History of American Abolitionism / Its four great epochs, embracing narratives of the ordinance of 1787, compromise of 1820, annexation of Texas, Mexican war, Wilmot proviso, negro insurrections, abolition riots, slave rescues, compromise of 1850, Kansas bill of 1854, John Brown insurrection, 1859, valuable statistics, &c., &c., &c., together with a history of the Southern Confederacy.

by F. G. De Fontaine

SECOND EPOCH.

CHAPTER III.

History of the Missouri Compromise, 1820—Benjamin Lundy and the “Genius of Universal Emancipation”—Insurrection at Charleston, S. C.—The result of agitation in Congress—British Influence and Interference—Abolition in the East and West Indies—Remarkable opinion of Sir Robert Peel—Letter from Lord Brougham on the Harper’s Ferry Insurrection.

Probably there has never been in the history of the United States, except at the present time, a more critical moment, arising from the violence of domestic excitement, than the agitation of the Missouri question from 1818 to 1821. On the 18th day of December, 1818, the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States presented before that body a memorial of the Legislature of the Territory of Missouri, praying that they might be admitted to form a Constitution and State government upon “an equal footing with the original States.” Here originated the difficulty. Slavery existed in the Territory proposed to be erected into an independent State. The proposition was therefore to admit Missouri as a slave State, which involved three very essential and important features. These were:—

1. The recognition of slavery therein as a State institution by the national sovereignty.

2. The guarantee of protection to the ownership of her slave property by the laws of the United States, as in the original States under the Constitution.

3. That the right of representation in the National Legislature should be apportioned on her slave population, as in the original States. This was a recognition of slavery, which at once aroused the interest of the people in every section of the Union.

The petition was received, read and reported upon, and in February, 1819, Mr. Tallmadge, of New York, proposed an amendment “prohibiting slavery except for the punishment of crimes, and that all children born in the said State after the admission thereof into the Union, shall be free at the age of twenty-five years.”

This passed the House, but was lost in the Senate. The excitement, not only in Congress, but throughout the Union, soon became intense, and for eighteen months the country was agitated from one extreme to the other. In many of the Northern States meetings were called, resolutions were passed instructing members how to vote, prayers ascended from the churches, and the pulpit began to be the medium of the incendiary diatribes for which it has since become so famous.

In both branches of Congress amendments were passed and rejected without number, while the arguments on both sides brought out the strongest views of the respective champions.

On one hand it was maintained that the compromise of the federal constitution regarding slavery respected only its existing limits at the time; that it was remote from the views of the framers of the Constitution to have the domain of slavery extended on that basis; that the fundamental principles of the American Revolution and of the government and institutions erected upon it were hostile to slavery; that the compromise of the Constitution was simply a toleration of things that were, and not a basis of things that were to be; that these securities of slavery, as it existed, would be forfeited by an extension of the system; that the honor of the republic before the world, and its moral influence with mankind in favor of freedom, were identified with the advocacy of principles of universal emancipation; that the act of 1787, which established the Territorial government north and west of the river Ohio, prohibiting slavery forever therefrom, was a public recognition and avowal of the principles and designs of the people of the United States in regard to new States and Territories north and west; and that the proposal to establish slavery in Missouri was a violation of all these great and fundamental principles.

On the other hand, it was urged that slavery was incorporated in the system of society as established in Louisiana, which comprehended the Territory of Missouri, when purchased from France in 1803; that the faith of the United States was pledged by treaty to all the inhabitants of that wide domain to maintain their rights and privileges on the same footing with the people of the rest of the country; and consequently, that slavery, being a part of their state of society, it would be a violation of engagements to abolish it without their consent. Nor could the government, as they maintained, prescribe the abolition of slavery to any part of said Territory as a condition of being erected into a State, if they were otherwise entitled to it. It might as well, as they said, be required of them to abolish any other municipal regulation, or to annihilate any other attribute of sovereignty. If the government had made an ill-advised treaty in the purchase of Louisiana, they maintained it would be manifest injustice to make its citizens suffer on that account. They claimed that they were received as a slaveholding community on the same footing with the slave States, and that the existence or non-existence of slavery could not be made a question when they presented themselves at the door of the Capitol of the republic for a State charter.

After much bitter and acrimonious discussion, the question was finally, through the exertions of Henry Clay, settled by a compromise, and a bill was passed for the admission of Missouri without any restriction as to slavery, but prohibiting it throughout the United States north of latitude thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes.

Missouri was not declared independent until August, 1821. Previous to the passage of the bill for its admission, the people had formed a State constitution, a provision of which required the Legislature to pass a law “To prevent free negroes from coming to and settling in the State.” When the constitution was presented to Congress, this provision was strenuously opposed. The contest occupied a greater part of the session; but Missouri was finally admitted on condition that no laws should be passed by which any free citizen of the United States should be prevented from enjoying those rights within the State to which he was entitled by the Constitution of the United States.

Such was the Missouri Compromise, and though its settlement once more brought repose to the country and strengthened the bonds of fraternity and union between the States, its agitation in Congress was like the opening of a foul ulcer—the beginning of that domineering, impertinent, ill-timed, vociferous and vituperative opposition which has ever since been the leading characteristic of the abolition movement.

The “settlement” of the question in Congress seemed to be merely the signal for its agitation among the non-slaveholding States. Fanatics sprang up like mushrooms, and, “in the name of God,” proclaimed the enormity of slavery and eternal damnation to all who indulged in the wicked luxury.

Among the earliest and most notable of these philanthropic reformers was one Benjamin Lundy, who, in the year 1821, commenced the publication of a monthly periodical called the “Genius of Universal Emancipation,” which was successively published at Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington City, and frequently en route during his travels wherever he could find a press. It is related of him that at one time he traversed the free States lecturing, collecting, obtaining subscribers, stirring up the people, writing for his paper, getting it printed where he could, stopping to read the “proof” on the road, and directing and mailing his papers at the nearest post-office. Then, packing up in his trunk his column-rules, type, “heading” and “direction book,” he pushed along like a thorough-going pioneer. What this solitary “Friend”—for such he was—in this manner accomplished, he himself states in an appeal to the public in 1830. He says:—

“I have within the period above mentioned (ten years) sacrificed several thousands of dollars of my own hard earnings; I have travelled upwards of five thousand miles on foot and more than twenty thousand in other ways; have visited nineteen States of this Union, and held more than two hundred public meetings—have performed two voyages to the West Indies, by which means the emancipation of a considerable number of slaves has been effected, and I hope the way paved for the enfranchisement of many more.”

INSURRECTION AT CHARLESTON, S. C.

The year 1822 was marked by one of the most nefarious negro plots ever developed in the history of the country. The first revelation was made to the Mayor of the city of Charleston on the 30th of May, 1822, by a gentleman who had on the morning of the same day returned from the country, and obtained on his arrival an inkling of what was going on from a confidential slave, to whom the secret had been imparted.

Investigations were immediately set on foot, and one of the slaves who was apprehended, fearing a summary execution, confessed all he knew. He said he had known of the plot for some time; that it was very extensive, embracing an indiscrimate massacre of the whites, and that the blacks were to be headed by an individual who carried about him a charm which rendered him invulnerable. The period fixed for the rising was on Sunday, the 16th of June, at twelve o’clock at night.

Through the instrumentality of a colored class-leader in one of the churches, this information was corroborated, and it was ascertained that enlistment for the insurrection was being actively carried on in the colored community of the church. It appeared that three months before that time, a slave named Rolla, belonging to Governor Bennett, had communicated intelligence of the intended rising, saying that when this event occurred they would be aided in obtaining their liberty by people from St. Domingo and Africa, and that if they would make the first movement at the time above named, a force would cross from James Island and land at South Bay, march up and seize the arsenal and guardhouse; that another body would at the same time seize the arsenal on the Neck, and a third would rendezvous in the vicinity of his master’s mill. They would then sweep the town with fire and sword, not permitting a single white soul to escape.

Startled by this terrible intelligence, the military were immediately ordered out and preparations made to suppress the first signs of an outbreak. Finding the city encompassed with patrols and a strict watch kept upon every movement, the negroes feared to carry out their designs, and when the period had passed for the explosion of the plot, the authorities proceeded with vigor to arrest all against whom they possessed information.

The first prisoner tried was Rolla, a commander of one of the contemplated forces. On being asked whether he intended to kill the women and children, he remarked, “When we have done with the men we know what to do with the women.” On this testimony he was found guilty, and sentenced to be executed on the 2d of July.

Another was Denmark Vesey, the father of the plot, and a free black man. It was proved that he had spoken of this conspiracy upwards of four years previously. His house was the rendezvous of the conspirators, where he always presided, encouraging the timid by the hopes of success, removing the scruples of the religious by the grossest perversion of Scripture, and influencing the bold by all the savage fascinations of blood, beauty and booty. It was afterwards proved, though not on his trial, that he had been carrying on a correspondence with certain persons in St. Domingo—the massacre and rebellion in that island having suggested to him the conspiracy in which he embarked at Charleston. His design was to set the mills on fire, and as soon as the bells began to ring the alarm, to kill every man as he came out of his door, and afterwards murder the women and children, “for so God had commanded in the Scriptures.” At the same time, the country negroes were to rise in arms, attack the forts, take the ships, kill every man on board except the captains, rob the banks and stores, and then sail for St. Domingo. English and French assistance was also expected.

Six thousand were ascertained to have been enlisted in the enterprise, their names being enrolled on the books of “The Society,” as the organization was called.

When the first rising failed, the leaders, who still escaped arrest, meditated a second one, but found the blacks cowed by the execution of their associates and by the vigilance of the whites. The leaders waited, they said, “for the head man, who was a white man,” but they would not reveal his name.

The whole number of persons executed was thirty-five; sentenced to transportation, twenty-one; the whole number arrested, one hundred and thirty-one.

Among the conspirators brought to trial and conviction, the cases of Glen, Billy Palmer and Jack Purcell were distinguished for the sanctimonious hypocrisy they blended with their crime. Glen was a preacher, Palmer exceedingly pious, and Purcell no less devout. The latter made the following important confession:—

“If it had not been for the cunning of that old villain Vesey I should not now be in my present situation. He employed every stratagem to induce me to join him. He was in the habit of reading to me all the passages in the newspapers that related to St. Domingo, and apparently every pamphlet he could lay his hands on that had any connection with slavery. He one day brought in a speech which he told me had been delivered in Congress by a Mr. King on the subject of slavery. He told me this Mr. King was the black man’s friend; that he (Mr. King) had declared he would continue to speak, write and publish pamphlets against slavery to the latest day he lived, until the Southern States consented to emancipate their slaves, for that slavery was a great disgrace to the country.”

The Mr. King here spoken of was Rufus King, Senator from New York. This confession shows that the evil which was foretold would arise from the discussion of the Missouri question had been in some degree realized in the course of two or three years.

Religious fanaticism also had its share in the conspiracy at Charleston, as well as politics. The secession of a large body of blacks from the white Methodist church formed a hot-bed, in which the germ of insurrection was nursed into life. A majority of the conspirators belonged to the “African church,” an appellation which the seceders assumed after leaving the white Methodist church, and among those executed were several who had been class-leaders. Thus was religion made a cloak for the most diabolical crimes on record. It is the same at this day. The tirades of the North are calculated to drive the negro population of the South to bloody massacres and insurrections.

BRITISH INFLUENCE AND INTERFERENCE.

During all this time, British abolition sentiments and designs were industriously infused into the minds of the people of the North. Looking over their own homeless, unfed, ragged millions, their filthy hovels and mud floors, worse than the common abode of pigs and poultry, crowded cellars, hungry paupers, children at work under ground—a community of wretchedness such as the American slave never dreamed of—British philanthropists wrote, declaimed, and expended untold sums upon a supposed abuse three thousand miles off, with which they have no connection, civil, social or political, and of which they know comparatively nothing. They passed their fellow-subjects by who were dying of hunger upon their very door-sills, to make long prayers in the market-place for the imaginary sufferings of negroes to whose well-fed and happy condition their own wretched paupers might aspire in vain.

Before they indulged in this invective, it would have been wise to have inquired who were the authors of the evil. In the language of an English statesman—

“If slavery is the misfortune of America, it is the crime of Great Britain. We poured the foul infection into her veins, and fed and cherished the leprosy which now deforms that otherwise prosperous country.”

Having filled their purses as traders in slaves, they have become traders in philanthropy, and manage to earn a character for helping slavery out of the very plantations of the South they helped to stock. They resemble their own beau ideal of a fine gentleman—George IV.—who, it is said, drove his wife into imprudences by his brutality and neglect, and then persecuted her to death for having fallen into them; or one of those fashionable philosophers who seduce women and then upbraid them for a want of virtue. Like the Roman emperor, they find no unsavory smell in the gold derived from the filthiest source.

The first abolition society in Great Britain was established in 1823, and it is a fact worthy of note that the first public advocate in England of the doctrine of immediate and unconditional abolition was a woman—Elizabeth Herrick. In 1825, the Anti-Slavery Society commenced the circulation of the Monthly Anti-Slavery Reporter, which was edited by Zacharay Macaulay, Esq., the father of the late Thomas B. Macaulay, the essayist, historian and lord. Petitions began to be circulated, public meetings were held, and the Methodist Conferences took an active part in the movement, exhorting their brethren, “for the love of Christ,” to vote for no candidates not known to be pledged to the cause of abolition. Rectors, curates, doctors of divinity, members of Parliament and peers engaged in the work, and converts rapidly increased. Riots and disturbances resulted. In 1832, an insurrection, fomented by abolition missionaries, broke out in the island of Jamaica, which was only terminated by a resort to the musket and gibbet—the usual fruit of these incendiary doctrines, wherever they have been circulated. In 1833, a bill was passed by the British government, by which, for a compensation of one hundred millions of dollars, eight hundred thousand slaves in the British West Indies received their liberation. This was followed, in 1843, by the abolition of slavery throughout the British dominions, which emancipated twelve millions more in the East Indies. The cause thus received a new impetus; societies sprang into life all over the United Kingdom; a correspondence was opened in every part of the world where negroes were held in bondage; lecturers were sent abroad, especially to the United States, to disseminate their doctrines and stir up rebellion, both among the people and the slaves; earnest endeavors were made to influence the policy of the non-slaveholding States of the North, and create a hatred for the South; and, in short, the abolition movement settled down in a determined warfare against the institution of slavery wherever it existed.

It has been a war in which newspapers, pamphlets, periodicals, tracts, books, novels, essays—in a word, the entire moral forces of the human mind—have been the weapons. England became the champion of anti-slavery, and the United States became the theatre of a crusade, which seemed as if intended to carry out the spirit of the remark of Sir Robert Peel, that “the one hundred millions of dollars paid for the abolition of slavery in the West Indies was the best investment ever made for the overthrow of American institutions.”

Exeter Hall and the Stafford House became the centre of this new system, around which revolved all the lights of British abolitionism. The ground of immediate and unconditional emancipation, however, was not taken by the English abolitionists until subsequent years, but these views, when presented, found ready concurrence from Clarkson, Wilberforce and other well known advocates of the cause. Among the English statesmen pledged upon the subject, were Grey, Lansdowne, Holland, Brougham, Melbourne, Palmerston, Graham, Stanley and Buxton, and in the hands of these fervent leaders the cause speedily progressed towards its fruition.

From this time forward the coalesced efforts of British and Northern influence to disturb the institution of slavery in the South, to render slave labor less valuable and incite the negroes to rebellion, have been continued with more or less system, occasionally threatening the stability of the Union; the whole object of Great Britain being, not the welfare of the slave, but the destruction of slave labor, whereby, through a system of conquest and forced labor, she would be able to supplant the United States, by producing her cotton from the fields of the Eastern world. With this end in view, and coupled perhaps with the idea that the abolition of slavery would break down our republican form of government, she resorted to every species of intrigue that promised success. Dissensions have been sown between the North and South; the “underground railroad” system has been established leading to her Canadian possessions; agitation and assault have been perseveringly maintained; the country has been flooded with tirades of every hue and kind against the institution; the Northern pulpit has been desecrated in its dedication to the work of stirring up strife; churches have been severed in twain, and Southern Christians denied fellowship with their Northern brethren, until the grand political climax has been reached of secession and revolution. It is safe to say that from the time this plan of operation was digested in England, thirty years ago, there is scarcely a movement that has taken place on the chess-board of American abolitionism, which, under the guise of philanthropy, has not been dictated at Exeter Hall for the purpose of destroying the production of cotton and breaking down the free government of this country.

Among the more far-seeing and practical statesmen of Great Britain, however—men who have ever dissented from the ultra views of abolitionists—there is an evident alarm that this headlong policy that has been pursued will rebound upon the interests of the mother country. Already the subject has become a source of anxious consideration, and the people of England are beginning to look around for some relief from that dependence upon American institutions which has heretofore been the reliance and support of millions of their workers. They find that the example they have set, and the policy they have urged, does not promise to be altogether so beneficial to them as they supposed. In this connection it will be interesting, as a matter of history, to preserve the master rebuke of Lord Brougham to the unconditional abolitionists of Boston, who invited him to be present at the John Brown anniversary of the past year. He says:—

“Brougham, Nov. 20, 1860.

“Sir—I feel honored by the invitation to attend the Boston Convention, and to give my opinion upon the question “How can American Slavery be abolished?” I consider the application is made to me as conceiving me to represent the anti-slavery body in this country; and I believe that I speak their sentiments as well as my own in expressing the widest difference of opinion with you upon the merits of those who prompted the Harper’s Ferry expedition, and upon the fate of those who suffered for their conduct in it. No one will doubt my earnest desire to see slavery extinguished, but that desire can only be gratified by lawful means, a strict regard to the rights of property, or what the law declares property, and a constant repugnance to the shedding of blood. No man can be considered a martyr unless he not only suffers but is witness to the truth; and he does not bear this testimony who seeks a lawful object by illegal means. Any other course taken for the abolition of slavery can only delay the consummation we so devoutly wish, besides exposing the community to the hazard of an insurrection perhaps less hurtful to the master than the slave.”

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