Liberty in the Nineteenth Century

by Frederic May Holland

The consequences were especially bad at the South. Calhoun and other Democrats were striving to unite all her people in resistance to emancipation, as well as to protectionism. They appealed to the insurrection in 1831, and to the treatment of this subject in the Liberator, as proofs that abolitionism was incendiary; and the feeling was so intense in Georgia, that the Governor was authorised by the Legislature, before the end of 1831, to offer five thousand dollars for the head of the editor or of any of his agents in that State. Southerners were generally provoked at such comparisons of slave-holders to thieves as were often made in the Liberator and were incorporated into the formal declaration made by Garrison and the other founders of the New England Anti-Slavery Society at Boston early in 1832. Planters friendly to emancipation were discouraged by Garrison's insisting that they ought not to have compensation, an opinion which was adopted by the American Anti-Slavery Society at its organisation at Philadelphia in 1833. Such protests on moral grounds were of great use to politicians who opposed any grant of money for emancipation, because they wished to preserve slavery. The national Constitution provided that emancipation should not take place in any State which did not give its consent; and this was much less attainable in 1835 than it had been ten years earlier.

So fierce was the hatred of anti-slavery periodicals, that many pounds of them were taken from the Charleston post-office and burned by the leading citizens in July, 1835; and this action was praised by a public meeting, which was attended by all the clergy. The papers were printed in New York, and do not seem to have been destroyed on account of their own mistakes, but of those made by the Liberator. Southern postmasters refused after this to deliver any anti-slavery matter; and their conduct was approved by the Postmaster-General, as well as by the President. The legislatures of North Carolina and Virginia demanded, in the session of 1835 and 1836, that all such publications be suppressed legally by the Northern States.

South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama took the same course; and it was agreed everywhere that abolitionists were to be lynched. Loyalty to slavery was required of all preachers and editors; no other qualification for every office, in the service either of the nation or of the State, was exacted so strictly; other controversies lost interest; and men who would have gained greatly from the introduction of free labour helped the slave-holders silence those intelligent Southerners who knew what urgent need there was in their section of emancipation for the general welfare.

Garrison, meantime, made both friends and enemies at the North. He had the support of nearly four hundred anti-slavery societies in 1835; but some of these had been founded in Ohio by Lundy on the principle of gradual emancipation, and others in New York by Jay, whose main objects were repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act and emancipation in the District of Columbia. Agitation for immediate abolition without compensation was nowhere active at that time, except in New England. The highest estimate of its partisans in 1840 was only two hundred thousand; most of them had already renounced the leadership of Garrison; and there is no reason to believe that the number of his thorough going followers ever reached one hundred thousand.

Most of the original abolitionists were church members; and the agitation was never opposed, even at first, by so large a proportion of the clergy at the North as of the people generally. Several ministers joined Garrison at once; 125 enrolled their names for publication as abolitionists in 1833; and two years later he had the open support of the New England Methodist Conference, the Maine Baptist Convention, and the Detroit Presbytery, as well as of many Congregationalists, and of most of the Quakers, Unitarians, and Free-Will Baptists. Preaching against slavery was not common in denominations where the pastor was more liable to be gagged by ecclesiastical superiors.

One reason that this authority, as well as that of public opinion in the Northern cities, was directed against agitation, was the pressure of business interests. The South sent most of her products, especially cotton, to manufacturers or merchants in Philadelphia, New York, and New England. This region in return supplied her with clothes, tools, and furniture. Much of her food came from the Western farmers; and these latter were so unable to send grain or cattle eastward until after 1850, that the best road for most of them to market was the Mississippi. The slave-holders were such good customers, that people along the Ohio River, as well as in Eastern seaports and factory towns, were slow to see how badly the slaves were oppressed.

Enlightenment on this subject, as well as about capacity for free labour, was also delayed by prejudices of race and colour, while there was much honest ignorance throughout the North. What was best understood about slavery was that it was merely a State institution, not to be abolished or even much ameliorated by the national Government. The main responsibility rested accordingly upon the Southern States; and the danger that these might be provoked to secede could not be overlooked. These considerations prevented the majority of the Northerners, and especially the leading members of every sect, from opposing slavery as actively as they would otherwise have been glad to do.

The most active partisan of the slave-holders was the politician who knew they had votes in Congress and in the electoral college for all the whites in the South and also for three-fifths of the coloured people. The views of the Democratic party about the tariff, the bank, and State rights had made it in 1832 victorious everywhere south of Maryland and Kentucky; and its preponderance in the cotton States, as well as in Virginia, enabled it long to resist the growing disaffection at the North. The Whigs went far enough in the same course for their own destruction; and the principle of individual liberty found few champions.

VII. Politicians and merchants worked together in getting up the series of mobs against abolitionists, which began in 1833, under the lead of a Methodist bishop in New York, and kept breaking out in that city, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Boston, and less important places, until they culminated in the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in 1838. After that year, they were neither frequent nor violent. The worst crime of the rioters was murdering a clergyman named Lovejoy in 1837 for trying to save his printing-press. Most of the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian preachers and editors were now doing what they could to suppress the agitation; but the riots called out no indignation like that which had poured forth from all the churches in 1828 against Sunday mails.

There was little freedom of speech for unpopular opinions in America in 1835, when Channing declared that the mob against Garrison had made abolitionism "the cause of Freedom." There were many readers, even in the South, for the little book in which he insisted that "Slavery ought to be discussed." He protested against depriving the slave of his right to improve and respect himself, and vindicated "the sacredness of individual man." He was the first to appeal from the Fugitive Slave Law to that "everlasting and immutable rule of right revealed in conscience." And few other clergymen gave such help to John Quincy Adams, who was then asserting the right of petition and of discussion in Congress. Memorials with a hundred and fifty thousand signatures had been presented against the annexation of Texas, and in favour of emancipation in the District of Columbia, when it was voted by all the Southern Representatives, as well as by the Northern Democrats, in January, 1837, that all petitions relating to slavery "shall be laid on the table and no action taken thereon." The ex-President, who was then a Representative from Massachusetts, protested indignantly, as did other Whigs, and they continued to plead for the constitutional rights of the North until 1844, when the gag-rule was abolished. On July 4, 1837, Adams told the people that "Freedom of speech is the only safety-valve which, under the high pressure of slavery, can preserve your political boiler from a fearful explosion." The number of names, including many repetitions, signed in the next two years to anti-slavery petitions was two millions.