History of American Abolitionism Part 2

Startled by this terrible intelligence, the military were immediately ordered out and preparations made to suppress the first signs of an outbreak. Finding the city encompa.s.sed with patrols and a strict watch kept upon every movement, the negroes feared to carry out their designs, and when the period had pa.s.sed for the explosion of the plot, the authorities proceeded with vigor to arrest all against whom they possessed information.

The first prisoner tried was Rolla, a commander of one of the contemplated forces. On being asked whether he intended to kill the women and children, he remarked, "_When we have done with the men we know what to do with the women_." On this testimony he was found guilty, and sentenced to be executed on the 2d of July.

Another was Denmark Vesey, the father of the plot, and a free black man.

It was proved that he had spoken of this conspiracy upwards of four years previously. His house was the rendezvous of the conspirators, where he always presided, encouraging the timid by the hopes of success, removing the scruples of the religious by the grossest perversion of Scripture, and influencing the bold by all the savage fascinations of blood, beauty and booty. It was afterwards proved, though not on his trial, that he had been carrying on a correspondence with certain persons in St. Domingo--the ma.s.sacre and rebellion in that island having suggested to him the conspiracy in which he embarked at Charleston. His design was to set the mills on fire, and as soon as the bells began to ring the alarm, to kill every man as he came out of his door, and afterwards murder the women and children, "for so G.o.d had commanded in the Scriptures." At the same time, the country negroes were to rise in arms, attack the forts, take the ships, kill every man on board except the captains, rob the banks and stores, and then sail for St. Domingo. English and French a.s.sistance was also expected.

Six thousand were ascertained to have been enlisted in the enterprise, their names being enrolled on the books of "The Society," as the organization was called.

When the first rising failed, the leaders, who still escaped arrest, meditated a second one, but found the blacks cowed by the execution of their a.s.sociates and by the vigilance of the whites. The leaders waited, they said, "for the head man, who was a white man," but they would not reveal his name.

The whole number of persons executed was thirty-five; sentenced to transportation, twenty-one; the whole number arrested, one hundred and thirty-one.

Among the conspirators brought to trial and conviction, the cases of Glen, Billy Palmer and Jack Purcell were distinguished for the sanctimonious hypocrisy they blended with their crime. Glen was a preacher, Palmer exceedingly pious, and Purcell no less devout. The latter made the following important confession:--

"If it had not been for the cunning of that old villain Vesey I should not now be in my present situation. He employed every stratagem to induce me to join him. He was in the habit of reading to me all the pa.s.sages in the newspapers that related to St. Domingo, and apparently every pamphlet he could lay his hands on that had any connection with slavery. _He one day brought in a speech which he told me had been delivered in Congress by a Mr. King on the subject of slavery. He told me this Mr. King was the black man's friend; that he (Mr. King) had declared he would continue to speak, write and publish pamphlets against slavery to the latest day he lived, until the Southern States consented to emanc.i.p.ate their slaves, for that slavery was a great disgrace to the country._"

The Mr. King here spoken of was Rufus King, Senator from New York. This confession shows that the evil which was foretold would arise from the discussion of the Missouri question had been in some degree realized in the course of two or three years.

Religious fanaticism also had its share in the conspiracy at Charleston, as well as politics. The secession of a large body of blacks from the white Methodist church formed a hot-bed, in which the germ of insurrection was nursed into life. A majority of the conspirators belonged to the "African church," an appellation which the seceders a.s.sumed after leaving the white Methodist church, and among those executed were several who had been cla.s.s-leaders. Thus was religion made a cloak for the most diabolical crimes on record. It is the same at this day. The tirades of the North are calculated to drive the negro population of the South to b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.sacres and insurrections.

BRITISH INFLUENCE AND INTERFERENCE.

During all this time, British abolition sentiments and designs were industriously infused into the minds of the people of the North. Looking over their own homeless, unfed, ragged millions, their filthy hovels and mud floors, worse than the common abode of pigs and poultry, crowded cellars, hungry paupers, children at work under ground--a community of wretchedness such as the American slave never dreamed of--British philanthropists wrote, declaimed, and expended untold sums upon a supposed abuse three thousand miles off, with which they have no connection, civil, social or political, and of which they know comparatively nothing. They pa.s.sed their fellow-subjects by who were dying of hunger upon their very door-sills, to make long prayers in the market-place for the imaginary sufferings of negroes to whose well-fed and happy condition their own wretched paupers might aspire in vain.

Before they indulged in this invective, it would have been wise to have inquired who were the authors of the evil. In the language of an English statesman--

"If slavery is the misfortune of America, it is the crime of Great Britain. We poured the foul infection into her veins, and fed and cherished the leprosy which now deforms that otherwise prosperous country."

Having filled their purses as traders in slaves, they have become traders in philanthropy, and manage to earn a character for helping slavery out of the very plantations of the South they helped to stock. They resemble their own _beau ideal_ of a fine gentleman--George IV.--who, it is said, drove his wife into imprudences by his brutality and neglect, and then persecuted her to death for having fallen into them; or one of those fashionable philosophers who seduce women and then upbraid them for a want of virtue. Like the Roman emperor, they find no unsavory smell in the gold derived from the filthiest source.

The first abolition society in Great Britain was established in 1823, and it is a fact worthy of note that the first public advocate in England of the doctrine of immediate and unconditional abolition was a woman--Elizabeth Herrick. In 1825, the Anti-Slavery Society commenced the circulation of the Monthly Anti-Slavery Reporter, which was edited by Zacharay Macaulay, Esq., the father of the late Thomas B. Macaulay, the essayist, historian and lord. Pet.i.tions began to be circulated, public meetings were held, and the Methodist Conferences took an active part in the movement, exhorting their brethren, "for the love of Christ," to vote for no candidates not known to be pledged to the cause of abolition.

Rectors, curates, doctors of divinity, members of Parliament and peers engaged in the work, and converts rapidly increased. Riots and disturbances resulted. In 1832, an insurrection, fomented by abolition missionaries, broke out in the island of Jamaica, which was only terminated by a resort to the musket and gibbet--the usual fruit of these incendiary doctrines, wherever they have been circulated. In 1833, a bill was pa.s.sed by the British government, by which, for a compensation of one hundred millions of dollars, eight hundred thousand slaves in the British West Indies received their liberation. This was followed, in 1843, by the abolition of slavery throughout the British dominions, which emanc.i.p.ated twelve millions more in the East Indies. The cause thus received a new impetus; societies sprang into life all over the United Kingdom; a correspondence was opened in every part of the world where negroes were held in bondage; lecturers were sent abroad, especially to the United States, to disseminate their doctrines and stir up rebellion, both among the people and the slaves; earnest endeavors were made to influence the policy of the non-slaveholding States of the North, and create a hatred for the South; and, in short, the abolition movement settled down in a determined warfare against the inst.i.tution of slavery wherever it existed.

It has been a war in which newspapers, pamphlets, periodicals, tracts, books, novels, essays--in a word, the entire moral forces of the human mind--have been the weapons. England became the champion of anti-slavery, and the United States became the theatre of a crusade, which seemed as if intended to carry out the spirit of the remark of Sir Robert Peel, that "_the one hundred millions of dollars paid for the abolition of slavery in the West Indies was the best investment ever made for the overthrow of American inst.i.tutions_."

Exeter Hall and the Stafford House became the centre of this new system, around which revolved all the lights of British abolitionism. The ground of immediate and unconditional emanc.i.p.ation, however, was not taken by the English abolitionists until subsequent years, but these views, when presented, found ready concurrence from Clarkson, Wilberforce and other well known advocates of the cause. Among the English statesmen pledged upon the subject, were Grey, Lansdowne, Holland, Brougham, Melbourne, Palmerston, Graham, Stanley and Buxton, and in the hands of these fervent leaders the cause speedily progressed towards its fruition.

From this time forward the coalesced efforts of British and Northern influence to disturb the inst.i.tution of slavery in the South, to render slave labor less valuable and incite the negroes to rebellion, have been continued with more or less system, occasionally threatening the stability of the Union; the whole object of Great Britain being, not the welfare of the slave, but the destruction of slave labor, whereby, through a system of conquest and forced labor, she would be able to supplant the United States, by producing her cotton from the fields of the Eastern world. With this end in view, and coupled perhaps with the idea that the abolition of slavery would break down our republican form of government, she resorted to every species of intrigue that promised success. Dissensions have been sown between the North and South; the "underground railroad" system has been established leading to her Canadian possessions; agitation and a.s.sault have been perseveringly maintained; the country has been flooded with tirades of every hue and kind against the inst.i.tution; the Northern pulpit has been desecrated in its dedication to the work of stirring up strife; churches have been severed in twain, and Southern Christians denied fellowship with their Northern brethren, until the grand political climax has been reached of secession and revolution. It is safe to say that from the time this plan of operation was digested in England, thirty years ago, there is scarcely a movement that has taken place on the chess-board of American abolitionism, which, under the guise of philanthropy, has not been dictated at Exeter Hall for the purpose of destroying the production of cotton and breaking down the free government of this country.

Among the more far-seeing and practical statesmen of Great Britain, however--men who have ever dissented from the ultra views of abolitionists--there is an evident alarm that this headlong policy that has been pursued will rebound upon the interests of the mother country.

Already the subject has become a source of anxious consideration, and the people of England are beginning to look around for some relief from that dependence upon American inst.i.tutions which has heretofore been the reliance and support of millions of their workers. They find that the example they have set, and the policy they have urged, does not promise to be altogether so beneficial to them as they supposed. In this connection it will be interesting, as a matter of history, to preserve the master rebuke of Lord Brougham to the unconditional abolitionists of Boston, who invited him to be present at the John Brown anniversary of the past year.

He says:--

"BROUGHAM, NOV. 20, 1860.

"SIR--I feel honored by the invitation to attend the Boston Convention, and to give my opinion upon the question "How can American Slavery be abolished?" I consider the application is made to me as conceiving me to represent the anti-slavery body in this country; and I believe that I speak their sentiments as well as my own in expressing the widest difference of opinion with you upon the merits of those who prompted the Harper's Ferry expedition, and upon the fate of those who suffered for their conduct in it. No one will doubt my earnest desire to see slavery extinguished, but that desire can only be gratified by lawful means, a strict regard to the rights of property, or what the law declares property, and a constant repugnance to the shedding of blood. No man can be considered a martyr unless he not only suffers but is witness to the truth; and he does not bear this testimony who seeks a lawful object by illegal means. Any other course taken for the abolition of slavery can only delay the consummation we so devoutly wish, besides exposing the community to the hazard of an insurrection perhaps less hurtful to the master than the slave."

CHAPTER IV.

Progress of Abolition in America--An Era of Reforms--Southern Efforts for Manumission--Various Plans of Emanc.i.p.ation that have been suggested--The first Abolition journal--New York "Journal of Commerce"--William Lloyd Garrison, his Early Life and a.s.sociations--The Nat. Turner Insurrection in 1832, &c., &c.

Probably no period in the history of the country has been more characterized by the spirit of reform and innovation than that embraced between the years 1825 and 1830. It then seemed as if all the social, moral and religious influences of the community had been gathered in a focus that was destined to annihilate the wickedness of man. Missionary enterprises, though in their youth, were full of vigor. Anniversaries were the occasion of an almost crazy excitement; religion a.s.sumed the shape of fanaticism; the churches were thrilled with the sudden idea that the millennium was at hand--the "evangelization of the world" never was blessed with fairer prospects--the "awakenings to grace" were on the most tremendous scale. Peace societies were formed--temperance societies flourished more than ever--Free Masonry was attacked, socially and politically--the Sabbath mail question became one of the absorbing topics of the day--theatres, lotteries, the treatment of the "poor Indian" by the general government--all came under the most rigorous religious review--the Colonization Society, established in 1816, enlarged its operations, and, in short, the spirit of reform became epidemic, and the period one of unprecedented moral and political inquiry.

It was a period, too, when in many of the States of the South, and especially those upon the Northern border, the subject was freely discussed of a gradual and healthy emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves, and various plans for this object were presented and entertained. The most valuable agencies were set at work--not by abolitionists, but by Southerners themselves, in whose hearts there had sprung up an embryo reformatory principle simultaneously with the landing upon their sh.o.r.es of the first slaves of their Northern brethren; which would have gone on increasing and fructifying had not the bitterest of denunciation been launched against them and driven the a.s.saulted into an att.i.tude of self-defence, whose defiant spirit now speaks out to the a.s.sailant in a bold justification of the inst.i.tution attacked, as natural and necessary, and which it shall be their purpose to perpetuate forever.

As early as 1816 a manumission society was formed in Tennessee, whose object was the gradual emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves under a system of healthy and judicious State legislation. At a later day, Virginia, Maryland and Kentucky were the theatres of discussion on the same subject, and in all of them the question was agitated, socially and politically, with a freedom and liberty that indicated a general desire to effect the philanthropic object.

Various plans having the same end in view were likewise proposed, some of them evincing a remarkable ingenuity. One of these, in 1817, was to encourage, by all proper means, emanc.i.p.ation in the South; then to make arrangements with the non-slaveholding States to receive the freed negroes, and compel the latter, by law, if necessary, to reside in those States. By this means it was thought that a gradual change of "complexion"

could be effected from natural causes, which would not take place unless the blacks were scattered, and that thus, from simple a.s.sociation and advent.i.tious mixtures, the sable color would retire by degrees, and after a few generations a black person would be a rarity in the community.

Another plan proposed in 1819 was to remove the females to the Northern States, where they should be bound out in respectable families; those unmarried, of ten years and upwards, to be immediately free, and all the rest of the stock then existing to become so at ten years of age; the proceeds of the males sold to be appropriated by the party making the purchase to the removal and education of these females. In furtherance of this scheme, it was argued that while negro women would still bear children, though settled among white persons, they would not do so half so rapidly, and thus their posterity would in three or four generations lose the offensive color and have a tint not more disagreeable than the millions who are called white men in Southern Europe and the West Indies, and finally be lost in the common ma.s.s of humanity. While it is true that very few people, after fifty or sixty years, could under this rule boast of their fathers and mothers, the grand object would be attained, and the world be satisfied.

Another proposition, which emanated from a distinguished gentleman in one of the Southern States, and filling one of the highest offices in the government of the United States, was that a grade of color should be fixed in all the slaveholding States at which a person should be declared free and ent.i.tled to all the rights of a citizen, even if born of a slave. He contended that this act would separate all such persons from the negro race, and present a very considerable check to the progress of the black population, giving them at the same time new interests and feelings. The children thus emanc.i.p.ated, even if the parents should not be wholly fitted for it, would come into society with advantages nearly equal to those of the poorer cla.s.ses of white people, and might work their way to independence as well, without any counteracting detriment to the public good.

In Virginia, in 1821, it was suggested through the columns of the Richmond Enquirer, that an act should be pa.s.sed declaring that all involuntary servitude should cease to exist in that State from and after the year 2000; thus, without reducing for one or two generations the value of slave property one cent, affording ample time and opportunity to dispose of or exchange that dead property for a more useful and profitable kind.

In 1825, Hon. Mr. King, of New York, introduced into the Senate of the United States the annexed resolution:--

"That as soon as the portion of the existing funded debt of the United States, for the payment of which the public land is pledged, shall have been paid off, thenceforth the whole of the public lands of the United States, with the net proceeds of all future sales thereof, shall const.i.tute and form a fund which is hereby appropriated to aid the emanc.i.p.ation of such slaves and the removal of any free persons of color in any of the said States, as by the laws of the several States respectively may be allowed to be emanc.i.p.ated, or to be removed to any territory or country without the limits of the United States of America."

This resolution, however, was not called up by the mover, or otherwise acted upon.

Still another plan was to raise money by contribution throughout the Union and elsewhere, and buy all the slaves at $250 each. The value of four million negroes at $500 each, their average market value, would be $2,000,000,000. It is unnecessary to say that none of these propositions were ever adopted in practice. In fact, while abolitionism has pretended to feel for the supposed sufferings of slaves, it has never felt much in its pockets to aid them.

At such a period--when the rampant spirit of reform was attacking every imaginary evil of the times--it is not a matter of wonder that northern abolitionists, yielding to their fanatical prejudices and to the British intrigue that was urging them onward, commenced that acrimonious agitation of the question which has since been its leading characteristic. The negro was p.r.o.nounced "a man and a brother," and that was the beginning and end of the argument. Tracts, speeches, pamphlets and essays were scattered, "without money and without price." The pulpit vied with the press, and every imaginable form of argument was used to hold up slavery as the most horrible of all atrocities, and the "sum of all villanies." Newspapers began to be an acknowledged element in the land, and, falling in the train of the young revolution, or rather growing out of it, wielded immense power among the ma.s.ses. Among those then devoted to the subject of reform were the National Philanthropist, commenced in 1826; the Investigator, published at Providence, R. I., by William Goodell, in 1827; the Liberator, by William Lloyd Garrison, at Boston, in 1831, and the Emanc.i.p.ator, in New York.

The first abolition journal ever published in this city was the present Journal of Commerce, which was commenced September 1, 1827, by a company of stockholders, the princ.i.p.al of whom was the famous Arthur Tappan. The following extracts from its prospectus, issued March 24, 1827, will sufficiently indicate the puritanical character of its authors, and the general tone of the paper:--

"In proposing to add another daily paper to the number already published in this city, the projectors deem it proper to state that the measure has been neither hasty nor unadvisedly undertaken. Men of wisdom, intelligence and character have been consulted, and with one voice have recommended its establishment.

"Believing, as we do, that the theatre is an inst.i.tution which all experience proves to be inimical to morality, and consequently tending to the destruction of our republican form of government, it is a part of our design to exclude from the columns of the journal all theatrical advertis.e.m.e.nts.

"The pernicious influence of lotteries being admitted by the majority of intelligent men, and this opinion coinciding with our own, all lottery advertis.e.m.e.nts will also be excluded.

"In order to avoid a violation of the Sabbath, by the setting of types, collecting of ship news, &c., on that day, the paper on Monday will be issued at a later hour than usual, but as early as possible after the arrival of the mails. In this way the Journal will antic.i.p.ate by several hours a considerable part of the news contained in the evening papers of Monday and the morning papers of Tuesday, and will also give the ship news collected after the publication of the other morning papers. With these views we ask all who are friendly to the cause of morality in encouraging our undertaking."

_Extract from the Minutes of a Meeting of Merchants and others at the American Tract Society's House, March 24, 1827:_

"_Resolved_, That the prospectus of a new daily commercial paper, to be called the 'New York Journal of Commerce,' having been laid before this meeting, we approve of the plan upon which it is conducted, and cordially recommend it to the patronage of all friends to good morals and to the stability of our republican inst.i.tutions."

"ARTHUR TAPPAN, Chairman."