The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences: Four Periods of American History

by Hilary A. Herbert

So wrote Dr. Channing, the great New England pulpit orator, in his celebrated letter on Texas annexation, to Henry Clay, in 1837.

While the rightfulness of slavery was being discussed in England, the American conscience had also been aroused, and emancipation was making progress on this side of the water.

Emancipation was an easy task in the Northern States, where slaves were few, their labor never having been profitable, and by 1804 the last of these States had provided for the ultimate abolition of slavery within its borders. But the problem was more difficult in the Southern States, where the climate was adapted to slave labor. There slaves were numerous, and slavery was interwoven, economically and socially, with the very fabric of existence. Naturally, it occurred to thoughtful men that there ought to be some such solution as that which was subsequently adopted in England, and which, as we have seen, was so highly extolled by Dr. Channing—emancipation of the slaves with compensation to the owners by the general government. The difficulty in our country was that the Federal Constitution conferred upon the Federal Government no power over slavery in the States—no power to emancipate slaves or compensate owners; and that for the individual States where the negroes were numerous the problem seemed too big. Free negroes and whites in great numbers, it was thought, could not live together. To get rid of the negroes, if they should be freed, was for the States a very serious, if not an unsurmountable task.

On the seventeenth of January, 1824, the following resolutions, proposed as a solution of the problem, were passed by the legislature of Ohio:[11]

Resolved, That the consideration of a system providing for the gradual emancipation of the people of color, held in servitude in the United States, be recommended to the legislatures of the several States of the American Union, and to the Congress of the United States.

Resolved, That, in the opinion of the general assembly, a system of foreign colonization, with correspondent measures, might be adopted that would in due time effect the entire emancipation of the slaves of our country without any violation of the national compact, or infringement of the rights of individuals; by the passage of a law by the general government (with the consent of the slave-holding States) which would provide that all children of persons now held in slavery, born after the passage of the law, should be free at the age of twenty-one years (being supported during their minority by the persons claiming the service of their parents), provided they then consent to be transported to the intended place of colonization. Also:

Resolved, That it is expedient that such a system should be predicated upon the principle that the evil of slavery is a national one, and that the people and the States of the Union ought mutually to participate in the duties and burthens of removing it.

Resolved, That His Excellency the Governor be requested to forward a copy of the foregoing resolutions to His Excellency the Governor of each of the United States, requesting him to lay the same before the legislature thereof; and that His Excellency will also forward a like copy to each of our senators and representatives in Congress, requesting their co-operation in all national measures having a tendency to effect the grave object embraced therein.

By June of 1825 eight other Northern States had endorsed the proposition, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, Massachusetts. Six of the slave-holding States emphatically disapproved of the suggestion, viz., Georgia, South Carolina, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama.[12]

Reasons which in great part influenced all the Southern States thus rejecting the proposition may be gathered from the following words of Governor Wilson, of South Carolina, in submitting the resolutions: "A firm determination to resist, at the threshold, every invasion of our domestic tranquillity, and to preserve our sovereignty and independence as a State, is earnestly recommended."[13]

The resolutions required of the Southern States a complete surrender in this regard of their reserved rights; they feared what Governor Wilson called "the overwhelming powers of the general government," and were unwilling to make the admission required, that the slavery in the South was a question for the nation.

Another reason was that, although there was a quite common desire in the Southern States to get rid of slavery, the majority sentiment doubtless was not yet ready for the step.

Basing this plan on the "consent of the slave-holding States," as the Ohio legislature did, was an acknowledgment that the North had no power over the matter; while the proposition to share in the expense of transporting the negroes, after they were manumitted, seems to be a recognition of the joint responsibility of both sections for the existence of slavery in the South. However that may be, the generous concurrence of nine of the thirteen Northern States indicates how kindly the temper of the North toward the South was before the rise of the "New Abolitionism" in 1831. Had emancipation been, under the Federal Constitution, a national and not a local question, it is possible that slavery might have been abolished in America, as it was in the mother country, peacefully and with compensation to owners.