The Negro in Tennessee, 1790-1865

by C. Perry Patterson

This report admits that slavery is a great evil and utters the following prophecy of its abolition: “The ministers of our holy religion will knock at the door of the hearts of the owners of slaves, telling every one of them to let his bondsman and his bondswoman go free, and to send them back to the land of their forefathers, and the voice of these holy men will be heard and obeyed, and even those who lend a deaf ear to the admonitions in the hour of death, will, on a bed of sickness and at the approach of death, make provision for the emancipation of their slaves, and for their transportation to their home on the coast of Africa.”[55] This report was adopted by the convention by a vote of 44 to 10.

Mathew Stephenson, of Washington County, supported by John McGoughey, Richard Bradshaw, and James Gillespey, prepared a protest to the committee’s report in which they said:

We believe that the importance of the subject, deeply involving the interest and safety of the State, both in a political and moral point of view, together with the number and respectability of the memorialists, merited from this convention a more respectful notice and consideration, than merely to appoint a committee of three, with instructions to give reasons why the convention would not take up and consider the matter.[56]

This protest from members of the Convention was supported by petitions from the anti-slavery forces in the state. A petition from the citizens of Jefferson called attention to some of the weaknesses of the report of the committee of three, such as the admission of the great evil of slavery, its subversiveness of republican institutions, the selling of slaves to the more southern slaveholding states, the pitiable condition of the free negroes, which was equally applicable to white men, and the fallacy of the argument that Tennessee would ever be more favorable to emancipation.

The protest of this committee, re-enforced by these “loud and reiterated calls, for at least some prospective relief from the evils” of slavery, persuaded the convention to make a more detailed analysis of the memorials of slavery in order to make its position clear to the people of the state. On July 9, a motion was adopted to re-commit the memorials on slavery to the committee of three for a second report.

The second report of the Committee of three showed that there were 1804 signatures to the memorials and that only 105 of these were designated as slaveholders.[57] The report admitted that there might be some signatures of slaveholders not so designated, but that such a number was likely inconsiderable. The report showed that the slaveholding petitioners did not represent the owners of five hundred slaves, and probably not of half that number, while the owners of one hundred and fifty thousand slaves were unrepresented by the memorialists.

The memorialists represented the counties of Washington, Greene, Jefferson, Cocke, Sevier, Blount, McMinn, Monroe, Knox, Rhea, Roane, Overton, Bedford, Lincoln, Maury, and Robertson, distributed as follows: two hundred and seventy-three in Washington; three hundred and seventy-eight in Greene; thirty-three in Maury; sixty-seven in Overton; twenty-four in Robertson; one hundred and five in Lincoln; one hundred and thirty-nine in Bedford; and smaller numbers in the other nine counties from which the petitions were presented.[58] The number of memorialists was rather small as compared with the five hundred and fifty thousand population of the state, and was almost entirely unrepresentative of the slaveocracy of the state.

The committee further showed that almost all the petitions presented a plan of emancipation. About one-half of the memorialists asked that all slave children born after 1835 be made free, and that all slaves in the state be made free by 1855. They asked that all negroes be sent out of the state. The other memorials asked that all the slaves be emancipated by 1866 and colonized.

The committee thought, “to assert that the hundred and fifty thousand slaves now in this state, together with their increase, could be emancipated and colonized in the short term of twenty-one or even thirty-two years, with the aid of means at the command of the State, is a proposition so full of absurdity, that no person in his sober senses, who had taken any time to reflect on the subject, would possibly maintain.”[59]