ANTI-ABOLITION AT THE NORTH
Southerners, save perhaps a few who were wise enough to foresee what the consequences might be, were deeply gratified when they read (1835-1838) of the violent opposition in the North to the desperate schemes of the Abolitionists. Surely these mobs fairly represented public opinion, and that public opinion certainly was a strong guaranty to the South of future peace and security.
But the Abolitionists themselves were not dismayed. They may have misread, indeed it is certain they did misunderstand, the signs of the times. Garrison in his Liberator took the ground—as do his children in their life of him, written fifty years later—that the great Faneuil Hall meeting of August 31, 1835, which they themselves declare represented "the intelligence, the wealth, the culture, and the religion of Boston," was but an indication of the "pro-slavery" sentiment then existing. In reality it was just what it purported to be—an authoritative condemnation, not of the anti-slavery opinions, but of the avowed purposes and methods of the new sect. The mobbing of Garrison and the sacking of his printing office in Boston on September 26th, however, and the lawless violence to Abolitionists that followed the denunciations of that despised sect by speakers, and by the public press, in New York, in Philadelphia, in Cincinnati, and elsewhere in the North, proved disastrous in the extreme.
While that great wave of anti-Abolition feeling was sweeping over that whole region from East to West, there were many good people who deluded themselves with the idea that this new sect with its visionary and impracticable ideas was being consigned to oblivion, but in what followed we have a lesson that unfortunately some of our people have not yet fully learned. Mob law in any portion of our free country, where there is law with officers to enforce it, is a mistake, a mistake that is likely to be followed sooner or later by most disastrous results. The mobs that marked the beginning of our Revolution in 1774 were legitimate; they meant revolt, revolt against constituted authorities. But where a mob does not mean the overthrow of government, where it only means to substitute its own blind will for the arm of the law, not good but evil—it may be long deferred, but evil eventually—is sure to follow. When mobs assailed Abolitionists because they threatened the peace and tranquillity of the country, evil followed swiftly.
Violent and harsh treatment of these mischievous agitators almost everywhere in the North, and the heroism with which they endured ignominy and insult, brought about a revulsion of public sentiment. To understand the philosophy of this, read two extracts from the writings of that great, and universally admired, pulpit orator, Dr. William E. Channing of Boston, the first written sometime prior to that August meeting:
The adoption of the common system of agitation by the Abolitionists has not been justified by success. From the beginning it has created alarm in the considerate, and strengthened the sympathies of the Free States with the slave-holder. It has made converts of a few individuals, but alienated multitudes. Its influence at the South has been almost wholly evil. It has stirred up bitter passions, and a fierce fanaticism, which have shut every ear and every heart against its arguments and persuasions. These efforts are more to be deplored, because the hope of freedom to the slave lies chiefly in the dispositions of his master. The Abolitionist proposed indeed to convert the slave-holder; and for this end he approached them with vituperation, and exhausted upon them the vocabulary of reproach. And he has reaped as he sowed.... Perhaps (though I am anxious to repel the thought) something has been lost to the cause of freedom and humanity.[33]
These were Dr. Channing's opinions of the Abolitionists prior to August, 1835, and he seems to have kept silent for a time after the mobbing that followed that great Faneuil Hall meeting; but a year later, when many other things had happened along the same line, he spoke out in an open letter to James G. Birney, an Abolitionist editor who had been driven from Cincinnati, and whose press, on which The Philanthropist was printed, had been broken up. In that letter, p. 157, supra, speaking of course not for himself alone, Dr. Channing says:
I think it best ... to extend my remarks to the spirit of violence and persecution which has broken out against the Abolitionists throughout the whole country. Of their merits and demerits as Abolitionists I have formerly spoken.... I have expressed my fervent attachment to the great end to which they are pledged and at the same time my disapprobation, to a certain extent, of their spirit and measures.... Deliberate, systematic efforts have been made, not here and there, but far and wide, to wrest from its adherents that liberty of speech and the press, which our fathers asserted in blood, and which our National and State Governments are pledged to protect as our most sacred right. Its most conspicuous advocates have been hunted and stoned, its meetings scattered, its presses broken up, and nothing but the patience, constancy and intrepidity of its members has saved it from extinction.... They are sufferers for the liberty of thought, speech and press; and in maintaining this liberty, amidst insult and violence, they deserve a place among its honorable defenders.
Still admitting that "their writings have been blemished by a spirit of intolerance, sweeping censure, and rash, injurious judgment," this great man now threw all the weight of his influence on the side of the Abolitionists, because they were the champions of free speech. Their moral worth and steady adherence to their ideas of non-resistance he pointed to admiringly, and it must always be remembered to their credit that the private lives of Garrison and his leading co-workers were irreproachable. Indeed, the unselfish devotion of these agitators and their high moral character were in themselves a serious misfortune. They soon attracted a lot of zealots, male and female, who became as reckless as they were. And these out-and-out fanatics were not themselves office-seekers. What they feared, they said, was that a "lot of soulless scamps would jump on to their shoulders to ride into office";[34] and there really was the great danger, as appeared later.
In the results that followed the mobbing of Abolitionists in the North, from 1834 to 1836, is to be found another lesson for those voters of this day who can profit by the teachings of history. The violent assaults on the Abolitionists by the friends of the Constitution and the Union constituted an epoch in the lives of these people. It gave them a footing and a hearing and many converts.
We have already noted some wonderful and instructive changes in the tide of events set in motion by the radical teachings of the New Abolitionists. The churches, as has been shown, to save the country, North and South, changed their attitude on slavery itself. Dr. Channing, who had opposed the methods of the Abolitionists, became, as many others did with him, when mobs had assailed these people, their defender and eulogist, because they were martyrs for the sake of free speech; and now we are to see in John Quincy Adams another change, equally notable, a change that was to make Mr. Adams thenceforward the most momentous figure, at least during its earlier stages, in the tragic drama that is the subject of our story.
Elected to the House of Representatives after the expiration of his term as President, Mr. Adams was not in sympathy with the methods of the Abolitionists. Indeed, prior to December 31, 1831, he had shown as little interest in slavery as he did when on that day in presenting to the House fifteen petitions against slavery he "deprecated a discussion which would lead to ill-will, to heart-burning, to mutual hatred ... without accomplishing anything else."[35]
The petitions presented by Mr. Adams were referred to a committee.
The Southerners had not then become so exasperated as to insist on Congress refusing to receive Abolition petitions. But multiplying these petitions was a ready means of provoking the slave-holders, and soon petitions poured in from many quarters, couched, most of them, in language, not disrespectful to Congress but provoking to slave-holders.
Unfortunately, the lower house of Congress on May 26, 1836, which was while mobs in the North were still trying to put down the Abolitionists, passed a resolution that all such petitions, etc., should thereafter be laid upon the table, without further action. Adams voted against it as "a direct violation of the Constitution of the United States." The Constitution forbids any law "abridging the freedom of speech ... or the right ... to petition the government for a redress of grievances." The resolution to lay all anti-slavery petitions on the table without further action was passed, "with the hope that it might put a stop to the agitation that seemed to endanger the existence of the Union." But it had the opposite effect. It soon became known as the "gag resolution," and was, for years, the centre of the most aggravating discussions that had, up to that time, ever occurred in Congress. Mr. Adams in these debates became, without, it seems, ever having been in full sympathy with the agitators, thenceforward their champion in Congress, and so continued until the day of his death in 1848.
The Abolitionists were happy. They were succeeding in their programme—making the Southern slave-holder odious by exasperating him into offending Northern sentiment.