The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

IV

Now as to the abolition of slavery.

What are the historical facts as to this? It is true that slavery had been abolished at the North; but this was under conditions which, had they prevailed at the South, would have been taken advantage of there also; and when the institution was abolished in the Northern States, it had become so unprofitable that no great credit can attach to the act of abolition.[71] It is also true that there were throughout the North a considerable body of men and women who, from a very long time back, believed sincerely that human slavery was a crime against nature, and strove zealously and persistently to overthrow it. At the South there were also many who labored with not less earnestness to effect the same end; though, owing to different conditions, the same means could not be employed; and, standing face to face with the immense slave population which existed at the South, they saw the same danger which faces us to-day, and sought in colonization the means at once to abolish slavery, to free America, and to Christianize Africa.

As to actual, immediate emancipation, however, it was no more the intentional work of the North as a people than it was of the South.

The credit for it, even so far as creating a public opinion which rendered it eventually possible, is due to a band of emancipators, who, for a long time absolutely insignificant in numbers, and ever comparatively few when contrasted with the great body of the people of the North, devoted their energies, their labors, their lives, to the accomplishment of this end. During their labors they encountered no less obloquy, and experienced scarcely less peril at the North than at the South, with this difference, that at the North the outrages perpetrated upon them were inspired by a mere sentiment, while at the South the vast number of slaves made any interference with them intolerable, and the treatment abolitionists received was based on a recognition of the fact that the doctrines they promulgated might at any moment plunge the South into the horrors of insurrection.

It was not at the South, but at the North, in Connecticut, that Prudence Crandall was, for teaching colored girls, subjected to a persecution as barbarous as it was persistent. After being sued and pursued by every process of law which a New England community could devise, she was finally driven forth into exile in Kansas.

She opened her school in Canterbury, Connecticut, in April, 1833, and was at once subjected to the bitterest persecution conceivable. It was all well enough to hold theories about the equal rights of all mankind; well enough to abuse the institution of slavery in Virginia, in South Carolina, in Georgia, or in Louisiana; but actually to start “a nigger school” in Canterbury, Connecticut, was monstrous. The town-meeting promptly voted to “petition for a law against the bringing of colored people from other towns and States for any purpose, and more especially for the purpose of dissemination of the principles and doctrines opposed to the benevolent colonization scheme.” “In May an act prohibiting private schools for non-resident colored persons, and providing for the expulsion of the latter, was procured from the legislature, amid the greatest rejoicings in Canterbury, even to the ringing of church-bells.” The most vindictive and inhuman measures were adopted against the offender; the shops and meeting-houses were closed against her and her pupils.[72]

It was not at the South, but at Canaan, New Hampshire, that on August 10, 1835, the building of the Noyes Academy, open to pupils of both colors, in pursuance of a formal town-meeting vote that it be “removed,” was dragged by one hundred yoke of oxen from the land belonging to the corporation, and left on the common, three hundred yeomen of the county participating. The teacher and colored pupils were given a month in which to quit the town.[73]

Throughout New England, less than thirty years before the promulgation of the emancipation proclamation abolitionists encountered not only opprobrium but violence. When George Thompson, the English abolitionist, went throughout the North in 1835, his windows were broken in Augusta, Maine, where a State anti-slavery convention was in progress, and a committee of citizens requested him to leave town immediately under pain of being mobbed if he reëntered the convention. At Concord, New Hampshire, he was interrupted with missiles while addressing a ladies’ meeting. At Lowell, Massachusetts, on his second visit, in the town hall a brick-bat thrown from without through the window narrowly escaped his head, and in spite of the manliness of the selectmen a meeting the next evening was abandoned in the certainty of fresh and deadly assaults.[74]

It is stated in a letter from Mr. William Lloyd Garrison that Thompson had a narrow escape from the mob at Concord, and Whittier was pelted with mud and stones.[75] At a convention in Lynn, George Thompson was stoned. The next evening he was mobbed by three hundred men.