Not many days elapsed before the responses which it awakened began to be heard; and they were by no means altogether such as he had expected. Although he disclaimed the Abolitionists; stated that he had never attended one of our meetings, nor heard one of our lecturers; although he made several grave objections to our doctrines and measures, and unwittingly gave his sanction to several of the most serious misrepresentations of our sentiments, our objects, and means of prosecuting them; yet he so utterly repudiated the right of any man to property in the person of any other man, and gave such a fearful exposé of the sinfulness of holding slaves and the vices which infested the communities where human beings were held in such an unnatural condition, that the Southern aristocracy and their Northern partisans came soon to regard him as a more dangerous man than even Mr. Garrison. He was denounced as an enemy of his country, as encouraging the insurrection of the slaves, and as in effect laboring to do as much harm as the Abolitionists.
In due time an octavo pamphlet of forty-eight pages was published in Boston, entitled “Remarks on Dr. Channing’s Slavery.” It was evidently written by a very able hand, and was attributed to one of the most prominent lawyers in that city. The writer spoke respectfully of Dr. Channing, but condemned utterly his doctrines on the subject of slavery, and found in them all the viciousness of the extremest abolitionism. The author announced and labored to maintain the following false propositions: “First. Public sentiment in the free States in relation to slavery is perfectly sound and ought not to be altered. Second. Public sentiment in the slaveholding States, whether right or not, cannot be altered. Third. An attempt to produce any alteration in the public sentiment of the country will cause great additional evil,—moral, social, and political.”
Such bald scepticism was not to be tolerated. “A Review of the Remarks” was soon sent forth. This called out a “Reply to the Review,” and thus the subject of slavery was fully broached among a class of people who had given no heed to The Liberator and our antislavery tracts.
In future articles I shall have occasion gratefully to acknowledge the further services rendered by Dr. Channing to the antislavery cause, and to show how at last he came nearly to accord in sentiment with the ultra-Abolitionists.
SLAVERY,—BY WILLIAM E. CHANNING.
This was the title of Dr. Channing’s book. It rendered the antislavery cause services so important that I am impelled to give a further account of it. It seemed to me at the time, it seems to me now, one of the most inconsistent books I have ever read. It showed how, all unconsciously to himself, the judgment of that wise man had been warped and his prejudices influenced by the deference, which had come to be paid pretty generally throughout our country, to the Southern slaveholding oligarchy; and by the denunciations which their admirers, sympathizers, abettors, and minions in the free States, poured without measure upon Mr. Garrison and his comparatively few fellow-laborers.
Dr. Channing’s profound respect for human nature and the rights of man, and his heartfelt compassion for the oppressed, suffering, despised, were such that he could not but see clearly the essential, inevitable, terrible wrongs and evils of slavery to the master as well as to his subject. He portrayed these cruelties and vices so clearly and forcibly that the pages of his book contain as utter condemnations of the domestic servitude in our Southern States, and as awful exposures of the consequent corruption, pollution of families and the community in those States,—condemnations as utter and exposures as awful as could be found in The Liberator. To his chapters on “Property in Man,” “Rights,” and “Evils of Slavery,” we could take no exceptions. But his chapter entitled “Explanations” seems to us, as Mr. Garrison called it, a chapter in recantation,—a disastrous attempt to make it appear as if there could be sin without a sinner. He says that the character of the master and the wrong done to the slave are distinct points, having little or no relation to each other. He therefore did not “intend to pass sentence on the character of the slaveholder.” Jesus Christ taught that “by their fruits ye shall know men.” But the Doctor said in this chapter, “Men are not always to be interpreted by their acts or their institutions.” “Our ancestors,” he continued, “committed a deed now branded as piracy,” i. e. the slave-trade. “Were they, therefore, the offscouring of the earth?” No,—but they were pirates, their good qualities in other respects notwithstanding. They were guilty of kidnapping the Africans, and made themselves rich by selling their victims into slavery. Piracy was too mild a term for such atrocious acts. They were just as wicked before they were denounced by law as afterwards. And it was by bringing the people of England and of this country to see the enormity of the crimes inseparable from that trade in human beings, that they were persuaded to repent of it, to renounce and abhor it. Again Dr. Channing says under this head, “How many sects have persecuted and shed blood! Were their members, therefore, monsters of depravity?” I answer, their spirit was cruel and devilish, utterly unlike the spirit of Jesus. They were none of his, whatever may have been their professions. As well might we deny that David was a gross adulterer and mean murderer, because he wrote some very devotional psalms.
A more marvellous inconsistency in the book before us is this. The Doctor declares “that cruelty is not the habit of the slave States in this country.” “He might have affirmed just as truly,” said Mr. Garrison, “that idolatry is not the habit of pagan countries.” What is cruelty? The extremest is the reducing of a human being to the condition of a domesticated brute, a piece of mere property. The Doctor himself has said as much in another part of this volume, see the 26th page in his excellent chapter on “Property.” Having described what man is by nature, he adds, “The sacrifice of such a being to another’s will, to another’s present, outward, ill-comprehended good, is the greatest violence which can be offered to any creature of God. It is to cast him out from God’s spiritual family into the brutal herd.” “No robbery is so great as that to which the slave is habitually subjected.” “The slave must meet cruel treatment either inwardly or outwardly. Either the soul or the body must receive the blow. Either the flesh must be tortured or the spirit be struck down.” No Abolitionist, not even Mr. Garrison, has set forth more clearly the extreme cruelty, inseparable from holding a fellow-man in slavery one hour.
Still Dr. Channing objected to our primal doctrine,—“immediate emancipation.” But could there have been a more obvious inference than this, which an upright mind would unavoidably draw from a consideration of the rights of man, the evils of slavery, and the unparalleled iniquity of subjecting a human being to such degradation. I ask, could there have been a more obvious inference than that any, every human being held in such a condition ought to be immediately released from it? It is plain to me that Dr. Channing himself drew the same inference that Elizabeth Heyrick,[H] of England, and Mr. Garrison had drawn, although he rejected the trenchant phrase in which they declared that inference. Having exhibited so faithfully and feelingly the wrongs and the evils of slavery, he says, on the 119th page of this book: “What, then, is to be done for the removal of slavery? In the first place, the slaveholder should solemnly disclaim the right of property in human beings. The great principle that man cannot belong to man should be distinctly recognized. The slave should be acknowledged as a partaker of a common nature, as having the essential rights of humanity. This great truth lies at the foundation of every wise plan for his relief.” Would not any one suppose, if he had not been forbidden the supposition, that the writer of these lines intended to enjoin the immediate emancipation of the enslaved? Surely, he would have the first thing that is to be done for their relief done immediately. Surely, he would have the foot of the oppressor taken from their necks at once. He would have the heavy yoke that crushes them broken without delay. Surely, he would have the foundation of the plan for the removal of slavery laid immediately. He would not, could not counsel the slaveholder to postpone a day, nor an hour, the recognition of the right of his slave to be treated as a fellow-man. There is a remarkable resemblance between what Dr. Channing here says ought to be done in the first place, and what the Abolitionists had from the beginning insisted ought to be done immediately.
One of the Doctor’s objections to our chosen phrase was that it was liable to be misunderstood. But, as we said at the time, “if immediate emancipation expresses our leading doctrine exactly, it ought to be used and explanations of it be patiently given until the true doctrine has come to be generally understood, received, and obeyed.” Now, immediate emancipation was the comprehensive phrase that did best express the right of the slave and the duty of the master. In whatever sense we used the word immediate, whether in regard to time or order, the word expressed just what we Abolitionists meant. We insisted upon it in opposition to those who were teaching slaveholders to defer to another generation, or to some future time an act of common humanity that was due to their fellow-men at once; and would be due every minute until it should be done. We insisted upon it in opposition to the popular but deceptive, impracticable, and cruel scheme which proposed to liberate the slaves on condition of their removal to Africa.