Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict

by Samuel J. May

The free colored population at the South were subjected to new disabilities, were exposed to most vexatious annoyances, and were denied the protection of law against encroachments or personal injuries by the “whites”; and very many of them, on slight pretexts, were reduced to slavery again.

Social intercourse between the Northern and the Southern States was then infrequent. It was kept up mainly by the wealthy and pleasure-seeking, who, in their enjoyment of the hospitality of the planters, could learn little of the condition and character of their bondmen, and were easily led to take “South-side views of slavery.”

Whatsoever we gathered from these sources of information led us too readily to acquiesce in the common assumption, that the negroes were a thick-skulled, stupid, kind-hearted, jolly people, not much if any worse off in slavery at the South than most of the free people of color, and some other poor folks were at the North. So, when we were disquieted at all on their account, it was but for a little time, and we relieved ourselves of the burden by a sigh or two over the misery that everywhere “flesh is heir to.”

The first event that fixed the attention of Northern men seriously upon the subject of slavery, over which they had slumbered since 1808, was the dispute that arose in 1819, upon the proposal to admit Missouri into the Union as a slave State. The contest was a vehement one. Mr. Webster was then upon the side of liberty. He led the van of the opposition that arrayed itself in New England, and would have averted the catastrophe, but for the cry “dissolution of the Union,” then first raised at the South, and the necromancy of Henry Clay, who, with his wand of compromise, conjured the people into acquiescence. Words, however, significant words, touching the evil and the awful wrong of slavery, were uttered in that controversy which were not to be forgotten. And feelings of compassion for the bondmen were awakened which were not allayed by the result.

Shortly before the Missouri controversy a movement had commenced in the slave States, which was pregnant with effects very different from those intended by the projectors of it. Often was it roughly demanded of us Abolitionists, “Why we espoused so zealously the cause of the enslaved?” “why we meddled so with the civil and domestic institutions of the Southern States?” Our first answer always was, in the memorable words of old Terence, “Because we are men, and, therefore, cannot be indifferent to anything that concerns humanity.” Liberty cannot be enjoyed, nor long preserved, at the North, if slavery be tolerated at the South. But to those who felt so slightly the cords of love and the bonds of a common humanity that they could not appreciate these reasons, we gave another reason for our interference with the slavery in our Southern States, even this: we were solicited, we were urged, entreated by the slaveholders themselves to interfere.

About the year 1816, while intent upon their projects for perpetuating and extending their “peculiar institution,” the slaveholders were alarmed by symptoms of discontent among the free colored people, imagined that they were promoting insubordination amongst the slaves, and so conceived the project of colonizing them in Africa. To insure the accomplishment of so mighty an undertaking, it was obviously necessary to obtain the aid of the general government. In order to sustain that government in making such a large appropriation of the public money as would be needed, the people of the North, as well as of the South, were to be conciliated to the plan; and to conciliate them it was necessary to make it appear to be a philanthropic enterprise, conferring great benefits immediately upon the free colored people, and tending certainly, though indirectly, to the entire abolition of slavery. Accordingly, agents, eloquent and cunning men, were sent into all the free States, especially into Pennsylvania, New York, and New England, to press the claims of the oppressed people of the South upon the compassion and generosity of the Northern philanthropists. Never did agents do their work better. Never were more exciting appeals made to the humane than were pressed home upon us by such men as Mr. Gurley, Mr. Cresson, and their fellow-laborers. They kept out of sight the real design, the primal object, the animus of the founders and Southern patrons of the American Colonization Society. They presented to us views of the debasing, dehumanizing effects of slavery upon its victims; the need of a far-distant removal from its overshadowing presence of those who had been blighted by it, that they might revive, unfold their humanity, exhibit their capacities, command the respect of those who had known them only in degradation, and, by their new-born activities, not only secure comfort and plenty for themselves on the shores of their fatherland, but prepare homes there for the reception of millions still pining in slavery, who, we were assured, would be gladly released whenever it should be known that the bestowment of freedom would be a blessing and not a curse to them. Such appeals were not made to our hearts in vain. Suffice it to say that Mr. Garrison, Gerrit Smith, Arthur Tappan, William Goodell, and all the early Abolitionists, were induced to espouse the cause of our oppressed and enslaved countrymen, by the speeches and tracts of Southern Colonizationists.

If I were intending to write a complete history of the conflict with slavery in our country, gratitude would impel me to give some account of a number of philanthropists who, in different parts of the Union, some of them in the midst of slaveholding communities, before Mr. Garrison’s day, had fully exposed and faithfully denounced “the great iniquity,” I should make especial mention of

REV. JOHN RANKIN AND REV. JOHN D. PAXTON.

The former was a Presbyterian minister in Kentucky, where, in 1825, having heard that his brother, Mr. Thomas Rankin, of Virginia, had become a slaveholder, he addressed to him a series of very earnest and impressive letters in remonstrance. They were published first in a periodical called the Castigator, and afterwards went through several editions in pamphlet form. He denounced “slavery as a never-failing fountain of the grossest immoralities, and one of the deepest sources of human misery.” He insisted that “the safety of our government and the happiness of its subjects depended upon the extermination of this evil.” We New England Abolitionists, in the early days of our warfare, made great use of Mr. Rankin’s volume as a depository of well-attested facts, justifying the strongest condemnation, we could utter, of the system of oppression that had become established in our country and sanctioned by our government.

Mr. Paxton was the pastor of a Presbyterian church in Cumberland, Virginia. He was a member of the Presbyterian General Assembly, which in 1818 denounced “the voluntary enslaving of one part of the human race as a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature,—utterly inconsistent with the law of God.” Believing what that grave body had declared, he set about endeavoring to convince the church to which he ministered of the exceeding sinfulness of slaveholding; and that “they ought to set their bondmen free so soon as it could be done with advantage to them.” His preaching to this effect gave offence to many of his parishioners, and led to his dismission. In justice to himself, and to the cause of humanity, for espousing which he had been persecuted, Mr. Paxton also published a volume of letters, which were of great service to us. In these letters he faithfully exposed the abject, debased, suffering condition of our American slaves,—incomparably worse than that which was permitted under the Mosaic dispensation,—and pretty effectually demolished the Bible argument in support of the abomination. However, the labors of these good men, and of those whom they roused, were erelong diverted into the seductive channel of the Colonization scheme.