“We are all equally interested in demolishing the fabric (of slavery) and we may as well go to work peaceably and reduce it brick by brick as to make it a matter of warfare, and throw our enterprise and industry into the opposite scale.”
In the course of time changes were made in the ownership of the paper, but one of its original proprietors is still its senior editor.
About this period William Lloyd Garrison made his appearance upon the stage, and he has been probably one of the most intensely hated, as well as one of the most sternly, severely and vociferously enthusiastic men in the Union. He is a native of Massachusetts, and at a very early age was placed in a printing office in Newburyport by his mother. Shortly after he was twenty-one years of age he set up a paper which he called the Free Press, which was read chiefly by a class of very advanced readers at the North. After this he removed to Vermont, and edited the Journal of the Times. This was as early as 1828. In September, 1829, he removed to Baltimore for the purpose of editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation, in company with Benjamin Lundy. While performing these duties, a Newburyport merchant, named Francis Todd, fitted out a small vessel, and filled it in Baltimore with slaves for the New Orleans market. Mr. Garrison noticed this fact in his paper, and commented upon it in terms so severe that Mr. Todd directed a suit to be brought against him for libel. He was thereupon tried, convicted and thrown in jail for non-payment of the fine (one hundred dollars and costs.) After an incarceration of fifty days, he was released on the payment of his fine, by Mr. Arthur Tappan, of this city, who, and his brother Lewis, before and since that time, have been chiefly celebrated for their efforts in the cause of abolition. In 1831, he wrote a few paragraphs that bear out the idea we have advanced—that there was then more real philanthropy in the South than at the North. He says:—
“I issued proposals for the publication of the “Liberator” in Washington City, during my recent tour, for the purpose of exciting the minds of the people on the subject of slavery. Every place I visited gave fresh evidences of the fact that a greater revolution in public sentiment was to be effected in the free States, and particularly in New England, than at the South. I found contempt more bitter, opposition more active, detraction more relentless, prejudice more stubborn and apathy more frozen, than among the slaveowners themselves. I determined at every hazard to lift up the standard of emancipation in the eyes of the nation, within sight of Bunker Hill, and in the birthplace of liberty. I am in earnest; I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch. I will be heard. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue lift from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.”
From this time it may be said that the anti-slavery cause took its place among the moral enterprises of the day. It assumed a definite shape, and commenced that system of warfare which has since been unremittingly waged against the South.
During this year—1830—Mr. Tappan, Rev. S. S. Jocelyn, and others, projected the establishment of a seminary of learning at New Haven for the benefit of colored students; but, opposition manifesting itself, it was abandoned.
The first regularly organized convention of colored men ever assembled in the United States for a similar purpose also held a meeting this year, and aided and abetted by the Tappans, Jocelyns and other agitators of the period, attempted to devise ways and means for bettering their condition and that of their race. They reasoned that all distinctive differences made among men on account of their origin was wicked, unrighteous and cruel, and solemnly protested against every unjust measure and policy in the country having for its object the proscription of the colored people, whether state, national, municipal, social, civil or religious. In fact, white men and black seem to have started in the race together, consorting like brothers and sisters together in their aims and projects to accomplish the same end.
About this time publications began to be scattered through the South, whose direct tendency was to stir up insurrection among the slaves. The Liberator found its way mysteriously into the hands of the negroes, and individuals, under the garb of religion, were discovered in private consultation with the slaves. Suddenly, in August, 1831, the whole Union was startled by the announcement of an outbreak among the slaves of Southampton County, Va; and now commences the history of a career of violence and bloodshed that has marked every footstep of the abolition movement.
THE NAT TURNER INSURRECTION.
The leader of this outbreak was a slave named Nat Turner, and from him its name has been derived. Impelled by the belief that he was divinely called to be the deliverer of his oppressed countrymen, he succeeded in fixing the impression upon the minds of two or three others, his fellow slaves. Turner could read and write, and these acquirements gave him an influence over his associates. He was possessed, however, of little information, and, is represented to have been cowardly, cruel, and as he afterwards confessed, “a little credulous.” It was a matter of notoriety that “secret agents of abolition had corrupted and betrayed him.” However that may be, Nat declared that “he was advised” only to read to the slaves, that “Jesus came not to bring peace, but a sword!” Such a tree produced fitting fruits.