ment, so near our shores, so contrary to the arguments and pleas of our slave-holders, could not but affect public sentiment in the United States.

The rise of abolition was coincident with a change in the attitude of the public mind towards the weak and the helpless, which was shown in reforms in the treatment of paupers, convicts, and the insane, and in the beginnings of public provision for the training of the blind, deaf and dumb, imbeciles, and other defective persons. This sense of public responsibility was as much needed in the south as at the north; but, partly because of a sparse agricultural population, partly because of an unconquerable frontier rudeness, the south was much less affected by these reforms than the northern communities; and the presence of an inferior and servile race which had to be kept under, worked against the humanitarian spirit.

Slavery was also unfavorably affected by the sudden opening-up of new fields of economic activity. The development of manufactures, the growth of large cities, the exchange of products far and wide, called for a kind of labor which was unsuited to slavery, and for a kind of laborer who instinctively felt that the slave was a competitor. On its side, the south, which in the nullification contest reacted into a type of state rights which had been decried in that section since Jefferson came to power in 1801, also reacted from an open discussion of slavery to an intense hostility towards anti-slavery within its own limits or anywhere else.

In 1830 there was little conscious anti-slavery feeling in either section. The few agitators, of whom Benjamin Lundy was the chief, were in despair at the apathy of the north. Even the seizure of two fugitive slaves in Boston in 1830, one of them a woman, raised not a ripple of excitement in New England. The people who felt an interest in the subject went, with few exceptions, no further than anti-slavery—that is, they believed that slavery was wrong and dangerous, and wished to see a period put to its extension and to its ill effects upon society. Such men, on the northern side, were Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Taylor and Talmadge in their attempts to prevent slavery from going into Missouri. Such men were eager to be rid of slavery in their own community, and deprecated it wherever it existed, not so much out of sympathy with the oppressed negro, as from the belief that slavery was an injury to their own neighbors and constituents, and that the influence of the slave power in national affairs was harmful. Most of the northern antislavery people disclaimed any intention of interfering with slavery in the southern states, but they instinctively disliked any project for enlarging the boundaries of slave-holding territory: their principle was that slavery and the slave-holding power should remain where they were.

Very different in their outlook were the abolitionists, a term already made familiar by such agitators 1 Turner, New West (Am. Nation, XIV.), chap. x.

VOL. XVI.-12

as Rankin and Lundy. Their objection was not only to slavery in the abstract, but to concrete slavery, as they saw it in their own communities or in neighboring parts of the country. Every abolitionist was an anti-slavery man, but he went far beyond the ordinary anti-slavery standards: he was heart and soul opposed to slavery as it existed; he was bent on persuading or coercing the master to give up his authority; he had in mind, not a distant political and sectional influence, but the blows of the overseer and the tears of the slave. He wished to get rid of slavery speedily, root and branch, cost what it might, suffer who must, for the salvation of the souls of the masters, for the preservation of the Union, for the rights of man, for the love of Christ. The true abolitionist ignored all difficulties and scoffed at the idea that there could be vested right in the person of man and woman. His ears were deaf to appeals to the authority of ancient custom, of state laws, of the guarantees of the federal Constitution. The abolitionist's creed was, give up your unblessed property, forsake your evil habits, change your laws, alter the Constitution.

Anti-slavery was a negative force, an attempt to wall in an obnoxious system of labor so that it might die of itself; abolition was a positive force, founded on moral considerations, stoutly denying that slavery could be a good thing for anybody, and perfectly willing to see the social and economic system of the south disrupted. As time went on,

the anti-slavery and abolition movements in the north came closer together and sometimes joined forces, partly through the appearance of political abolitionists like Salmon P. Chase and Charles Sumner, who built up a little anti-slavery party and secured the support of thousands of men who were never conscious abolitionists; and partly by the warming-up of the anti-slavery people, as the contest grew fiercer, to a belief that abolition might, after all, be the only way to stop the advance of slavery. Yet two such conspicuous champions of anti-slavery as John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln always said that they were not abolitionists. In the heat of the fray southern leaders and speakers got into the habit of calling everybody "abolitionist" who was in any degree opposed to slavery; but the distinction was clear enough, all the way down to the Civil War.1

Abolition, in its extreme form, could not exist in the south, because, after 1830, public sentiment would not permit such aggressive attacks on the property and character of the leaders of the community; but in several parts of the border states anti-slavery men continued to live and even to agitate, and for some years feeble efforts at a gradual emancipation were permitted. To the last, in private conversation, slave-holders and free farmers occasionally admitted that slavery was a bad

On abolition in general, see Hart, Contemporaries, §§ 172

thing for the south,' and as late as 1850, in the University of Virginia, a student criticised slavery in a public address."

In North Carolina, where a strong Quaker influence against negro slavery never quite expired, in 1832, Judge William Gaston, in an address at the State University, called upon the students to aid in the "extirpation" of slavery, because "it stifles industry and represses enterprise . . . and poisons morals at the fountain-head." Daniel R. Goodloe, in 1841, published an Inquiry, which was one of the first searching economic arguments against slavery; and as late as 1857, Hinton R. Helper, of that state, published an appeal to the poor whites."

4

In Virginia the anti-slavery feeling was intensified by the Nat Turner Insurrection of 1831, which led the Richmond Enquirer to say: "Something must be done, and it is the part of no honest man to deny it -of no free press to affect to conceal it." When the legislature next met, in a debate of many days the strongest opinions were expressed against slavery, especially by members from the mountain counties, though a lowland member said: "Slavery in Vir

1 Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, 675; Olmsted, Back Country, 177-186, 270-272.

2 Bremer, Homes of the New World, II., 188-193, 529-531; Kemble, Georgian Plantation, 77.

'Gaston, Address delivered before the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies.

Weeks, in Southern Hist. Assoc., Publications, II., No. 2, 115-130.

See Chadwick, Causes of the Civil War (Am. Nation, XIX.).