Liberty in the Nineteenth Century

by Frederic May Holland

Especially gratifying is the growth of respect for the right of free speech. The complaints by Dickens, Chevalier, and Miss Martineau of the despotism of the majority were corroborated by Tocqueville, who travelled here in 1831 and published in 1835 a very valuable statement of the results and tendencies of democracy. The destruction that year of a Catholic convent near Boston by a mob is especially significant, because the anniversary was celebrated next year as a public holiday. The worst sufferers under persecution at that time were the philanthropists.

V. In order to do justice to all parties in this controversy we should take especial notice of the amount of opposition to slavery about 1825 in what were afterwards called the Border States. Here all manual labour could have been done by whites; and much of it was actually, especially in Kentucky. There slaves never formed a quarter of the population; and in Maryland they sank steadily from one-fourth in 1820 to one-eighth in 1860. Of masters over twenty or more bondmen in 1856, there were only 256 in Kentucky and 735 in Maryland. It was these large holders who monopolised the profits, as they did the public offices. White men with few or no slaves had scarcely any political power; and their chance to make money, live comfortably, and educate their children, was much less than if all labour had become free. Such a change would have made manufacturing prosper in both Kentucky and

Maryland; but all industries languished except that of breeding slaves for the South. The few were rich at the expense of the many. Only time was needed in these and other States to make the majority intelligent enough to vote the guilty aristocrats down.

Two thousand citizens of Baltimore petitioned against admitting Missouri as a slave State in 1820; and several avowed abolitionists ran for the Legislature shortly before 1830. At this time there were annual anti-slavery conventions in Baltimore, with prominent Whigs among the officers, and nearly two hundred affiliated societies in the Border States. There were fifty in North Carolina, where two thousand slaves had been freed in 1825, and three-fifths of the whites were reported as favourable to emancipation. Henry Clay was openly so in 1827; and the Kentucky Colonisation Society voted in 1830 that the disposition towards voluntary emancipation was strong enough to make legislation unnecessary. The abolition of slavery as "the greatest curse that God in his wrath ever inflicted upon a people" was demanded by a dozen members of the Virginia Legislature, as well as by the Richmond Inquirer, in 1832; and similar efforts were made shortly before 1850 in Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland, Western Virginia, Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, and Missouri.

From 1812 to 1845 the Senate was equally divided between free and slave States; and any transfer, even of Delaware, from one side to the other would have enabled the North to control the upper House as well as the lower. The plain duty of a Northern philanthropist was to co-operate with the Southern emancipationists and accept patiently their opinion that abolition had better take place gradually, as it had done in New York, and, what was much more important, that the owner should have compensation. This had been urged by Wilberforce in 1823, as justice to the planters in the West Indies; the legislatures of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New. Jersey recommended, shortly before 1830, that the nation should buy and free the slaves; and compensation was actually given by Congress to loyal owners of the three thousand slaves in the District of Columbia emancipated in 1862. Who can tell the evils which we should have escaped, if slavery could have continued after 1830 to be abolished gradually by State after State, with pecuniary aid from Congress or the North?

This was the hope of Benjamin Lundy, who passed much of his life in the South, though he was born in New Jersey. He had advocated gradual emancipation in nearly every State, visiting even Texas and Missouri, organising anti-slavery societies, and taking subscriptions to his Genius of Universal Emancipation, which was founded in Tennessee in 1821, but afterwards was issued weekly at Baltimore. He published the names of nine postmasters among his agents, and copied friendly articles from more than forty newspapers. One of his chief objects was to prevent that great extension of slavery, the annexation of Texas.

VI. The election of the first pro-slavery President, Jackson, in 1828, discouraged the abolitionists; and Lundy was obliged to suspend his paper for lack of subscribers early next year. When he resumed it in September, he took an assistant editor, who had declared on the previous Fourth of July, in a fashionable Boston church: "I acknowledge that immediate and complete emancipation is not desirable. No rational man cherishes so wild a vision." Before Garrison set foot on slave soil, it occurred to him that every slave had a right to instant freedom, and also that no master had any right to compensation. These two ideas he advocated at once, and ever after, as obstinately as George the Third insisted on the right to tax America. Garrison, of course, was a zealous philanthropist; and he was as conscientious as Paul was in persecuting the Christians. But he seems to have been more anxious to free his own conscience than to free the slaves. Immediate emancipation had been advocated in Lundy's paper at much length, and even as early as 1825, but so mildly as to call out little opposition. Insisting on no compensation was much more irritating; and Garrison's writings show that his mind was apt to free itself in bitter words, even against such men as Whittier, Channing, Longfellow, Douglass, and Sumner. He had been but three months in Baltimore when he published a censure by name of the owner and captain of one of the many vessels which were permitted by law to carry slaves South, as "highway robbers and murderers," who "should be sentenced to solitary confinement for life," and who deserved "to occupy the lowest depths of perdition." He was found guilty of libel, and imprisoned for seven weeks because he could not pay a moderate fine.

The money was given by a generous New Yorker; but Garrison's work in the South was over, and Lundy's was of little value thenceforth. The man who brought the libel suit was an influential citizen of Massachusetts; and Boston pulpits were shut against Garrison on his return. He could not pay for a hall; but one was given him without cost by the anti-clerical society, whose leader, Abner Knee-land, was imprisoned thirty days in 1834 for a brief expression of atheism which would not now be considered blasphemous.

Two weeklies, which were unpopular from the first, began to be published at Boston early in 1831. Kneeland's Investigator was pledged "to contend for the abolition of slavery" and "advocate the rights of women." It was friendly to labour reform as well as to scientific education, and opposed capital punishment, imprisonment for debt, and legislation about religion; but its predominant tone has been skeptical to the present day. Garrison was too orthodox in 1831 to favour the emancipation of women; he was in sympathy with other reforms; but his chief theme was the "pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition." The next mistake of his Liberator was the prominence given to negro insurrection and other crimes against whites. The Southerners were naturally afraid to have such subjects mentioned, even in condemnation; and guilty consciences made slave-holders think the danger much greater than it was. The first number of the Liberator contained Garrison's verses about the horrors of the revolt which might bring emancipation. He announced at the same time that he was going to review a recent pamphlet which he described thus: "A better promoter of insurrection was never sent forth to an oppressed people." His contributors spoke often of the right of slaves to resist, and asked, "In God's name, why should they not cut their masters' throats?" Many women and children were massacred by rebel slaves in Virginia that autumn; and Garrison promptly declared that the assassins "deserve no more blame than our fathers did for slaughtering the British," and that "When the contest shall have again begun, it must again be a war of extermination." Similar language was often used in the Liberator afterwards.

Garrison was too firm a non-resistant to go further than this; but the majority of Northerners would have agreed with the Reverend Doctor Wayland, President of Brown University, who declared slavery "very wicked," but declined to have the Liberator sent him, and wrote to Mr. Garrison that its tendency was to incite the slaves to rebellion. Of course this was not the editor's intention; but history deals mainly with causes and results.