Right and wrong in Massachusetts

by Maria Weston Chapman

Their success was thus announced in the annual report of 1835:—

“In consequence of the formation of the American Society, and of the design contemplated to form State Societies in the New England States, which has been already accomplished in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, the operations of the New England Society during the past year have been very much confined to Massachusetts, and hereafter it will be only a State Society.”

These enlarged souls thought it no humiliation to take a lower seat. Their object was Liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof, and not the establishment of a powerful institution, of which they should have the control. They go on to say,—

“Though the comparative importance of this association has, owing to the causes just mentioned, been in some measure diminished, yet its zeal, activity and numbers are unimpaired, while its principles are spreading with unexampled rapidity.”

We find them abjuring every thought of control, jurisdiction, centralization and monopoly of means and power. Voluntarily taking what in the apprehension of many would be a lower seat, they assumed the name of the Massachusetts, instead of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. The plan of a national organization, with its various component parts, from state and county to town and parish societies, was skilfully planned, and its execution commenced with great spirit. There was no difficulty in obtaining funds for the use of the Executive Committee of this national association, as all the abolitionists were its members, and their confidence in the men they had selected to form this Committee, was very great. Unlike the parent and pioneer Committee, it numbered among its members men of wealth; and their liberality enabled them to send into the field numbers of able financial and lecturing agents.

At the State gatherings and New England Conventions, these agents were wont to take donations and pledges, which Massachusetts abolitionists, with their characteristic disinterestedness, were anxious to make, that the central committee might be supplied, even though it drained the State Society of its resources.

A practical difficulty soon became obvious. Some, meaning to pledge money to the State Society, found their pledge received as to the National Society—others, meaning to sustain the National, found their pledge recorded as to the State; and great confusion, both in the accounts of the agents, and in the minds of abolitionists, was the consequence. Notwithstanding this, the work went most encouragingly forward;—all being delighted with the efficiency of the National Society, however inconvenient and depressing, in a business sense, its mode of operation might be, and however the action of the State Society was paralyzed by the labors of its financial agents. Still it was thought that some arrangement might be devised by which to obviate the uncertainty and inconvenience which the double draft of funds occasioned; and at the last quarterly meeting of the Massachusetts Society in 1835, a committee was appointed to consider the subject. They reported that the then existing arrangements were very embarrassing to the Massachusetts Society; but no plan was adopted for more convenient ones.

This was the situation and bearing of the fiscal arrangements at the beginning of 1836.

Meanwhile the grand battle had been going powerfully on, and the energies of all were severely tasked. The enthusiasm for the cause had overleaped not only sectarian divisions, but the “graceful feebleness,” which the age cherished as an ornament in the female character. The women of the cause, in the difficult times of 1835, were peculiarly active. They devoted themselves to the work of obtaining signatures to petitions with commendable energy. A history of their progress from door to door, with the obstacles they encountered, would be at once touching, ludicrous, and edifying. Young women, whose labors depended on public opinion, laid the claims of the enslaved to freedom before those whose simple word might grant or deny their own means of subsistence. Benevolent-looking elderly gentlemen, individuals of the highest respectability and influence in the community, were wont to witness the appeal kindly, favoring the applicant with good advice as to her future course.

“My dear young lady, it gives me pain to see your efforts so entirely wasted. You only injure the cause you espouse by thus leaving your sphere. You actually prevent those who are capable of understanding this question, and whom their sex points out as the only proper persons to consider it, from entering upon its consideration. You make the whole matter seem little, and below the attention of men.” But the women judged for themselves, and very rationally too, that the women whose efforts for the cause could not be hindered by men, were more valuable auxiliaries than the men whose dignity forbade them to be fellow-laborers with women.