Part 10

In the course of the years 1825, 1826, and 1827, the benevolent people of England were pretty thoroughly roused by Clarkson, Wilberforce, Macaulay, and their brother philanthropists, to a consciousness of their nation’s wickedness, in consenting to the system of West India slavery under the dominion of the British Crown. The question of immediate emancipation was agitated everywhere throughout the realm. It was introduced into the debating-club which George Thompson had joined. His sympathy for the slaves had been awakened very early in life. His father, when a young man, ran away from home, and enlisted as captain’s clerk on board a slave-ship, not knowing what he did. But so soon as he witnessed the embarkation of the victims of that accursed traffic, and the treatment of them on the “middle passage,” he was too much horrified to remain an hour longer, than he was obliged to, in any way connected with “a business too bad for demons to do.” Immediately, therefore, on the arrival of his ship in the West Indies, he fled to an officer of a British man-of-war, and begged that he might be impressed into the naval service, and so escape the repetition of the horrors he had seen and unwillingly helped to perpetrate. Often had George heard his father narrate the cruelties which were inflicted on board the ship with which he was connected,--cruelties inseparable from the forcible transportation of human beings, without the least regard to their personal comfort, from the freedom of their native wilds to the hell of slavery in America. Thus was his young heart and soul fired with indignation at the sin of his nation, and baptized into the love of impartial liberty. He, of course, welcomed the introduction of the question into the club, and entered upon the debate with holy zeal. The discussion was continued through twelve evenings. It attracted much attention; resulted in a resolution, passed almost unanimously, in favor of _immediate emancipation_; and was deemed of sufficient importance to be reported to the government. Especial mention was made of “the heartfelt, impassioned eloquence of a young man, named George Thompson”; and our friend became the cherished associate of several gentlemen who have since been widely known among the active friends of all the reforms and social improvements that have blessed Great Britain and Ireland within the last forty years.

In 1828 Mr. Thompson was especially invited to join “The London Literary and Scientific Association,” comprising about a thousand young men. Here, too, the question of West India emancipation came up for consideration, was earnestly and ably debated through three long evenings, and resulted in favor of the _immediate abolition_ of slavery. This result was attributed mainly to “the masterly logic, as well as fervid eloquence, of young Thompson.” The newspapers commented on his success, as an augury of what might be expected from him in _a more august debating-club_, which in England means Parliament.

And here I must tell you a family secret. The lady who afterwards became his wife, whose position in society was much higher than his own (a circumstance of far greater importance in England than in our country), was present at these debates. She was fired with such admiration of his powers, and of his consecration of them to the cause of suffering humanity, that it lighted a kindred flame in his bosom; or, to speak in plain American English, they there fell in love with each other, and were soon after married.

About this time the London Antislavery Society was formed. The directors, or executive committee thereof, advertised for a suitable man, who was willing to become their lecturing agent. This opened the door to what has since been the business of his life. He hesitated several weeks, distrusting his ability. But, encouraged and urged by his young wife, he at length consented that the Secretary, Mr. Thomas Pringle, should be informed of his wish to receive an appointment. By that gentleman he was invited to an interview with Sir George Stevens and Rev. Zachary Macaulay, who, after satisfying themselves of his qualifications, commended him to Lord Brougham, Lord Denham, and Sir George Bunting, the committee that was to decide the question of appointment. These gentlemen, after an extended conversation with him, gave him a commission for three months, and sent him forth to agitate the community on the question of West India emancipation.

Could you but turn to the English papers of that day, you would see for yourself how rapidly, and to what an unexampled height, rose his reputation as a lecturer. At the end of three months, the demands that came from all parts of the kingdom for the services of Mr. Thompson settled the question with the committee. They gave him an appointment until “the warfare should be accomplished.” And for three or four years he was the principal, if not the only, agent of that Society, performing an amount of labor which seems almost superhuman. In all parts of the United Kingdom his voice was heard, either in speeches to the crowds that everywhere thronged to listen to him, or in debates with Mr. Bostwick and other agents hired by the West India slaveholders to oppose him. And when, in 1833, the victory was achieved; when, overpowered by the outward pressure, both Houses of Parliament were compelled to make a virtue of necessity, and to magnify the glory of England by that Act which gave liberty to eight hundred thousand slaves, Lord Brougham rose in the House of Lords and said: “I rise to take the crown of this most glorious victory from every other head, and place it upon George Thompson’s. He has done more than any other man to achieve it.” This tribute was most justly deserved.

Yet for all his labors, his inestimable services, Mr. Thompson received only pecuniary compensation enough to pay his expenses and support his small family. He asked no more. He had consecrated himself to the cause of suffering humanity for its own sake, not expecting to be enriched thereby. But the friends of that cause which he had served so well, so nobly, could not be indifferent to his future career. Lord Brougham, Lord Denham, and others, confident that he would become an ornament and an honor to the legal profession, offered him all the assistance he could need to defray his own and his family’s expenses for five years, while he should be pursuing his preparatory studies, and getting established as a member of the English bar. The prospect thus opened was most inviting to him; the proposed profession was congenial to his taste. Indeed, if I have been correctly informed, the preliminary arrangements were made, when the claims of the most oppressed of all men,--the enslaved in the United States,--were forcibly urged upon him.

Mr. Garrison had been in England several weeks, laboring successfully to undeceive the philanthropists and people of Great Britain as to the real design and tendency of the American Colonization Society. Their kindred spirits had met and mingled. He had heard Mr. Garrison’s exposition, and had become, with Clarkson, Wilberforce, Buxton, and others, fully satisfied that the expatriation of the free colored people, their removal from this country, if practicable, would only perpetuate the bondage of the enslaved, and aggravate their wrongs. Mr. Garrison, on the other hand, had repeatedly witnessed the surpassing power of Mr. Thompson’s eloquence on the audiences he addressed, had heard the tributes everywhere paid to the importance of his services, and was present at the consummation of his unsparing labors,--the passage by the British Parliament of the bill for the abolition of West India slavery. It was manifest to him that the man, who had done so much for the overthrow of British slavery, could help mightily to accomplish the far greater work needed to be done in this country; and his heart was set on enlisting Mr. Thompson in the service of the American Antislavery Society. He pressed his wish, his demand, upon him just as Mr. Thompson was about to agree to the above-named arrangement for the study of the law. Mr. Garrison’s invitation was not to be accepted hastily, nor could he reject it without consideration. He revolved it anxiously in his mind, as he went from city to city with his now beloved brother, hearing him portray the peculiarities of the American system of slavery, the far greater difficulties against which Abolitionists here had to contend, the need we felt of a living voice, potent enough to wake up thousands who were _dead_ in this iniquity.

On the eve of Mr. Garrison’s departure from England in the fall of 1833 Mr. Thompson, with deep emotion, said to him: “I have thought much of the bright professional prospects opened to me here. I have thought yet more of the dark, dismal, desperate condition of millions of my fellow-beings in your country. They are no farther from me than are the eight hundred thousand whom I have been laboring to emancipate, and their claims upon me for the help God may enable me to give them are just as strong. I cannot withhold myself from their service. If, on your return to Boston, you shall still think I can render you much assistance, and your fellow-laborers concur with you in that opinion, command me, and I will hasten to you.”

Mr. Thompson, however, remained in England almost a year after Mr. Garrison left him, that he might reorganize the antislavery hosts who had triumphed so gloriously in the conflict for British West India emancipation, and induce them to engage as heartily in the enterprise for the emancipation of the millions held in the most abject bondage in these United States, and for the abolition of slavery throughout the world.

GEORGE THOMPSON’S FIRST YEAR IN AMERICA.

When, on his return from England in October, 1833, Mr. Garrison informed us that he had obtained from George Thompson--the champion of the triumphant conflict for West India emancipation--the promise to “come over and help us,” if we concurred in the invitation Mr. Garrison had given him, our hearts were encouraged, our hands strengthened, our purpose confirmed. Our own great antislavery orators, male and female, who since then have done so much to convict and convert the nation, had not yet appeared. Theodore D. Weld and Henry B. Stanton were studying theology in Lane Seminary; Parker Pillsbury, Stephen S. Foster, and John A. Collins were doing likewise somewhere in Vermont; Henry C. Wright had not plucked up quite courage enough to justify Mr. Garrison’s terrible denunciations of slaveholders and their abettors; James G. Birney was the Secretary of the Kentucky Colonization Society; Gerrit Smith had not got wholly out of the toils of that fraudulent scheme which had deceived “the very elect”; Charles C. Burleigh was an unknown youth in Plainfield Academy; Wendell Phillips, our Apollo, was just preparing to leap into his place at the head of the Massachusetts bar; and Angelina Grimké, Lucy Stone, Abby Kelly Foster, Susan B. Anthony, Antoinette L. Brown, Sallie Holley, and other excellent women, who have since rendered such signal services, had not then left “the appropriate sphere of women.”

That George Thompson would come to our aid, the orator to whose relentless logic and surpassing eloquence, more than to any other instrumentality, Lord Brougham had just attributed the triumph of the antislavery cause in England,--that he was about coming to help us did seem at that time a godsend indeed. But, as was stated in my last, his coming was deferred a year, that the Abolitionists of Great Britain and Ireland might not lay aside their well-used weapons, nor cease from their warfare, while so many millions of human beings remained in the most abject slavery, especially in the United States, where the horrid institution was established by the authority of England. Having re-enlisted his fellow-laborers throughout the United Kingdom to co-operate with us, he came to Boston in the fall of 1834.

At that time I was devoting a few weeks of permitted absence from my church in Connecticut to a lecturing tour in the antislavery cause, and came to Mr. Garrison’s house in Roxbury an hour after the arrival of Mr. Thompson. He readily consented to go with us the next day to Groton, there to attend a county convention. We gladly spent the remainder of that day together, in earnest and prayerful communion over the great work in which we had engaged; and at night repaired to lodge at the Earl Hotel in Hanover Street, that we might not fail to be off for Groton the next morning at four o’clock, in the first stage-coach, no conveyance thither by railroad being extant then.

At the appointed hour, the house being well filled, the meeting was called to order, and business commenced. As all were eager to see and hear the great English orator, preliminary matters were disposed of as soon as practicable. Then Mr. Thompson was called up by a resolution enthusiastically passed, declaring our appreciation of the inestimable value of his antislavery labors in England, our joy that he had come to aid us to deliver our country from the dominion of slaveholders, and our wish that he would occupy as much of the time of the convention as his inclination might prompt and his strength would enable him to do. He rose, and soon enchained the attention of all present. He set forth the essential, immitigable sin of holding human beings as slaves in a light, if possible, more vivid, more intense, than even Mr. Garrison had thrown upon that “sum of all villanies.” He illustrated and sustained his assertions by the most pertinent facts in the history of West India slavery. He inculcated the spirit in which we ought to prosecute our endeavor to emancipate the bondmen,--a spirit of compassion for the masters as well as their slaves,--a compassion too considerate of the harm which the slaveholder suffers, as well as inflicts, to consent to any continuance of the iniquity. He most solemnly enjoined the use of only moral and political means and instrumentalities to effect the subversion and extermination of the gigantic system of iniquity, although it seemed to tower above and overshadow the civil and religious institutions of our country. He showed us that he justly appreciated the greater difficulties of the work to be done in our land, than of that which had just been so gloriously accomplished in England, but exhorted us to trust undoubtingly in “the might of the right,”--the mercy, the justice, the power of God,--and to go forward in the full assurance that He, who had crowned the labors of the British Abolitionists with such a triumph, would enable us in like manner to accomplish the greater work he had given us to do.

Mr. Thompson then went on to give us a graphic, glowing account of the long and fierce conflict they had had in England for the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. His eloquence rose to a still higher order. His narrative became _a continuous metaphor_, admirably sustained. He represented the antislavery enterprise in which he had been so long engaged as a stout, well-built ship, manned by a noble-hearted crew, launched upon a stormy ocean, bound to carry inestimable relief to 800,000 sufferers in a far-distant land. He clothed all the kinds of opposition they had met, all the difficulties they had contended with, in imagery suggested by the observation and experience of the voyager across the Atlantic in the most tempestuous season of the year. In the height of his descriptions, my attention was withdrawn from the emotions enkindled in my own bosom sufficiently to observe the effect of his eloquence upon half a dozen boys, of twelve or fourteen years of age, sitting together not far from the platform. They were completely possessed by it. When the ship reeled or plunged or staggered in the storms, they unconsciously went through the same motions. When the enemy attacked her, the boys took the liveliest part in battle,--manning the guns, or handing shot and shell, or pressing forward to repulse the boarders. When the ship struck upon an iceberg, the boys almost fell from their seats in the recoil. When the sails and topmasts were wellnigh carried away by the gale, they seemed to be straining themselves to prevent the damage; and when at length the ship triumphantly sailed into her destined port with colors flying and signals of glad tidings floating from her topmast, and the shout of welcome rose from thousands of expectant freedmen on the shore, the boys gave three loud cheers, “Hurrah! Hurrah!! Hurrah!!!” This irrepressible explosion of their feelings brought them at once to themselves. They blushed, covered their faces, sank down on their seats, one of them upon the floor. It was an ingenuous, thrilling tribute to the surpassing power of the orator, and only added to the zest and heartiness with which the whole audience applauded (to use the words of another at the time) “the persuasive reasonings, the earnest appeals, the melting pathos, the delightful but caustic irony and enrapturing eloquence of Mr. Thompson.”

Thus commenced his brilliant career in this country. The Groton Convention lasted two days, the 1st and 2d of October. Mr. Thompson went thence immediately to Lowell, where he spoke to a delighted crowd on the 5th. Four days after, on the 9th of October, he gave his first address in Boston. It was at an adjourned meeting of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society. All the prominent Abolitionists, who could be, were there to see and hear “the almost inspired apostle of negro emancipation,” who had “come over to help us.” Every one that heard him then felt that his signal gifts had not been overrated, and joined in thanksgiving to the God of the oppressed, whose Holy Spirit, we believed, had moved him to consecrate those gifts to the abolition of slavery.

Reports of Mr. Thompson’s eloquence spread rapidly, and invitations came to him from all quarters. The day after the meeting in Boston he went into the State of Maine, and lectured on the 12th in Portland, on the 13th in Brunswick, on the 15th in Augusta. Everywhere he was heard with delight, and made many converts. At Augusta, it is true, he received an angry letter from five “gentlemen of property and standing,” informing him that his “coming to their city had given great offence,” and admonishing him not to presume to address the public there again. But his engagements elsewhere, rather than their threats, obliged him to leave immediately. The next evening he lectured in the neighboring city of Hallowell, where the people heard him gladly. On the 17th he delivered an address in Waterville, which was listened to by most of the students and several of the faculty of the College, and made deep impressions upon a large number. On the 20th he spoke again to a crowded audience in Brunswick, with like effect upon the students and faculty of Bowdoin College. Returning, he lectured at Portland in six different churches, to large and delighted audiences, before the close of the month; and then came into New Hampshire and gave lectures in Plymouth, Concord, and other places, on his way back to Boston. After a few days’ repose, he went forth again, in answer to many urgent invitations, and lifted up his voice for the enslaved in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Whoever will turn over the leaves of the _Liberator_ for 1834 and 1835 will find on almost every page some admiring mention of Mr. Thompson’s lectures or speeches, and grateful acknowledgments of the deep impressions his words had made.

It is true that in the same paper will be found, under the appropriate head “_Refuge of Oppression_,” extracts from newspapers and letters from all parts of the country, denouncing, execrating him, and calling upon the patriotic to put a stop to his incendiary career. He was a foreign intruder, who had come here to “meddle with a delicate matter about which he could know nothing.” He was “a British emissary, sent to embroil the Northern with the Southern States, and break up our glorious Union.” He was “the paid agent of the enemies of republican institutions, supported in our midst, that he might do all in his power to prevent the success of the grandest experiment in national government ever tried on earth.” The changes were rung on these and similar charges until those, who could be deceived thereby, were maddened in their fear and hatred of Mr. Thompson. He was threatened with all kinds of ill-treatment; yet he went fearlessly wherever he was invited to speak, and not unfrequently disarmed and converted some who had come to the meetings intending to do him harm.

In several of his lecturing tours I was his companion; and I wondered how any persons who heard him speak, in public or in private, could suspect or be persuaded that he was an enemy of our country. I was continually surprised, as well as delighted, by the evidences he gave of his just appreciation of the principles of our government, and the admiration of them that he always cordially expressed. Having hitherto contemplated our Republic from a distance, he seemed to have taken a more comprehensive view of it than too many of our own citizens, even statesmen, had done, whose regard for the whole nation had been warped by their concern for the supposed interests of a section or a State. Mr. Thompson’s detestation of slavery was intensified by his clear perception of the corruption it had diffused throughout our body politic and body ecclesiastic; and, if not abolished, the ruin it would inevitably bring upon our country, called, in the providence of God, to be “the land of the free and the asylum of the oppressed.” No American patriot ever felt, for no human heart could feel, a deeper, more sincere, or more intelligent concern for the honor, glory, perpetuity of our Republic than Mr. Thompson felt and evinced in his every word and act. Few home-born lovers of our country have done a tithe as much as he did to save her from the ruin she was bringing upon herself by her recreancy to the fundamental principles, upon which she professed to stand. Not a dozen names, of those who have lived within the last forty years, deserve to stand higher on the list of our public benefactors than the name of George Thompson.

Yet was he maligned, hated, hunted, driven from our shores. The story of the treatment he received is too shameful to be told. During the last six months of his stay here the persecution of him was continuous. The newspapers, from Maine to Georgia, with a few most honorable exceptions, denounced him daily, and called for his punishment as an enemy, or his expulsion from the country. Those few who dared to tell the truth testified, not only to his enrapturing eloquence and his friendliness to our nation, but to his eminently Christian deportment and spirit. But the tide of persecution could not be stayed. He was often insulted in the streets. Meetings to which he spoke, or at which he was expected to speak, were broken up by mobs. Rewards were offered for his person or his life. Twice I assisted to help his escape from the hands of hired ruffians.

All this he bore, for the most part, with fortitude and sweet serenity. He seemed less apprehensive of his danger than his friends were. Sometimes he overawed the men who were sent to take him by his dignified, heroic bearing, and at other times dispelled their evil intentions by his pertinent wit. I will give a single instance. At one of the last meetings he addressed in Boston, some Southerners cried out:--

“We wish we had you at the South. We would cut your ears off, if not your head.”

Mr. Thompson promptly replied: “Would you? Then should I cry out all the louder, ‘He that _hath_ ears to hear let him hear.’” It was irresistible. I believe the Southerners themselves joined in the rapturous applause.