Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

The beginning of this vigilance work was the underground railroad which existed all over the North, and even to some extent in the border slave states. To help fugitive slaves on their way to freedom became a passionate occupation of young and old, however, only after Garrison’s doctrines had given a religious sanction to the practice. Social conditions in America, at this time, led to a confusion of moral ideas and sometimes to a perversion of the moral sense. We are familiar with the perplexities that distressed tender-hearted people in the border free states. In the border slave states moral questions were equally complex. There is a page or two in Huckleberry Finn in which Mark Twain has depicted the feelings of a boy, living in the border slave state Missouri, as to the ethics of helping a runaway slave to escape. Surely the passage is among the greatest pages which that great author ever penned....

I says; “All right; but wait a minute. There’s one more thing—a thing that nobody don’t know but me. And that is, there’s a nigger here that I’m trying to steal out of slavery, and his name is Jim—old Miss Watson’s Jim.”

He says: “What! Why Jim is—” He stopped and went to studying.

I says: “I know what you’ll say. You’ll say its dirty, low-down business; but what if it is? I’m low down; and I’m going to steal him and I want you to keep mum and not let on. Will you?”

His eye lit up, and he says: “I’ll help you steal him!”

Well, I let go all holts then, like I was shot. It was the most astonishing speech I ever heard—and I’m bound to say Tom Sawyer fell considerable in my estimation. Only I couldn’t believe it. Tom Sawyer a nigger stealer!...

Well, one thing was dead sure, and that was that Tom Sawyer was in earnest, and was actually going to help steal that nigger out of slavery. That was the thing that was too many for me. Here was a boy that was respectable and well brung up; and had a character to lose, and folks at home that had characters; and he was bright and not leather-headed; and knowing and not ignorant, and not mean, but kind; and yet here he was, without any more pride, or rightness, or feeling, than to stoop to this business, and make himself a shame, and his family a shame, before everybody. I couldn’t understand it no way at all. It was outrageous, and I knowed I ought to just up and tell him so; and so be his true friend, and let him quit the thing right where he was and save himself. And I did start to tell him; but he shut me up and says: “Don’t you reckon I know what I’m about?” “Yes.” “Didn’t I say I’d steal him?” “Yes.” “Well, then.” That’s all he said and that’s all I said....

That the angel-minded Dr. Howe should have headed a vigilance committee was no more extraordinary than many other strange and terrible things in that epoch. Dr. Howe was perhaps by nature and early experience fitted to head such a committee; but nothing could be farther removed from such work than the twenty years of peaceful work in philanthropy which had followed his stormy youth; above all, he was no longer young. At forty-five a man cannot learn a new trade. Howe could not meet the world on a political basis or express himself through political agencies—whether through the constitutional vehicles of legislature, party, and public meeting—or through the improvised vehicles of vigilance committee and underground railroad. His activity in both of these fields was splendid, yet lame; it was the work of a man who only half understood his own function. In his own work, the only realities for him are metaphysical realities. But in politics, he has the mind of an ordinary man; his thought creeps from point to point, treats human institutions with respect, and subordinates itself to the opinions of other people. It is positively amazing to find Howe, the pioneer, the fire-brand—or rather the torch-bearer—in one department of thought, becoming a mere linkboy in another and nearly allied department.

Howe’s incapacity for leadership in politics was first shown during the Freesoil movement. The “Coalition” which the Freesoilers made with the Democrats in Massachusetts, soon after Webster’s defection in 1850, was one of those political unions which are nowadays called “deals.” Persons of conflicting principles join together in order to defeat a common opponent, and, of course, to divide the offices. Some people object to such deals on the ground that there is always an element of betrayal, a lie, a debauchery of conscience somewhere and somehow involved in them.

The coalition which Dr. Howe’s associates entered into was very famous at the time and thereafter. I will not attempt to define its immorality; but I will only say that it was, as Richard H. Dana Jr. notes in his diary, “an error in moral science.” Dr. Howe did not, in political matters, understand his own nature sufficiently to keep clear of this coalition. He plunged into it. He was never happy thereafter. It violated his conscience and plagued him for years. He could never forgive the leaders of the Freesoil party, nor forget the treason. He writes to Sumner in 1852: “I have always had an instinct in me which I have never been able to body forth clearly—which tells me that all this manœuvring and political expediency is all wrong, and that each man should go for the right regardless of others.”