CAUSES IN THE STATE, WHICH HINDERED
Slavery was at war with the ideals upon which Virginians had founded their commonwealth. It was a burden upon her advance along every line of normal achievement. It was repugnant to the sensibilities of thousands of her most devoted sons and yet, despairing of any present remedy, they sternly deprecated discussion as a disloyal parading before the world of this skeleton in her closet.
Slavery made its home among the great plantations spreading their broad acres far from the centres of population, their owners living distant one from the other. It required, therefore, some more persuasive force than bolts and bars, to protect these isolated whites from the fury of the blacks if ever roused to a maddened discontent with their lot, and a consciousness of their power. Thus the daily precepts of slavery,—obedience, submission and reverence for the white man,—must not be dissipated by public discussions in which the rightfulness of slavery was questioned and the glories of freedom held up before the eyes of the wondering blacks. San Domingo sent its warnings, the horrors of the Nat Turner Insurrection were still fresh in the minds of men, and so the imperilled slave-holders denounced as the enemies of their race white men who indulged in academic discussions as to the advantages of emancipation.
The foregoing were some of the causes arising within the state which served to discourage public discussions with respect to the abolition of slavery, and to invest with unnatural heat and bitterness the sentiments of those who nevertheless essayed the task.
CAUSES FROM WITHOUT, WHICH HINDERED
From beyond came movements and voices even more destructive of the spirit of free discussion and which lent to the reactionary elements in the state an advantage which they could never have acquired except for this outside interference.
As far back as 1835 John Quincy Adams noted in his diary:
"Anti-slavery associations are formed in this country and in England and they are already co-operating in concerted agency together. They have raised funds to support and circulate inflammatory newspapers and pamphlets gratuitously, and they send multitudes of them into the Southern country into the midst of swarms of slaves."[[255]]
In the same year there assembled in Faneuil Hall what the biographers of William Lloyd Garrison called "the social, political, religious and intellectual elite of Boston," who, under the leadership of Theodore Lyman, Jr., Abbott Lawrence, Peleg Sprague, and Harrison Gray Otis adopted resolutions denouncing the Northern Abolitionists for seeking by their inflammatory publications "to scatter among our Southern brethren fire-brands, arrows, and death," and pledging the meeting to support all constitutional laws for the suppression of all publications, "the natural and direct tendency of which is to incite the slaves of the South to revolt."[[256]]
Margaret Mercer, of Maryland, whose devotion to the cause of negro emancipation was well attested by her act in manumitting her own slaves, as well as in her life of service devoted largely to their interests, writing to Gerrit Smith, laments the incendiary appeals of William Lloyd Garrison and the direful forebodings which they aroused among the Southern people especially in the imaginations of the women. She says: