The law created four "receivers general" (one each at Boston, New York, Charleston, and St. Louis), to whom all money collected by the United States officials should be turned over, and directed that "rooms, vaults, and safes" should be provided for the safe keeping of the money.[1]
[Footnote 1: Shepard's Van Buren, Chap. 9.]
As might be expected, the people laid all the blame for the hard times on Van Buren and his party. The Democrats, they said, had destroyed the National Bank; they had then removed the United States money, and given it to "pet" state banks; they had then distributed the surplus, and by taking the surplus from the state banks had brought on the panic. Whether this was true or not, the people believed it, and were determined to "turn out little Van."
The campaign of 1840 was the most novel, exciting, and memorable that had yet taken place. Three parties had candidates in the field. The Antislavery party put forward James Gillespie Birney and Thomas Earle. The Democrats in their convention renominated Van Buren, but no Vice President. The Whigs nominated W.H. Harrison, and John Tyler of Virginia. The mention of the Antislavery party makes it necessary to account for its origin.
%348. The Antislavery Movement%.—The appearance of the Antislavery or Liberty party marks the beginning in national affairs of an antislavery movement which had long been going on in the states. When the Missouri Compromise was made in 1820, many people believed that the troublesome matter of slavery was settled. This was a mistake, and the compromise really made matters worse. In the first place, it encouraged the men in Illinois who favored slavery to attempt to make it a slave state by amending the state constitution, an attempt which failed in 1824 after a long struggle. In the second place, it aroused certain men who had been agitating for freeing the slaves to redoubled energy. Among these were Benjamin Lundy, James Gillespie Birney, and William Lloyd Garrison, who in 1831 established an abolition newspaper called the Liberator, which became very famous. In the third place, it led to the formation all over the North, and in many places in the South, of new abolition societies, and stirred up the old ones and made them more active.[1]
[Footnote 1: James G. Birney and his Times, Chap. 12.]
For a time these societies carried on their work, each independent of
the others. But in 1833, a convention of delegates from them met at
Philadelphia, and formed a national society called the American
Antislavery Society.[1]
[Footnote 1: Its constitution declared (1) that each state has exclusive right to regulate slavery within it; (2) that the society will endeavor to persuade Congress to stop the interstate slave trade, to abolish slavery in the territories and in the District of Columbia, and to admit no more slave states into the Union.]
%349. Antislavery Documents shut out of the Mails.%—Thus organized, the society went to work at once and flooded the South with newspapers, pamphlets, pictures, and handbills, all intended to arouse a sentiment for instant abolition or emancipation of slaves. The South declared that these were inflammatory, insurrectionary, and likely to incite the slaves to revolt, and called on the North to suppress abolition societies and stop the spread of abolition papers. To do such a thing by legal means was impossible; so an attempt was made to do it by illegal means. In the Northern cities such as Philadelphia, Utica, Boston, Haverhill, mobs broke up meetings of abolitionists, and dragged the leaders about the streets. In the South, the postmasters, as at Charleston, seized antislavery tracts and pamphlets going through the mails, and the people burned them. In New York city such matter was taken from the mails and destroyed by the postmaster. When these outrages were reported to Amos Kendall, the Postmaster-General, he approved of them; and when Congress met, Jackson asked for a law that would prohibit the circulation "in the Southern States, through the mails, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection." From the legislatures of five Southern states came resolutions calling on the people of the North to suppress the abolitionists.[1] Congress and the legislatures of New York and Rhode Island responded; but the bills introduced did not pass.[2]
[Footnote 1: South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, and
Georgia.]