If we must give a name, a date, and a place to the first open appearance of a movement which was a product of the age, that name is Garrison; the date, the beginning of the year 1831; and the place, Boston. The character of William Lloyd Garrison, whether noble or vulgar; his purposes, whether generous or selfish; and the motives which impelled him, whether narrow and personal or grandly humane, are not subjects for treatment in a work upon constitutional history. Constitutional history has to do only with the doctrines of political ethics and public jurisprudence which he formulated, and with the means proposed by him, and those who thought and acted with him, for their realization; and the historian does neither him nor them any injustice in saying that, while those doctrines are to be justified from the point of view of an extreme idealism, the means for their realization, at first only indicated, but later boldly and rudely expressed, were revolutionary, almost anarchic.
| The civil status under the Constitution of 1787. |
There is now certainly little question that the determination of the civil status of all persons is, from an ethical point of view, a matter of national concern, and that that status must be fixed, in general principle, by a national act. There is just as little question that the denial of personal liberty to any human being of adult years does not comport with the civilization of the nineteenth century. In espousing these principles the Abolitionists were only prophets ahead of their time, and must be accorded the honor which belongs to such. On the other hand, it is entirely unquestionable that the Constitution of the United States recognized to the Commonwealths, respectively, the exclusive control of the civil status of persons belonging within their several jurisdictions, and it is entirely improbable that the Constitution of 1787 could ever have been established without the guarantees, expressed and implied in it, of such power to the Commonwealths. There is no question at all that the slavery or freedom of the negro race within the several Commonwealths was, under the Constitution of 1787, not only left, as it had been before, a matter for each Commonwealth to determine for itself, but that the exclusive power of determination in regard to it was guaranteed by the Constitution to the several Commonwealths. The Commonwealths in which slaveholding generally and extensively prevailed regarded the guarantee as the principal consideration for their assent to the "compact." The attempt to violate, or weaken, or even to cast doubt upon, these guarantees appeared to them to be an attack upon the fundamental covenants of the Union. The Constitution might, indeed, be so amended as to withdraw these powers and guarantees from the Commonwealths, by the regular procedure provided in the Constitution itself; and the general Government was vested by the Constitution with the general powers of exclusive government in the Territories, the District of Columbia, and the places owned by the United States within Commonwealths and used by the general Government for governmental purposes. But so long as the Constitution remained what it was, there was no constitutional power in the general Government to attack slavery in the Commonwealths; and the slaveholders could certainly claim that, in the exercise of its powers in the Territories, the District, and other places where those powers were exclusive, the general Government should act fairly toward all the members of the Union.
| Points at which slavery could be legally attacked. Garrison's methods. |
Nevertheless, here were legal points of attack for the Abolitionists. They might memorialize Congress for the abolition of slavery in the Territories and in the District, and for the initiation of an amendment which would abolish slavery in the Commonwealths or would give Congress the power to do so, and they might appeal to the legislatures of the Commonwealths to demand of Congress the calling of a constitutional convention of the United States to initiate such an amendment. But Garrison would have nothing to do with the Constitution, or with existing legal methods. He denounced the Constitution, "as a covenant with death and an agreement with hell," and declared that he wanted "no union with slaveholders." His violent language, his repudiation of vested rights and constitutional agreements, and his fanatical disregard of other men's opinions and feelings, led the people both of the North and the South to believe that his methods were incendiary and his morals loose; that he and his co-workers were planning and plotting slave insurrection, and thereby the wholesale massacre of slaveholders; and that he and they were endeavoring to attain, through violence and anarchy, a leadership which they could not otherwise reach.
| The Southampton massacre. |
In August of 1831, a slave insurrection broke out in Southampton County, Va., under the leadership of a negro named Nat Turner, and more than sixty white persons, most of them women and children, were massacred in cold blood. The Southerners said, no doubt believed, that the insurrection was incited by the Abolitionists in the North. Governor Floyd, of Virginia, declared, in his message to the legislature upon the subject, that there was ample proof of it in the documents accompanying the message. The great mass of the people at the North believed the same thing. The Abolitionist historians assert, on the contrary, that there was no connection between the work of the Abolitionists and this event. We shall probably never know whether there was or not. This much we can say, that the radical character of the Abolition doctrines and the violence of the language in which they were expressed—not so much before as after this event, indeed—produced the universal feeling, both in the North and in the South, that these doctrines and this event were in perfect harmony, and that the latter might very naturally be the outcome of the former. The moral sentiment of the North was not prepared for the destruction of slavery by any such means. It considered these methods as containing ten times more evil and barbarism than slavery itself. It is just to say that what appeared to be the methods of the Abolitionists were revolting to the moral feelings of all the decent people of the North, and to ninety-nine one-hundredths of all the people of the North, while the Southerners saw in them nothing but the destruction of all law and order, the plunder of their property, the burning of their firesides, and the massacre of their families. The pronounced and determined manner in which the people of the North went about the work of suppressing the agitation occasioned by the Abolitionists is ample evidence to any sane mind that the indignation of a righteous conscience was fully aroused, and not the fury of a guilty conscience.