It is seldom credited to southern slaveholders that they gave up as much property as the records show that they did. The slaveholding states practiced real abolition while New England and the other great abolition sections of the country were agitators of abolition rather than practitioners of it. None of their legislation shook the shackles from a single slave, according to eminent authority,[18] but merely abolished slavery that did not exist; that is, these acts said slaves yet unborn would be free at birth, or at certain age. This was not abolishing slavery by freeing those actually held in slavery. As a matter of fact, those held in slavery at the time of the passing of these acts were retained as slaves until they died, or were sold to Southerners. Of course, all over the country there was abolition by private individuals, but the point is, the Southern slaveholders were the real abolitionists. They actually gave up their property, and turned loose their slaves. There were 7,300 free negroes in Tennessee in 1860. Considering the fact that hundreds of free negroes went to Liberia, Haiti, Canada, and the free states, from Tennessee, and that hundreds of free negroes died in the period from 1796 to 1860, it is safe to say that, at $1000 each, more than ten million dollars’ worth of property was surrendered by the abolitionists of Tennessee. It was largely the small farmer slaveholders that made this sacrifice for their convictions.
II. Anti-slavery Leaders.
Tennessee made a substantial contribution to the anti-slavery leadership of the nation. There were two groups of these men. One of them left the state for a larger field of activity, and might be called Separatists, while the members of the other group remained at home and fought in the ranks. These might be called Puritans. Jesse Mills, Elihu Swain, John Underhill, Jesse Lockhart, Rev. John Roy, Peter Cartwright, Charles Osborn, and Rev. John Rankin are examples of those who left the state for abolition centers.[19]
Rev. John Roy was a Methodist preacher who rode Green circuit in Tennessee. He was a man of considerable ability, strong feeling, full of courage, with an iron will. He was strongly anti-slavery in his sentiment, and for this reason moved to Indiana, where he died in 1837 in his 69th year.[20]
Peter Cartwright was one of the greatest preachers of Methodism. He was a native Virginian, but entered the Western Conference in 1804. He gave a great part of his life to the services of the church in Tennessee. He was a man of great humor and wit, and was a fighter against slavery. He finally decided that his labors would be more appreciated in an anti-slavery state, and moved to Illinois in 1824. He became increasingly bitter against slaveholders in his old age, and as a delegate from Illinois to the Methodist Conference in 1844, he voted for the division of the church.
Charles Osborn was one of the greatest of these leaders who left the state. He was born in North Carolina, August 21, 1795. At the age of 19, he moved with his parents to Tennessee, where he became a Quaker minister. In December, 1814 he organized the manumission movement in Tennessee, and was its leader until 1816, when he moved to Ohio, where he did his greatest work.[21] George Washington Julian makes Osborn the undoubted leader in the abolition movement of the Northwest, of which Ohio was the center and one of the two centers of the abolition movement in the nation. Osborn laid the foundation for his work in his new field, for which Tennessee had prepared him by environment and previous service, by establishing at Mount Pleasant, Ohio, in 1817, the Philanthropist, which Julian regards as the first anti-slavery publication in the United States.[22] In 1818, Osborn removed to Indiana, where he lived the remainder of his life.
Rev. John Rankin was possibly the greatest of those leaders who saw fit to leave the State to find an environment more in harmony with his attitude toward slavery. He was a Presbyterian minister, “who was destined, during the three decades preceding the Civil War, to occupy a position of first importance among the anti-slavery workers of the United States. In 1825, he published his famous Letters on Slavery, which went through many editions and exerted a very great influence. Many western men have called him the ‘father of abolition,’ and it was not an uncommon thing in the thirties to hear him spoken of as ‘the Martin Luther of the Cause’.”[23] Rev. Rankin said that in his early boyhood a majority of the people of East Tennessee were abolitionists.[24] The first issue of the Emancipator, referring to the loss of anti-slavery leadership in Tennessee, said,
Thousands of first-rate citizens, men remarkable for their piety and virtue, have within twenty years past, removed from this and other slave states to Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, that their eyes may be hid from seeing the cruel oppressor lacerate the back of his slaves, and that their ears may not hear the bitter cries of the oppressed. I have often regretted the loss of so much virtue from these slave states, which held too little before. Could all those who have removed from slave states on that account, to even the single state of Ohio, have been induced to remove to, and settle in Tennessee, with their high-toned love for universal liberty and aversion to slavery, I think that Tennessee would ere this have begun to sparkle among the true stars of liberty.[25]
James Jones, Samuel Doak, Mr. R. G. Williams, Rev. Philip Lindsey, and Elihu Embree were the most eminent of the group of leaders in abolition who chose to stand their ground and fight straight from the shoulder. James Jones was another member of the Society of Friends, who were really the leaders in the anti-slavery movement in Tennessee. Jones was thoroughly devoted to the cause of abolition, wrote several addresses for the Tennessee Manumission Society, and was for several years its president. His untimely death in 1830 was a serious loss to the cause of humanity and undoubtedly was the death of the Tennessee Manumission Society. Benjamin Lundy paid the following tribute to him at his death:
A great man has fallen, one of the brightest stars in the galaxy of American philanthropists has set, has set to rise no more, James Jones, President of the Manumission Society of Tennessee—the steady, ardent and persevering friend of universal emancipation, is numbered among the dead.... No language can impress upon the mind an adequate idea of his many virtues. Suffice it to say that few men living can fill the station that he held, with equal honor and usefulness. Long shall the poor oppressed African mourn for his irreparable loss.[26]