basis.

CHAPTER VI.

ANTI-SLAVERY.

Calhoun's CALHOUN, escaping trial, went home to tell his people that the south could not be united against the north on the tariff question. "The basis of southern union," he said, "must be shifted to the slave question."

Two periods

in the antislavery

movement.

This question had then (1833) entered upon its later phase. In the history of the movement against slavery in the United States, two periods are easily observed. The first is from the beginning of the government to the year 1831, during which antislavery meant opposition to an evil from which all parts of the country were suffering, and to the relief of which all must contribute. Slavery was to be removed gradually, and with compensation to the owners of slaves who might be emancipated. As a general rule, societies were the instruments to be employed in bringing about the desired results, the subject being too delicate, or too vast, or both, for individual action. All this changes in the second period, from 1831 forward. Slavery is the sin for which those only who tolerate it are to pay the penalty; it is to be wiped out at once, and without compensating those who have upheld it; and as its abolition is to be effected only at great risks and in defiance of powerful traditions, it must be the work of individuals, who, though combined in associations, are mostly engaged in individual action.

It was a natural consequence of this contrast that while the South coöperated in anti-slavery movements before 1831, it set itself against them afterwards. Of one hundred and forty-four anti-slavery societies in 1826, one hundred and six were southern. Of the comparatively few, ten years later, all were northern.

South

periods is This hap

The dividing line between the two ampton marked by the Southampton massacre. massacre. pened in the Virginia county of that name in August, 1831. Its leader was a slave of fanatic character, named Turner; its first victims were sixty whites, its last one hundred blacks, who fell before the state militia and United States troops sent against them. In December of the same year, the legislature of Virginia, discussing the massacre, went on to discuss its cause, and the possibility of removing it by emancipation. Various plans were proposed, and though none was adopted, though all were opposed by the eastern members, the tone of the debate was generally anti-slavery. "The hour of the eradication. of the evil is advancing," said T. J. Randolph, a grandson of Jefferson; "it must come." It was the last time that any southern legislature, or assembly of any kind, suffered slavery to be treated in this style.

Lundy and

Already the changed character of the anti-slavery movement had appeared. Benjamin Lundy, a meGarrison. chanic of Quaker parentage, began his journal, entitled Genius of Universal Emancipation, in 1821, and three years later, removed its office from Ohio to Maryland. There, at Baltimore, in a slaveholding community, he continued to urge the immediate abolition of slavery, and, not content with his labors as a journalist, travelled north and south to meet men face to face, and increase the number of his fellow-laborers. In Boston, he found a a young printer, William L. Garrison, working in the

• same cause, and willing to follow him to Baltimore.

Soon

after Garrison's arrival, however, an article which he wrote exposed him to arrest and fine, and being unable to pay the fine, he was imprisoned until set free by a friend at a distance. He made his way back to Boston, and to its better opportunities of writing freely, and at the beginning of 1831 established the Liberator, a paper of more outspoken and unshaken hostility to slavery than any which went before or followed after. "A greater revolution in public sentiment," it declared, "is to be effected in the free states, particularly in New England, than at the south. Let southern oppressors tremble; let their northern apologists tremble. subject I do not wish," said the determined editor, to speak or write with moderation."

Anti

On this

66

The new school of abolitionists was neither nu

American merous nor influential at the beginning. A few Slavery local societies were formed, and their meetings and

Society. publications increased the volume rather than the power of the movement. It gathered fresh strength from the abolition of British colonial slavery by Parliament in the summer of 1833, and early in the following winter the leading abolitionists met at Philadelphia and organized the American Anti-Slavery Society. The declaration of this body, compared by its members to the Declaration of Independence adopted in the same city fifty-seven years before, was drawn by Garrison. It recognized the right of states to legislate exclusively on slavery within their own limits, but asserted the right of the general government to suppress the slave trade from state to state, and to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and the territories. It insisted upon the duty of the government and the people, particularly in the free states, " to remove slavery by moral and political action, as prescribed in the

Constitution of the United States." In every respect the declaration was imperative; and as not only expressing, but inspiring, the strongest anti-slavery convictions of the time, it must be forever memorable in our history. The poet Whittier said, thirty years afterwards, "I set a higher value on my name as appended to the anti-slavery declaration of 1833 than on the title page of any book."

The abolitionists were soon beset. Men pointed Reaction at them as if they were mad or wicked.

among

the people.

Mobs

broke into their meetings and laid violent hands upon their leaders, who were sometimes rescued only by being taken to prison. The legislature of Georgia offered five thousand dollars for the arrest and conviction of the editor or publisher of the Liberator. Not Georgia alone, but Alabama, North and South Carolina, and Virginia, called upon the free states to make antislavery publications penal offences, and to suppress antislavery societies. These demands were supported by those in office and those out of office throughout the north. At Charleston, S. C., the United States post-office was attacked, and papers brought by mail from the north were seized and burned, (1835.) Instead of defending his charge, the postmaster ordered similar mail matter to be stopped thereafter, and the postmaster general of the United States, though confessing that he had no authority to ratify such an act, refused to condemn it.

In the

The government followed the lead of the people. govern- President Jackson's message of December, 1835, ment. suggested the passage of a law to prohibit the circulation of "incendiary publications" through the mails. Two months later, Calhoun, chairman of a Senate committee, reported a bill providing that when a state declared publications to be incendiary, Congress must prohibit their circulation; but this fell through, (April, 1836.) Its fail

ure was more than made up, however, by the adoption, in the House of Representatives, of a rule which was maintained for several years, that "all petitions relating in any way to slavery be laid on the table without being printed or referred," (May 11.) These first concessions to slavery were ominous not to the slave alone, but to the free. Among the few who stood firm on the other side was Elijah P. Lovejoy, a young New England minLovejoy. ister, who had become the editor of the Observer,

Murder

of

at St. Louis. He was a man of broader nature and better education than any who had become conspicuous in the anti-slavery cause. He did not profess to be an abolitionist, or to devote himself exclusively to a crusade against slavery; but his sympathies were all on the side of freedom, and he never hesitated to express them. If he was a champion of any one principle, it was of free speech, which, as we have seen, had fallen into great peril since the government and the people united against it. "So long as I am an American citizen," said Lovejoy, "so long as American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write, and to publish whatever I please on any subject, being amenable to the laws of my country for the same." He removed his paper from St. Louis to Alton, Illinois, that he might be in a free state; but the state was not free to him, or to brave men like him. Repeatedly assailed by mobs, his house stoned, his printing presses destroyed, he was in arms with a few friends to defend a new press from threatened violence, when he was shot about midnight, (November 7, 1837.) Such was the spirit of the country, that a meeting to express some natural sentiment at this murder was held with great difficulty in Faneuil Hall, and, when held, was obliged to listen to a defence of the murderers from the attorney general of Massachusetts.

32

James 7. Austin.