Part 15 (1/2)

The Abolitionists, however, did not stop with a mere attack on slavery. Not satisfied with the mere enumeration of examples of Negro achievement, they made even higher claims in behalf of the people now oppressed. Said Alexander H. Everett:[1] ”We are sometimes told that all these efforts will be unavailing--that the African is a degraded member of the human family--that a man with a dark skin and curled hair is necessarily, as such, incapable of improvement and civilization, and condemned by the vice of his physical conformation to vegetate forever in a state of hopeless barbarism. I reject with contempt and indignation this miserable heresy. In replying to it the friends of truth and humanity have not hitherto done justice to the argument. In order to prove that the blacks were capable of intellectual efforts, they have painfully collected a few specimens of what some of them have done in this way, even in the degraded condition which they occupy at present in Christendom. This is not the way to treat the subject. Go back to an earlier period in the history of our race. See what the blacks were and what they did three thousand years ago, in the period of their greatness and glory, when they occupied the forefront in the march of civilization--when they const.i.tuted in fact the whole civilized world of their time. Trace this very civilization, of which we are so proud, to its origin, and see where you will find it. We received it from our European ancestors: they had it from the Greeks and Romans, and the Jews. But, sir, where did the Greeks and the Romans and the Jews get it?

They derived it from Ethiopia and Egypt--in one word, from Africa.[2]

... The ruins of the Egyptian temples laugh to scorn the architectural monuments of any other part of the world. They will be what they are now, the delight and admiration of travelers from all quarters, when the gra.s.s is growing on the sites of St. Peter's and St. Paul's, the present pride of Rome and London.... It seems, therefore, that for this very civilization of which we are so proud, and which is the only ground of our present claim of superiority, we are indebted to the ancestors of these very blacks, whom we are pleased to consider as naturally incapable of civilization.”

[Footnote 1: See ”The Anti-Slavery Picknick: a collection of Speeches, Poems, Dialogues, and Songs, intended for use in schools and anti-slavery meetings. By John A. Collins, Boston, 1842,” 10-12.]

[Footnote 2: It is worthy of note that this argument, which was long thought to be fallacious, is more and more coming to be substantiated by the researches of scholars, and that not only as affecting Northern but also Negro Africa. Note Lady Lugard (Flora L. Shaw): _A Tropical Dependency_, London, 1906, pp. 16-18.]

In adherence to their convictions the Abolitionists were now to give a demonstration of faith in humanity such as has never been surpa.s.sed except by Jesus Christ himself. They believed in the Negro even before the Negro had learned to believe in himself. Acting on their doctrine of equal rights, they traveled with their Negro friends, ”sat upon the same platforms with them, ate with them, and one enthusiastic abolitionist white couple adopted a Negro child.”[1]

[Footnote 1: Hart: _Slavery and Abolition_, 245-6.]

Garrison appealed to posterity. He has most certainly been justified by time. Compared with his high stand for the right, the opportunism of such a man as Clay shrivels into nothingness. Within recent years a distinguished American scholar,[1] writing of the principles for which he and his co-workers stood, has said: ”The race question transcends any academic inquiry as to what ought to have been done in 1866. It affects the North as well as the South; it touches the daily life of all of our citizens, individually, politically, humanly. It molds the child's conception of democracy. It tests the faith of the adult. It is by no means an American problem only. What is going on in our states, North and South, is only a local phase of a world-problem.... Now, Whittier's opinions upon that world-problem are unmistakable. He believed, quite literally, that all men are brothers; that oppression of one man or one race degrades the whole human family; and that there should be the fullest equality of opportunity. That a mere difference in color should close the door of civil, industrial, and political hope upon any individual was a hateful thing to the Quaker poet. The whole body of his verse is a protest against the a.s.sertion of race pride, against the emphasis upon racial differences. To Whittier there was no such thing as a 'white man's civilization.' The only distinction was between civilization and barbarism. He had faith in education, in equality before the law, in freedom of opportunity, and in the ultimate triumph of brotherhood.

'They are rising,-- All are rising, The black and white together.'

This faith is at once too sentimental and too dogmatic to suit those persons who have exalted economic efficiency into a fetish and who have talked loudly at times--though rather less loudly since the Russo-j.a.panese War--about the white man's task of governing the backward races. _But whatever progress has been made by the American Negro since the Civil War, in self-respect, in moral and intellectual development, and--for that matter--in economic efficiency, has been due to fidelity to those principles which Whittier and other like-minded men and women long ago enunciated_.[2] The immense tasks which still remain, alike for 'higher' as for 'lower' races, can be worked out by following Whittier's program, if they can be worked out at all.”

[Footnote 1: Bliss Perry: ”Whittier for To-Day,” _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. 100, 851-859 (December, 1907).]

[Footnote 2: The italics are our own.]

3. The Contest

Even before the Abolitionists became aggressive a test law had been pa.s.sed, the discussion of which did much to prepare for their coming.

Immediately after the Denmark Vesey insurrection the South Carolina legislature voted that the moment that a vessel entered a port in the state with a free Negro or person of color on board he should be seized, even if he was the cook, the steward, or a mariner, or if he was a citizen of another state or country.[1] The sheriff was to board the vessel, take the Negro to jail and detain him there until the vessel was actually ready to leave. The master of the s.h.i.+p was then to pay for the detention of the Negro and take him away, or pay a fine of $1,000 and see the Negro sold as a slave. Within a short time after this enactment was pa.s.sed, as many as forty-one vessels were deprived of one or more hands, from one British trading vessel almost the entire crew being taken. The captains appealed to the judge of the United States District Court, who with alacrity turned the matter over to the state courts. Now followed much legal proceeding, with an appeal to higher authorities, in the course of which both Canning and Adams were forced to consider the question, and it was generally recognized that the act violated both the treaty with Great Britain and the power of Congress to regulate trade.

To all of this South Carolina replied that as a sovereign state she had the right to interdict the entry of foreigners, that in fact she had been a sovereign state at the time of her entrance into the Union and that she never had surrendered the right to exclude free Negroes.

Finally she a.s.serted that if a dissolution of the Union must be the alternative she was quite prepared to abide by the result. Unusual excitement arose soon afterwards when four free Negroes on a British s.h.i.+p were seized by the sheriff and dragged from the deck. The captain had to go to heavy expense to have these men released, and on reaching Liverpool he appealed to the Board of Trade. The British minister now sent a more vigorous protest, Adams referred the same to Wirt, the Attorney General, and Wirt was forced to declare South Carolina's act unconst.i.tutional and void. His opinion with a copy of the British protest Adams sent to the Governor of the state, who immediately transmitted the same to the legislature. Each branch of the legislature pa.s.sed resolutions which the other would not accept, but neither voted to repeal the law. In fact, it remained technically in force until the Civil War. In 1844 Ma.s.sachusetts sent Samuel h.o.a.r as a commissioner to Charleston to make a test case of a Negro who had been deprived of his rights. h.o.a.r cited Article II, Section 2, of the National Const.i.tution (”The citizens of each state shall be ent.i.tled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states”), intending ultimately to bring a case before the United States Supreme Court. When he appeared, however, the South Carolina legislature voted that ”this agent comes here not as a citizen of the United States, but as an emissary of a foreign Government hostile to our domestic inst.i.tutions and with the sole purpose of subverting our internal police.” h.o.a.r was at length notified that his life was in danger and he was forced to leave the state. Meanwhile Southern sentiment against the American Colonization Society had crystallized, and the excitement raised by David Walker's _Appeal_ was exceeded only by that occasioned by Nat Turner's insurrection.

[Footnote 1: Note McMaster, V, 200-204.]

When, then, the Abolitionists began their campaign the country was already ripe for a struggle, and in the North as well as the South there was plenty of sentiment unfavorable to the Negro. In July, 1831, when an attempt was made to start a manual training school for Negro youth in New Haven, the citizens at a public meeting declared that ”the founding of colleges for educating colored people is an unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other states, and ought to be discouraged”; and they ultimately forced the project to be abandoned. At Canterbury in the same state Prudence Crandall, a young Quaker woman twenty-nine years of age, was brought face to face with the problem when she admitted a Negro girl, Sarah Harris, to her school.[1]

When she was boycotted she announced that she would receive Negro girls only if no others would attend, and she advertised accordingly in the Liberator. She was subjected to various indignities and efforts were made to arrest her pupils as vagrants. As she was still undaunted, her opponents, on May 24, 1833, procured a special act of the legislature forbidding, under severe penalties, the instruction of any Negro from outside the state without the consent of the town authorities. Under this act Miss Crandall was arrested and imprisoned, being confined to a cell which had just been vacated by a murderer. The Abolitionists came to her defense, but she was convicted, and though the higher courts quashed the proceedings on technicalities, the village shopkeepers refused to sell her food, manure was thrown into her well, her house was pelted with rotten eggs and at last demolished, and even the meeting-house in the town was closed to her. The attempt to continue the school was then abandoned. In 1834 an academy was built by subscription in Canaan, N.H.; it was granted a charter by the legislature, and the proprietors determined to admit all applicants having ”suitable moral and intellectual recommendations, without other distinctions.” The town-meeting ”viewed with abhorrence” the attempt to establish the school, but when it was opened twenty-eight white and fourteen Negro scholars attended. The town-meeting then ordered that the academy be forcibly removed and appointed a committee to execute the mandate.

Accordingly on August 10 three hundred men with two hundred oxen a.s.sembled, took the edifice from its place, dragged it for some distance and left it a ruin. From 1834 to 1836, in fact, throughout the country, from east to west, swept a wave of violence. Not less than twenty-five attempts were made to break up anti-slavery meetings. In New York in October, 1833, there was a riot in Clinton Hall, and from July 7 to 11 of the next year a succession of riots led to the sacking of the house of Lewis Tappan and the destruction of other houses and churches. When George Thompson arrived from England in September, 1834, his meetings were constantly disturbed, and Garrison himself was mobbed in Boston in 1835, being dragged through the streets with a rope around his body.

[Footnote 1: Note especially ”Connecticut's Canterbury Tale; its Heroine, Prudence Crandall, and its Moral for To-Day, by John C.

Kimball,” Hartford (1886).]

In general the Abolitionists were charged by the South with promoting both insurrection and the amalgamation of the races. There was no clear proof of these charges; nevertheless, May said, ”If we do not emanc.i.p.ate our slaves by our own moral energy, they will emanc.i.p.ate themselves and that by a process too horrible to contemplate”;[1] and Channing said, ”Allowing that amalgamation is to be antic.i.p.ated, then, I maintain, we have no right to resist it. Then it is not unnatural.”[2] While the South grew hysterical at the thought, it was, as Hart remarks, a fair inquiry, which the Abolitionists did not hesitate to put--Who was responsible for the only amalgamation that had so far taken place? After a few years there was a cleavage among the Abolitionists. Some of the more practical men, like Birney, Gerrit Smith, and the Tappans, who believed in fighting through governmental machinery, in 1838 broke away from the others and prepared to take a part in Federal politics. This was the beginning of the Liberty party, which nominated Birney for the presidency in 1840 and again in 1844. In 1848 it became merged in the Free Soil party and ultimately in the Republican party.

[Footnote 1: Hart, 221, citing _Liberator_, V, 59.]

[Footnote 2: Hart, 216, citing Channing, _Works_, V. 57.]

With the forties came division in the Church--a sort of prelude to the great events that were to thunder through the country within the next two decades. Could the Church really countenance slavery? Could a bishop hold a slave? These were to become burning questions. In 1844-5 the Baptists of the North and East refused to approve the sending out of missionaries who owned slaves, and the Southern Baptist Convention resulted. In 1844, when James O. Andrew came into the possession of slaves by his marriage to a widow who had these as a legacy from her former husband, the Northern Methodists refused to grant that one of their bishops might hold a slave, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was formally organized in Louisville the following year. The Presbyterians and the Episcopalians, more aristocratic in tone, did not divide.