The Abolitionists Part 15

Some years before the events just spoken of, Townsend had been a medical student in Cincinnati. One day he stepped into the courthouse, where a fugitive-slave case was being tried. There he listened to an argument from Salmon P. Chase, the negro's defender, that made an Abolitionist of him. The senatorial incident naturally followed.

There was another Ohioan--not an individual this time, but an inst.i.tution--that will always hold a high place in the annals of Abolitionism. Oberlin College was a power in the land. It had a corps of very able professors who were, without exception, active Anti-Slavery workers. They regarded themselves as public instructors as well as private teachers. There was scarcely a township in Ohio that they did not visit, either personally or through their disciples.

They were as ready to talk in country schoolhouses as in their own college halls. Of course, they were violently opposed. Mobs broke up their meetings very frequently, but that only made them more persistent. Their teachings were viciously misrepresented. They were accused of favoring the intermarriage of the races, and parents were warned, if they sent their children to Oberlin, to look out for colored sons-in-law and daughters-in-law. For such slanders, however, the men and women of Oberlin--for both s.e.xes were admitted to faculty and cla.s.ses--seemed to care no more than they did for pro-slavery mobs.

There is another name which, although it belongs exclusively neither to the East nor to the West, to the North nor to the South, should not be omitted from a record like this. Doctor Gamaliel Bailey resided in the District of Columbia, and issued the _National Era_ from Washington city.

Although a journal of small folio measurement and issued but once a week, it was for a considerable time the most influential organ of the Abolitionists. Its circulation was large and its management very able. Of course, it took no little courage and judgment to conduct such a publication in the very center of slaveholding influence, and more than once it barely escaped destruction by mobs.

If there was nothing else to his credit there was one thing accomplished by the _Era's_ owner that ent.i.tles him to lasting remembrance. He was the introducer, if not the real producer, of _Uncle Tom's Cabin._ It first appeared in the _Era_ in serial numbers.

It is perfectly safe to say that no other newspaper in the country, of any standing, would have touched it. Without Dr. Bailey's encouragement the work would not have been written. This was admitted by Mrs. Stowe.

Up to this point the people whose names have been mentioned in these pages have, to a certain extent, been public characters and leaders.

They were generals, and colonels, and captains, and orderly sergeants, in the army of emanc.i.p.ation. There were, also, privates in the ranks whose services richly deserve to be commemorated, showing, as they do, the character of the works they performed. The writer cannot resist the temptation to refer to two of them in particular, although, doubtless, there were many others of equal merit. A reason for the preference he shows in this case, that will not be misunderstood, is the fact that one of the men was his uncle and the other his father.

James Kedzie and John Hume were plain country farmers residing in southwestern Ohio, neither very rich nor very poor. They were natives of Scotland, and stating that fact is almost equivalent to saying they were Abolitionists. None of the Scotch of the writer's personal knowledge, at the period referred to, were otherwise than strongly Anti-Slavery. There are said to be exceptions to all rules, and there was one in this instance. He was a kinsman of the author, and a "braw"

young Scotchman who came over to this country with the expectation of picking up a fortune in short order. Finding the North too slow, he went South. There he met a lady who owned a valuable plantation well stocked with healthy negroes. He married the woman, and became something of a local nabob, with the reputation of great severity as a master. One day, with his own hand, he inflicted a cruel flogging on a slave who had the name of a "bad n.i.g.g.e.r." That night, when the master was playing chess with a neighbor by candlelight on the ground floor of his dwelling, all the windows being open, the negro crept up with a loaded gun and shot him dead.

The sad affair was regretfully commented on by the dead man's relatives, who, I remember, referred to his untimely ending as "his judgment," and as a punishment he had brought upon "himself."

My uncle and father did not conceal their unpopular views. They openly voted the Abolition ticket. In eight years, beginning with their two ballots, they raised the third party vote in their immediate vicinity to eight, and they boasted of the progress they had made.

They did not make public addresses, but they faithfully listened to those made by others in support of the cause. They attended all Abolition meetings that were within reach. They took the _National Era_. Not only that, but they got up clubs for it. The first club I recollect my father's securing consisted of half a dozen subscribers, for one half of which he paid. The next year's was double in size, and so was my father's contribution. There was no fund for the promotion of the Abolitionist cause, for which they were called upon, to which they did not cheerfully pay according to their means.

All Abolition lecturers and colporteurs were gratuitously entertained, although their presence was sometimes a cause of abuse, and even of danger. There were other travelers who sometimes applied for help.

Their faces were of dusky hue, and their great whitish eyes were like those of hunted beasts of the forest. They went on their way strengthened and rejoicing--always in the direction of the North Star.

The men are dead, but Slavery is dead also, partly through their labors and sacrifices. Their unpretentious, patient, earnest lives were not in vain. They contributed to the final triumph of Freedom's holy cause.

APPENDIX

EMANc.i.p.aTION PROCLAMATION

January 1, 1863.--Whereas, on the 22d day of September, 1862, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

That on the 1st day of January, 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward and forever free, and the Executive government of the United States, including the naval and military authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons or any of them in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

That the Executive will on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be in good faith represented in the Congress of the United States, by members chosen thereto at elections, wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such States have partic.i.p.ated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States.

Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do on this first day of January, 1863, and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit:

Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, a.s.sumption, Terre Bonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk and Portsmouth) and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.

And by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward shall be, free, and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.

And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.

And I further declare and make known that such persons, of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States, to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.

And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Const.i.tution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty G.o.d.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington this first day of January, 1863, and of the independence of the United States the Eighty-seventh.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

By the President: WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State.

BORDER SLAVE-STATE MESSAGE

Amendment to the National Const.i.tution recommended by President Lincoln in his Message to Congress of December I, 1862.

_Resolved_ by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress a.s.sembled: that the following articles be proposed to the Legislatures (or conventions) of the several States as amendments to the Const.i.tution of the United States, all or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures (or conventions) to be valid as parts of the said Const.i.tution, namely:

Article.--Every State wherein Slavery now exists, which shall abolish the same therein, at any time or times before the 1st day of January in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred, shall receive compensation from the United States as follows, to wit:

(Then follows a provision to issue bonds of the United States Government, which shall be delivered to the States in amounts sufficient to compensate the owners of slaves within their jurisdictions for the loss of their slave property.)

Article.--All slaves who shall have enjoyed actual freedom by the chances of the war, at any time before the end of the rebellion, shall be forever free; but all owners of such, who shall not have been disloyal, shall be compensated for them at the same rates as is provided for States adopting abolishment of slavery, but in such way that no slave shall be twice accounted for.

Article.--Congress may appropriate money and otherwise provide for colonizing free colored persons, with their own consent, at any place or places without the United States.

"PRAYER OF TWENTY MILLIONS"

On the 19th of August, 1862, Horace Greeley, under the above heading, addressed a letter to the President, which appeared over his signature in the New York _Tribune_ of that date. The conclusion of Mr.

Greeley's epistle was as follows:

"On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the rebellion, and at the same time uphold its inciting cause, are preposterous and futile--that the rebellion, if crushed out to-morrow, would be renewed within a year if Slavery were left in full vigor--that army officers who remain to this day devoted to Slavery can at best be but halfway loyal to the Union--and that every hour of deference to Slavery is an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union. I appeal to the testimony of your emba.s.sadors in Europe. Ask them to tell you candidly whether the seeming subserviency of your policy to the slaveholding, slavery-upholding interest is not the perplexity, the despair of statesmen of all parties, and be admonished by the general answer."