Dr. Channing further objected that “the use of the phrase immediate emancipation had contributed much to spread far and wide the belief, that the Abolitionists wished immediately to free the slave from all his restraints.” But ought we to have been held responsible for such a senseless, wanton misconstruction of words that had been explained a thousand times by our appointed lecturers, in our tracts, and in the “Declaration of the Sentiments, Purposes, and Plans of the American Antislavery Society,” which was published three years before Dr. Channing’s book appeared? Freemen,—Republican freemen were, are, and ever ought to be subject to the restraints of civil government, equal and righteous laws. From the commencement of our enterprise, our only demand for our enslaved countrymen has been that they should forthwith be admitted to all the rights and privileges of freemen upon the same conditions as others, after they shall have acquired (those of them who do not now possess) the qualifications demanded of others.
Still further the Doctor accused us Abolitionists of having “fallen into the common error of enthusiasts,—that of exaggerating their object, of feeling as if no evil existed but that which they opposed, and as if no guilt could be compared with that of countenancing or upholding it.” We grieved especially that he suffered this censure to drop from his pen, as, coming from him, it would repress in many bosoms the concern which was beginning to be felt more than ever before for the slaves and the slaveholders. There was no danger that we should esteem or lead others to esteem the evils of their condition to be greater than they were. All about us there was still an alarming insensibility or indifference to the subject. This could not have been made to appear more glaring than by the Doctor himself, on the 137th page of his book. “Suppose,” he there said, “suppose that millions of white men were enslaved, robbed of all their rights in a neighboring country, and enslaved by a black race who had torn their ancestors from the shores on which our fathers had lived. How deeply should we feel their wrongs!” Ay, how much more deeply would even the Abolitionists feel for them! Yet why should we not all feel as much, in the case that actually existed in our country as in the one supposed? We are unable to find a reason of which we ought not to be ashamed, because it must be one based upon a cruel prejudice, the offspring of the degradation into which we had forced the black men. I really wish if there are any who think with Dr. Channing that the Abolitionists did exaggerate the guilt of holding men in slavery, or consenting with slaveholders,—I really wish such persons would read Dr. Channing’s chapter on the “Evils of Slavery,” and then show us, if he can, wherein we exaggerated them.
Dr. Channing repelled with great emphasis the charge often brought against Abolitionists, that we were endeavoring to incite the slaves to violence, bloodshed, insurrection. He said, page 131: “It is a remarkable fact, that though the South and the North have been leagued to crush them, though they have been watched by a million of eyes, and though prejudice has been prepared to detect the slightest sign of corrupt communication with the slave, yet this crime has not been fastened on a single member of this body.” No, not one of our number, that I was acquainted with, ever suggested the resort to insurrection and murder by the enslaved as the means of delivering them from bondage. And in our Declaration at Philadelphia we solemnly disclaimed any such intention.
We knew that slavery could be peaceably abolished only by the consent of the slaveholders and the legislators of their States. We knew that they could not fail to be affected, moved by the right action of our Federal Government, touching the enslavement of the colored population in the District of Columbia, and in the territories that were entirely under the jurisdiction of Congress. And we knew that the members of Congress could not be reached and impelled to act as we wished them to, but by the known sentiments and expressed wishes of their constituents,—the people of the nation North and South. It was needful, therefore, to press the subject upon the consideration of the people throughout the land. Accordingly, we did all in our power to awaken the public attention, to agitate the public mind, to touch the public heart. We sent able lecturers to speak wherever there were ears to hear them, and we sent newspapers and tracts wherever the mails would carry them.
Dr. Channing reproached us for this, especially for sending our publications to the slaveholders. But we know not how else we could have made them sensible of the horror with which their system of domestic servitude was viewed by thousands in the Northern States; and inform them correctly of our determination to effect the liberation of their bondmen; and the peaceful means and legal measures by which we intended, if possible, to accomplish our purpose. We wondered greatly at the Doctor’s objection to our course in this direction. To whom should we have sent our publications, if not to those whose cherished institution we were aiming by them to undermine and overthrow? Would it have been open, manly, honorable not to have done so?
One more objection Dr. Channing made, which seemed to us as unreasonable as the last. It was to our manner of forming our Antislavery Associations. He said: “The Abolitionists might have formed an association, but it should have been an elective one. Men of strong principles, judiciousness, sobriety, should have been carefully sought as members. Much good might have been accomplished by the co-operation of such philanthropists.” Alas! such philanthropists, the wise and prudent men, to whom he probably alluded, seemed to have made up their minds to acquiesce in the continuance of slavery, so long as our white brethren at the South saw fit to retain the institution; or to help them take it down very gradually, by removing the victims of it to the shores of Africa. Nearly fifty years had passed, and such philanthropists as he indicated had done little or nothing for the enslaved, and seemed to be growing more indifferent to their wrongs. If we had elected them, would they have associated with us? Are they the men to bear the brunt of a moral conflict? “Not many wise,”—as this world counts wisdom,—“not many rich, not many mighty,” were ever found among the leaders of reform. God has always chosen the foolish to confound the wise. It is left for imprudent men, enthusiasts, fanatics, to begin all difficult enterprises. They have usually been the pioneers of reform. Else why was not the abolition of slavery attempted and accomplished long before by that “better class”?
I have not dwelt so long upon this book, and criticised parts of it so seriously, in order to throw any shade upon the memory of that great man, whom I have so much reason to revere and love. But I have done this in order to reveal more fully to the present generation, and to those who may come after us, the sad state of the public mind and heart in New England thirty-five years ago. All the objections Dr. Channing alleged against us in this book were the common current objections of that day, hurled at us in less seemly phrases from the press, the platform, and the pulpit. They would not have been thought of, if we had been laboring for the emancipation of white men. It was sad that a man of such a mind and heart as Dr. Channing’s could have thought them of sufficient importance to press them upon us as he did. Nevertheless, his book contained so many of the vital principles for which we were contesting, set forth so luminously and urged so fervently, that it proved to be, as I have already said, a far greater help to our cause than we at first expected. And we look back with no little admiration upon one who, enjoying as he did, in the utmost serenity, the highest reputation as a writer and a divine, put at hazard the repose of the rest of his life, and sacrificed hundreds of the admirers of his genius, eloquence, and piety, by espousing the cause of the oppressed, which most of the eminent men in the land would not touch with one of their fingers.
THE GAG-LAW.
In the winter of 1835 and 1836 the slaveholding oligarchy made a bolder assault than ever before upon the liberty of our nation, and the most alarming intimations were given of a willingness to yield to their imperious demands. The legislatures of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia passed resolutions of the same import, only those of Virginia and South Carolina were clothed, as might have been expected, in somewhat more imperative and threatening terms. These resolutions insisted that each State, in which slavery was established, had the exclusive right to manage the matter in the way that the inhabitants thereof saw fit; and that the citizens of other States who were interfering with slavery in any way, directly or indirectly, were guilty of violating their social and constitutional obligations, and ought to be punished. They therefore “claimed and earnestly requested that the non-slaveholding States of the Union should promptly and effectually suppress all abolition societies, and that they should make it highly penal to print, publish, and distribute newspapers, pamphlets, tracts, and pictorial representations calculated or having a tendency to excite the slaves of the Southern States to insurrection and revolt.”
These resolutions further declared that “they should consider every interference with slavery by any other State, or by the General Government, as a direct and unlawful interference, to be resisted at once, and under every possible circumstance.” Moreover, they insisted that they “should consider the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia as a violation of the rights of the citizens of that District, and as a usurpation to be at once resisted, as nothing less than the commencement of a scheme of much more extensive and flagrant injustice.”