Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict

by Samuel J. May

GEORGE THOMPSON’S FIRST YEAR IN AMERICA.

When, on his return from England in October, 1833, Mr. Garrison informed us that he had obtained from George Thompson—the champion of the triumphant conflict for West India emancipation—the promise to “come over and help us,” if we concurred in the invitation Mr. Garrison had given him, our hearts were encouraged, our hands strengthened, our purpose confirmed. Our own great antislavery orators, male and female, who since then have done so much to convict and convert the nation, had not yet appeared. Theodore D. Weld and Henry B. Stanton were studying theology in Lane Seminary; Parker Pillsbury, Stephen S. Foster, and John A. Collins were doing likewise somewhere in Vermont; Henry C. Wright had not plucked up quite courage enough to justify Mr. Garrison’s terrible denunciations of slaveholders and their abettors; James G. Birney was the Secretary of the Kentucky Colonization Society; Gerrit Smith had not got wholly out of the toils of that fraudulent scheme which had deceived “the very elect”; Charles C. Burleigh was an unknown youth in Plainfield Academy; Wendell Phillips, our Apollo, was just preparing to leap into his place at the head of the Massachusetts bar; and Angelina Grimké, Lucy Stone, Abby Kelly Foster, Susan B. Anthony, Antoinette L. Brown, Sallie Holley, and other excellent women, who have since rendered such signal services, had not then left “the appropriate sphere of women.”

That George Thompson would come to our aid, the orator to whose relentless logic and surpassing eloquence, more than to any other instrumentality, Lord Brougham had just attributed the triumph of the antislavery cause in England,—that he was about coming to help us did seem at that time a godsend indeed. But, as was stated in my last, his coming was deferred a year, that the Abolitionists of Great Britain and Ireland might not lay aside their well-used weapons, nor cease from their warfare, while so many millions of human beings remained in the most abject slavery, especially in the United States, where the horrid institution was established by the authority of England. Having re-enlisted his fellow-laborers throughout the United Kingdom to co-operate with us, he came to Boston in the fall of 1834.

At that time I was devoting a few weeks of permitted absence from my church in Connecticut to a lecturing tour in the antislavery cause, and came to Mr. Garrison’s house in Roxbury an hour after the arrival of Mr. Thompson. He readily consented to go with us the next day to Groton, there to attend a county convention. We gladly spent the remainder of that day together, in earnest and prayerful communion over the great work in which we had engaged; and at night repaired to lodge at the Earl Hotel in Hanover Street, that we might not fail to be off for Groton the next morning at four o’clock, in the first stage-coach, no conveyance thither by railroad being extant then.

At the appointed hour, the house being well filled, the meeting was called to order, and business commenced. As all were eager to see and hear the great English orator, preliminary matters were disposed of as soon as practicable. Then Mr. Thompson was called up by a resolution enthusiastically passed, declaring our appreciation of the inestimable value of his antislavery labors in England, our joy that he had come to aid us to deliver our country from the dominion of slaveholders, and our wish that he would occupy as much of the time of the convention as his inclination might prompt and his strength would enable him to do. He rose, and soon enchained the attention of all present. He set forth the essential, immitigable sin of holding human beings as slaves in a light, if possible, more vivid, more intense, than even Mr. Garrison had thrown upon that “sum of all villanies.” He illustrated and sustained his assertions by the most pertinent facts in the history of West India slavery. He inculcated the spirit in which we ought to prosecute our endeavor to emancipate the bondmen,—a spirit of compassion for the masters as well as their slaves,—a compassion too considerate of the harm which the slaveholder suffers, as well as inflicts, to consent to any continuance of the iniquity. He most solemnly enjoined the use of only moral and political means and instrumentalities to effect the subversion and extermination of the gigantic system of iniquity, although it seemed to tower above and overshadow the civil and religious institutions of our country. He showed us that he justly appreciated the greater difficulties of the work to be done in our land, than of that which had just been so gloriously accomplished in England, but exhorted us to trust undoubtingly in “the might of the right,”—the mercy, the justice, the power of God,—and to go forward in the full assurance that He, who had crowned the labors of the British Abolitionists with such a triumph, would enable us in like manner to accomplish the greater work he had given us to do.

Mr. Thompson then went on to give us a graphic, glowing account of the long and fierce conflict they had had in England for the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. His eloquence rose to a still higher order. His narrative became a continuous metaphor, admirably sustained. He represented the antislavery enterprise in which he had been so long engaged as a stout, well-built ship, manned by a noble-hearted crew, launched upon a stormy ocean, bound to carry inestimable relief to 800,000 sufferers in a far-distant land. He clothed all the kinds of opposition they had met, all the difficulties they had contended with, in imagery suggested by the observation and experience of the voyager across the Atlantic in the most tempestuous season of the year. In the height of his descriptions, my attention was withdrawn from the emotions enkindled in my own bosom sufficiently to observe the effect of his eloquence upon half a dozen boys, of twelve or fourteen years of age, sitting together not far from the platform. They were completely possessed by it. When the ship reeled or plunged or staggered in the storms, they unconsciously went through the same motions. When the enemy attacked her, the boys took the liveliest part in battle,—manning the guns, or handing shot and shell, or pressing forward to repulse the boarders. When the ship struck upon an iceberg, the boys almost fell from their seats in the recoil. When the sails and topmasts were wellnigh carried away by the gale, they seemed to be straining themselves to prevent the damage; and when at length the ship triumphantly sailed into her destined port with colors flying and signals of glad tidings floating from her topmast, and the shout of welcome rose from thousands of expectant freedmen on the shore, the boys gave three loud cheers, “Hurrah! Hurrah!! Hurrah!!!” This irrepressible explosion of their feelings brought them at once to themselves. They blushed, covered their faces, sank down on their seats, one of them upon the floor. It was an ingenuous, thrilling tribute to the surpassing power of the orator, and only added to the zest and heartiness with which the whole audience applauded (to use the words of another at the time) “the persuasive reasonings, the earnest appeals, the melting pathos, the delightful but caustic irony and enrapturing eloquence of Mr. Thompson.”

Thus commenced his brilliant career in this country. The Groton Convention lasted two days, the 1st and 2d of October. Mr. Thompson went thence immediately to Lowell, where he spoke to a delighted crowd on the 5th. Four days after, on the 9th of October, he gave his first address in Boston. It was at an adjourned meeting of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society. All the prominent Abolitionists, who could be, were there to see and hear “the almost inspired apostle of negro emancipation,” who had “come over to help us.” Every one that heard him then felt that his signal gifts had not been overrated, and joined in thanksgiving to the God of the oppressed, whose Holy Spirit, we believed, had moved him to consecrate those gifts to the abolition of slavery.

Reports of Mr. Thompson’s eloquence spread rapidly, and invitations came to him from all quarters. The day after the meeting in Boston he went into the State of Maine, and lectured on the 12th in Portland, on the 13th in Brunswick, on the 15th in Augusta. Everywhere he was heard with delight, and made many converts. At Augusta, it is true, he received an angry letter from five “gentlemen of property and standing,” informing him that his “coming to their city had given great offence,” and admonishing him not to presume to address the public there again. But his engagements elsewhere, rather than their threats, obliged him to leave immediately. The next evening he lectured in the neighboring city of Hallowell, where the people heard him gladly. On the 17th he delivered an address in Waterville, which was listened to by most of the students and several of the faculty of the College, and made deep impressions upon a large number. On the 20th he spoke again to a crowded audience in Brunswick, with like effect upon the students and faculty of Bowdoin College. Returning, he lectured at Portland in six different churches, to large and delighted audiences, before the close of the month; and then came into New Hampshire and gave lectures in Plymouth, Concord, and other places, on his way back to Boston. After a few days’ repose, he went forth again, in answer to many urgent invitations, and lifted up his voice for the enslaved in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Whoever will turn over the leaves of the Liberator for 1834 and 1835 will find on almost every page some admiring mention of Mr. Thompson’s lectures or speeches, and grateful acknowledgments of the deep impressions his words had made.

It is true that in the same paper will be found, under the appropriate head “Refuge of Oppression,” extracts from newspapers and letters from all parts of the country, denouncing, execrating him, and calling upon the patriotic to put a stop to his incendiary career. He was a foreign intruder, who had come here to “meddle with a delicate matter about which he could know nothing.” He was “a British emissary, sent to embroil the Northern with the Southern States, and break up our glorious Union.” He was “the paid agent of the enemies of republican institutions, supported in our midst, that he might do all in his power to prevent the success of the grandest experiment in national government ever tried on earth.” The changes were rung on these and similar charges until those, who could be deceived thereby, were maddened in their fear and hatred of Mr. Thompson. He was threatened with all kinds of ill-treatment; yet he went fearlessly wherever he was invited to speak, and not unfrequently disarmed and converted some who had come to the meetings intending to do him harm.

In several of his lecturing tours I was his companion; and I wondered how any persons who heard him speak, in public or in private, could suspect or be persuaded that he was an enemy of our country. I was continually surprised, as well as delighted, by the evidences he gave of his just appreciation of the principles of our government, and the admiration of them that he always cordially expressed. Having hitherto contemplated our Republic from a distance, he seemed to have taken a more comprehensive view of it than too many of our own citizens, even statesmen, had done, whose regard for the whole nation had been warped by their concern for the supposed interests of a section or a State. Mr. Thompson’s detestation of slavery was intensified by his clear perception of the corruption it had diffused throughout our body politic and body ecclesiastic; and, if not abolished, the ruin it would inevitably bring upon our country, called, in the providence of God, to be “the land of the free and the asylum of the oppressed.” No American patriot ever felt, for no human heart could feel, a deeper, more sincere, or more intelligent concern for the honor, glory, perpetuity of our Republic than Mr. Thompson felt and evinced in his every word and act. Few home-born lovers of our country have done a tithe as much as he did to save her from the ruin she was bringing upon herself by her recreancy to the fundamental principles, upon which she professed to stand. Not a dozen names, of those who have lived within the last forty years, deserve to stand higher on the list of our public benefactors than the name of George Thompson.