“Brougham, Nov. 20, 1860.
“Sir—I feel honored by the invitation to attend the Boston Convention, and to give my opinion upon the question “How can American Slavery be abolished?” I consider the application is made to me as conceiving me to represent the anti-slavery body in this country; and I believe that I speak their sentiments as well as my own in expressing the widest difference of opinion with you upon the merits of those who prompted the Harper’s Ferry expedition, and upon the fate of those who suffered for their conduct in it. No one will doubt my earnest desire to see slavery extinguished, but that desire can only be gratified by lawful means, a strict regard to the rights of property, or what the law declares property, and a constant repugnance to the shedding of blood. No man can be considered a martyr unless he not only suffers but is witness to the truth; and he does not bear this testimony who seeks a lawful object by illegal means. Any other course taken for the abolition of slavery can only delay the consummation we so devoutly wish, besides exposing the community to the hazard of an insurrection perhaps less hurtful to the master than the slave.”
CHAPTER IV.
Progress of Abolition in America—An Era of Reforms—Southern Efforts for Manumission—Various Plans of Emancipation that have been suggested—The first Abolition journal—New York “Journal of Commerce”—William Lloyd Garrison, his Early Life and Associations—The Nat. Turner Insurrection in 1832, &c., &c.
Probably no period in the history of the country has been more characterized by the spirit of reform and innovation than that embraced between the years 1825 and 1830. It then seemed as if all the social, moral and religious influences of the community had been gathered in a focus that was destined to annihilate the wickedness of man. Missionary enterprises, though in their youth, were full of vigor. Anniversaries were the occasion of an almost crazy excitement; religion assumed the shape of fanaticism; the churches were thrilled with the sudden idea that the millennium was at hand—the “evangelization of the world” never was blessed with fairer prospects—the “awakenings to grace” were on the most tremendous scale. Peace societies were formed—temperance societies flourished more than ever—Free Masonry was attacked, socially and politically—the Sabbath mail question became one of the absorbing topics of the day—theatres, lotteries, the treatment of the “poor Indian” by the general government—all came under the most rigorous religious review—the Colonization Society, established in 1816, enlarged its operations, and, in short, the spirit of reform became epidemic, and the period one of unprecedented moral and political inquiry.
It was a period, too, when in many of the States of the South, and especially those upon the Northern border, the subject was freely discussed of a gradual and healthy emancipation of the slaves, and various plans for this object were presented and entertained. The most valuable agencies were set at work—not by abolitionists, but by Southerners themselves, in whose hearts there had sprung up an embryo reformatory principle simultaneously with the landing upon their shores of the first slaves of their Northern brethren; which would have gone on increasing and fructifying had not the bitterest of denunciation been launched against them and driven the assaulted into an attitude of self-defence, whose defiant spirit now speaks out to the assailant in a bold justification of the institution attacked, as natural and necessary, and which it shall be their purpose to perpetuate forever.
As early as 1816 a manumission society was formed in Tennessee, whose object was the gradual emancipation of the slaves under a system of healthy and judicious State legislation. At a later day, Virginia, Maryland and Kentucky were the theatres of discussion on the same subject, and in all of them the question was agitated, socially and politically, with a freedom and liberty that indicated a general desire to effect the philanthropic object.
Various plans having the same end in view were likewise proposed, some of them evincing a remarkable ingenuity. One of these, in 1817, was to encourage, by all proper means, emancipation in the South; then to make arrangements with the non-slaveholding States to receive the freed negroes, and compel the latter, by law, if necessary, to reside in those States. By this means it was thought that a gradual change of “complexion” could be effected from natural causes, which would not take place unless the blacks were scattered, and that thus, from simple association and adventitious mixtures, the sable color would retire by degrees, and after a few generations a black person would be a rarity in the community.
Another plan proposed in 1819 was to remove the females to the Northern States, where they should be bound out in respectable families; those unmarried, of ten years and upwards, to be immediately free, and all the rest of the stock then existing to become so at ten years of age; the proceeds of the males sold to be appropriated by the party making the purchase to the removal and education of these females. In furtherance of this scheme, it was argued that while negro women would still bear children, though settled among white persons, they would not do so half so rapidly, and thus their posterity would in three or four generations lose the offensive color and have a tint not more disagreeable than the millions who are called white men in Southern Europe and the West Indies, and finally be lost in the common mass of humanity. While it is true that very few people, after fifty or sixty years, could under this rule boast of their fathers and mothers, the grand object would be attained, and the world be satisfied.