Rev. Samuel Doak was the leader of that strong and able Presbyterian contingent that came from North Carolina into Tennessee in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. He was also the leading educator of the State in his day.[27] He was a graduate of Princeton, and founded in Tennessee the first institution of learning in the Mississippi Valley.[28] He was a prominent abolitionist from 1800 to 1830, and from 1818 he taught immediate abolition. Among his pupils was Sam Houston, who opposed secession, John Rankin, and Rev. Jesse Lockhart, who preached and lectured on abolition in Southern Ohio.[29]
Dr. Philip Lindsey, who was President of the University of Nashville from 1825 to 1850, was the leader in organizing the Tennessee Colonization Society. He was its president for a number of years and was connected with it until his death. His educational leadership gave the colonization movement a prestige and influence that could not have come through any other channel. The University of Nashville in this period was the leading educational institution of the State, if not of the South.[30]
Mr. R. G. Williams was one of the anti-slavery leaders who helped to make Maryville, in East Tennessee, the seat of Maryville Seminary, now Maryville College, one of the great anti-slavery centers of the nation, a forerunner of Oberlin in Ohio. “We are rejoiced to know,” said The Emancipator of New York, “that in East Tennessee and directly in the very center of the slaveholding country, among the fastnesses of the American Alps, God has secured a little Spartan band of devoted abolitionists of the best stamp, whom neither death nor danger can turn,”[31] and a later issue of The Emancipator, quoting the letter of a student of Maryville College, said, “We take the liberty to uphold and defend our sentiments, whether it is agreeable or not to the selfishness of the slaveholder. We would thankfully receive any communication on the subject. We have some friends in the country around, among whom we have the privilege of distributing without fear a considerable number of pamphlets. About thirty students in the Theological Seminary at this place are preparing for the ministry, of whom twelve are abolitionists.” This same issue, quoting a letter of Mr. R. G. Williams, said: “We could form a good Anti-slavery Society in this part of the state, but we choose to work in an unorganized manner a while yet, before we set ourselves up as a target, notwithstanding the strict laws of Tennessee. We meet through the country and discuss the merits of abolition and colonization; the former is ably defended by Rev. T. S. Kendall, pastor of the Seceder Church in this county (Blount), and several others.”[32]
The most eminent anti-slavery leader in the state was Elihu Embree. He was a Quaker, son of Thomas and Esther Embree, of Pennsylvania, born November 11, 1782. He moved to Tennessee at an early age, and became an iron manufacturer in East Tennessee. He early espoused the cause of freedom, and began at Jonesboro, Tennessee, in 1819, the publication of the Manumission Intelligencer as the mouth-piece of the manumission societies of Tennessee. He continued this publication until his untimely death in 1820.
Embree was a radical, outspoken, and uncompromising abolitionist. He was the leader of the Society of Friends in their work for abolition in Tennessee. Embree’s writing and lecturing on abolition did more to advertise the state as an abolition center in the twenties than the work of all the others combined. In Garrison’s Life, by his children, there is an account of the work of Embree, “to whom,” it says, “must be accorded the honor of publishing the first periodical in America of which the one avowed object was opposition to slavery.”[33] Mr. Embree said he “spent several thousand dollars ... in some small degree abolishing, and in endeavoring to facilitate the general abolition of slavery.”[34]
Embree had owned seven or eight slaves, but in discussing his connection with slavery, he said:
“I repent that I ever owned one. And indeed the crime is of such a hue, that the time may yet come, that a man who has, in a single instance, gone astray thus far, may never be able in his life time to regain public confidence; and should this change of public sentiment take place in my day, and render me disqualified to act in the promotion of this glorious cause, I hope to acquiesce in, and be resigned to suffer the just judgment, and be more humble under a sense of my past misconduct; meanwhile I shall doubtless have the pleasure of rejoicing at seeing this stigma on our religious professions, and scar upon our national escutcheon, eradicated by men of clean hands.”[35]
III. Abolition Literature.
The first issue of the Manumission Intelligencer was published in March, 1819, at Jonesboro, Tennessee. It was a weekly at first, and, in this form, about fifty issues were published, eight or ten copies of which are in the possession of various individuals in Washington County. In 1820, Embree changed the paper to a monthly octavo and called it The Emancipator.[36] Due to Embree’s death, December 12, 1820, The Emancipator was forced to discontinue, after a very prosperous existence of eight months, during which time a subscription list of 2000 had been secured.[37] The numbers issued were bound in one volume of one hundred and twenty pages, a copy of which is in the possession of Esq. Thomas J. Wilson, who married Mr. Embree’s daughter.
Embree said that the purpose of “This paper is especially designed by the editor to advocate the abolition of slavery, and to be a repository of tracts on that interesting and important subject. It will contain all the necessary information that the editor can obtain of the progress of the abolition of slavery of the descendants of Africa, together with a concise history of their introduction into slavery, collected from the best authority.”[38]