Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict

by Samuel J. May

I hastened to Mr. Greenwood for redress. With evident mortification and sorrow he confessed his inability to do me justice. Nevertheless, in the July number, 1834, there was allowed to be published, on the 397th page, a paragraph, written by one of the Boston ministers, “for the special instruction of such ardent, but mistaken philanthropists among us as think they are justified, from their abhorrence of slavery, and their zeal for universal emancipation, to interfere with the constitutions of civil governments, or the personal rights of individuals.”

Having permitted such an assault to be made upon us in their pages, I could not doubt that the editors of the Examiner would suffer me to be heard in defence. I therefore prepared carefully a respectful “letter” to them, trusting it would appear in their next number. But, to my surprise and serious displeasure, it was excluded. The letter was accordingly published in the Liberator, which, here let me say to its distinctive honor, always allowed the foes as well as the friends of freedom and humanity a place in its columns. And the editors of the Examiner, unsolicited, did me the favor, in their November number, 1834, page 282, to refer to my letter, commending its “eloquence and its good spirit, although circumstances obliged them to decline publishing it, and advising their readers to procure it and read it, and the documents to which it refers.” This evinced the willingness of those gentlemen to deal fairly, but showed that they were in bondage.

Immediately after the first New England Antislavery Convention, which closed on the 29th of May, 1834, I devoted four or five weeks to lecturing on the Abolition of Slavery in most of the principal towns between Boston and Portland. In several places there were strong expressions of hostility to our undertaking. But nothing like personal violence was offered me. I stopped over Sunday, 8th of June, at Portsmouth, to supply brother A. P. Peabody’s pulpit, that he might preach in a neighboring town. I consented to do this, on the condition that I might deliver an antislavery lecture from his pulpit on Sunday evening. This he gladly agreed to, and took pains to publish my intention. But, greatly to my surprise, after the forenoon service, the Trustees of the church waited upon me, and informed me that, at the earnest demand of many prominent members, I should not be allowed to speak on slavery from their pulpit; that the meeting-house would not be opened that evening. My remonstrance with them was of no avail. So at the close of my afternoon services I said to the congregation: “You are all doubtless aware that I had arranged with your excellent pastor to deliver a lecture on American slavery from this desk this evening. But during the intermission your Trustees called and peremptorily forbade my doing so. Has our consenting with the oppressors of the poor indeed brought us to this? That I, who am striving to be a minister of Him “who came to break every yoke” am forbidden to plead with you who are reputed to be an eminently Christian church the cause of millions of our countrymen who are suffering the most abject bondage ever enforced upon human beings? I know not, I do not wish to know, who those prominent members of your church are that have presumed to close this pulpit, and deny to others the right to manifest their sympathy for the down-trodden, and to hear what may and should be done for their relief. The time shall come when those prominent ones will be brought down, and their children and children’s children will be ashamed to hear of their act.”

With this exception, and an unsuccessful attempt to disturb a meeting that I was addressing in Worcester, I met with no serious molestation in any of the towns of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or Maine, where I lectured during the summer and autumn of 1834. The faces of many of the rich and fashionable were averted from me; but “the common people” seemed to hear me gladly. Politicians and would-be statesmen often encountered me in the stage-coaches and at the hotels where I stopped. Many of our conflicts were amusing rather than terrible. They always based themselves upon “the provisions of the Constitution,” about which it was soon made to appear, that they knew little or nothing. They took it for granted that the fathers of our Republic agreed that slavery should exist in any of the States where the white citizens chose to have it; and that the Constitution of our Union gave certain guarantees for the protection of their “peculiar institution” to the States in which it was maintained. Moreover, these political savans insisted that the Constitution provided that this matter should be left wholly to the slaveholders themselves; and that all condemnation of it as a wicked system, and the exposure of its evils and its horrors, was a violation of State comity, if not of the rights of our fellow-citizens of the South.

Perceiving how little most of such friends of the Union knew about the fundamental law of our Republic, and finding, on inquiry, that copies of the Constitution were in that day very scarce, I not unfrequently shut up my opponents almost as soon as they opened their mouths upon the subject. When they ventured to say, “The Constitution, sir, settled this question in the beginning,” I would inquire, “My friend, have you ever read the Constitution?” “Everybody knows, sir, that slavery—” “Have you, yourself, read that document to which you appeal?” “Why, sir, do you presume to deny that guarantees—” “My friend, I ask again, have you yourself ever read the Constitution of the United States? I do not care to go into an argument with you until I know whether you are acquainted with our great national charter.” In this way, time and again, I drew from my would-be opponents (sometimes justices of the peace), the acknowledgment that they had never themselves seen a copy of the Constitution, but supposed that what everybody, except the Abolitionists, said of its provisions must be true. Occurrences of this sort I reported to the managers of the Antislavery Society so frequently, that they caused a large edition of the United States Constitution to be printed, so that copies of it might be distributed with our tracts, wherever the agents and lecturers saw fit. This was one of the naughty things we did, so inimical to the peace and well-being of our country.

The discussions which I had with sundry individuals who were acquainted with the subject led me to study the Constitution with greater care and deeper interest than ever before. It seemed to me that we owed it to the memory of those venerated men whose names are conspicuous in the early history of our Republic—those men who so solemnly pledged “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” to the cause of freedom and the inalienable rights of man—to exonerate them, if we fairly could, from the awful responsibility that was laid upon them by those who insisted that they guaranteed to the Southern States the unquestioned exercise of their assumed right to enforce the enslavement of one sixth part of the population of the land, many of whom had shared with them in all the hardships and perils of their struggles for independence. It seemed to me that every article of the Constitution usually quoted as intended to favor the assumptions of slaveholders admitted of an opposite interpretation, and that we were bound by every honorable and humane consideration to prefer that interpretation. The conclusions to which I was brought on this subject I gave some time afterwards in the Antislavery Magazine for 1836. But the publication of the “Madison Papers,” in which was given the minutes, debates, etc., of the convention which framed the Constitution, I confess, disconcerted me somewhat. I could not so easily maintain my ground in the discussions which afterwards agitated so seriously the Abolitionists themselves,—some maintaining that the Constitution was, and was intended to be, proslavery; others maintaining that it was antislavery. It seemed to me that it might be whichever the people pleased to make it. I rejoice, therefore, with joy unspeakable that the question is at length practically settled, though by the issue of our late awful war.

THE CLERGY AND THE QUAKERS.

The coming of George Thompson to our country in the fall of 1834, and his thrilling eloquence respecting our great national iniquity, awakened general attention to the subject, and caused more excitement about it than before. He came, as it were, a missionary from the philanthropists of Great Britain to show our people their transgression. The politicians tried to get up the public indignation against him as “a foreign emissary interfering with our political affairs.” The religionists resented his coming as an impertinence, though they were much engaged in sending missionaries to the heathen to reclaim them from sins no more heinous than ours. Nevertheless, the people flocked to hear him, and many were converted. The demand for antislavery lectures came from all parts of New England, and from many parts of the Middle and Western States. A great work was to be done. The fields were whitening to the harvest, but the laborers were few. I therefore accepted the renewed invitation of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society to become its General Agent and Corresponding Secretary, and removed to Boston early in the spring of 1835. Many of my nearest relatives and dearest friends received me kindly, but with sadness. They feared I should lose my standing in the ministry and become an outcast from the churches. For a while it seemed as if their apprehensions were not groundless. None of the Boston ministers, excepting Dr. Channing, welcomed me. Dr. Follen, Dr. Ware, Jr., and Dr. Palfrey were then resident in Cambridge; Mr. Pierpont was in Europe. James Freeman Clarke had not left Louisville, and Theodore Parker was a student in the Divinity School. I was indeed soon made to feel that I was not in good repute. Dr. Ware, who had charge of the Hollis Street pulpit in the absence of the pastor, invited me to supply it, if I found I could do so consistently with my new duties. I engaged for two Sundays. But at the close of the first, one of the chief officers of the church waited upon me, by direction of the principal members, and requested me not to enter their pulpit again, assuring me, if I should do so, that a dozen or more of the prominent men with their families would leave the house. Of course I yielded that, and I was not invited into any other pulpit in the city, excepting Dr. Channing’s, during the fifteen months that I resided there.

Soon after my removal to Boston I was informed that a young and very popular minister in a neighboring town had preached an antislavery sermon on the Fast Day then just past. I hurried to see him, and requested him to read to me the sermon. He did so. It was an admirable exposé of the wickedness of holding men in slavery, and of the duty incumbent upon all Christian and humane persons to do what they could to break such a yoke. It was the outpouring of an ingenuous, benevolent, generous heart, that deeply felt for the wrongs of the outraged millions in our country.

I begged a copy of the discourse for the press, assuring him it would be a most valuable contribution to the cause of the oppressed. He consented to let me have it, promising that, after retouching and fitting it for the press, he would send it to me. I returned to the Antislavery office and made arrangements to publish a large edition of that, which would then have been a remarkable sermon.