Part 1

SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF OUR ANTISLAVERY CONFLICT.

BY SAMUEL J. MAY.

BOSTON: FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO. 1869.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by SAMUEL J. MAY in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO., CAMBRIDGE.

PREFACE.

Many of these Recollections were published at intervals, during the years 1867 and 1868, in _The Christian Register_. They were written at the special request of the editor of that paper; and without the slightest expectation that they would ever be put to any further use. But so many persons have requested me to republish them in a volume, that I have gathered them here, together with several more recollections of events and transactions, illustrative of the temper of the times as late as the winter of 1861, when our guilty nation was left “to be saved so as by the fire” of civil war.

My readers must not expect to find in this book anything like a complete history of the times to which it relates. The articles of which it is composed are fragmentary and sketchy. I expect and hope they will not satisfy. If they whet the appetites of those who read them for a more thorough history of the conflict with slavery in our country and in Great Britain, they will have accomplished their purpose. That in the two freest, most enlightened, most Christian nations on earth there should have been, during more than half of the nineteenth century, so stout a defence of “the worst system of iniquity the world has ever known,” is a marvel that cannot be fully studied and explained, without discovering that the mightiest nation, as well as the humblest individual, may not with impunity consent to any sin, nor persist in unrighteousness without ruin.

I am happy to announce that in due time a somewhat elaborate history of the rise and fall of the slave power in America may be expected from the Hon. Henry Wilson. He is competent to the undertaking. He is cautious and candid as well as brave and explicit. He was an Abolitionist before he became a politician. He has never ignored the rights of humanity, for the sake of partisan success or personal aggrandizement. Mr. Wilson, I believe, did as much as any one of our prominent statesmen to procure the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and to effect its subversion throughout the country.

My brief sketches have been taken, I presume, from a point of sight different somewhat from his. Many of my readers may wish that I had not reported so many of the evil words and deeds of ministers and churches. I have done so with regret and mortification. But it has seemed to me that the most important lesson taught in the history of the last forty years--the influence of slavery upon the religion of our country--ought least of all to be withheld from the generations that are coming on to fill our places in the Church and in the State.

My book, I fear, will be displeasing to many because they will not find in it much that they expect. I can only beg such to bear in mind what I have proposed to give my readers,--not a history of the antislavery conflict, only some of my recollections of the events and actors in it. I have merely mentioned the names of our indefatigable and able fellow-laborers, Henry C. Wright, Stephen S. Foster, and Parker Pillsbury. A due account of their valuable services in this country and Great Britain would fill a volume as large as this. But, for the most part, these became known to me through _The Liberator_ and _Antislavery Standard_.

My sphere of operation and observation was confined almost entirely to Massachusetts and Connecticut, until I removed to Central New York in 1845. My travels as an antislavery agent and lecturer were restricted to New England, and to the years from 1832 to 1836, before many who have since become distinguished had given themselves to the work. The field has been coextensive with our vast country. It cannot be supposed that I have personally known a tenth part of the individuals who have done good services, much less that I have been a witness of their words and deeds. Often have I been encouraged and delighted by unexpected tidings of noble words uttered and brave deeds done, in one part and another of the land, by individuals whom I never saw before nor since. Almost everywhere there was some one who promptly responded to the demand for the liberation of the enslaved, and dared to advocate their right to freedom. Could a perfect history be written of the antislavery labors of the last forty years, hundreds would be named as having rendered valuable services, of whom I have never heard; whose good word or work perhaps was not known beyond the immediate circle that was affected by it. But the memory thereof will not be lost. Every righteous act, every heroic, generous, true utterance in the cause of the outraged, crushed, despised bondmen, will be had in everlasting remembrance, and He who seeth in secret will hereafter, if not here, openly reward the faithful.

S. J. M.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

RISE OF ABOLITIONISM 1 Rev. John Rankin and Rev. John D. Paxton 10 Benjamin Lundy 11 William Lloyd Garrison 15 Miss Prudence Crandall and the Canterbury School 39 The Black Law of Connecticut 52 Arthur Tappan 57 Charles C. Burleigh 62 Miss Crandall’s Trial 66 House set on Fire 70 Mr. Garrison’s Mission to England.--New York Mobs 72 The Convention at Philadelphia 79 Lucretia Mott 91 Mrs. L. Maria Child 97 Eruption of Lane Seminary 102 George Thompson, M. P., LL. D. 108 His First Year in America 115

ANTISLAVERY CONFLICT 126 Reign of Terror 131 Walker’s Appeal 133 The Clergy and the Quakers 144 The Quakers 147 The Reign of Terror continued 150 Francis Jackson 157 Riot at Utica, N. Y.--Gerrit Smith 162 Dr. Channing 170 His Address on Slavery 177 The Gag-Law 185 The Gag-Law.--Second Interview 194 Hon. James G. Birney 203 John Quincy Adams 211 The Alton Tragedy 221 Woman Question.--Misses Grimké 230 “The Pastoral Letter” and “The Clerical Appeal” 238 Dr. Charles Follen 248 John G. Whittier and the Antislavery Poets 259 Prejudice against Color 266 A Negro’s Love of Liberty 278 Distinguished Colored Men 285 David Ruggles, Lewis Hayden, and William C. Nell 285 James Forten 286 Robert Purvis 288 William Wells Brown 289 Charles Lenox Remond 289 Rev. J. W. Loguen 290 Frederick Douglass 292 The Underground Railroad 296 George Latimer 305 The Annexation of Texas 313 Abolitionists in Central New York.--Gerrit Smith 321 Conduct of the Clergy and Churches 329 Unitarian and Universalist Ministers and Churches 333 Unitarians 335 The Fugitive Slave Law 345 Daniel Webster 348 The Unitarians and their Ministers 366 The Rescue of Jerry 373 New Persecutions 389 Riot in Syracuse 391

APPENDIX 397

RISE OF ABOLITIONISM.

Ever and anon in the world’s history there has been some one who has broken out as a living fountain of the _free spirit_ of humanity, has given bold utterance to the pent-up thought of wrongs, too long endured, and has made the demand for some God-given right, until then withheld,--a demand so obviously just, that the tyrants of earth have trembled as if called to judgment, and the oppressed have rejoiced as at the voice of their deliverer. “It is thus the spirit of a single mind makes that of multitudes take one direction.”

Such, as the subsequent history of our country has shown, such was the spirit of the mind of that man who will be honored through all coming time, as the leader of the most glorious movement ever made in humanity’s behalf,--the movement for _perfect, impartial liberty_, which for the last thirty-nine years has rocked our Republic from centre to circumference, and will continue to agitate it until every vestige of slavery is shaken out of our civil fabric.

“When the tourist of Europe has descended from the Black Forest into Suabia, his guide asks him if he does not wish to see the source of the Danube. Only one answer can be given to such a question. So he is conducted into the garden of an obscure nobleman of Baden; and there, within a small stone enclosure, he is shown the highest spring of that river, which has worn its channel deeper and wider for sixteen hundred miles, and, receiving on its way the contributions of thirty navigable streams, enters the Black Sea by five mouths, thus opening a communication between the interior of Europe and the Mediterranean, bearing on its bosom the commerce of fifty millions of people, and bringing them into the community of nations.”

Soon after Mr. Garrison’s assault upon the institution of American slavery began to be felt, (and that was almost as soon as it began,) a Southern governor wrote to the mayor of Boston, demanding to know what was to be expected, what to be feared, from this attack upon “the peculiar institution of the South.” In due time the gentleman who was then the high official addressed replied to his Southern excellency, that there was no occasion for uneasiness. “He had made diligent search for the would-be ‘Liberator.’ The city officers had ferreted out the paper and its editor. His office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a few very insignificant persons of all colors.”

Undoubtedly to that dainty gentleman the rise of the antislavery enterprise in our country did seem insignificant,--quite as insignificant as the little spring of water in the garden at Baden. He may never have learnt among his nursery rhymes, that

“Large streams from little fountains flow, Tall oaks from little acorns grow,”

and he must have forgotten that Christianity began in a stable,--“that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble were called. But that God chose the _foolish_ things of the world to confound the wise, and the _weak_ things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.” Our poet, Lowell, estimated, more justly “the would-be Liberator,” his office and his humble assistant.

“In a small chamber, friendless and unseen, Toiled o’er his types one poor, unlearned young man; The place was dark, unfurnitured, and mean; Yet there _the freedom of a race_ began.

“Help came but slowly; sure no man yet Put lever to the heavy world with less. What need of help? He knew how types to set; He had a dauntless spirit and a press.

“Such dauntless natures are the fiery pith, The compact nucleus round which systems grow; Mass after mass becomes inspired therewith, And whirls impregnate with the central glow.”

It cannot be denied that the spirit of Mr. Garrison’s mind has made the minds of multitudes--yes, of the majority of the people of our country--take a new direction in favor of impartial liberty. Of course, I do not claim that this new love of liberty originated with him. He was no more the creator of this moral power, which has taken our nation in its grasp, and is remoulding all our civil and religious institutions, than the fountain in the garden at Baden is the originator of the mighty Danube. Mr. Garrison, no less than that spring, is but a medium, through which the Father of all mercies pours from the hollow of his hand the waters that refresh the earth, and, from the fulness of his heart, the streams that purify the souls, making glad the children of God on earth and in heaven. But although to God we must ultimately ascribe all our blessings, yet do we naturally, and with great reason, revere and love as our _benefactors_ those persons who have been the means and instruments by which personal, political, or religious blessings have been conferred upon us. Especially do we acknowledge our indebtedness to them, if they have suffered reproach, persecution, loss, death, for the sake of the good which we enjoy. The time, therefore, is coming, if it be not now, when the people of our reunited Republic will gratefully own William Lloyd Garrison among the greatest benefactors of our nation and our race.

However much our gratitude to the fathers of our Revolution may dispose us to hide their shortcomings of the goal of impartial liberty, however much we may find or devise to excuse or extenuate their infidelity to the cause of down-trodden humanity, there the shameful facts stand, and never can be effaced from the record;--the _fact_ that (notwithstanding their glorious Declaration) the American revolutionists did not intend the deliverance of _all_ men from oppression; no, not of all the men who heroically fought for it side by side with themselves; no, not of the men who, of all others, needed that deliverance the most;--the _fact_ that the Constitution of this Republic (notwithstanding its avowed purpose) did not mean to secure liberty to _all_ the dwellers in the land over which it was to preside; nor did it provide that those might depart from under it who were not to have any share in its blessings, nor allow the spirit of liberty in them to assert its claims;--the shameful _fact_ that the aim, the tendency, and the result of that great struggle for freedom were partial, restricted, selfish;--the terrible fact that the American revolutionists of 1776 left more firmly established in our country a system of bondage, a slavery, “one hour of which” was known and acknowledged by them to be “more intolerable than whole ages of that from which they had revolted.”

To complete, _by moral and religious means and instruments_, the great work which the American revolutionists commenced; to do what they left undone; to exterminate from our land the worst form of oppression, the tremendous sin of slavery, was the sole purpose of the enterprise of the Abolitionists, commenced in January, 1831. In this great work Mr. Garrison has been the leader from the beginning. Of him, therefore, I shall have the most to say. But of many other noble men and women I shall have occasion to make most grateful mention.

Although I claim that Mr. Garrison has done more than any one else for the liberation of the immense slave population of America, I am not ignorant or forgetful of those who, before his day, made some attempts for their deliverance. Not to mention the many eminent divines and statesmen of England and the Colonies, before the Revolution, who utterly condemned slavery,--the prominent leaders in that momentous conflict with Great Britain, and in the institution of our Republic, felt and acknowledged its glaring inconsistency with a democratic government. Some of that day predicted, with almost prophetic foresight, the evils, the ruin, which it would bring upon our nation, if slavery should be permitted to abide in our midst. Many protested against the Constitution, because of those articles in it which favored the continuance and indefinite extension of “the great iniquity.” But their objections were too generally overruled by plausible expositions of the potency of other parts of our Magna Charta; and they acquiesced, in the vain hope that the _spirit_ of the Constitution would prove to be better than the letter.

For twenty years after the re-formation of our General Government in 1787, true-hearted men and women spoke and wrote in terms of strong condemnation of slavery, as well as the slave-trade. They spoke and wrote and published what the spirit of liberty dictated, in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, not less than in Pennsylvania, New York, and the New England States. Nay, more, they instituted “societies for the amelioration of the condition of the enslaved, and their _gradual_ emancipation.” Headed by no less a man than Dr. Franklin, they besieged Congress with petitions for the suppression of the African slave-trade, and the _gradual_ abolition of slavery. But after, in 1808, they had obtained the prohibition of the trade, they subsided, as did the abolitionists of Great Britain, into the belief that the subversion of the whole evil of slavery would soon follow as a consequence; not foreseeing that, so long as the _market_ for slaves should be kept open, the commodity demanded there would be forthcoming, let the hazard of procuring it be ever so great. It is now notorious that the traffic in human beings has never been carried on so briskly as since its nominal abolition, while the sufferings of the victims, and the destruction of their lives, have been threefold greater than before.

Owing to this mistaken expectation of the effect of the Act of 1808 abolishing the slave-trade, the attention of philanthropists was in a great measure withdrawn from the subject of slavery for ten years or more. Meanwhile, the friends of “the peculiar institution” were busily engaged in extending its borders and strengthening its defences. The purchase of the Louisiana and Florida territories threw open countless acres of _virgin_ soil, on which the labor of slaves was more profitable than elsewhere. The invention of the “cotton-gin” rendered the preparation of that staple so easy, that our Southern planters could compete with any producers of it the world over. Cotton plantations, therefore, multiplied apace. The value of slaves was more than doubled. The spirit of private manumission, which in Virginia alone, between 1798 and 1808, had set free more than a thousand bondmen annually, was checked by avarice, and then forbidden by law. And the “Ancient Dominion,” proud Virginia, rapidly became the home of slave-breeders; and from that American Guinea was carried on a traffic in human beings as brisk and horrible as ever desolated the coast of Africa.

The free colored population at the South were subjected to new disabilities, were exposed to most vexatious annoyances, and were denied the protection of law against encroachments or personal injuries by the “whites”; and very many of them, on slight pretexts, were reduced to slavery again.

Social intercourse between the Northern and the Southern States was then infrequent. It was kept up mainly by the wealthy and pleasure-seeking, who, in their enjoyment of the hospitality of the planters, could learn little of the condition and character of their bondmen, and were easily led to take “South-side views of slavery.”

Whatsoever we gathered from these sources of information led us too readily to acquiesce in the common assumption, that the negroes were a thick-skulled, stupid, kind-hearted, jolly people, not much if any worse off in slavery at the South than most of the free people of color, and some other poor folks were at the North. So, when we were disquieted at all on their account, it was but for a little time, and we relieved ourselves of the burden by a sigh or two over the misery that everywhere “flesh is heir to.”

The first event that fixed the attention of Northern men seriously upon the subject of slavery, over which they had slumbered since 1808, was the dispute that arose in 1819, upon the proposal to admit Missouri into the Union as a slave State. The contest was a vehement one. Mr. Webster was _then_ upon the side of liberty. He led the van of the opposition that arrayed itself in New England, and would have averted the catastrophe, but for the cry “dissolution of the Union,” then first raised at the South, and the necromancy of Henry Clay, who, with his wand of compromise, conjured the people into acquiescence. Words, however, significant words, touching the evil and the awful wrong of slavery, were uttered in that controversy which were not to be forgotten. And feelings of compassion for the bondmen were awakened which were not allayed by the result.

Shortly before the Missouri controversy a movement had commenced in the slave States, which was pregnant with effects very different from those intended by the projectors of it. Often was it roughly demanded of us Abolitionists, “Why we espoused so zealously the cause of the enslaved?” “why we meddled so with the civil and domestic institutions of the Southern States?” Our first answer always was, in the memorable words of old Terence, “Because we are men, and, therefore, cannot be indifferent to anything that concerns humanity.” Liberty cannot be enjoyed, nor long preserved, at the North, if slavery be tolerated at the South. But to those who felt so slightly the cords of love and the bonds of a common humanity that they could not appreciate these reasons, we gave another reason for our interference with the slavery in our Southern States, even this: _we were solicited, we were urged, entreated by the slaveholders themselves to interfere_.