The Negro in Tennessee, 1790-1865

by C. Perry Patterson

VI. Abolition Sentiment After 1834.

There continued to be anti-slavery forces in the state as long as slavery existed. In 1835, there was organized at Rock Creek, in East Tennessee, an abolition society that advocated immediate abolition. It was one of three abolition societies at this time in the entire South, the other two being in Virginia and Kentucky. This society lasted only two years.[63] In 1836, fifty-five citizens of Rhea County sent a petition to the legislature, protesting against a law that the legislature had passed making it a penitentiary offence to receive abolition literature. This protest states, “that said law is too bloody, too tyrannical and too despotic to govern a free people which we profess to be in practice and should be in theory.” The petitioners further state that they are “opposed to the manner in which such law has curtailed our most sacred privileges, the free communication of thought upon any subject provided we tell the truth.”[64] The Maryville Intelligencer, issued at the seat of Maryville College, published reports of the synods of the Presbyterian Church, yet the editor remarked that “this publication, we must remember, is after a law making it penal in Tennessee to receive any anti-slavery paper or pamphlet, yes, making it a penitentiary offense to receive this very report of the Kentucky Synod.”[65] Hon. John M. Lea made one of the last anti-slavery addresses in Tennessee before the Apprentices’ Union at Nashville in 1841.[66] In 1849, the Jonesboro Whig said: “In Tennessee, the residence of James K. Polk, especially in East Tennessee, anti-slavery sentiments are strong and decided.” The Knoxville Tribune at this same time was publishing a series of papers on abolition, advocating the calling of a constitutional convention to amend the constitution to “open the way for the full and final redemption of the state.”[67]

A correspondent from Tennessee in the New York Observer, writing on abolition in the state, said in 1849:

The question is being a good deal agitated, and fully discussed. Many who own slaves oppose the institution, and non-slaveholders almost to a man. In my neighborhood of some five miles square, there are about eighty families, and a number of them own slaves, and there is but one advocate of slavery. A slaveholder said, “It is of no use to avoid the question any longer. The sooner it is settled the better, for God has declared that right shall prevail, and slavery must end.” Another individual who occupies a high station in society said, “Agitate the question and anti-slavery will prevail.” I might produce hundreds, yes, thousands of expressions of opinion equally strong and decisive. The great difficulty seems to be as to the means of getting rid of the evil.[68]

While there was this anti-slavery minority expressing itself in an intermittent way after 1834, the great majority of the state was thoroughly pro-slavery. In 1835, Rev. Amos Dresser, an active member of the Abolition Society of Ohio, was arrested in Nashville for publishing and circulating pamphlets among the slaves to incite them to insurrection. The Committee of Vigilance and Safety, consisting of sixty-two citizens, tried him and found him guilty. He was sentenced to receive twenty stripes on his bare back and to leave the city within twenty-four hours. He received the flogging, and did not wait for the expiration of the twenty-four hours.[69]

Public meetings were generally held, denouncing such insurrectionists and their accomplices. It was reported that Arthur Tappan and others of New York City had furnished funds to aid the circulation of abolition literature in the state. At one of these meetings held by the Committee of Vigilance and Safety, the merchants of Tennessee were requested to boycott Arthur Tappan and Company and all other abolitionists. These incidents were largely responsible for the Act of 1836 mentioned above and the Gag Resolution in Andrew Jackson’s administration. In the debate in the Senate on the Calhoun Resolution, both of the senators from Tennessee, Hugh Lawson White and Felix Grundy, defended the flogging of Rev. Dresser. Senator Grundy advocated a “summary disposal of such abolitionists.”[70]

Tennessee was never a unit on the slavery question. There were scattered groups of abolitionists throughout the state as long as slavery existed, while East Tennessee was almost solidly anti-slavery. The contest over slavery in the convention of 1834, in the churches, and in politics created divisions among the people of the state that have had a permanent influence upon the life of the state.

It is singularly true, however, that Tennessee did finally abolish slavery by popular vote. She was the only one of the Confederate States that was excepted from President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863[71] and that abolished slavery by its own act. There was an attempt to hold a convention of Union men in Nashville in the fall of 1864, but the Confederate army in the vicinity of Nashville made it unsafe for the convention to meet. It did meet January 8, 1865, and on the ninth recommended that Article II, Section 31, of the Constitution of 1834, to the effect that “the General Assembly shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves without the consent of their owner or owners,” be abrogated and that slavery be abolished forever, and the legislature be forbidden to re-establish property in man. These proposed constitutional changes were submitted to popular vote of the Union men, February 22, 1865, and Andrew Johnson as military governor of Tennessee announced that the amendments had been adopted and that “the shackles have been formally stricken from the limbs of more than 275,000 slaves in the state.”[72]

“The amended constitution of the State of Tennessee adopted on the 22nd of February, 1865,” said Judge Shackelford in 1865, “prohibits slavery or voluntary servitude, in the State of Tennessee, and it has forever ceased to exist.”[73] It is clear, then, that his amendment was not the ratification of President Lincoln’s Proclamation, which did not apply to Tennessee, but was itself the act of emancipation by which the slaves of Tennessee ceased to be property and became free men.