With these views, he gave much time and work to organizing in this State, "The National Liberty Party," in 1840, and to securing from Pennsylvania some of the seven thousand votes that were cast for John G. Birney in that year throughout the Union. By the time another election came, the party had swelled its numbers to seventy thousand. To contribute his share towards this success, tract after tract, address after address, were written and sent broadcast; meetings were convened, committees formed, resolutions framed, speeches made, petitions and remonstrances sent, public action fearlessly sifted and criticised; in short, because he held a steady faith in men's humane promptings when ultimately reached, he 'cried aloud' to them by every access, and 'spared not' to call them from their timidity and time-serving to manly utterance through the ballot-box.
Of such appeals, his address of the "Liberty Party of Pennsylvania, to the people of the State," issued in 1844, may stand as a sample. It is a vivid portrayal of the slave power's insidious encroachments, and of its monopolized guidance of the Government. It gathers up the national statistics into groups, shows how new meaning is reflected from them thus related, that all unite to illustrate the single fact of the South's steady increase of power, her tightening grasp about the throat of government, and her buffets of threat to the North when a weedling palm failed to palsy fast enough. It warns northern voters of the undertow that is drawing them, and adjures them, by every consideration of political common sense, not to cast their ballots for either of the pro-slavery candidates presented. The conclusion of this address is as follows:
OUR OBJECT.
"And now, fellow-citizens, you may ask, what is our object in thus exhibiting to you the alarming influence of the slave power? Do we wish to excite in your bosoms feelings of hatred against citizens of a common country? Do we wish to array the Free states against the Slave states in hostile strife? No, fellow-citizens. But we wish to show you that, while the slave states are inferior to us in free population, having not even one half of ours; inferior in morals, being the region of bowie knives and duels, of assassinations and lynch law; inferior in mental attainments, having not one-fourth of the number that can read and write; inferior in intelligence, having not one-fifth of the number of literary and scientific periodicals; inferior in the products of agriculture and manufactures, of mines, of fisheries, and of the forest; inferior, in short, in everything that constitutes the wealth, the honor, the dignity, the stability, the happiness, the true greatness of a nation,—it is wrong, it is unjust, it is absurd, that they should have an influence in all the departments of government so entirely disproportionate to our own. We would arouse you to your own true interests. We would have you, like men, firmly resolved to maintain your own rights. We would have you say to the South,—if you choose to hug to your bosom that system which is continually injuring and impoverishing you; that system which reduces two millions and a half of native Americans in your midst to the most abject condition of ignorance and vice, withholding from them the very key of knowledge; that system which is at war with every principle of justice, every feeling of humanity; that system which makes man the property of man, and perpetuates that relation from one generation to another; that system which tramples, continually, upon a majority of the commandments of the Decalogue; that system which could not live a day if it did not give one party supreme control over the persons, the health, the liberty, the happiness, the marriage relations, the parental authority and filial obligations of the other;—if you choose to cling to such a system, cling to it; but you shall not cross our line; you shall not bring that foul thing here. We know, and we here repeat it for the thousandth time to meet, for the thousandth time, the calumnies of our enemies, that while we may present to you every consideration of duty, we have no right, as well as no power, to alter your State laws. But remember, that slavery is the mere creature of local or statute law, and cannot exist out of the region where such law has force. 'It is so odious,' says Lord Mansfield, 'that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law.'
"We would, therefore, say to you again, in the strength of that Constitution under which we live, and which no where countenances slavery, you shall not bring that foul thing here. You shall not force the corrupted and corrupting blood of that system into every vein and artery of our body politic. You shall not have the controlling power in all the departments of our government at home and abroad. You shall not so negotiate with foreign powers, as to open markets for the products of slave labor alone. You shall not so manage things at home, as every few years to bring bankruptcy upon our country. You shall not, in the apportionment of public moneys, have what you call your 'property' represented, and thus get that which, by no right, belongs to you. You shall not have the power to bring your slaves upon our free soil, and take them away at pleasure; nor to reclaim them, when they, panting for liberty, have been able to escape your grasp; for we would have it said of us, as the eloquent Curran said of Britain, the moment the slave touches our soil, 'The ground on which he stands is holy, and consecrated to the Genius of UNIVERSAL EMANCIPATION.'
"Thus, fellow-citizens, we come to the great object of the Liberty Party: ABSOLUTE AND UNQUALIFIED DIVORCE OF THE GENERAL GOVERNMENT FROM ALL CONNECTION WITH SLAVERY. We would employ every constitutional means to eradicate it from our entire country, because it would be for the highest welfare of our entire country. We would have liberty established in the District, and in all the Territories. * * We would have liberty of speech and of the press, which the Constitution guarantees to us. We would have the right of petition most sacredly regarded. We would secure to every man what the Constitution secures, 'The right of trial by jury.' We would do what we can for the encouragement and improvement of the colored race, and restore to them that inestimable right of which they have been so meanly, as well as unjustly, deprived, the RIGHT OF SUFFRAGE. We would look to the best interests of the country, and the whole country, and not legislate for the good of an Oligarchy, the most arrogant that ever lorded it over an insulted people. We would have our commercial treaties with foreign nations regard the interests of the Free states. We would provide safe, adequate, and permanent markets for the produce of free labor. And, when reproached with slavery, we would be able to say to the world, with an open front and a clear conscience, our General Government has nothing to do with it, either to promote, to sustain, to defend, to sanction, or to approve.
"Thus, fellow-citizens, you see our objects. You may now ask, by what means we hope to attain them. We answer, by POLITICAL ACTION. What is political action? It is acting in a manner appropriate to those objects which we wish to secure through the agency of the different departments of Government. * * The only way in which we can act constitutionally, is to go to the ballot-box, and there, silently and unostentatiously, deposit a vote for such men as will do what they can to carry out those principles which we have so much at heart.
* * * * *"Come, then, men of Pennsylvania, come and join us in this good work. Join us, to use such moral means as to correct public sentiment throughout the region where slavery exists, and to impress upon the people of the Free states a manly sense of their own rights. Join us, to place "just men" in all our public offices; men whose example a whole people may safely imitate. Join us to free our General Government from the ignominious reproach of slavery; to restore to our country those principles which our fathers so labored to establish; and to hand these principles down afresh to successive generations. It is the cause of truth, of humanity, and of God, to which we invite your aid. It is a cause of which you never need be ashamed. Living, you may be thankful, and dying, you may be thankful, for having labored in it. We have, as co-laborers with us, the noblest allies that man can wish. Within, we have the deepest convictions of conscience, the clearest deductions of reason; and, all over the world, wherever man is found, the first, the most ardent longings of the human soul. Without, we have the happiness of nearly three millions of the human race; the honor, as well as the best interests of our whole country; and the universal consent of all good men whose moral vision is not obscured by the mist of a low, misguided selfishness: while we seem to hear, as it were, the voices of the great and the good, the patriot and the philanthropist, of a past generation, calling to us and cheering us on. But, above all these, and beyond all these, we have with us the highest attributes of God, Justice and Mercy. With such allies, and in such a cause, who can doubt on which side the victory will ultimately rest.
"May He who guides the destinies of nations, and without whose aid 'they labor in vain that build,' so incline your hearts to exert your whole influence to place in all our public offices just and good men, that our country may be preserved, her best interests advanced, and her institutions, free in reality as in name, handed down to the latest posterity."
Is not the love of God and man ingrained in every line of this writing? Yet let us see how it was received by the most Christian (?) body in this city.
I need hardly say that my father's mind had been largely impressed, from earliest manhood, with the highest subject human thought can touch. His library records his wide religious reading; but he could not see an honest path towards the profession of any definite views till 1836. The change wrought in him then, can best be gathered from his own simple words (under date, 1842) written in a fly-leaf of "The Unitarian Miscellany:" "Though I humbly trust that God made my trials in 1836 the means of bringing me to true repentance, yet I have kept these books as monuments of what I once was, and to remind me how grateful I should be to Him for having snatched me as a 'brand from the burning,'" Such a faith as this, born of the spiritual travail of years, what a life it always has for the heart that forms it! It tells not of a persuasion, but of a conviction; a disproof of skepticism through the gathered forces of the soul; a struggle, through epochs of doubt and dismay, into an attitude of positive vital faith. Its process is the only one that gives real right to ultimate peace. In comparison with the method and measure of such a conviction, what matters its specific form? Self-truth is the point,—the fact for starting, the line for guiding; and as for result, this lonely and solemn rally on the deepest within us, as it is continuously unfolded, must lead to a glad and solemn union with the Highest without us. Who can know unfailing inward energy except through this new birth? It proved an ever-fresh spring of vigor to my father, and because of it he was chosen, in 1839, president of "The Philadelphia Bible Society." What changes were wrought in the policy of the Society, what numerous plans were devised and executed for multiplying its operations, how it was made a cordial alliance of all denominations, will presently appear. This is now to be said: that, after filling his office for five years, he found that his Anti-slavery testimony had engendered in the managers a bitterness that would seize the address of 1844 for pretext, and make retaliation in his sacrifice. Thankful, for the thousandth time, to be a sacrifice for the cause he loved, he sent in his resignation in a letter full of Christian kindness and sorrow. A short extract will show its tone:
"One whose great heart wishes the best for humanity calls to us from the West: 'When your Society propose to put a Bible into every family, and yet omit all reference to the slaves; and when, giving an account of the destitution of the land, they make no mention of two and a half millions of people perishing in our midst without the Scriptures, can we help feeling that something is dreadfully wrong?' This, brethren, is a most solemn question. It is a question which I verily believe the American Bible Society, so far as they may have yielded, directly or indirectly, openly or silently, to a corrupt public sentiment on this subject, will have to answer at the bar of Him who has declared, that, 'If ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin,' and that 'Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.' The spirit of Christianity is a spirit of universal love and philanthropy. She looks down with pity, and, if she could, she would look with scorn upon all the petty distinctions that exist among men. She casts her benignant eye abroad over the earth, and, wherever she sees man, she sees him as man, as a being made in the image of God, whether an Indian, an African, or a Caucasian sun may shine upon him. She stoops from heaven to raise the fallen, to bind up the broken-hearted, to release the oppressed, to give liberty to the captive, and to break the fetters of those that are bound. She is marching onward with accelerated step, and, wherever she leaves the true impress of her heavenly influence, the moral wilderness is changed into the garden of the Lord. May it never be ours to do what may seem to be even the slightest obstacle to her universal sway.
"But I have already written more than I intended. In bringing this communication to a close, allow me to express to you individually, and as a Board, my most sincere Christian attachment. Whatever course any members may have taken in relation to this matter, I must believe that they have acted from what has seemed to them a sense of duty. Far be it from me to impeach their motives. Time, the great test of truth, may show them their course in a very different light from that in which they now view it. I may, as a Christian, lament that their views of duty are not more in unison with my own. I may, as a man, feel heart-sickened at the diseased, the deplorably diseased state of the public mind, in relation to two and a half millions of my fellow-men in bondage. I may, as a citizen of a Free state, blush at the humiliating fact, that not only the tyranny, but the ubiquity of the slave power is everywhere so manifest; that it has insinuated itself into our free domain to such a degree that there seems to be as much mental Slavery in the Free states, as there is personal in the Slave states. I may feel all this, but I must not impeach the motives by which others have been governed."
There were twenty-one managers present at the reading of this letter, and, at its conclusion, a noble friend of the slave moved that the resignation be not accepted; the motion was lost by a vote of fourteen against seven. It was then moved that it be accepted 'with regret:' this was carried by the same vote! But 'with regret' was not an empty form for easing this action to its recipient; how much it meant is seen in the resolution that was added by unanimous acceptance: "Resolved,—That this Board are mainly indebted to Professor C.D. Cleveland for the prominent and influential position it has attained in the regards of this Christian community, and that they bear an earnest testimony to the sound judgment and unwearied zeal which have ever characterized the discharge of his duties in his responsible office." Let this tribute, coming from the bitterest personal opposition that ever man encountered, measure the work that extorted it. Looking at it, it will be difficult for the reader to believe that a sacrifice was made of the man to whom it refers by a representative Christian body, and merely to sate for a time the inhuman slave-greed; yet it is only one fact out of many that might be adduced, and I have brought it forward because it is, in my father's words, "a fair exponent of the position of the Christian Church at that time upon the subject of Slavery." Henceforward, he ceased not to rain blows, not only at his own (the Presbyterian) denomination, but at all the organized expressions of Christian purpose,—the Sunday-School Union, the Tract Society, etc.
While working thus by voice and pen, he was incessantly busy in personal rescue of the slave. Especially was this the case when it became the duty of every lover of his kind to defy the Fugitive Slave Law. How eagerly he then sprang to aid the escape of those against whom a law of the land impotently tried to bar the law of our common humanity! During the years that followed the passage of this infamous bill, the position he had attained here was of particular service. Recognized as one, who, being a sort of standing sacrifice, might as well continue to battle in the front; trusted implicitly even by his bitterest foes; with such a broad philanthropy to back his appeals; pushing straight into every breach where work was needed; blind to everything but his one light of moral instinct;—he became an organ for the charities of those whose softer natures longingly whispered the cry, but could not do the cut and thrust work, of deliverance. Dr. Furness held the same position, and others who, like him, refused to be enrolled in the 'Underground Committee,' or in any definite Anti-Slavery organization. These men knew that they were of greater service to the cause by being its body-guard, by standing between it and the public, by making the appeals and taking the blows, and by affording access, pecuniary and other, of each to each.
Thus the times moved on—growing hotter, more difficult and dangerous, but always working these two results: redoubling the labors of this noble band, and shaking the city from lethargy into ferment. Men were compelled to take sides, and but one result could follow, (the result which always follows when human nature is stung and quickened to find its highest instincts,) the Party of Right steadily moved to triumph.