theodore Parker, by l'eter Dean, was published in London in 1877, where also had been published, in 1865, A. Réville's Life and Writings of Parker, a trans-
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THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT IN BOSTON.
Thus the years passed, the slave-power growing stronger in political influence, carrying one measure after another, bending to its interest the leading politicians of both parties. At the same time the moral power of the Antislavery movement increased with still greater rapidity. A small body in Congress resisted the encroachments of the South; among them was John G. Palfrey, who, in the Thirtieth Congress, delivered a speech of great power and beauty; in which he showed the growth of the pro-slavery influence, which he was the first to call the slave-power. He ended by saying: " If the slaveholders insist that Union and Slavery cannot live together, they may be taken at their own word; but it is the Union that must stand." It was on this occasion that John Quincy Adams exclaimed, "Thank God! the seal is broken." In this same debate Horace Mann made a powerful argument against the admission of slavery into the Ter- ritories ; he spoke forcibly on the effect of slavery in destroying manliness and energy of character, and said: "There are in this land three million Casper Hausers."
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