CHAPTER XIV

THE ABOLITION PROPAGANDA

(1830-1840)

P we are to accept the statement of the motives and purposes of the abolitionists put forward by their adversaries, they were among the worst of mankind: “Prurient love of notoriety," "envy or malignity," an intention to "excite to desperate attempts and particular acts of cruelty and horror,” to bring about "a complete equalization of blacks and whites," to "scatter among our southern brethren firebrands, arrows and death"-such are some of the amenities applied to the abolitionists. Even the gentle Emerson said of them: "If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, 'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tender

'Harper, in Pro-Slavery Argument, 93; Von Raumer, America, 121; Garrisons, Garrison, I., 495-500; cf. Bledsoe, Liberty and Slavery, chap. ii.

ness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home!'"'1

These charges can hardly be thought a self-evident statement of the objects of the abolitionists, which may be gathered in part from their private character, partly from their own public statements, and partly from the methods which they employed to influence public opinion. As for their character, the abolitionists in general were people who paid their debts, attended divine service, and had the reputation of an orderly life. Some of them were one-sided men, such as Garrison and Phillips, who held a brief for liberty and did not trouble themselves to look at the case of the other side-indeed, they did not admit that there was another side. There were some impostors and some demagogues among them, but Whittier in New England, the Tappans in New York, and Birney in the west, were characteristic abolitionists of their sections, and none of them was false, self-seeking, or bloodthirsty.

In their spoken and printed statements the abolitionists justified Jay's admonition: "They will address arguments to the understanding and the consciences of their fellow-citizens"; and Lundy, an uncompromising foe of slavery, held that "the language of cutting retort or severe rebuke, is seldom convincing, and it is wholly out of place in persuasive argument." Most of them also held

1 Emerson, Essay on Self-Reliance.

that the use of force was not part of their programme.'

Then how and where was the slave to be freed? In the first number of the Liberator, Garrison abjured the doctrine of gradual emancipation, and all his societies declared unhesitatingly for immediate emancipation, the American society adding that

No compensation should be given to the planters emancipating their slaves." Yet, outside of New England, the societies and leaders would have cheerfully accepted gradual emancipation acts from the neighboring slave states. Among the known opponents of immediacy were Evan Lewis of Philadelphia, first president of the American Anti-Slavery Society, William Jay of New York, and Moses Brown of Providence.3

Abolition meant to the abolitionists not only freedom, but the eradication of all the incidents and results of slavery-"all the laws, discriminations, social customs and practices which bore against the negro race." As for the slave-holder, since slavery was an obvious evil, the abolitionists held him morally responsible and called upon him to repent and to show works meet for repentance by abolish'Jay, Miscellaneous Writings, 140; Life of Benjamin Lundy, 28; Garrisons, Garrison, I., 295.

'See Garrisons, Garrison, I., 410, in postscript. For early advocates of immediacy, see George Bourne, Book and Slavery Irreconcilable (1816); Elizabeth Heyrick, Immediate vs. Gradual Emancipation (London, 1824).

Goodell, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 393.

• Declaration of 1833, in Garrisons, Garrison, I.,

408.

ing slavery on his own plantation. As incident to these purposes the abolitionists claimed the fullest right of freedom of speech, both north and south.'

An obvious and disturbing retort by the slaveholder was that the abolitionist knew nothing of what he was discussing. "Why don't you go South?" was a taunt frequently hurled, to which Garrison, who had never been beyond Baltimore, but whose personal courage was undeniable, replied: "Why, then, should we go into the slaveholding states, to assail their towering wickedness, at a time when we are sure we should be gagged, or imprisoned, or put to death, if we went thither?" 2 The only New England agitators who had seen much of slavery in the south were Channing and James Freeman Clarke, a Unitarian minister in Louisville from 1833 to 1840. The reproach did not apply to men born in the south, like Birney and Cassius M. Clay, Rankin and Mahan, or Elijah P. Lovejoy, who lived for a time in St. Louis. Few abolitionists were known to have attempted a propaganda in the far south. The charge that the abolitionists knew nothing of slavery was not significant, for foreign and northern visitors freely reported their impressions, and in the columns of southern newspapers the abolitionists found unfailing material.

The argument that the abolitionists had no busi

' Channing to Birney, Works, II., 161. 2 Garrisons, Garrison, I., 507.

3 Clarke, Anti-Slavery Days, 22.

VOL. XVI.-14

See chap. xvi., below.

ness to discuss a question which did not concern them would have been stronger had the south encouraged or even permitted discussion by its own people. A keen foreigner observed that she “scarcely ever met with a man, or woman either, who can openly and honestly look the thing in the face. They wind and turn about in all sorts of ways, and make use of every argument, sometimes the most opposite, to convince me that the slaves are the happiest people in the world." The abolitionists fell back on their right to supply the deficiency. "We are told indeed by the South," said Dr. Channing, “that slavery is no concern of ours, and consequently that the less we say of it the better. What! shall the wrongdoer forbid lookers-on to speak, because the affair is a private one?" "

Never doubting their legal and moral right to organize northern public opinion against slavery in the south, the abolitionists worked out a thoroughgoing propaganda: they drew up petitions to the state and national legislatures; they appeared before legislative committees; they sent out travelling agents; they busied themselves with the conditions of the free colored people; above all, they held antislavery meetings in all sorts of places, from a stableloft to a church or public hall. An account of one of these meetings, in Faneuil Hall in 1850, will serve as a type of all. It was addressed by escaped 1 Bremer, Homes of the New World, I., 275.

2 Channing, Works, VI., 61.