Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict

by Samuel J. May

Such was the very general uprising of the people of Syracuse in opposition to the rendition of fugitives from slavery.

My own sentiments and feelings were very fully declared, a few days afterwards, from my own pulpit, and subsequently in Rochester and Oswego. I trust my readers will bear with a somewhat extended abstract of my sermon.

“If there be a God, almighty, perfectly wise, and impartially just and good, his will ought to be supreme with all moral beings throughout his universe. To teach otherwise,—to teach that we or any of his moral offspring are bound or can be bound by any earthly power to do what is contrary to divine law, is virtually Atheism; it is to enthrone Baal or Mammon in the place of Jehovah. And this is just what the people of this country are now called upon by our Federal Government to do. The legislators of this Republic have enacted a law which offends every feeling of humanity, sets at naught every precept of the Christian religion, outrages our highest sense of right. And now they and their political and priestly abettors demand that we shall conform to the requirements of this law, because it was enacted by the government under which we live.

“Brethren, are any of you ready to bow and take this yoke upon your necks, and do the biddings of these wicked men? I hope not. You shall not be, if I can convince you that you ought not. The iniquity of our country has culminated in the passage of this infernal law. Fearful encroachments have successively been made upon our liberties. This last is the worst, the most daring. If we yield to it, all will be lost. Our country will be given up to oppressors. There can be no insult, no outrage upon our moral sense, which we shall be able to withstand; no spot on which we can raise a barrier to the tide of political and personal pollution that must ever follow in the wake of slavery. Our government will become a despotism or a cruel oligarchy, and our religion will be in effect, if not in name, the worship of Baal, which means ‘him that subdues.’...

“This horrible law, which in the middle of the nineteenth century of the Christian era the legislators of the most highly favored nation on earth have had the effrontery to enact,—this law peremptorily, under heavy fines and penalties, forbids us to give assistance and comfort to a certain class of our fellow-men in the utmost need of help,—those who have fled and are longing to be saved from the greatest wrongs that can be inflicted upon human beings,—the wrongs of slavery. And yet we are told by many—many who profess to be Christians, even teachers of Christianity, ah! Doctors of Divinity—that the pulpit may not remonstrate against this tremendous iniquity, because, forsooth, it has passed into a law. What, are we, then, to allow that there is no authority higher than that of the earthly government under which we live,—a government framed by our revered but fallible fathers, and which we administer by agents of our own election, who are by no means incorruptible? Has it come to this? Is this the best lesson our Republican and Christian wisdom can teach the suffering nations of earth? Nay, are we to submit to this human authority without question? May we not so much as discuss the justice of its demands upon us? Must even those men be silent who were set in our midst for the defence of the Gospel,—the Gospel of Him who was ‘anointed to preach to the poor, who was sent to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, to set at liberty them that are bruised?’ Such is the doctrine of our politicians and of our politico-religious ministers. But a more heartless, demoralizing, base, antidemocrat, and antichristian doctrine could not be preached. I repudiate it utterly.... The pulpit has no higher function than to expound, assert, and maintain the rights of man. The assumption of Mr. Webster and his abettors—that there is no higher law than an enactment of our Congress or the Constitution of the United States—is glaringly atheistical, inasmuch as it denies the supremacy of the Divine Author of the moral constitution of man....

“It is a matter of great interest to me personally, that my attention was first powerfully called to the subject of slavery, and my resolution to do my duty regarding it, was first roused by Daniel Webster, when he was a man, and not a mere selfseeking politician. The first antislavery meeting I ever attended was one in which Mr. Webster took a conspicuous part. It was on the 3d of December, 1819, in the State House at Boston, called to oppose the Missouri Compromise. Then and there generous, humane, Christian sentiments respecting slavery were uttered by him and others that kindled in my bosom a warmth of interest in the cause of the oppressed that has never cooled. But the next year, on the 22d of December, 1820, a few days before I entered the pulpit as a preacher, Mr. Webster delivered his famous oration at Plymouth. It was an admirable exposition of the rise, characteristics, and spirit of our free political and religious institutions. Towards the close, having alluded to slavery and the slave-trade, he said, with deep solemnity: ‘I invoke the ministers of our religion, that they proclaim its denunciation of these crimes. If the pulpit be silent wherever or whenever there may be a sin bloody with this guilt within the hearing of its voice, the pulpit is false to its trust.’

“Thus solemnly charged by one whom I then revered as a good man, no less than as a great statesman, the following Sunday I commenced preaching. Tremblingly alive to the weighty responsibilities I was about to incur, I fully resolved that the pulpit which might be committed to my charge should not be silent respecting slavery or any other great public wrong....

“And now, that same Daniel Webster, who first roused me to feel somewhat as I ought for the enslaved, has done more than any other man to procure the enactment of a law, under the provisions of which, if I do my duty, and by my preaching incite others to do their duty, to those who are in danger of being enslaved, I and they may be subjected to unusually heavy fines, or may be thrown into prison as malefactors. Have I not, then, a personal controversy with that distinguished man,—distinguished now, alas! for something else than splendid talents and exalted virtues? If I have gone wrong, did not Mr. Webster misdirect me? If I have done no more than he solemnly charged all preachers to do, has he not basely deserted and betrayed me? Verily, verily I say unto you, he bound the burden of this antislavery reform, and laid it upon the shoulders of others, but he himself has not helped to bear it,—no, not with one of his fingers. Nay, worse, he has done all he could to prepare the prison, and to whet the sword of vengeance for those sons of New England who shall obey the injunction he gave them from Plymouth Rock, that spot hallowed by all who truly love liberty and hate oppression....

“Tell me, then, no more that the pulpit has nothing to do,—that I as a Christian minister have nothing to do with politics, when I see how politics have corrupted, yes, utterly spoiled the once noble (we used in our admiration to say), godlike Daniel Webster! If that man, with his surpassing strength of intellect and once enlarged, generous views of the right and the good,—if he has not been able to withstand the demoralizing influences of political partyism, but has been shrivelled up into a mere aspirant for office, basely consenting to any and every sacrifice of humanity demanded by the oppressors of our country, and at last pledging himself to sustain all the provisions of a law more ingeniously wicked than the stimulated fears of the most cowardly tyrants ever before devised,—I repeat, if such a man as Daniel Webster once was has been corrupted and ruined by politics, shall I, a minister of the Christian religion, fail to point out as plainly as I may, and proclaim as earnestly as I can, the moral dangers that beset those who engage in the strife for political preferment?...

“For one, I will not help to uphold our nation in its iniquity,—no, not for an hour. If it cannot be reclaimed, let it be dissolved. The declaration so often made by the professed friends of our Union, that it cannot be preserved unless this horrible law can be enforced, is unwittingly a declaration that it is the implacable enemy of liberty,—an obstacle in the way of human progress. If it really be so, it must be, it will be removed. And he who attempts to prevent its dissolution will find himself fighting against God. If such a law as this for the recapture of fugitive slaves be essential to our Republic as now constituted, let it be broken up, and some new form of government arise in its stead. A better one would doubtless succeed. A worse one it could not be, if the enslavement, continued degradation and outlawry of more than three millions of our people, be indeed the bond of our present Union....

“Suppose that a considerable proportion of the States in this Union were, or should become, idolatrous heathen. Suppose that they worshipped Moloch, or some other false deity who delighted in human sacrifices. And suppose that, to propitiate the people of those States, and to secure the pecuniary and political advantages of a continued Union with them, Congress should enact that the people of the Christian States should allow those idolaters to come here when they pleased and offer human sacrifices in our midst, or carry away our children to be burnt on their altars at the South; would Mr. Webster or Mr. Clay, or the editors of The New York Observer, or The Journal of Commerce, or the Doctors of Divinity who have endeavored to array the public on the side of wrong,—would even they call upon us to obey such a law? I am sure they would not. And yet I fain would know wherein such a law as I have supposed would be any worse than this law which they are laboring to enforce.... Why, then, if it would be reasonable and proper, in the view of Mr. Webster and his reverend abettors, to nullify a law requiring us to permit human beings to be offered as burnt sacrifices,—why is it not equally reasonable and proper for us to set at naught this law which commands us to do something worse,—that is, to assist in reducing human beings to the condition of domesticated brutes?... Nay, further, I insisted that the Fugitive Slave Law violates the religious liberty, interferes with the faith and worship of Christians, just as much as the law I have supposed would do.... A law of the land requiring you, as this Fugitive Slave Law does, to disobey the Golden Rule is, indeed, a far more grievous encroachment upon your liberty of conscience than a law prescribing to your faith any creed, or any rites and ceremonies by which you must worship God....

“Fellow-citizens! Christian brethren! the time has come that is to test our principles, to try our souls. I would not that any one in this emergency should trust to his own unaided strength. Let us fervently pray for wisdom to direct us, and for fortitude to do whatever may be demanded at our hands, by the Royal Law,—the Golden Rule....

“I would counsel prudence, although this evil day demands of us courage and self-sacrifice.... We should spare no pains through the press, by conversation, and by public addresses, particularly by faithful discourses from the pulpits, to cherish and quicken the sense of right and the love of liberty in the hearts of the people. A correct public sentiment is our surest safeguard....

“Do you inquire of me by what means you ought to withstand the execution of this diabolical law? It is not for me to determine the action of any one but myself. ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ is the second great command which all should faithfully try to obey. Every man and woman among you is bound, as I am, to do for the protection or rescue of a fugitive from slavery what, in your hearts before God, you believe it would be right for you to do in behalf of your own life or liberty, or that of a member of your family. If you are fully persuaded that it would be right for you to maim or kill the kidnapper who had laid hands upon your wife, son, or daughter, or should be attempting to drag yourself away to be enslaved, I see not how you can excuse yourself from helping, by the same degree of violence, to rescue the fugitive slave from the like outrage....

“Before all men, I declare that you are, every one of you, under the highest obligation to disobey this law,—nay, oppose to the utmost the execution of it. If you know of no better way to do this than by force and arms, then are you bound to use force and arms to prevent a fellow-being from being enslaved. There never was, there cannot be, a more righteous cause for revolution than the demands made upon us by this law. It would make you kidnappers, men-stealers, bloodhounds....

“It is known that I have been and am a preacher of the ‘doctrine of non-resistance.’ I believe it to be one of the distinctive doctrines of Christianity. But I have never presumed to affirm that I possessed enough of the spirit of Christ,—enough confidence in God and man,—enough moral courage and self-command to act in accordance with the Gospel precept in the treatment of enemies. But there is not a doubt in my heart that, if I should be enabled to speak and act as Jesus would, I should produce a far greater and better effect than could be wrought by clubs, or swords, or any deadly weapons.... I shall go to the rescue of any one I may hear is in danger, not intending to harm the cruel men who may be attempting to kidnap him. I shall take no weapon of violence along with me, not even the cane that I usually wear. I shall go, praying that I may say and do what will smite the hearts rather than the bodies of the impious claimants of property in human beings,—pierce their consciences rather than their flesh....

“Fellow-citizens, fellow-men, fellow-Christians! the hour is come! A stand must be taken against the ruthless oppressors of our country. Resistants and non-resistants have now a work to do that may task to the utmost the energies of their souls. We owe it to the millions who are wearing out a miserable existence under the yoke of slavery; we owe it to the memory of our fathers who solemnly pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the cause of liberty; We owe it to the expectations, the claims of oppressed and suffering men the world over; we owe it to ourselves, if we would be true men and not the menials of tyrants, to trample this Fugitive Slave Law under foot, and throw it indignantly back at the wicked legislators who had the hardihood to enact it.”

It was obvious enough that some parts of the discourse were not relished by quite a number of my auditors. Several seemed to be seriously offended. It is therefore to be cherished among my many grateful recollections that, as I was coming down from the pulpit the late Major James E. Heron, of the United States Army, then one of the prominent members of our society, came up to me glowing with emotion, gave me his hand, and said, quite audibly: “Mr. May, I thank you. I was once a slaveholder. I know all about the Southern system of domestic servitude. I am intimately acquainted with the principles of the slaveholders, and the condition of their bondmen. You have never in my hearing exaggerated the wrongs and the vices inherent in the system. You cannot overstate them. And the bold attempt which is now making to subjugate the people of the Northern States to the will and service of the slaveholders ought to be resisted to the last.” He must have been heard by many. His words were repeated about the city, and his full indorsement of my antislavery fanaticism helped to make it much more tolerable, in the regards of some who were ready to revolt from it.

The Vigilance Committee appointed on the 4th of October, and the Association we formed on the 12th, to co-operate with that committee, and to bear mutually the expenses that might be incurred in resisting the law, kept the attention of our citizens alive to the subject. And their interest was quickened and their determination confirmed by the reports that came to us from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and many other places, of the preparations that were making to protect the colored people, and set at defiance the plan for their re-enslavement. The historian of our country, if he be one worthy of the task, will linger with delight over the pages on which he shall narrate the uprising of the people generally, in 1850 and 1851, throughout the Northern States, in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law. There were not wanting fearless preachers who took up the arms of the Gospel and faithfully fought against the great unrighteousness. Only a few days after the infamous speech of Mr. Webster on the 7th of March, Theodore Parker addressed a crowded audience in Faneuil Hall, and exposed to their deeper abhorrence the atrocious provisions of the Bill which the Massachusetts senator had had the effrontery to advocate and pledge himself to maintain. On the 22d of September following he preached to his hearers in the Melodeon a thrilling discourse on “The Function and Place of Conscience in Relation to the Laws of Men,” which must have fired them all the more to stand to the death in defence of any human being who had sought, or should seek, an asylum in Massachusetts. And again on the 28th of November, 1850, the day of annual Thanksgiving, he delivered his comprehensive, deep-searching discourse on “The State of the Nation,” showing the reckless impiety of rulers who could frame such unrighteousness into law, and the folly of the people who could suppose themselves bound to obey such a law. Oh! if the ministers of religion generally, throughout our country, had said and done, before and after that date, a tithe as much as Mr. Parker said and did against the “great iniquity” of our nation, the slaveholders could never have gained such an ascendency in our Government, nor have become so inflated with the idea of their power, as to have attempted the dissolution of the Union, which it cost all the blood and treasure expended in our awful civil war to preserve. Mr. Parker was not indeed left alone to fight the battle of the Lord. Rev. Dr. Storrs, of Brooklyn, N. Y., Rev. G. W. Perkins, of Guilford, Conn., Rev. J. G. Forman, of West Bridgewater, Rev. Charles Beecher, Rev. William C. Whitcomb, of Stoneham, Rev. Nathaniel West, of Pittsburg, each spoke and wrote words of sound truth and great power, as well as those whose services I have acknowledged in another place, and others no doubt whose names have escaped my memory. But of the thirty thousand ministers of all the denominations in the United States, I believe not one in a hundred ever raised his voice against the enslavement of millions of our countrymen, nor lifted a finger to protect one who had escaped from bondage. And many, very many of the clergy openly and vehemently espoused the cause of the oppressors. Not only did the preachers in the slaveholding States, with scarcely an exception, justify and defend the institution of slavery, but there were many ministers in the free States who took sides with them. The most distinguished in this bad company were Professor Stuart, of Andover, Dr. Lord, President of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, Bishop Hopkins, of Burlington, Vt., and Rev. Dr. Nehemiah Adams, of Boston. But I must refer my readers to the books mentioned at the bottom of page [349], if they would know how “the orthodox and evangelical” ministers of the free States contributed their influence to uphold “the peculiar institution of the South.” And it must be left for the future historian of our Republic in the nineteenth century to tell to posterity how fearfully the American Church and ninety-nine hundredths of the ministers were subjugated to the will and behest of our slaveholding oligarchy. My purpose is to give, for the most part, only my personal recollections. And on this point, I am sorry to say, they are numerous and mortifying enough.

THE UNITARIANS AND THEIR MINISTERS.

When the Fugitive Slave Law was first promulgated, there was, as I have stated, a very general outburst of indignation throughout the North,—a feeling of dreadful shame, a sense of a most bitter insult. The first impulse of the Unitarians, as of others, was to denounce it. At their autumnal convention in Springfield, October, 1850, they did so, though not without strong opposition to any vote or action on the subject. Probably the opposers would have prevailed, and the law have been left unrebuked, had not that venerable man, the late Rev. Dr. Willard, of Deerfield, risen and earnestly—yes, solemnly—protested against passing lightly over a matter of such fearful importance. Dr. Willard was old, and had long been blind. Would to God that the moral sight of many of his younger ministerial brethren had been half as clear and pure as his! With tremulous eloquence he called upon them to reconsider their motion. He appealed to their pity for men and women over whom was impending the greatest calamity that could befall human beings. He appealed to their regard for the honor of their country, and besought them to avert her shame, by doing what they might to show the world, that it was the statesmen and politicians, not the people of the Northern States, who approved of this wicked, cruel law. His words roused others, who spoke to the same effect; and so that Convention was persuaded to adopt resolutions condemning the law. But quite a number of the prominent ministers of the denomination soon after gave strong utterance to an opposite opinion. I need mention but three. Rev. Dr. Lunt, of Quincy, preached a discourse on the “Divine Right of Government,” in which he endeavored to bring his hearers to the conclusion that, “wise, practical men would allow the laws of the land, which have been enacted in due form, to have their course and be executed, until we can so far change the current of public opinion that what is objectionable in those laws may be corrected.” He conceded, indeed, that “there are cases when rulers may be rightfully resisted, and when revolution is a duty; yet these are extreme cases, and require for their justification the most imperative necessity.” He said this all unconscious, it would seem, that such an extreme case was upon us; unconscious, and leaving his hearers unconscious, that the Fugitive Slave Law must be resisted, or the people of Massachusetts would consent to become menials of the slaveholders, kidnappers, robbers of men, bloodhounds.

The excellent Dr. E. S. Gannett, of Boston, was heard to say, more than once, very emphatically, and to justify it, “that he should feel it to be his duty to turn away from his door a fugitive slave,—unfed, unaided in any way, rather than set at naught the law of the land.”

And Rev. Dr. Dewey, whom we accounted one of the ablest expounders and most eloquent defenders of our Unitarian faith,—Dr. Dewey was reported to have said at two different times, in public lectures or speeches during the fall of 1850 and the winter of 1851, that “he would send his mother into slavery, rather than endanger the Union, by resisting this law enacted by the constituted government of the nation.” He has often denied that he spoke thus of his “maternal relative,” and therefore I allow that he was misunderstood. But he has repeatedly acknowledged that he did say, “I would consent that my own brother, my own son, should go, ten times rather would I go myself into slavery, than that this Union should be sacrificed.” The rhetoric of this sentence may be less shocking, but the principle that underlies it is equally immoral and demoralizing. It is, that the inalienable, God-given rights of man ought to be violated, outraged, rather than overturn or seriously endanger a human institution called a government.