When, then, the Abolitionists began their campaign the country was already ripe for a struggle, and in the North as well as the South there was plenty of sentiment unfavorable to the Negro. In July, 1831, when an attempt was made to start a manual training school for Negro youth in New Haven, the citizens at a public meeting declared that "the founding of colleges for educating colored people is an unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other states, and ought to be discouraged"; and they ultimately forced the project to be abandoned. At Canterbury in the same state Prudence Crandall, a young Quaker woman twenty-nine years of age, was brought face to face with the problem when she admitted a Negro girl, Sarah Harris, to her school.[170] When she was boycotted she announced that she would receive Negro girls only if no others would attend, and she advertised accordingly in the Liberator. She was subjected to various indignities and efforts were made to arrest her pupils as vagrants. As she was still undaunted, her opponents, on May 24, 1833, procured a special act of the legislature forbidding, under severe penalties, the instruction of any Negro from outside the state without the consent of the town authorities. Under this act Miss Crandall was arrested and imprisoned, being confined to a cell which had just been vacated by a murderer. The Abolitionists came to her defense, but she was convicted, and though the higher courts quashed the proceedings on technicalities, the village shopkeepers refused to sell her food, manure was thrown into her well, her house was pelted with rotten eggs and at last demolished, and even the meeting-house in the town was closed to her. The attempt to continue the school was then abandoned. In 1834 an academy was built by subscription in Canaan, N.H.; it was granted a charter by the legislature, and the proprietors determined to admit all applicants having "suitable moral and intellectual recommendations, without other distinctions." The town-meeting "viewed with abhorrence" the attempt to establish the school, but when it was opened twenty-eight white and fourteen Negro scholars attended. The town-meeting then ordered that the academy be forcibly removed and appointed a committee to execute the mandate. Accordingly on August 10 three hundred men with two hundred oxen assembled, took the edifice from its place, dragged it for some distance and left it a ruin. From 1834 to 1836, in fact, throughout the country, from east to west, swept a wave of violence. Not less than twenty-five attempts were made to break up anti-slavery meetings. In New York in October, 1833, there was a riot in Clinton Hall, and from July 7 to 11 of the next year a succession of riots led to the sacking of the house of Lewis Tappan and the destruction of other houses and churches. When George Thompson arrived from England in September, 1834, his meetings were constantly disturbed, and Garrison himself was mobbed in Boston in 1835, being dragged through the streets with a rope around his body.
In general the Abolitionists were charged by the South with promoting both insurrection and the amalgamation of the races. There was no clear proof of these charges; nevertheless, May said, "If we do not emancipate our slaves by our own moral energy, they will emancipate themselves and that by a process too horrible to contemplate";[171] and Channing said, "Allowing that amalgamation is to be anticipated, then, I maintain, we have no right to resist it. Then it is not unnatural."[172] While the South grew hysterical at the thought, it was, as Hart remarks, a fair inquiry, which the Abolitionists did not hesitate to put—Who was responsible for the only amalgamation that had so far taken place? After a few years there was a cleavage among the Abolitionists. Some of the more practical men, like Birney, Gerrit Smith, and the Tappans, who believed in fighting through governmental machinery, in 1838 broke away from the others and prepared to take a part in Federal politics. This was the beginning of the Liberty party, which nominated Birney for the presidency in 1840 and again in 1844. In 1848 it became merged in the Free Soil party and ultimately in the Republican party.
With the forties came division in the Church—a sort of prelude to the great events that were to thunder through the country within the next two decades. Could the Church really countenance slavery? Could a bishop hold a slave? These were to become burning questions. In 1844-5 the Baptists of the North and East refused to approve the sending out of missionaries who owned slaves, and the Southern Baptist Convention resulted. In 1844, when James O. Andrew came into the possession of slaves by his marriage to a widow who had these as a legacy from her former husband, the Northern Methodists refused to grant that one of their bishops might hold a slave, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was formally organized in Louisville the following year. The Presbyterians and the Episcopalians, more aristocratic in tone, did not divide.
The great events of the annexation of Texas, with the Mexican War that resulted, the Compromise of 1850, with the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, and the Dred Scott decision of 1857 were all regarded in the North as successive steps in the campaign of slavery, though now in the perspective they appear as vain efforts to beat back a resistless tide. In the Mexican War it was freely urged by the Mexicans that, should the American line break, their host would soon find itself among the rich cities of the South, where perhaps it could not only exact money, but free two million slaves as well, call to its assistance the Indians, and even draw aid from the Abolitionists in the North.[173] Nothing of all this was to be. Out of the academic shades of Harvard, however, at last came a tongue of flame. In "The Present Crisis" James Russell Lowell produced lines whose tremendous beat was like a stern call of the whole country to duty:
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit and 'tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.
New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key.
As "The Present Crisis" came after the Mexican War, so after the new Fugitive Slave Law appeared Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). "When despairing Hungarian fugitives make their way, against all the search-warrants and authorities of their lawful governments, to America, press and political cabinet ring with applause and welcome. When despairing African fugitives do the same thing—it is—what is it?" asked Harriet Beecher Stowe; and in her remarkable book she proceeded to show the injustice of the national position. Uncle Tom's Cabin has frequently been termed a piece of propaganda that gave an overdrawn picture of Southern conditions. The author, however, had abundant proof for her incidents, and she was quite aware of the fact that the problem of the Negro, North as well as South, transcended the question of slavery. Said St. Clair to Ophelia: "If we emancipate, are you willing to educate? How many families of your town would take in a Negro man or woman, teach them, bear with them, and seek to make them Christians? How many merchants would take Adolph, if I wanted to make him a clerk; or mechanics, if I wanted to teach him a trade? If I wanted to put Jane and Rosa to school, how many schools are there in the Northern states that would take them in?... We are in a bad position. We are the more obvious oppressors of the Negro; but the unchristian prejudice of the North is an oppressor almost equally severe."