Volume Iii Part 12 (2/2)

[1839]

Meantime much was occurring to harden northern hostility to slavery into resolute hatred, a fire which might smoulder long but could not die out.

The fugitive slave law for the rendition of runaways found in free States operated cruelly at best, and was continually abused to kidnap free blacks. The owner or his attorney or agent could seize a slave anywhere on the soil of freedom, bring him before the magistrate of the county, city, or town corporate in which the arrest was made, and prove his owners.h.i.+p by testimony or by affidavit; and the certificate of such magistrate that this had been done was a sufficient warrant for the return of the poor wretch into bondage. Obstruction, rescue, or aid toward escape was fined in the sum of five hundred dollars. This is the pith of the fugitive slave act of 1793. It might have been far more mischievous but for the interpretation put upon it in the celebrated case of Prigg versus Pennsylvania.

Mr. Prigg was the agent of a Maryland slave-owner. He had in 1839 pursued a slave woman into Pennsylvania, and when refused her surrender by the local magistrate carried her away by force. He was indicted in Pennsylvania for kidnapping, an amicable lawsuit made up, and an appeal taken to the United States Supreme Court. Here, in an opinion prepared by Justice Story, the Pennsylvania statute under which the magistrate had acted, providing a mode for the return of fugitives by state authorities, was declared unconst.i.tutional on the ground that only Congress could legislate on the subject; but it was added that while a free State had no right in any way to block the capture of a runaway, as for example by ordering a jury trial to determine whether a seized person had really been a slave, so as to protect free persons of dark complexion, yet States might forbid their officers to aid in the recovery of slaves. As the act of 1793 did not name any United States officials for this service it became nearly inoperative. Spite of this terrible construction of the Const.i.tution, which Chief Justice Taney thought should have included an a.s.sertion of a State's duty by legislation to aid rendition, many northern States pa.s.sed personal liberty laws, besetting the capture of slaves with all possible difficulties thought compatible with the Const.i.tution. The South denounced all such laws whatever as unconst.i.tutional, and perhaps some of them were.

[1835]

Const.i.tutional or not, they were needed. There were regular expeditions to carry off free colored persons from the coasts of New York and New Jersey, many of them successful. The foreign slave-trade, with its ineffable atrocities, proved defiant of law and preternaturally tenacious of life. A lucrative but barbarous domestic trade had sprung up between the Atlantic States, Virginia and North Carolina especially, and those on the Gulf, for the supply of the southern market. Families were torn apart, gangs of the poor creatures driven thousands of miles in shackles or carried coastwise in the over-filled holds of vessels, to live or die--little matter which--under unknown skies and strange, heartless masters.

The slave codes of the southern States grew severer every year, as did legislation against free colored people. Laws were pa.s.sed rendering emanc.i.p.ation more difficult and less a blessing when obtained. The Mississippi and Alabama const.i.tutions, 1817 and 1819 respectively, and all those in the South arising later, were shaped so as to place general emanc.i.p.ation beyond the power even of Legislatures. Congress was even thus early--so it seemed at the North--all too subservient to the slave-holders, partly through the operation of the three-fifths rule, partly from fear that opposition would bring disunion, partly in that ambitious legislators were eager for southern votes. As to the Senate, the South had taken care, Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee having evened the score, all before 1800, to allow no new northern State to be admitted unless matched by a southern. In addition to all this, the North had a vast trade with the South, and northern capitalists held to an enormous amount mortgages on southern property of all sorts, so that large and influential cla.s.ses North had a pecuniary interest in maintaining at the South both good nature and business prosperity.

CHAPTER II.

”IMMEDIATE ABOLITION”

[1832]

While slavery was thus strengthening itself upon its own soil and in some respects also at the North, its champions ever more alert and forward, its old foes asleep, these very facts were provoking thought about the inst.i.tution and hostility to it, destined in time to work its overthrow. Interested people saw that slavery, so aggressive and defiant, must be fought to be put down, and that if the Const.i.tution was its bulwark, as all believed, provided a t.i.the of what the South as well as the North had said of its evils was true, the whole country, and not the South only, was guilty in tolerating the curse. In 1821 Lundy began publis.h.i.+ng his Genius of Universal Emanc.i.p.ation, seconded, from 1829, by the more radical Garrison. In 1831 Garrison founded the Liberator, whose motto, ”immediate and unconditional emanc.i.p.ation,” was intended as a rebuke to the tame policy of the colonizationists. ”I am in earnest,”

said the plucky man, when his utterances threatened to cost him his life, ”I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard.” These were startling tones. Had G.o.d turned a new prophet loose in the earth?

The abolition spirit was a part of the general moral and religious quickening we have mentioned as beginning about 1825, and revealing itself in revivals, missions, a religious press, and belief in the end of the world as approaching. The ethical teaching of the great German philosopher, Emanuel Kant, denouncing all use of man as an instrument, began to take effect in America through the writings of Coleridge.

Hatred of slavery was gradually intensified and spread. In 1832 rose the New England Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 the American Society was organized, with a platform declaring ”slavery a crime.”

[1833]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait.]

John G. Whittier in 1833.

This declaration marked one of the most important turning-points in all the history of the United States. It drew the line. It brought to view the presence in our land of two sets of earnest thinkers, with diametrically opposite views touching slavery, who could not permanently live together under one const.i.tution. May, Phillips, Weld, Whittier, the Tappans, and many other men of intellect, of oratorical power, and of wealth, drew to Garrison's side. State abolition societies were organized all over the North, the Underground Railroad was hard worked in helping fugitives to Canada, and fiery prophets harangued wherever they could get a hearing, demanding ”immediate abolition” in the name of G.o.d.

The Abolitionists proposed none but moral arms in fighting slavery--papers, pamphlets, public addresses, personal appeals. They deprecated rebellion by slaves, and urged congressional action against slavery only in the District of Columbia, in the territories, and at sea, where the absolute jurisdiction of the general Government was admitted by nearly all. Nevertheless, southern hostility to them was indescribably ferocious and uncompromising. They were charged with instigating all the slave insurrections and insubordination that occurred, and with having made necessary the new, more diabolical discipline over blacks, both bond and free. Southern papers and Legislatures incessantly commanded that Abolitionists be delivered up to southern justice, their societies and their publications suppressed by law, and abolitionist agitation made penal. There were northerners quite ready to grant these demands. Rage against abolitionism, much of it, if possible, even more unreasoning, prevailed at the North. Garrison says that he found here ”contempt more bitter, detraction more relentless, prejudice more stubborn, and apathy more frozen than among slave-owners themselves.” The Church, politics, business--all interests save righteousness--seemed to bow to the false G.o.d. Of all utterances against abolitionism, those of clergymen and religious journals were the bitterest. To call slavery sin was the unpardonable sin.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait.]

Wm. Lloyd Garrison.

[1834-1836]

In 1834, on July 4th, a mob broke up a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York. A few days after, Lewis Tappan's house was sacked in the same manner, as well as several churches, school-houses, and dwellings of colored families. At Newark, N. J., a colored man who had been introduced into a pulpit by the minister of the congregation, was forcibly wrenched therefrom and carried off to jail.

The pulpit was then torn down and the church gutted. In Norwich, Conn., the mob pulled an abolitionist lecturer from his platform and drummed him out of town to the Rogues' March. In 1836 occurred the murder of Rev. E. P. Lovejoy, at Alton, Ill. He was the publisher of The Observer, an abolitionist sheet, which had already been three times suspended by the destruction of his printing apparatus. It was at a meeting held in Faneuil Hall over this occurrence that Wendell Phillips first made his appearance as an anti-slavery orator. Also in 1836 the office at Cincinnati in which James G. Birney published The Philanthropist, was sacked, the types scattered, and the press broken and sunk in the river.

Birney was a southerner by birth, and had been a slave-holder, but had freed his slaves. Between 1834 and 1840 there was hardly a place of any size in the North where an Abolitionist could speak with certain safety.

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