In the following year, 1840, the brig Creole, laden with slaves, sailed from Richmond, bound for New Orleans; the slaves mutinied, took the vessel, and carried her into the British West Indies, and thereby became free. The hero on this occasion was Madison Washington.
CHAPTER XL. THE IRON AGE.
The resolute and determined purpose of the Southerners to make the institution of slavery national, and the equally powerful growing public sentiment at the North to make freedom universal, showed plainly that the nation was fast approaching a crisis on this absorbing question. In Congress, men were compelled to take either the one or the other side, and the debates became more fiery, as the subject progressed.
John P. Hale led in the Senate, while Joshua R. Giddings was the acknowledged leader in the House of Representatives in behalf of freedom. On the part of slavery, the leadership in the Senate lay between Foot of Mississippi, and McDuffie of South Carolina; while Henry A. Wise, followed by a ravenous pack watched over the interest of the “peculiar institution” in the House.
The early adoption of the famous “Gag Law,” whereby all petitions on the subject of slavery were to be “tabled” without discussion, instead of helping the Southern cause, brought its abettors into contempt. In the House, Mr. Giddings was censured for offering resolutions in regard to the capture of the brig Creole.
Mr. Giddings resigned, went home, was at once re-elected, and returned to Congress to renew the contest. An attempt to expel John Quincy Adams, for presenting a petition from a number of persons held in slavery, was a failure, and from which the friends of the negro took fresh courage.
In the South, the Legislatures were enacting laws abridging the freedom of speech and of the press, and making it more difficult for Northerners to travel in the slave states. Rev. Charles T. Torry was in the Maryland Penitentiary for aiding slaves to escape, and Jonathan Walker had been branded with a red-hot iron, and sent home for the same offence. The free colored people of the South were being persecuted in a manner hitherto unknown in that section. Amid all these scenes, there was a moral contest going on at the North. The Garrison abolitionists, whose head-quarters were in Boston, were at work with a zeal which has scarcely ever been equalled by any association of men and women.
“The Liberator,” Mr. Garrison’s own paper, led the vanguard; while the “National Anti-slavery Standard,” edited at times by Oliver Johnson, Lydia Maria Child, David Lee Child, and Sydney Howard Gay, gave no uncertain sound on the slavery question.