IV
Now as to the abolition of slavery.
What are the historical facts as to this? It is true that slavery had been abolished at the North; but this was under conditions which, had they prevailed at the South, would have been taken advantage of there also; and when the institution was abolished in the Northern States, it had become so unprofitable that no great credit can attach to the act of abolition.[71] It is also true that there were throughout the North a considerable body of men and women who, from a very long time back, believed sincerely that human slavery was a crime against nature, and strove zealously and persistently to overthrow it. At the South there were also many who labored with not less earnestness to effect the same end; though, owing to different conditions, the same means could not be employed; and, standing face to face with the immense slave population which existed at the South, they saw the same danger which faces us to-day, and sought in colonization the means at once to abolish slavery, to free America, and to Christianize Africa.
As to actual, immediate emancipation, however, it was no more the intentional work of the North as a people than it was of the South.
The credit for it, even so far as creating a public opinion which rendered it eventually possible, is due to a band of emancipators, who, for a long time absolutely insignificant in numbers, and ever comparatively few when contrasted with the great body of the people of the North, devoted their energies, their labors, their lives, to the accomplishment of this end. During their labors they encountered no less obloquy, and experienced scarcely less peril at the North than at the South, with this difference, that at the North the outrages perpetrated upon them were inspired by a mere sentiment, while at the South the vast number of slaves made any interference with them intolerable, and the treatment abolitionists received was based on a recognition of the fact that the doctrines they promulgated might at any moment plunge the South into the horrors of insurrection.
It was not at the South, but at the North, in Connecticut, that Prudence Crandall was, for teaching colored girls, subjected to a persecution as barbarous as it was persistent. After being sued and pursued by every process of law which a New England community could devise, she was finally driven forth into exile in Kansas.
She opened her school in Canterbury, Connecticut, in April, 1833, and was at once subjected to the bitterest persecution conceivable. It was all well enough to hold theories about the equal rights of all mankind; well enough to abuse the institution of slavery in Virginia, in South Carolina, in Georgia, or in Louisiana; but actually to start “a nigger school” in Canterbury, Connecticut, was monstrous. The town-meeting promptly voted to “petition for a law against the bringing of colored people from other towns and States for any purpose, and more especially for the purpose of dissemination of the principles and doctrines opposed to the benevolent colonization scheme.” “In May an act prohibiting private schools for non-resident colored persons, and providing for the expulsion of the latter, was procured from the legislature, amid the greatest rejoicings in Canterbury, even to the ringing of church-bells.” The most vindictive and inhuman measures were adopted against the offender; the shops and meeting-houses were closed against her and her pupils.[72]
It was not at the South, but at Canaan, New Hampshire, that on August 10, 1835, the building of the Noyes Academy, open to pupils of both colors, in pursuance of a formal town-meeting vote that it be “removed,” was dragged by one hundred yoke of oxen from the land belonging to the corporation, and left on the common, three hundred yeomen of the county participating. The teacher and colored pupils were given a month in which to quit the town.[73]
Throughout New England, less than thirty years before the promulgation of the emancipation proclamation abolitionists encountered not only opprobrium but violence. When George Thompson, the English abolitionist, went throughout the North in 1835, his windows were broken in Augusta, Maine, where a State anti-slavery convention was in progress, and a committee of citizens requested him to leave town immediately under pain of being mobbed if he reëntered the convention. At Concord, New Hampshire, he was interrupted with missiles while addressing a ladies’ meeting. At Lowell, Massachusetts, on his second visit, in the town hall a brick-bat thrown from without through the window narrowly escaped his head, and in spite of the manliness of the selectmen a meeting the next evening was abandoned in the certainty of fresh and deadly assaults.[74]
It is stated in a letter from Mr. William Lloyd Garrison that Thompson had a narrow escape from the mob at Concord, and Whittier was pelted with mud and stones.[75] At a convention in Lynn, George Thompson was stoned. The next evening he was mobbed by three hundred men.
All this in New England. Finally, the English missionary was driven out of the country, being in danger, as Garrison wrote, “of assassination even in the streets of Boston.”[76] Indeed, mobs were as frequent at that period in New England as they could have been in Virginia or South Carolina had the abolitionists attempted to preach their doctrines here. William Lloyd Garrison himself was assailed and denounced, and even in the city of Boston was subjected to the bitterest and most persistent persecution. He was notified to close up the office of his paper, The Liberator, under penalty of tar and feathers. A placard was circulated, stating that a purse of one hundred dollars had been raised to reward the first man who should lay hands on the “infamous foreign scoundrel Thompson,” so that he might be brought to the tar-kettle before dark.
Finally, Garrison himself was mobbed in Boston, torn out of the house in which was the office of the Anti-Slavery Society, where he was attending a meeting of women, dragged through the streets of Boston with a rope around him, and but for the cleverness of two sensible men who got him into the City Hall he would have been killed. Even there he was in such peril that he was put in the jail to keep him from the mob, which came near getting possession of him a second time.
This mob was not, as may be supposed, a mob of the creatures who usually constitute such an assemblage, but is said to have been composed of respectable and well-dressed persons. Garrison, attacking the mayor afterward, in the press, for not taking his part more firmly, declared that if it had been a mob of workingmen assaulting a meeting of merchants, no doubt he would have acted with energy, “but broadcloth and money alter the case.”[77] Indeed, he says, the mayor acknowledged that “the city government did not very much disapprove of the mob to put down such agitators as Garrison and those like him.”[78]
It is notable that the entire press of Boston, with hardly more than one or two exceptions, approved the action of the mob and censured Garrison.
This is what Garrison himself said of it:
“1. The outrage was perpetrated in Boston, the cradle of liberty, the city of Hancock and Adams, the headquarters of refinement, literature, intelligence, and religion. No comments can add to the infamy of this fact.
“2. It was perpetrated in the open daylight of heaven, and was therefore most unblushing and daring in its features.”
“3. It was dastardly beyond precedent, as it was an assault of thousands upon a small body of helpless females. Charleston and New Orleans have never acted so brutally.
“4. It was planned and executed, not by the rabble or the workingmen, but by ‘gentlemen of property and standing, from all parts of the city’—and now (October 25th) that time has been afforded for reflection, it is still either openly justified or coldly disapproved by the ‘higher classes,’ and exultation among them is general throughout the city....”
“5. It is evidently winked at by the city authorities. No efforts have been made to arrest the leading rioters....”
All of this was within three years of the time when a bill to abolish slavery in Virginia had failed in her General Assembly by only one vote and that vote the casting vote of the speaker.
There is surely no necessity to pile up more authority on this point. If there were it could be done; for not only in New England, but elsewhere in the North, instances can be cited in which violence, and once even murder, occurred. Elijah P. Lovejoy, after having his printing-office sacked three times, fell a martyr to the ferocity of a mob in Illinois for having, under an instinct of humanity, aided a fugitive slave to escape. On one thing, however, the North may with justice pride itself: that in the end, there was awakened in it a general sentiment for emancipation. For this it was indebted to a work of genius produced by a woman; a romance which touched the heart of Christendom. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” overruled the Supreme Court of the United States, and abrogated the Constitution. By arousing the general sentiment of the world against slavery, it contributed more than any other one thing to its abolition in that generation.
But not even then did the North set out to abolish slavery. President Lincoln is universally accredited as the emancipator of the African. It is his hand which is represented in bronze and marble as striking the shackles from the slave. He was the chosen and great standard-bearer of the most advanced element of the North, the great representative of their ideas, the idolized chief magistrate, and the trusted commander of their armies.
His words on this subject must be authoritative.
On the 22d of December, 1860, after South Carolina had seceded, he says: “Do the Southern people really entertain fears that a Republican administration would directly or indirectly interfere with the slaves or with them about their slaves? ... The South would be in no more danger in this respect than it was in the days of Washington.”
On the 4th of March, 1861, in his official utterance, his inaugural address, he says: “I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it now exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
If there can possibly be a more authoritative declaration than this, we have it in a resolution passed by Congress of the United States, and signed by Lincoln as President in July, 1861, after the battle of Manassas:
“Resolved ... that this war is not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired,” etc.
Slave-holding even in Federal territory was not forbidden until June 19, 1862, which was just a month before the bill was passed providing that all “slaves of persistent rebels found in any place occupied or commanded by the forces of the Union should not be returned to their masters [as they had hitherto been under the law], and providing that they might be enlisted to fight for the Union.”
A Constitutional Amendment (the Thirteenth), abolishing and prohibiting evermore the enslavement of human beings, failed to pass in the House of Representatives in the session of 1864, and would have failed altogether had not a member from Ohio changed his vote in order to move a reconsideration and keep it alive till the following session, when Mr. Lincoln having been reëlected, and having recommended its passage, and the war being evidently near its end, it was passed by a vote of 119 yeas to 57 nays.
Indeed, before Mr. Lincoln issued his emancipation proclamation he gave one hundred days’ warning to the revolutionary States to lay down their arms, and in the proclamation he places the entire matter forever at rest by declaring in terms, in that unmistakable English of which he was a master, that the measure was adopted “upon military necessity.”
No one can read this record and not admit that slavery was abolished in the providence of God, against the intention of the North and of the South alike, because its purpose had been accomplished, and the time was ripe for its ending.