their slaves with them, so as to prove how mild the system was. Some visitors suggested that slaves be paid small wages, encouraged to thrift and saving, and taught to read and write; but this seemed to the south absolutely incompatible with safety. Channing proposed that in the slave states every slave should have a guardian for his protection and should be encouraged to buy himself and his family; then, if the free negroes should be educated and upraised, the whole problem would be solved.1 Another proposition was to restrict the sale of slaves, as by forbidding the sale of a slave for debt or the separation of a young child from its mother; another was to fix a time beyond which fugitives could not be recoverable.2 Had any of these minor remedies been taken up in good faith by the south, the abolition movement would have lost much of its force. A trial on a small scale of the slave-wages scheme was considered to be a total failure. Not a single state took action to facilitate self-purchase; a few ineffective acts were passed to limit the sale of little children from their mothers-and that was all. The south had an instinctive feeling that to admit that anything was wrong in slavery was to give up the principle 1 Adams, Southside View, 147-156; Buckingham, Slave States, I., 168; Channing, Works, II., 109-111; Bremer, Homes of the New World, 328, 443-448. 'Adams, Southside View, 135, 151; cf. Nott, Slavery and the Remedy, passim; T. S. Clay, Detail of a Plan, passim. Dew, in Pro-Slavery Argument, 426–428. that it was a beneficent institution; and it seemed to the southern people craven to yield anything to the undistinguishing abolition attacks.1 In fact, the only plan that had any adherents in the south was gradual emancipation, combined with the expatriation of all the free negroes, a plan set forth in detail by Henry Clay, in a letter of 1849;2 but even that plan was based upon the theory that the negro race should somehow pay for its own transportation, and the history of the Colonization Society showed the lack of interest in the south and the hopelessness and the futility of any attempt to carry all the negroes away. In forty years of activity, from the first emigration in 1820 to the end of the year 1860, the Colonization Society, with an expenditure of $1,806,000, succeeded in carrying over to Africa 10,586 negroes (besides about a thousand sent by state societies); of these about 4500 were born free, 344 purchased their freedom, and about 6000 were emancipated to go to Liberia; the largest number transported in any late year was 783, in the year 1853. Out of this whole number the seven cotton states furnished less than 4000; and the customary surplus of births over deaths in those states filled up this thirty years' depletion in a single month. Colonization was a hopeless suggestion: first, and finally, because it would have cost 1 Dew, in Pro-Slavery Argument, 426–428. seven hundred million dollars to remove the four millions of people whose labor alone could earn the seven hundred million dollars, provided they remained in America. It must never be forgotten that the whole theory of abolition depended upon accepting the negro as a brother American, who had as good a right to his place in the community as his master; and after a few years of agitation the abolitionists realized that the only means to secure their end was by arousing the north. In this result their enemies co-operated by their gag resolutions and appeals for silence, but on the northern people the movement, after 1840, seemed to have spent its force. Agitators, funds, and public interest diminished. Other reforms— woman suffrage, the care of the insane, temperance -seemed more to interest the public. At this point two questions arose, neither of which primarily involved abolition, and both of which gave the abolitionist a new opportunity: one was the annexation of Texas; the other was fugitive slaves." On both these questions the attitude of the abolitionists did much to arouse the northern mind, although the two movements outran them and were taken up by the non-abolitionist anti-slavery people. Long before this point was reached the abolitionists had organized a political movement, which was destined to have far greater effects than their 1 Garrison, Westward Extension (Am. Nation, XVII.), chap. ix. 'Smith, Parties and Slavery (Am. Nation, XVIII.), chap. v. philanthropic propaganda. The entry of the abolitionist into politics was cautious and timid. Channing, in 1836, complained that "by assuming a political character they lose the reputation of honest enthusiasts. . . . Should they in opposition to all probability become a formidable party, they would unite the slave-holding states as one man. . . . No association like the abolitionists. . . can, by becoming a political organization, rise to power." The uproar in Congress from 1835 to 1837 put a different face upon the whole question of political action. The very sensitiveness of the pro-slavery leaders showed that here was a good point of attack; and there were too many questions upon which the federal government could take action for anybody convincingly to assert that slavery was wholly outside the jurisdiction of the federal government. In vain did Garrison inveigh against an abolition party or abolitionist votes. In 1843 he proposed to read out of the abolitionist ranks any man who would take an oath to the Constitution or vote for its support. The next year his Massachusetts AntiSlavery Society, as a body, accepted this dogma, set forth in extravagant speeches by Wendell Phillips; and they made an effort to fix a stigma upon every abolitionist who should vote in the election of that year.3 So far from accepting Garrison's dictum, the ' Channing, Works, VI., 69. Garrisons, Garrison, III., 90. 3 Ibid., 96-112, 117-119. middle states and western abolitionists began to use their votes directly and to some purpose. Exasperated at the failure of members of the legislature to carry out their pre-election promises, the Ohio abolitionists, in the state election of 1838, used their balance of power to elect a Democratic governor, and they sent Giddings to Congress. When the legislature turned its back upon them and enacted a state fugitive-slave act in 1839, the abolitionists began to put up independent candidates. Meantime, Holly, a New York abolitionist, and Torrey, a New-Englander, were organizing like movements in the east; and in November, 1839, while many of the New England abolitionists were breaking away from Garrison, a convention of abolitionists at Warsaw, New York, nominated James G. Birney for president. This action, repeated by a formal Liberty convention in 1840, was followed by state Liberty conventions in Ohio and then in northwestern states; and thus the first abolitionist national political party was born, in defiance of Garrison's teachings and a protest against his leadership. The movement was still feeble: though in 1840 the societies included probably 50,000 voters, only 7100 votes were cast for Birney, of which about a third came from New England. But the change in method was startlingly significant: it gave a new impulse to the flagging spirits of the abolitionists; it formed a new centre for the open discussion of slavery; it was one method of organizing opposi VOL. XVI.-21 |