The devoted, indefatigable, self-sacrificing, Benjamin Lundy, was living in Missouri at the time when Mr. Benton first proposed the Texas scheme, and at once gave him battle, so far as he was permitted to do it, in the newspapers of that State. Afterwards on removing to Maryland and establishing there his own paper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation, he did all in his power to alarm the country. He went to Texas and, at great personal hazard, traversed that country and gathered a large amount of most important information, revealing the spirit of the settlers there and the designs of the projectors and managers of the scheme.
He did not labor in vain. The leading National Republican papers in the free States seconded his efforts. Especially my good friend and classmate David Lee Child, Esq., as early as 1829, when editor of The Massachusetts Journal, emphatically denounced the dismemberment and robbery of Mexico for the protection and perpetuation of slavery in the United States. And he manfully contended against that nefarious, execrable plot until further opposition was made useless, as we shall see, by the perpetration of the great iniquity in 1845. In 1835 Mr. Child addressed a number of carefully prepared letters to Mr. Edward S. Abdy, a philanthropic English gentleman, hoping thereby to awaken the attention of British Abolitionists. In 1836 he wrote nine or ten able articles on the impending evil, that were published in a Philadelphia paper. The next year he went to France and England. In Paris he addressed an elaborate memoir to the “Société pour l’Abolition d’Esclavage,” and in London he published in the Eclectic Review a full exposition of the interest which the British nation ought to take in utterly extinguishing the slave-trade, and preventing the re-establishment of slavery in Texas, and the aggrandizement of the unprincipled slaveholding power in that country, larger than the whole of France. No two persons did so much to prevent the annexation of Texas as did Benjamin Lundy and David L. Child. They undoubtedly furnished the Hon. John Q. Adams with much of the information and some of the weapons that he plied with so much vigor on the floor of Congress; but, alas! as the event proved, with so little effect to prevent the great transgression which the Southern statesmen led our nation to commit. At first the indignation of the people in many of the free States at the proposed extension of the domain of slaveholders, and the confirmation of their ascendency in the government of our nation, seemed to be general, deep, and fervent. In 1838 the legislatures of Massachusetts, Ohio, and Rhode Island, with great unanimity, passed resolutions, earnestly and solemnly protesting against the annexation of Texas to our Union, and declaring that no act done, or compact made for that purpose, by the government of the United States would be binding on the States or the people.
For a while it seemed as if the villany was averted; but it was started again in 1843, and from that time until its consummation the protests of the above-named States were renewed with frequent repetition and, if possible, in still more emphatic language. No party within their borders ventured to take the side of the slaveholders. Connecticut and New Jersey at that time joined in the protest. Massachusetts of course took the lead. Meetings of the people, to declare their opposition to the proposed outrage upon the Union, were held in many of the principal towns of the State. At length, when the resolutions providing for the annexation were pending in both Houses of Congress, a great convention of her citizens met in Faneuil Hall, to make known their displeasure in a still more impressive tone and manner. The call to the meeting was signed by prominent men of all parties. It invited the cities and towns of the Commonwealth to send as many delegates to the Convention as they could legally send representatives to the General Court. This took place in January, 1845, only three months before my removal to Syracuse. I was then living in Lexington. A town-meeting was held there to respond to the call to Faneuil Hall, by the choice of two delegates. To my great surprise I was chosen one of the two, and General Chandler, high sheriff of the county, was the other. But unutterable was my astonishment when, on coming into the Convention, I found William Lloyd Garrison seated among the members, sent thither with other delegates by the votes of a large majority of the Tenth Ward of the city of Boston, where he resided. This did, indeed, betoken a marvellous change in the sentiments and feelings of the community. He, who a few years before had been dragged through the streets with a halter, by a mob of “gentlemen of property and standing,” clamoring for his immediate execution, was there in the “Cradle of Liberty,” member of a Convention that comprised the men of Massachusetts who were accustomed to represent, on important occasions, the intelligence, the patriotism, and weight of character of the Commonwealth.
Mr. Garrison addressed the Convention, and was listened to with respectful attention. I need not say that he spoke in a manner worthy of the place and the occasion, and in perfect consistency with his avowed principles. The chief business done by the Convention was the issuing of an elaborate, carefully prepared Address to the people of the United States, setting forth the reasons why Texas should not be annexed to our Republic, and why we ought not to submit to such a violation of the Constitution of our Union, and such an outrage upon the territory and institutions of an adjoining nation. Mr. Garrison published the document in his Liberator of the next week and said, “The Address of the Convention was, as a whole, a most forcible and eloquent document, worthy to be read of all men, and to be preserved to the latest posterity. It was adopted unanimously, after a disclaimer by Samuel J. May and myself of that portion of it which seeks to vindicate the United States Constitution from the charge of guaranteeing protection to slavery.” I was irresistibly impelled to ask that that part of the otherwise admirable Address might be omitted, because it would obliterate the most momentous lesson taught in the history of our nation,—namely, that the reluctant, indirect, inferential consent given by the framers of our Republic to the continuance of slavery in the land—not any deliberate explicit guaranty—had countenanced and sustained the friends of that “System of Iniquity,” from generation to generation, in violating the inalienable rights of millions of our fellow-beings, and had brought upon us, who are opposed to that system, the evils of political discord, national disgrace, and the fear of national disruption and ruin.
I urged the Convention to acknowledge distinctly that, “under the commonly received interpretation of the Constitution, we have hitherto been giving our countenance and support to the slaveholders in their outrages upon humanity, the fundamental rights of man,—an iniquity of which we will no longer be guilty. We have been roused from our insensibility to the wrongs we have wickedly consented should be inflicted upon others—”the least of the brethren“—by the discovery of the evils we have thereby brought upon ourselves, and the ruin that awaits our nation if we do not stay the iniquity where it is, and commence at once the work “meet for the repentance” that alone can save us,—the extermination of slavery from our borders.” “Let this Convention declare, that we certainly will not consent to the extension of slavery,—no, not an inch. And if they urge to its consummation the annexation of Texas, in the way they propose, they will, by so doing, trample the Constitution under foot, set at naught some of its most important provisions, grossly violate the compact of our United States, and therefore absolve us from all obligations to respect it or live under it any longer.”
Mr. Garrison urged that the Address should be further amended by adding that, if our protest and remonstrance shall be disregarded, and Texas be annexed, then shall the Committee of the Convention call another at the same place; that then and there Massachusetts shall declare the union of these States dissolved, and invite all the States, that may be disposed, to reunite with her as a Republic based truly upon the grand principles of the Declaration of Independence. Although his motion was not carried by the Convention, it was received with great favor by a large portion of the members and other auditors; and he sat down amidst the most hearty bursts of applause.
It seemed as if the opposition of Massachusetts and other States to annexation was too strong, and the reasons urged against it were too weighty, to be disregarded by the legislators, the guardians of the nation. The contest waxed and waned throughout the whole of the year 1845. A petition signed by fifty thousand persons was sent to Congress at its opening in December of that year. But several prominent Whig members of Congress from the Southern States were found, in the end, to care more for the perpetuation of slavery than for their party or their principles. And certain members from the free States (one even from Massachusetts) were plied by considerations and alarmed by threats, which the Southern statesmen knew so well how to wield, until they gave way, and suffered the nefarious, the abominable, unconstitutional, disastrous deed to be done,—Texas to be annexed.
Late in the year 1845, when some of the hitherto opposers were evidently about to yield, Mr. D. L. Child, as a final effort against the consummation of the great iniquity, prepared an admirable article for the New York Tribune, under the title,—“Taking Naboth’s Vineyard.” But alas! “considerations” had affected Mr. Greeley’s mind also, and he refused to publish it. Mr. Child then hired him to publish the article in a supplement to his paper, and paid him sixty dollars for the service. But instead of treating it as a supplement is wont to be treated, instead of distributing it coextensively with the principal issue, my friend tells me that Mr. Greeley, having supplied the members of the two Houses of Congress each with a copy, sent the residue of the edition to him. So strangely have political considerations, particularly those suggested by slaveholding statesmen, influenced the politicians of the North.
Other besides political considerations were no doubt plied to affect the votes of the representatives of the free States. It was reported at the time that no less than forty of them had their pockets stuffed with Texas scrip, which would become very valuable if annexation should be effected.