Part 11

On the 27th of September, 1835, we left Boston together in a private conveyance,--he to lecture at Abington, one of the most antislavery towns in the State, and I at Halifax, a few miles beyond. On my return the next morning I learnt that there had been a fearful onslaught upon Mr. Thompson; and, when I called to take him back to the city, I found him more subdued than I had ever seen him. He had not expected ill-usage there. As we passed the meeting-house, from which he and his audience had been routed the night before, he was overcome by his emotions. There lay strewn upon the ground fragments of windows, blinds, and doors, and some of the heavy missiles with which they had been broken down. He fell back in the chaise, and for several minutes gave way to his feelings. When able to command himself he said:--

“What does it mean? Am I indeed an enemy of your country? Do I deserve this at your hands? Testify against me if you can, Mr. May. You know, if any one does, what sentiments I have uttered, what spirit I have evinced. You have been with me in private and in public. Have you ever suspected me? Have you ever heard a word from my lips unfriendly to your country,--your magnificent, your might-be-glorious, but your awfully guilty country? What have I said, what have I done, that I should be treated as an enemy? Have not all my words and all my acts tended to the removal of an evil which is your nation’s disgrace, and, if permitted to continue, must be your ruin?”

We rode on in silence, for he knew my answers without hearing them from my lips. But the outrage at Abington assured us that the spirit of persecution was rife in the land, and might manifest itself anywhere.

Nevertheless, Mr. Thompson accepted an invitation to lecture a few days afterwards in the afternoon, by daylight, at East Abington. Accordingly, on the 15th of October, I went with him to the appointed place. We had been credibly informed that a number of men were going thither to take him, if they could do so without harm to themselves. But the good men and women of the town and neighborhood were up to the occasion. The meeting-house was crowded, so that, though the evil intenders were there in force, they soon saw that the capture could not be made there. And then the wit, the wisdom, the pathos, the eloquence of the speaker disarmed them, took them captive, and, for the hour, at least, made them delighted hearers.

This was Mr. Thompson’s last public appearance during his first year in America. All his friends insisted that he must keep out of sight, and as soon as practicable return to England. It was well known that his life was in danger. That we had not attributed too great malignity to our countrymen--even to the citizens of Boston--was soon made apparent by their own acts.

It was announced in the _Liberator_, and so became publicly known, that a regular meeting of the “Boston Female Antislavery Society” would be held in the Hall, 46 Washington Street, on the 21st of October, 1835. Without authority, it was reported by other papers that Mr. Thompson was to address them; and it was more than intimated that then and there would be the time and place to seize him. On the morning of that day the following placard was posted in all parts of the city:--

“THOMPSON THE ABOLITIONIST.

“That infamous foreign scoundrel, Thompson, will hold forth this afternoon at 46 Washington Street. The present is a fair opportunity for the friends of the Union to _snake_ Thompson out! It will be a contest between the Abolitionists and the friends of the Union. A purse of _one hundred dollars_ has been raised by a number of patriotic citizens, to reward the individual who shall first lay violent hands on Thompson, so that he may be brought to the Tar Kettle before dark. Friends of the Union, be vigilant!”

The sequel of the infamous proceedings thus inaugurated will be given hereafter. Mr. Thompson was not there, and so the mob vented itself upon another. Mr. Thompson was, and had been for several days, secreted by his friends in Boston, and afterwards in Brookline, Lynn, Salem, Phillips Beach, and elsewhere, until his enemies were baffled in their pursuit of him, and arrangements were made to take him safely out of the country.

On or about the 20th of November he was conveyed in a small boat, rowed by two of his friends, from one of the Boston wharves to a small English brig, that had fortunately been consigned to Henry G. Chapman, one of our earliest and best antislavery brothers; and in that vessel he was carried to St. Johns. From that port he sailed for England on the 28th of the same month. Would that all my countrymen could read the letter that he wrote to Mr. Garrison on the eve of his departure. If words can truly express a man’s thoughts and feelings, the words of that letter were written by a lover of our country, a true philanthropist, a Christian hero.

ANTISLAVERY CONFLICT.

There were many noble confessors of the antislavery gospel, and many self-sacrificing sufferers in the cause, in various parts of our country, to whom I should be doing great injustice not to speak particularly of their services, if I were writing a complete history of our protracted conflict for impartial liberty. But I must confine myself, for the most part, to my personal recollections of prominent events and the individuals who were most conspicuous within my own limited view.

It is to be hoped that a complete history of this second American Revolution will, erelong, be written by Mr. Garrison, the man of all others best qualified to write it,--except that he will not give that prominence to himself in his narrative which he took in the beginning and occupied until emancipation was proclaimed for all in bondage throughout our borders. He has been the coryphæus of our antislavery band. He uttered the first note that thrilled the heart of the nation. He, more than any one, has corrected the national discord. And he has led the grand symphony in which so many millions of our countrymen at last have gladly, exultingly joined.

But so many have, at different periods and in various ways, contributed to the glorious result that it will not be possible even for Mr. Garrison to do ample justice to all his fellow-laborers. Indeed, many of them cannot be known to him, or to any one but the Omniscient. As in every other war, the fate of many a battle was decided by the indomitable will and heroic self-sacrifice of some nameless private soldier, who happened to be at the point of imminent peril, so, no doubt, has a favorable turn sometimes been given to our great enterprise by the undaunted moral courage and persistent fidelity of one and another, who are unknown but to Him who seeth in secret.

In my last article I gave an account of the bitter persecution of Mr. Thompson. The fact that he was a foreigner was used with great effect to exasperate the mobocratic spirit against him; but the real gist of his offence was the same that every one was guilty of, who insisted upon the abolition of slavery.

At the annual meeting of the American Antislavery Society in May, 1835, I was sitting upon the platform of the Houston Street Presbyterian Church in New York, when I was surprised to see a gentleman enter and take his seat who, I knew, was a partner in one of the most prominent mercantile houses in the city. He had not been seated long before he beckoned me to meet him at the door. I did so. “Please walk out with me, sir,” said he; “I have something of great importance to communicate.” When we had reached the sidewalk he said, with considerable emotion and emphasis, “Mr. May, we are not such fools as not to know that slavery is a great evil, a great wrong. But it was consented to by the founders of our Republic. It was provided for in the Constitution of our Union. A great portion of the property of the Southerners is invested under its sanction; and the business of the North, as well as the South, has become adjusted to it. There are millions upon millions of dollars due from Southerners to the merchants and mechanics of this city alone, the payment of which would be jeopardized by any rupture between the North and the South. We cannot afford, sir, to let you and your associates succeed in your endeavor to overthrow slavery. It is not a matter of principle with us. It is a matter of business necessity. We cannot afford to let you succeed. And I have called you out to let you know, and to let your fellow-laborers know, that we do not mean to allow you to succeed. We mean, sir,” said he, with increased emphasis,--“we mean, sir, to put you Abolitionists down,--by fair means if we can, by foul means if we must.”

After a minute’s pause I replied: “Then, sir, the gain of gold must be better than that of godliness. Error must be mightier than truth; wrong stronger than right. The Devil must preside over the affairs of the universe, and not God. Now, sir, I believe neither of these propositions. If holding men in slavery be wrong, it will be abolished. We shall succeed, your pecuniary interests to the contrary notwithstanding.” He turned hastily away; but he has lived long enough to find that he was mistaken, and to rejoice in the abolition of slavery.

We were soon made to realize that the words of the New York merchant were not an unmeaning threat. He had not spoken for himself, or any number of the moving spirits of that commercial metropolis alone. He was warranted in saying what he did by the pretty general intention of the “gentlemen of property and standing” throughout the country to put a stop to the antislavery reform. The storm-clouds of persecution had gathered heavily upon our Southern horizon. Fiery flashes of wrath had often darted thence towards us. But we were slow to believe that our Northern sky would ever become so surcharged with hatred for those, who were only contending for “the inalienable rights of man,” as to break upon us in any serious harm. The summer and fall of 1835 dispelled our misplaced confidence. We found, to our shame and dismay, that even New England had leagued with the slaveholding oligarchy to quench the spirit of impartial liberty, and uphold in our country the most cruel system of domestic servitude the world has ever known. The denunciations of the South were reverberated throughout the North. The public ear was filled with most wanton, cruel misrepresentations of our sentiments and purposes, and closed, as far as possible, against all our replies in contradiction, explanation, or defence. The political newspapers, with scarcely an exception, teemed with false accusations, the grossest abuse, and the most alarming predictions of the ultimate effects of our measures. The religious papers and periodicals were no better. The churches in Boston, not less than elsewhere, were closed against us. Not a minister[B]--excepting Dr. Channing, and the one in Pine Street Church--would even venture to read a notice of an antislavery meeting. Dr. Henry Ware, Jr., was denounced and vilified for having done so from Dr. Channing’s pulpit. All the public halls, too, of any tolerable size, were one after the other refused us. Even Faneuil Hall, the so-called cradle of American liberty, was denied to our use, though asked for in a respectful petition signed by the names of a hundred and twenty-five gentlemen of Boston, whose characters were as irreproachable as any in the city. But a few weeks afterwards, on the 21st of August, at the request of fifteen hundred of the “gentlemen of property and standing,” that hall, in which had been cradled the independence of the United States, was turned into the Refuge of Slavery. There as large a multitude as could crowd within its spacious walls, with feelings of alarm for the safety of our country, and of indignation at the Abolitionists as disturbers of the peace, already excited by the grossest misrepresentations of our sentiments, purposes, and acts, industriously disseminated by newspapers and in reports of public speeches throughout the Southern States,--there, in Faneuil Hall, thousands of our fellow-citizens were infuriated yet more against us by harangues from no less distinguished civilians than the Hon. Harrison Gray Otis, Peleg Sprague, and Richard Fletcher. These gentlemen reiterated all the common unproved charges against us, and solemnly, eloquently, passionately argued and urged that the enslavement of millions of the people in our country was a matter with which we of the Northern States had no right to meddle. It was a concern, they insisted, of the Southern States alone, found there when these portions of our Republic were about to emerge from their colonial dependence upon Great Britain, and left there by the framers of the Constitution, which was meant to be the fundamental law of our glorious Union. They harped upon the guaranties given to the slaveholders, that they should be sustained and undisturbed in _enforcing_ their claim of _property_ in the persons and services of their laborers. And those gentlemen insisted that the endeavors of Abolitionists to convince their fellow-citizens of the heinous wickedness of holding human beings in slavery gave just offence to those who were guilty of the sin; violated the compact by which these United States were held together, and, if they were permitted to be prosecuted, would cause the dissolution of the Union.

Meetings of a similar character, in the same or a more violent spirit of denunciation, were held in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and most of the cities of the nation. What were the immediate effects of this general outcry against us I shall narrate as briefly as I may.

REIGN OF TERROR.

The nearly simultaneous uprising of the proslavery hosts in 1835, and the almost universal outbreak of violence upon our antislavery heads in all parts of the country, from Louisiana to Maine, showed plainly enough that Mr. Garrison’s demand for the immediate emancipation of the enslaved had entered into the ear of the whole nation. All the people had heard it, or heard of it. It had received a heartfelt response from not a few of the purest and best men and women in the land. This was manifest at the Convention in Philadelphia, in December, 1833, where were delegates from ten of the States of our Union, all of whom seemed ready to do, to dare, and to suffer whatever the cause of the oppressed millions might require. It waked at once the lyre of our Whittier, which has never slumbered since, and inspired him to utter those thrilling strains which all but tyrants and their minions love to hear. It drew from Elizur Wright, Jr., Professor in Western Reserve College, Ohio, in 1833, a thorough searching pamphlet on “the sin of slavery.” It called out from Hon. Judge William Jay, of New York, that “Inquiry,” which brought so many to the conclusion that the Colonization plan tended, if it were not _intended_, to perpetuate slavery, and satisfied them that “the class of Americans called Africans” (to use the pregnant title of Mrs. Child’s impressive Appeal) had as much right to live in this country and enjoy liberty here as any other Americans. Mr. Garrison’s word gave rise to that memorable discussion in Lane Seminary, of which I have heretofore given some account, and which resulted in the departure, from that narrow enclosure, of eighty preachers of the doctrine of “immediate emancipation,” to repeat and urge their deep convictions upon the willing and the unwilling in almost every part of the land, which sent out Theodore D. Weld and Henry B. Stanton and James A. Thome, sons of thunder, whose voices reverberated throughout our Middle, Western, and Southern States. Mr. Garrison’s word came to the ears, and at once found its way to the hearts, of those admirable ladies in South Carolina, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who erelong came to the North, and bore their emphatic, eloquent, thrilling testimony to the intrinsic, all-pervading sinfulness of that system of domestic servitude to which they had been accustomed from their birth. And, more than all, his word had reached that high-souled, brave, courteous civilian, philanthropist, and Christian in Alabama, Hon. James G. Birney, who, as I shall hereafter relate, having for several years devoted his time, his personal influence, and persuasive eloquence to the Colonization cause, when he came to see its essential injustice and proslavery tendency, earnestly renounced his error. He forthwith emancipated his slaves, paid them fairly for their services, did all he could for their improvement, and thenceforward consecrated himself, through much evil report and bitter persecution, to the dissemination of the sentiments and the accomplishment of the great object of the American Antislavery Society. Immediately after his conversion he wrote and published two letters addressed to the American Presbyterians, of whose body he had been a highly esteemed member. In those letters he set forth most clearly the sinfulness of slaveholding, and implored his brethren to turn from it, and rid themselves wholly of the awful guilt of holding, or allowing others to hold, human beings as their chattels personal, and treating them as domesticated brutes.

These and other instances might be adduced to show how far and widely the antislavery doctrines had been made known at the time of which I am writing. But, alas! there were a great many different and very disagreeable evidences that _the truth_, which alone could make our nation _free_, had been heard, or heard of, everywhere.

WALKER’S APPEAL.

It should be stated, however, that the excitement which had become so general and so furious against the Abolitionists throughout the slaveholding States was owing in no small measure to an individual with whom Mr. Garrison and his associates had had no connection. David Walker, a very intelligent colored man of Boston, having travelled pretty extensively over the United States, and informed himself thoroughly of the condition of the colored population, bond and free, had become so exasperated that he set himself to the work of rousing his fellow-sufferers to a due sense of “their degraded, wretched, abject condition,” and preparing them for a general and organized insurrection. In the course of the year 1828 Mr. Walker gathered about him, in Boston and elsewhere, audiences of colored men, into whom he strove to infuse his spirit of determined, self-sacrificing rebellion against their too-long endured and unparalleled oppression. Little was known of these meetings, excepting by those who had been specially called to them. But in September, 1829, he published his “_Appeal to the colored citizens of the world, in particular and very expressly to those of the United States_.”

It was a pamphlet of more than eighty octavo pages, ably written, very impassioned and well adapted to its purpose. The second and third editions of it were published in less than twelve months. And Mr. Walker devoted himself until his death, which happened soon after, to the distribution of copies of this Appeal to colored men who were able to read it in every State of the Union.

Just as I had written the above sentence, Dr. W. H. Irwin, of Louisiana, came in with an introduction to me. He is one of many Union men who have been stripped of their property and driven out of the State by President Johnson’s and Mayor Monroe’s partisans. Learning that he had been a resident many years in the Southern States, I inquired if he saw or heard of Walker’s Appeal in the time of it. He replied that he was living in Georgia in 1834, was acquainted with the Rev. Messrs. Worcester and Butler, missionaries to the Cherokees, and knew that they were maltreated and imprisoned in 1829 or 1830 for having one of Walker’s pamphlets, as well as for admitting some colored children into their Indian school.

So soon as this attempt to excite the slaves to insurrection came to the knowledge of Mr. Garrison, he earnestly deprecated it in his lectures, especially those addressed to colored people. And in his first number of the _Liberator_ he repudiated the resort to violence, as wrong in principle and disastrous in policy. His opinions on this point were generally embraced by his followers, and explicitly declared by the American Antislavery Society in 1833.

But as we wished that our fellow-citizens South as well as North should be assured of our pacific principles, and as we hoped to abolish the institution of slavery by convincing slaveholders and their abettors of the exceeding wickedness of the system, we did send our reports, tracts, and papers to all white persons in the Southern States with whom we were any of us acquainted, and to distinguished individuals whom we knew by common fame, to ministers of religion, legislators, civilians, and editors. _But in no case did we send our publications to slaves._ This we forbore to do, because we knew that few of them could read; because our arguments and appeals were not addressed to them; and especially because we thought it probable that, if our publications should be found in their possession, they would be subjected to some harsher treatment.

Notwithstanding our precaution, the Southern “gentlemen of property and standing” denounced us as incendiaries, enemies, accused us of intending to excite their bondmen to insurrection, and to dissolve the Union. They would not themselves give any heed to our _exposé_ of the sin and danger of slavery, nor would they suffer others so to do who seemed inclined to hear and consider. They assaulted, lynched, imprisoned any one in whose possession they found antislavery publications. They waylaid the mails, or broke into post-offices, and tore to pieces or burnt up all papers and pamphlets from the North that contained aught against their “peculiar institution,” and significantly admonished, if they did not summarily punish, those to whom such publications were addressed. Meetings were called in most, if not all, of the principal cities of the South, at which Abolitionists were denounced in unmeasured terms, and the friends of the Union, North and South, and East and West, were peremptorily summoned to suppress them. By the votes of such meetings, and still more by the acts of the Legislatures of several States, large rewards--$5,000, $10,000, $20,000--were offered for the abduction or assassination of Arthur Tappan, William Lloyd Garrison, Amos A. Phelps, and other prominent antislavery men. Moreover, letters of the most abusive character were sent to us individually, threatening us with all sorts of violence, arson, and murder.