They were, for the most part, humble people—their souls crushed and bruised, as Plato says, with servile employments. Their lives had been obstructed by slavery; slavery had nurtured in them some vices, had dwarfed and crippled in them many virtues. They were, in the mass, uncouth, grotesque, ungainly, repulsive to the eye; they were degraded, imbruted, low, ignorant, weak and poor; and, therefore, the heart of every gentleman should have leaped, like Burke’s sword from its scabbard, to avenge even a look that threatened them with insult. Yet, on the other hand, there were many among them too comely and noble to need the defence the hearts of chevaliers fling around those to whom Man and Nature have been unkind. “In the negro countenance,” says Charles Lamb, “you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness toward some of these faces, or rather masks, that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls—those ‘images of God cut in ebony.’” The gentle Londoner could have said it all, and more, of the negro faces one met in Boston, and he might have added a far prouder word for the character that matched the faces. For all that is manliest in manhood, all that is womanliest in womanhood, rose here and there, with tropic energy, uncrushed by the load of past slavery and present social wrong, among those people. Piety, rude and simple, it may be, yet fervent and mighty as ever clasped with tears the Savior’s feet, or rose through eternity to faint in the raptures of prayer before the throne of Jehovah; love, none more loyal and tender, for the father, the mother, the husband, the wife, the child, the home, the country; compassion, quick and strong for mutual succor; flush-handed hospitality; courtesy born not of art but nature; patience; cheerfulness; self-respect; laborious industry; ambition to rise and to excel, despite of fettering disabilities and thick-strewn obstacles; heroic bravery and endurance, such as blanch the cheeks and shake the hearts of those who read or hear the pains and perils negroes have dared for their own freedom, and nobler still, the freedom of their fellows—these, and many other virtues, bourgeoned and blossomed in the hearts and lives of the black fugitives. For these people, whatever pro-slavery snobs and sciolists might say of them, or however they might prate of their inferiority, were, nevertheless, of worthy blood. Take as one sure proof of the negro’s native elegance and gentility of soul, his love and talent for music. The old genius of Africa which taught the lips of Memnon those weird auroral tones which enchanted the valley of the Nile, still haunts the broken souls of the race on this continent. America has no distinctive music but her negro melodies. Listening to those merry rigadoon tunes, wonderful for their jovial sweetness and facile celerity of movement, or to those melancholy or mournful chants, ineffable in pathos, which thrill the spirit with their wild, mysterious cadences, he would have little wit who could deny the spiritual worth of the race whose fugitives at that period found no safety in Boston.
No safety. None at all. Yet Boston had it to remember that one of the first five martyrs of her freedom and of the freedom of America, was a negro—Crispus Attucks. But Boston’s remembrance of that fact seemed at that time to be almost confined to a certain literary slop-pail who periodically emptied himself upon the fame of the hero whom John Hancock and Samuel Adams had thought worthy of funeral honors. Boston had, for many years, paid her debt of gratitude to Attucks by treating the men and women of his race something after the fashion that Jews were treated in the Middle Ages. They had their Ghetto at the west end of the town; there they lived by sufferance, despised, rejected, borne down by a social scorn which, to the noblest of them, was daily heartbreak, and which the lowliest of them could not bear without pain. They had a narrow range of humble employments and avocations, such as window-cleaning, white-washing, boot-blacking, cab-driving, porterage, domestic service, and the like; keeping a barber’s shop or an old clothes shop, was perhaps the highest occupation open to them; and these they pursued faithfully and industriously. They were shut out of the mechanic occupations; shut out of commerce; shut out of the professions. They were excluded from the omnibuses; excluded from the first-class cars; excluded from the theatres unless the manager could make a place for them where seeing or hearing was next to impossible; excluded from some of the churches by express provision, and from most, if not all, of the others, by tacit understanding; excluded from the common schools, and allotted caste-schools where to learn anything was against nature; excluded from the colleges; excluded from the decent dwellings; excluded from the decent graveyards; excluded from almost everything. They were, however, freely admitted to the gallows and the jail. But these, somehow or other, saw less of them than of the race that despised them.
For all the years anterior to the period under notice, these people had been, speaking in a general way, safe in Boston. There had, to be sure, been occasional instances of private kidnapping, little known; and there had been an abortive attempt to legally clutch into slavery one negro, Latimer. Still, Boston cherished, sentimentally, at least, free principles, and the New England traditions and laws, all favoring liberty, had been strong enough in her borders to protect the fugitives. Moreover, the caste prejudices against them had for twenty years or so preceding been slowly breaking down. During that time, thanks to one heroic saint, Emerson—thanks to one saintly hero, Garrison—the dawn of a new era was broadening up the northern sky, and all things had begun to come under the sovereignty of reason. Emerson had shed the new and free disclosing light of a poet’s soul and a scholar’s mind on the great problems of spiritual and secular life: straightway the primal soul held session; the old decisions were unsettled; everything was to be reëxamined; thought awoke; the breeze streamed; the sun shone; the Dutch canal fled into a rushing river; all that was generous, all that was thoughtful, all that was intrepid in New England uprose from lethargy; and while he—
— “with low tones that decide,
And doubt and reverend use defied—
With a look that solved the sphere,
And stirred the devils everywhere—
Gave his sentiment divine,”—
the contest of reason against authority and precedent began, and amidst much theological mud-flinging and unable-editor jeering, continued from year to year, awakening the distinctive intellectual life of America. On the other hand, Garrison had impeached Slavery before the nation, as the giant foe of civil and political liberty, democracy, society, humanity, in a word, civilization; and amidst a roaring storm of rancor, and the howls of slavers and traders, that tremendous trial also began, and continued from year to year. At the outset, Boston merchants, convulsed with sordid fear lest their southern trade should suffer by this arraignment of the oligarchy, gathered in a mob to hang the gallant citizen—had, in fact, the rope already around his neck, when the Mayor put him in jail, as a dastardly way of saving him. At the outset, too, the gentle Governor of Georgia issued an official proclamation offering five thousand dollars reward for his assassination. Happy, free America! But Garrison had in his heart all that made patriots and Puritans, and amidst a tempest of persecution unequalled since the Dark Ages, dauntless with pen and voice, he held his course against Slavery like the thunder storm against the wind. To his aid gathered a little group of gentlemen and gentlewomen, writers and orators of marked power. Abby Kelley, fair and eloquent for liberty as ever the Greek Hypatia for science: Lydia Maria Child, whose generous and exquisite literary genius all know: Mrs. Chapman, her thought shining in a terse, crystalline diction, like gold in a mountain stream: Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Carolinians, who knew what Slavery was, and knew how to flash the heart’s light upon it: Beriah Green, a master of the old ignited logic: Theodore Weld, a resplendent and indomitable torrent of brave speech: Edmund Quincy, wit, humorist, satirist, gentleman, with the best spirit of the days of Queen Anne in his thought and style: Wendell Phillips, with a fiery glory of classic oratory, strange, but for him, to the air of America: Burleigh, Francis Jackson, in later years Theodore Parker, these, and a score of others gathered around Garrison, sacrificing name and fame, genius, scholarship, wealth, everything they had to sacrifice, to the heroic task of redeeming their country from its shame and wo. Outside of this organization was Channing, with words like morning: John Quincy Adams, too, during those years, fought the battle of free speech in the halls of Congress: Webster, also, poured the lightning and thunder of his mind against the extension of slavery, though never, save in the abstract, against slavery itself: the Whig party backed him; the men of the Liberty party, and in later years the Free Soil party, came to the side issues of the war. But these were not the Abolitionists proper; the Abolitionists were those who stood with Garrison, and their work was with Slavery itself. Against it they reared Alps of testimony and argument; they exposed it utterly; they bent every energy to the task of rousing the nation to its annihilation. Part of their task was the elevation of the fugitives in Boston, and it was owing to their efforts that the caste prejudices were breaking down. The comparative triumph of the present time, whose signal is that the black child sits on equal terms in the Boston schools with the white, was not then achieved, but still, at the period under notice, much had been done. The cars were open to the negro, the omnibuses, the decent dwellings, some mechanic occupations, some of the churches; and one or two colored lawyers had been admitted to the Boston Bar. The theatres still held out; the “respectable” churches, of course—spite of the black bishops of the days of Paul and Augustine; commerce, also; the schools and colleges, likewise; but the Abolitionists were battering on the wall, and it was breaking, breaking, breaking slowly down.
Suddenly over these struggling tides of light and darkness swept the black refluent surge of barbarism. In the year 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law. The great Humboldt justly called it “the Webster law”—for with Webster against it, it either could not have passed, or having passed, it never could have been executed. Webster hostile to it, and the North would have risen around him as one man. But the time had come for the Presidential candidates to make their game, and on the seventh of March, 1850, Webster made his game. The draft of a speech for freedom lying in his desk, he stood up in the Senate, spoke a speech for slavery, which was at war with every other speech of his previous life, and his game was made. He made it, played it, lost it, died, and lies cursed with forgiveness, and buried in tears.