HOUSE SET ON FIRE.
Soon after their failure to get a decision from the Court of Errors, an attempt was made to set her house on fire. Fortunately the match was applied to combustibles tucked under a corner where the sills were somewhat decayed. They burnt like a slow match. Some time before daylight the inmates perceived the smell of fire, but not until nearly nine o’clock did any blaze appear. It was quickly quenched; and I was sent for to advise whether, if her enemies were so malignant as this attempt showed them to be, it was safe and right for her to expose her pupils’ and her own life any longer to their wicked devices. It was concluded that she should hold on and bear yet a little longer. Perhaps the atrocity of this attempt to fire her house, and at the same time endanger the dwellings of her neighbors would frighten the leaders and instigators of the persecution to put more restraint upon “the baser sort.” But a few nights afterwards it was made only too plain that the enemies of the school were bent upon its destruction. About twelve o’clock, on the night of the 9th of September, Miss Crandall’s house was assaulted by a number of persons with heavy clubs and iron bars; five window-sashes were demolished and ninety panes of glass dashed to pieces.
I was summoned next morning to the scene of destruction and the terror-stricken family. Never before had Miss Crandall seemed to quail, and her pupils had become afraid to remain another night under her roof. The front rooms of the house were hardly tenantable; and it seemed foolish to repair them only to be destroyed again. After due consideration, therefore, it was determined that the school should be abandoned. The pupils were called together, and I was requested to announce to them our decision. Never before had I felt so deeply sensible of the cruelty of the persecution which had been carried on for eighteen months, in that New England village against a family of defenceless females. Twenty harmless, well-behaved girls, whose only offence against the peace of the community was that they had come together there to obtain useful knowledge and moral culture, were to be told that they had better go away, because, forsooth, the house in which they dwelt would not be protected by the guardians of the town, the conservators of the peace, the officers of justice, the men of influence in the village where it was situated. The words almost blistered my lips. My bosom glowed with indignation. I felt ashamed of Canterbury, ashamed of Connecticut, ashamed of my country, ashamed of my color. Thus ended the generous, disinterested, philanthropic, Christian enterprise of Prudence Crandall.
This was the second attempt made in Connecticut to establish a school for the education of colored youth. The other was in New Haven, two years before. So prevalent and malignant was our national prejudice against the most injured of our fellow-men!
MR. GARRISON’S MISSION TO ENGLAND.—NEW YORK MOBS.
The subject of this article is very opportune at the present time.[A] While the roar of the cannon, fired in honor of Mr. Garrison at the moment of his late departure from England, is still reverberating through the land, it will be interesting and instructive to recall the purpose of his mission to that country just thirty-four years ago; and how he was vilified when he went, and denounced, hunted, mobbed, on his return. He went there to undeceive the philanthropists of Great Britain as to a gigantic fraud which had been practised upon them, as well as the antislavery people of the United States. He has gone now to the World’s Antislavery Convention as a delegate from our National Association for the education, and individual, domestic, and civil elevation of our colored population, whose condition thirty years ago, and until a much more recent period, it was confidently maintained, and pretty generally conceded, could not be essentially improved within the borders of our Republic, if, indeed, on the same continent with our superior Anglo-Saxon race.
The conscience of our country was never at peace concerning the enslavement of the colored people. It was denounced by Jefferson in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, and afterwards in his “Notes on Virginia.” An effort to abolish slavery was made in the Convention that framed our Constitution; and strenuous opposition to that Magna Charta was made in several of the State Conventions called to ratify it, because the abominable wrong was indirectly and covertly sanctioned therein. Soon after we became a nation plans were proposed and associations formed for the improvement of the condition of the colored population; and the General Government was earnestly entreated, in a petition headed by Dr. Franklin, “to go to the utmost limits of its power” to eradicate the great evil from the land. But the doctrine was industriously taught by our statesmen that the status of that class of the people was left, in the Constitution of the Union, to be determined by the government of each of the States in which they may be found. And still greater pains were taken, by those who were bent on the perpetuation of slavery, to make it generally believed throughout the country that negroes were naturally a very inferior race of men; utterly incapable of much mental or moral culture, and better off in domestic servitude on our continent than in their native state in Africa. Notwithstanding this disparagement of them, and the other inducements pressed upon the white people everywhere to acquiesce in their enslavement, many colored persons emancipated themselves, especially in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Louisiana; and many more were set free by the workings of the consciences of their owners, or in gratitude for their services to individuals or the public. Thus, considerable bodies of freedmen were found almost everywhere in the midst of the slaves. Not without reason, these persons became objects of distrust to slaveholders. Devices were therefore sought to get rid of their disturbing influence, and to prevent the increase of the number of such persons.
In 1816 the grand scheme was proposed, and readily adopted in most of the slaveholding States, for colonizing on the coast of Africa the free colored people of the United States, and prohibiting the emancipation of any more of the enslaved, excepting upon the condition of their removal to Liberia.
To carry this great undertaking into complete effect it was necessary to secure the patronage of the Federal Government. This obviously could not be done, without first conciliating to the project the approval and co-operation of the people of the non-slaveholding States. Accordingly, agents, eloquent and cunning, were sent north, east, and west, to summon the benevolent and patriotic everywhere to aid in an enterprise which, it was claimed, would result in the safe but entire abolition of American slavery.
The dreadful wrongs and cruelties inflicted upon our bondmen were not kept out of sight by these agents, but sometimes glowingly depicted. The participation of the Northern States in the original sin of the enslavement of Africans was pertinently urged. The utter impracticability and danger of setting free such hordes of ignorant, degraded people were insisted on with particular emphasis. The immense good that would be done to benighted Africa was eloquently portrayed,—how the slave-trade might be stopped, and the knowledge of the arts of civilized America, and the blessings of our Christian religion, might be spread throughout that dark region of the earth, from the basis of colonies planted at Liberia and elsewhere along those coasts, hitherto visited only by mercenary and cruel white men. All these considerations were so pressed upon the churches and ministers and kind-hearted people of the Northern States, that erelong an enthusiasm was awakened everywhere in favor of colonizing the colored people of our country “in their native land,” and thus, at the same time, evangelizing Africa and wiping out the shame of the American Republic. Without stopping to consider the glaring inconsistencies of the scheme, it was taken for granted to be the only feasible way of doing what we all longed to have done,—abolishing slavery. So the colonization of our colored population became the favorite enterprise at the North, even more than at the South. Thousands who were so prejudiced against them that they would never consent to admit them to the enjoyment of the rights, and the exercise of the prerogatives, of men in our country were ready to give liberally to have them transported across the Atlantic, and were deluded into the belief that it was a benevolent, yes, a Christian enterprise. The very elect were deceived. The men who have since been most distinguished among the Abolitionists—Mr. Garrison, Arthur Tappan, Gerrit Smith, James G. Birney, and hundreds more—were for a while zealous Colonizationists.