II. Anti-slavery Leaders.
Tennessee made a substantial contribution to the anti-slavery leadership of the nation. There were two groups of these men. One of them left the state for a larger field of activity, and might be called Separatists, while the members of the other group remained at home and fought in the ranks. These might be called Puritans. Jesse Mills, Elihu Swain, John Underhill, Jesse Lockhart, Rev. John Roy, Peter Cartwright, Charles Osborn, and Rev. John Rankin are examples of those who left the state for abolition centers.[19]
Rev. John Roy was a Methodist preacher who rode Green circuit in Tennessee. He was a man of considerable ability, strong feeling, full of courage, with an iron will. He was strongly anti-slavery in his sentiment, and for this reason moved to Indiana, where he died in 1837 in his 69th year.[20]
Peter Cartwright was one of the greatest preachers of Methodism. He was a native Virginian, but entered the Western Conference in 1804. He gave a great part of his life to the services of the church in Tennessee. He was a man of great humor and wit, and was a fighter against slavery. He finally decided that his labors would be more appreciated in an anti-slavery state, and moved to Illinois in 1824. He became increasingly bitter against slaveholders in his old age, and as a delegate from Illinois to the Methodist Conference in 1844, he voted for the division of the church.
Charles Osborn was one of the greatest of these leaders who left the state. He was born in North Carolina, August 21, 1795. At the age of 19, he moved with his parents to Tennessee, where he became a Quaker minister. In December, 1814 he organized the manumission movement in Tennessee, and was its leader until 1816, when he moved to Ohio, where he did his greatest work.[21] George Washington Julian makes Osborn the undoubted leader in the abolition movement of the Northwest, of which Ohio was the center and one of the two centers of the abolition movement in the nation. Osborn laid the foundation for his work in his new field, for which Tennessee had prepared him by environment and previous service, by establishing at Mount Pleasant, Ohio, in 1817, the Philanthropist, which Julian regards as the first anti-slavery publication in the United States.[22] In 1818, Osborn removed to Indiana, where he lived the remainder of his life.
Rev. John Rankin was possibly the greatest of those leaders who saw fit to leave the State to find an environment more in harmony with his attitude toward slavery. He was a Presbyterian minister, “who was destined, during the three decades preceding the Civil War, to occupy a position of first importance among the anti-slavery workers of the United States. In 1825, he published his famous Letters on Slavery, which went through many editions and exerted a very great influence. Many western men have called him the ‘father of abolition,’ and it was not an uncommon thing in the thirties to hear him spoken of as ‘the Martin Luther of the Cause’.”[23] Rev. Rankin said that in his early boyhood a majority of the people of East Tennessee were abolitionists.[24] The first issue of the Emancipator, referring to the loss of anti-slavery leadership in Tennessee, said,
Thousands of first-rate citizens, men remarkable for their piety and virtue, have within twenty years past, removed from this and other slave states to Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, that their eyes may be hid from seeing the cruel oppressor lacerate the back of his slaves, and that their ears may not hear the bitter cries of the oppressed. I have often regretted the loss of so much virtue from these slave states, which held too little before. Could all those who have removed from slave states on that account, to even the single state of Ohio, have been induced to remove to, and settle in Tennessee, with their high-toned love for universal liberty and aversion to slavery, I think that Tennessee would ere this have begun to sparkle among the true stars of liberty.[25]
James Jones, Samuel Doak, Mr. R. G. Williams, Rev. Philip Lindsey, and Elihu Embree were the most eminent of the group of leaders in abolition who chose to stand their ground and fight straight from the shoulder. James Jones was another member of the Society of Friends, who were really the leaders in the anti-slavery movement in Tennessee. Jones was thoroughly devoted to the cause of abolition, wrote several addresses for the Tennessee Manumission Society, and was for several years its president. His untimely death in 1830 was a serious loss to the cause of humanity and undoubtedly was the death of the Tennessee Manumission Society. Benjamin Lundy paid the following tribute to him at his death:
A great man has fallen, one of the brightest stars in the galaxy of American philanthropists has set, has set to rise no more, James Jones, President of the Manumission Society of Tennessee—the steady, ardent and persevering friend of universal emancipation, is numbered among the dead.... No language can impress upon the mind an adequate idea of his many virtues. Suffice it to say that few men living can fill the station that he held, with equal honor and usefulness. Long shall the poor oppressed African mourn for his irreparable loss.[26]
Rev. Samuel Doak was the leader of that strong and able Presbyterian contingent that came from North Carolina into Tennessee in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. He was also the leading educator of the State in his day.[27] He was a graduate of Princeton, and founded in Tennessee the first institution of learning in the Mississippi Valley.[28] He was a prominent abolitionist from 1800 to 1830, and from 1818 he taught immediate abolition. Among his pupils was Sam Houston, who opposed secession, John Rankin, and Rev. Jesse Lockhart, who preached and lectured on abolition in Southern Ohio.[29]
Dr. Philip Lindsey, who was President of the University of Nashville from 1825 to 1850, was the leader in organizing the Tennessee Colonization Society. He was its president for a number of years and was connected with it until his death. His educational leadership gave the colonization movement a prestige and influence that could not have come through any other channel. The University of Nashville in this period was the leading educational institution of the State, if not of the South.[30]
Mr. R. G. Williams was one of the anti-slavery leaders who helped to make Maryville, in East Tennessee, the seat of Maryville Seminary, now Maryville College, one of the great anti-slavery centers of the nation, a forerunner of Oberlin in Ohio. “We are rejoiced to know,” said The Emancipator of New York, “that in East Tennessee and directly in the very center of the slaveholding country, among the fastnesses of the American Alps, God has secured a little Spartan band of devoted abolitionists of the best stamp, whom neither death nor danger can turn,”[31] and a later issue of The Emancipator, quoting the letter of a student of Maryville College, said, “We take the liberty to uphold and defend our sentiments, whether it is agreeable or not to the selfishness of the slaveholder. We would thankfully receive any communication on the subject. We have some friends in the country around, among whom we have the privilege of distributing without fear a considerable number of pamphlets. About thirty students in the Theological Seminary at this place are preparing for the ministry, of whom twelve are abolitionists.” This same issue, quoting a letter of Mr. R. G. Williams, said: “We could form a good Anti-slavery Society in this part of the state, but we choose to work in an unorganized manner a while yet, before we set ourselves up as a target, notwithstanding the strict laws of Tennessee. We meet through the country and discuss the merits of abolition and colonization; the former is ably defended by Rev. T. S. Kendall, pastor of the Seceder Church in this county (Blount), and several others.”[32]
The most eminent anti-slavery leader in the state was Elihu Embree. He was a Quaker, son of Thomas and Esther Embree, of Pennsylvania, born November 11, 1782. He moved to Tennessee at an early age, and became an iron manufacturer in East Tennessee. He early espoused the cause of freedom, and began at Jonesboro, Tennessee, in 1819, the publication of the Manumission Intelligencer as the mouth-piece of the manumission societies of Tennessee. He continued this publication until his untimely death in 1820.
Embree was a radical, outspoken, and uncompromising abolitionist. He was the leader of the Society of Friends in their work for abolition in Tennessee. Embree’s writing and lecturing on abolition did more to advertise the state as an abolition center in the twenties than the work of all the others combined. In Garrison’s Life, by his children, there is an account of the work of Embree, “to whom,” it says, “must be accorded the honor of publishing the first periodical in America of which the one avowed object was opposition to slavery.”[33] Mr. Embree said he “spent several thousand dollars ... in some small degree abolishing, and in endeavoring to facilitate the general abolition of slavery.”[34]
Embree had owned seven or eight slaves, but in discussing his connection with slavery, he said:
“I repent that I ever owned one. And indeed the crime is of such a hue, that the time may yet come, that a man who has, in a single instance, gone astray thus far, may never be able in his life time to regain public confidence; and should this change of public sentiment take place in my day, and render me disqualified to act in the promotion of this glorious cause, I hope to acquiesce in, and be resigned to suffer the just judgment, and be more humble under a sense of my past misconduct; meanwhile I shall doubtless have the pleasure of rejoicing at seeing this stigma on our religious professions, and scar upon our national escutcheon, eradicated by men of clean hands.”[35]