"How Can I Help to Abolish Slavery?" or, Counsels to the Newly Converted

by Maria Weston Chapman

First, hear the agents of slavery presenting the colonization scheme as the instrument of abolition.

“Aid the Colonization Society.” Yes; to make slavery stronger by exalting prejudice as an ordination of divine Providence; to make slavery safer by eliminating that dangerous element, the free black; to make its term longer by stultifying national conscience. See that society making the laws of slave States more cruel, the men of the free States more obdurate, the situation of the free men of color more difficult and insupportable, as a part of its plan. It could not, if it would, transport three millions of souls to Africa; the navies and revenues of the world would be insufficient. It would not, if it could; for slavery has no intention of parting with its three millions of victims; unless induced to free them out of generosity, it will keep them on speculation. Its forty years of colonization labor, and its million of gold and silver, have exiled fewer to Liberia than have escaped into Canada in spite of it—less in that period than the monthly increase of the slaves! It can do nothing for Christianizing Africa, for it sends a slaveholding gospel, which is anti-Christ. Be not deceived, then, by a tyrannical mockery like this, working to perpetuate slavery, and not to abolish it. Aid the American Anti-Slavery Society, which deals with the heart and conscience of this slaveholding nation, demanding immediate, unconditional emancipation, without expatriation; the abolition of slavery by the spirit of repentance, in conformity with all your own principles and traditions, whether religious or political.

Hear another cry, (coming, not like the first, from the enemies of abolition, but from friends, generally those of more pretension than devotedness:) “Form a political party, free soil or other, to vote down slavery.”

Yes, don’t kill the growing monster—call to him to stop growing; merge immediatism, which always succeeds, in gradualism, which never does. Substitute a secondary object for the primary one. Strive in the first place not to abolish slavery, but to get one set of men out of office and another in, to learn by the event that the last are as incapable to turn back the whirlpool that masters the government as the first were. Make an appeal to force of numbers in a case where you know it is against you; in a case, too, where, having sworn assistance, you must lose influence by such an appeal. Spend your time and money, not in making new abolitionists, but in counting the old ones, that at every count diminish. Politics, in the common, small sense of the term, merely takes the circumstances it finds, and does its best with them. But the present circumstances are unfavorable. Then create new ones. This is true politics, in the enlarged, real meaning of the word. Here is a building to be erected, and no sufficient materials. A little untempered mortar, a few unbaked bricks—that is all. Go to the deep quarries of the human heart, and make of your sons and daughters polished stones to build the temple of the Lord. It is this cleaving into the living rock the American Anti-Slavery Society girds itself to do. Under its operations men become better and better abolitionists. Under the labors of political partisanship they necessarily grow worse and worse. They must ever ask themselves how little anti-slavery feeling and principle they can make serve the temporary turn; because the less of either, the greater the chance. They must always be sacrificing the end to the means. Call them to the witness box in their capacity of philosophical observers, and out of their little circumventing political characters, and themselves will tell you that the effect of electioneering on anti-slavery is most unfavorable, adding to the existing opposition to right the fury of party antagonism, throwing away the balance of power, lowering the tone of moral and religious feeling and action, and thus letting a sacred enterprise degenerate into a scramble for office. But labor with the American Anti-Slavery Society directly to the great end, and even Franklin Pierce and Co., pro-slavery as they are, will grovel to do your bidding. The administration now on the throne is as good for your bidding as any other. In a republican land the power behind the throne is the power. Save yourself the trouble of calling caucuses, printing party journals, distributing ballots, and the like. Let men who are fit for nothing of more consequence do this little work, which is best done by mere nobodies. More than enough of them are always ready for it. You, who are smitten by the sacred beauty of the great cause, should serve it greatly. Don’t drag the engine, like an ignoramus, but bring wood and water and flame, like an engineer. The American Anti-Slavery Society has laid the track.

“Buy slaves and set them free.” Yes; lop the branches and strengthen the root; make the destruction of the system more difficult by practising upon it; create a demand for the slave breeder to supply; compromise with crime; raise the market price, when you ought to stop the market; put a philanthropic mark upon the slave trade; spend money enough in buying one man to free fifty gratis, and convert a thousand. But there is a wholesale way, cries one. “Sell the public lands, and set every means in motion, from the merely mercantile donation of a million to the infant cent society, and thus raise two thousand millions of dollars, and beg the slaveholders to take it, (not as compensation, but as a token of good will,) and let their bondmen go.” I marvel at this insufficient notion of the heart of a slaveholder. I wonder exceedingly at such a want of imagination. “Not as compensation” is well put; for what sum can compensate a monarch for his throne? This system of slavery makes the south the parent of long lines of princes. It gives to her diabolical dominions

“Kingdoms, and sway, and strength, and length of days.”

I am strangely divided in sympathy. I feel at once the generosity of the proposal, and have the feeling of contempt with which its insufficient inappropriateness is received.

“Organize vigilance committees, and establish underground railroads.” Yes; hide from tyranny, instead of defying it; whisper a testimony; form a bad habit of mind in regard to despotism; try to keep out the sea with a mop, when you ought to build a dike; flatter your sense of compassion by taking private retail measures to have suffering ameliorated, when you might, with the American Anti-Slavery Society, be taking public wholesale measures to have wrong (the cause of suffering) righted. You may safely leave with the half and quarter converted, with the slaveholders, nay, even with the Curtises, the charge of all these things, which without the American Anti-Slavery Society are but as hydrogen and nitrogen without oxygen, however good with it, as the natural fruits of its labors. What I would discourage is, not mercy and compassion in an individual case, but a disgraceful mistake in the economy of well doing; spending in salving a sore finger what would buy the elixir vitæ; preferring the less, which excludes the greater, to the greater, which includes the less. Slavery can only be abolished by raising the character of the people who compose the nation; and that can be done only by showing them a higher one. Now, there is one thing that can’t be done in secret; you can’t set a good example under a bushel.

“But instruction! instruction! found schools and churches for the blacks, and thus prepare for the abolition of slavery.” O, shallow and shortsighted! the demand is the preparation; nothing can supply the place of that. And exclusive instruction, teaching for blacks, a school founded on color, a church in which men are herded ignominiously, apart from the refining influence of association with the more highly educated and accomplished,—what are they? A direct way of fitting white men for tyrants, and black men for slaves. No; if you would teach and Christianize the nation, strengthen the American Anti-Slavery Society, the only American institution founded on the Christian and republican idea of the equal brotherhood of man, and in opposition to a church and state which deny human brotherhood by sanctioning slavery, and pull down Christ to their own level. The American Anti-Slavery Society is church and university, high school and common school to all who need real instruction and true religion. Of it what a throng of authors, editors, lawyers, orators, and accomplished gentlemen of color have taken their degree! It has equally implanted hopes and aspirations, noble thoughts and sublime purposes in the hearts of both races. It has prepared the white man for the freedom of the black man, and it has made the black man scorn the thought of enslavement, as does a white man, as far as its influence has extended. Strengthen that noble influence. Before its organization, the country only saw here and there in slavery some “faithful Cudjoe or Dinah,” whose strong natures blossomed even in bondage, like a fine plant beneath a heavy stone. Now, under the elevating and cherishing influence of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the colored race, like the white, furnishes Corinthian capitals for the noblest temples. Aroused by the American Anti-Slavery Society, the very white men who had forgotten and denied the claim of the black man to the rights of humanity now thunder that claim at every gate, from cottage to capital, from school house to university, from the railroad carriage to the house of God. He has a place at their firesides, a place in their hearts—the man whom they once cruelly hated for his color. So feeling, they cannot send him to Coventry with a horn-book in his hand, and call it instruction! They inspire him to climb to their side by a visible acted gospel of freedom. Thus, instead of bowing to prejudice, they conquer it.

“Establish free-labor warehouses.” Indeed! is that a good business calculation that leads to expend in search of the products of free labor the time and money that would make all labor free? While wrong exists in the world, you cannot (short of suicide) but draw your every life breath in involuntary connection with it; nor is conscience to be satisfied with any thing short of a complete devotion to the anti-slavery cause of the life that is sustained by slavery. We may draw good out of evil: we must not do evil, that good may come. Yet I counsel you to honor those who eat no sugar, as you ask no questions for conscience’s sake; while you despise those who thrust forward such a call upon conscience, impossible, in the nature of things, to be obeyed, and therefore not binding, as if it were the end of the law for righteousness, in order to injure Garrison, the great and good founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society. I have seen men stand drawing bills of exchange between England and the United States, while uttering maledictions against the American Anti-Slavery Society, because it does not, as such, occupy itself with the free produce question. This I brand as pro-slavery in disguise—sheer hypocrisy.