Right and wrong in Massachusetts

by Maria Weston Chapman

“Thank Heaven for song and praise, that I can

Thus sing the song of the faithful man!”

The enemy, thus met, would have ceased to play so ineffectual a string; but, perceiving the weakness of the agents of this year, he never ceased to have recourse to it.

Let not those who have never been tried in such a furnace, condemn, without pardon and pity, those whose nobility of spirit was not equal to pass the assay.

There appears to have been, on the part of Mr. Phelps, and the other agents of this period, an inability to comprehend or appreciate the just and straight-forward course of the Massachusetts Board, with whom they were associated, as well as a consciousness that it would never permit its sanction to be used for their purposes. They therefore carefully kept their operations secret from the Board, while they were using its funds and sanction to carry them on, in conjunction with Mr. Torrey, and Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of the Executive Committee at New York. All the Summer and Autumn of 1838, the scheme for a new paper was thus secretly carried on. Mr. Torrey wrote afterwards to a friend, “the clergymen throughout the State have been sounded; and they are for it, to a man.”

The plan of a new paper, to be under their own dictation, and in an attitude of opposition to the man and to the paper whom their misrepresentations had made odious, could not fail to be approved by the ministry; but to abolitionists, a different form of introduction was found necessary. To them it was represented that it would aid the Liberator, and that possibly Mr. Garrison might be induced to become the editor. Its comparative cheapness, too, was an inducement to some honest minds, who were unaware of its purpose to effect a division in their ranks.

More than a year had elapsed since the clerical appeal conspiracy. Some of the appellants had become officers of county Societies. Certain of their brethren in spirit, as well as in the ministry, had taken the lead in town Societies;—a creeping movement was in this way going on among them, to get the control of the organizations; and, co-operating with it, were the young theologians who had aided the old attempt against the cause; now, some of them, as the occupants of pulpits, rejoicing in the opportunity to lend their aid to the new one.

Mr. Phelps, in whom general confidence was yet unimpaired, was every where warm in his eulogies of Mr. Torrey’s diligence in the cause. But those who had opportunities of observing his course closely, were made aware that mischief and diligence are by no means incompatible. His labors were unremitting to weaken the bonds of relationship between the County Society and the State Society. The abolitionists of Essex, generally, saw not the tendency and design of these efforts. They could be made without suspicion, as the National Society had ever been a favorite with Massachusetts men, with whom it originated, and who constitute the largest portion of its efficient members. Such men could not readily conceive of the possibility of acting in their County capacity or their National capacity, in opposition to themselves in their State capacity. But the active brains of the Secretary of the Executive Committee at New York, together with the Secretaries of the Massachusetts and the Essex County Societies, had devised and cherished the idea of such a change, though it would necessarily convert the affiliated Anti-Slavery system from a harmonious whole, into jarring and discordant divisions. A society had, before this, been formed in the western part of the State, to be directly auxiliary to the National Society. This circumstance was unnoticed at the time, except by a few, who waited for the light of future events by which to interpret its meaning.

Such disunion and derangement could not be easily effected in the region where the free spirit first laid the broad foundations of its organized action. It was necessary to cast about for some plausible ground on which to create division of feeling, and to proceed upon it with the utmost caution.

Public sentiment had become so far changed in Massachusetts by the eight years’ warfare of abolitionists, that ministers were almost as liable to public censure for an open pro-slavery course, as for an open advocacy of Freedom. They, of all men, were, in one sense, justified in the customary declaration that they were “as much anti-slavery as others;” for they kept careful watch of the times, that they might not vary from them materially. With all their prudence and caution, they found this double public a difficult monster to manage. Though, as a body, they had undergone no change of feeling, they perceived that their efforts to check the progress of Freedom, must be made more carefully than ever; and they adopted a tone of great solicitude for “the poor slave.”