There was always in the South, prior to 1831, an active and freely expressed emancipation sentiment. But there was not enough of it to influence legislation. In all but three or four of these States, emancipation was made difficult by laws which, among other conditions, required that slaves after being freed should leave the State.
Emancipation in the North had not been completed in 1830. Professor Ingram, president of the Royal Irish Academy, says in his "History of Slavery," London, 1895, p. 184: "The Northern States—beginning with Vermont in 1777 and ending with New Jersey in 1804—either abolished slavery or adopted measures to effect its gradual abolition within their boundaries. But the principal operation of (at least) the latter change was to transfer Northern slaves to Southern markets."
There had been in 1820 an angry discussion in Congress about the admission of Missouri—with or without slavery—which was finally settled by the Missouri Compromise. This dispute over the admission of Missouri is often said to have been the beginning of the sectional quarrel that finally ended in secession; but the controversy over Missouri and that begun by the "New Abolitionists" in 1831 were entirely distinct. They were conducted on different plans.
In the Missouri controversy the only questions were as to the expediency and constitutionality of denying to a new State the right to enter the Union, with or without slavery, as she might choose. The entire dispute was settled to the satisfaction of both sections by an agreement that States thereafter, south of 36° 30', might enter the Union with or without slavery; and nobody denied, during all that discussion about Missouri, or at any time previous to 1831, that every citizen was bound to maintain the Constitution and all laws passed in pursuance of it, including the fugitive slave law.
"The North submitted at that time (1828) to the obligations imposed upon it by the fugitive slave-catching clause of the Constitution and the fugitive slave law of 1793."[20] So say the biographers of William Lloyd Garrison for the purpose of establishing, as they afterwards do, their claim that Garrison conducted a successful revolt against that provision of the Constitution. What strengthens the statement that the North in 1828 submitted without protest to the "fugitive slave-catching clause of the Constitution," is that the Compromise Act of 1820 contained a provision extending the fugitive slave law over the territory made free by the act, while it should continue to be territory, and until there should be formed from it States, to which the existing law would automatically apply. Every subsequent nullification of the fugitive slave laws of the United States, whether by governors or state legislatures, was therefore a palpable violation of a provision that was of the essence of the Missouri Compromise.
The South was content with the Missouri Compromise, and from that date, 1820, until the rise of the "New Abolitionists," slavery was in all that region an open question. Judge Temple says in his "Covenanter, Cavalier, and Puritan," p. 208: "In 1826, of the 143 emancipation societies in the United States, 103 were in the South."
The questions for Southern emancipationists were: How could the slaves be freed, and in what time? How about compensation to owners? Where could the freed slaves be sent, and how? And, if deportation should prove impossible, what system could be devised whereby the two races could dwell together peacefully? These were indeed serious problems, and required time and grave consideration.
"Who can doubt," says Mr. Curtis, to quote once more his "Life of Buchanan," "that all such questions could have been satisfactorily answered, if the Christianity of the South had been left to its own time and mode of answering them, and without any external force but the force of kindly, respectful consideration and forebearing Christian fellowship?"[21]
But this was not to be.