The National Anti-Slavery Society—the society organized by Garrison and his confrères, and which longest maintained its organization—made one great mistake. It disbanded. It assumed that its work was done when African slavery in this country was pronounced defunct by law. It took it for granted that the enslavement of the colored man—not necessarily the negro—was no longer possible under the Stars and Stripes. Then and there it committed a grievous blunder. Its paramount error was in assuming that a political party could for all time be depended upon as a party of freedom. It trusted to the assurances of politicians that they would protect the colored man in all his natural and acquired rights, and in that belief voluntarily gave up the ghost and cast its mantle to the winds.
Now, the fact is that the National Anti-Slavery Society was never more needed than it is to-day. There is a mighty work to be done that was directly in the line of its operations. First and foremost, it will not be denied that a citizen of our Republic who is deprived of the elective franchise is robbed of one of his most valuable privileges—one of his most essential rights. The ballot, under a political system like ours, is both the sword and the shield of liberty. Without it no man is really a freeman. He does not stand on an equality with his fellows.
Nor will it be denied that the negro, although our amended Constitution promises him all the privileges of citizenship, is in many parts of our country practically divested of his vote. By a species of legerdemain in the communities in which he is most numerous and most needs protection, he is to all intents and purposes disfranchised. What will follow as the final outcome we do not know, but that is the beginning of his attempted re-enslavement. It is beyond any question that his return to involuntary servitude in some condition or conditions, the disarming him of the ballot being the initial step in the proceeding, is seriously contemplated, if not deliberately planned. Indeed, under the name of "peonage" the work of re-establishing a system of slaveholding that is barbarous in the extreme is already begun. Men and women have been seized upon by force, and upon the most flimsy pretexts have been subjected to a bondage that in its inhumanities may easily equal even the slavery of the olden time. The number of victims is undoubtedly much larger than the general public has any idea of.
Nor are there lacking signs of studied preparation for the extension of the system. The present time is full of them. Efforts to create a prejudice against the colored man are visible in all directions. He is described as a failure in the role of freeman. The idleness and shiftlessness of certain members of his race—undoubtedly altogether too numerous—are dwelt upon as characteristic of the entire family. Scant praise is given to those members who are doing well, and whose number is encouragingly large. These are as far as possible ignored. The race problem is spoken of as full of increasing difficulties, and as imperatively demanding a change from present conditions. The people of the North are being especially indoctrinated with such ideas. They are told that they must leave their brethren of the former slaveholding States, and in which the negroes principally dwell, to deal with the issues arising between the whites and the blacks; that they—the Southerners—understand the questions to be settled, and that outsiders should withhold their hands and their sympathies. It is none of their business, they are informed, while assurances are freely given that the people who, because of their experience with them, understand the negroes, will take considerate care of them. What kind of care they are taking of them in certain quarters is shown by recent incontestable revelations.
And what has the political party which, in view of its manifold professions, was supposed to have the interests of the negro in its especial keeping, done about it? Nothing whatever. It has looked on with the coolest indifference. The only concern it has shown in the matter has related to the question of Congressional representation as dependent upon the enumeration of electors, and, in so doing, has plainly intimated that if, through the negro's political robbery, it can secure an increase of partisan power, it is perfectly willing that the cause of the injured black man should "slide."
Indifference in regard to the rights of peoples of color is unfortunately not the only nor even the greatest charge to be laid at the door of the Republican party. It may be asserted that this party has become an active aggressor in trampling down the liberties of colored peoples. As the assignee of Spain in taking over (without consulting those who were most concerned) the control of the territory of the Philippine Islands, it has purchased (and has paid cash for) the right to dominate from eight to ten millions of people. These people may, under the existing conditions, be described as being in a state of slavery. If a foreign people, say a people coming from the other side of the globe, should treat Americans as we have treated the Filipinos, should deny to us the right of self-government, should send great armies to chastise us for disobedience (or for what they might call "rebellion"), and should do this for no better reason than that our skin was darker or lighter than their own, we Americans would doubtless consider ourselves to be in a state of slavery. Why in any sense is slavery in Luzon more defensible than slavery in South Carolina or in Alabama? If it be wrong to keep in slavery the black man in America (as in theory at least we are all now agreed it is wrong), what is the justice in depriving of his freedom the brown-skinned Tagal? Can a bill of sale from Spain give to us any such privilege, if privilege it may be called? Can an agreement with Spain bring to naught our responsibilities under our own Declaration of Independence?
Although, owing to the remoteness of the islands, we have as yet but little trustworthy knowledge as to what has really occurred in this new territory, and possibly in any case have not been informed of the things which are most to be condemned, the reports that have reached us of barbarities perpetrated upon a people who never did us any harm or wrong ought certainly to awaken in American bosoms every throb of pity and every sentiment of manliness. We have had accounts of butcheries called "battles" in which have been slaughtered hundreds of almost defenseless creatures for no offense except that of standing up for their independence. It is said that certain districts that would not acknowledge our mastery have been turned into wildernesses, and that in these districts the number of the slain may easily have equaled the victims of massacres in Armenia and Bessarabia, massacres which we have always so strenuously condemned. Thousands of men, women, and children have perished at our hands or in connection with operations for which we were responsible; and in addition to the taking of life there is record of the infliction of serious cruelties. As assignees of Spain, we seem to have succeeded not only to her properties but to her policies in the treatment of subject races. We do not know that in the greatest excesses of the bad colonial government of Spaniards they ever inflicted a torture more exquisite than that of the "water cure." How many of the perpetrators of these atrocities have been adequately punished, or how many have been punished at all?
It is wonderful with what complacency we have received the accounts of these horrible affairs. Nobody has been disturbed. The newspapers, beyond reporting the facts, have had nothing to say. The Church has been silent—at least that can be said of the Protestant Church. Not one brave or manly word of protest or condemnation has the writer heard, or heard of, from a Protestant American pulpit. Catholics, being victims and sufferers, have complained and protested. The greatest discomfort these things have produced has been occasioned by the apprehension that, through somebody's lack of patriotism, our flag may be withdrawn from the field of such glorious operations. It used to be our boast that Freedom followed our flag. Now slavery follows it.
In view of the facts stated we can understand, not only the serenity, but the favor with which the people of this country, or the great body of them, so long looked upon the workings of African slavery, and the difficulty which the Abolitionists had in arousing a sentiment of revulsion toward it.
One of the curious things in this connection is the similarity—the practical sameness—of the arguments used to justify the Philippine occupation and those once used to justify American slaveholding. We are now working to civilize and Christianize the Filipinos, and were then civilizing and Christianizing the negroes with the lash and the bludgeon.
Of course, there are other arguments. Increase of trade and wealth, as the result of our appropriation of other peoples' possessions, is freely predicted. It has always been the robber's plea. That is what it is to-day, even when employed by a professed Christian nation. Nor is it improved by the fact that the grounds upon which it is predicated and urged are largely fallacious. The spoliation of the Philippines will never repay us for the blood—our own blood—and treasure it has cost us, apart from any moral or humanitarian consideration. There is not one aspect in this business that promises to redound to our benefit. No, I won't say that; I would hardly be justified in going that far. In one particular the Philippine operation has profited a considerable part of our people. It has added materially to our Army and our Navy. The opportunity for enlargement in those quarters was, undoubtedly, the strongest inducement for our entering upon a colonial policy. For a great many people, and especially in official circles, we cannot have a standing army that is too large, nor too many ships of war. The more powerful those appendages of our authority the larger is the opening for the kinsmen and retainers of those in high places, who may be seeking profitable and agreeable employment, and the more liberal the contributions of contractors and jobbers to the sinews of partisan warfare. Our Army to-day is nearly three times what it was five years ago, although outside of the Philippines we are at peace with all mankind. Nor is that formidable advance at an end. The Far East is now certain to be the world's great battle-ground for the near future, and since we have entered that field as the master of the Philippines, like a knight of the olden time who was ready to do battle with all comers, we must be constantly increasing our preparation. We may not only have to fight the Russians and the Japanese and the Chinese, one or all, but those foolish Filipinos may again take it into their silly heads that they can govern themselves as well or better than we can do it for them. That means rebellion, and, of course, chastisement must follow. As climatic conditions in that part of the world are such that it requires the presence of three men in the army to supply the active services of one, it is obvious that so long as we adhere to our present Asiatic policy, we shall never have an army and a navy large enough and strong enough to meet the requirements of our new condition.
On all questions affecting human liberty, no one can fail to observe that the attitude of the two great political parties of to-day, is practically that of the two principal parties at the time the Abolitionists began their operations. One of them may pass perfunctory resolutions against the Philippine crime, but dares to say nothing about the treatment visited upon the negro. The other may say a few compassionate, but meaningless, words for the negro, but cannot denounce the oppression of the Filipinos. Both are fatally handicapped by their connections and committals. Both are, in fact, pro-slavery, although the one in power, because of its responsibility for existing conditions, is the more criminal of the two.
What this country now needs, in the opinion of the writer, is a revival of Abolitionism, and to that end, as one of the instrumentalities that would be serviceable, he holds that the old National Anti-Slavery Society should be restored. The most of the men and women that made that institution so useful and honorable, have passed from the scenes of their labors, but a few of them are left, and they and such as may feel like joining them, should meet and unfurl the old standard once more. There may be new associations looking to very much the same ends, but better the old guard under the old name. It would carry a prestige that no newer organization could command. It would create a measure of confidence that would be most strongly felt. The principles and policies it should urge are few and simple.
First: Let it declare that the colored man in this country must be permitted to enjoy all his rights under the Constitution as it is, both political and personal.
Second: Let it declare that all forms of servitude, including the denial of political self-government, under the flag, as well as under the Constitution, must cease.
And then let it go to work for the results thus indicated, in the spirit and with the confidence of the old-time leaders. The Society should be revived and re-established, not for a single campaign only, or for the rectification of such oppressions as are now in sight, but for all time. It ought to be made a permanent institution. It should be so arranged that the sons would step into the ranks as the fathers dropped out and that new recruits would be constantly enlisted. Thus reorganized the grand old institution would be an invaluable watchman on the walls of Freedom's stronghold. The exhortation to which it should listen, is that of the poet Bryant when he says:
"Oh not yet Mayst thou unloose thy corslet, nor lay by Thy sword, nor yet, O Freedom, close thy lids In slumber, for thine enemy never sleeps.
"George William Curtis, in one of his essays, says that "three speeches have made the places where they were delivered illustrious in our history—three, and there is no fourth." He refers to the speech of Patrick Henry in Williamsburg, Virginia, of Lincoln in Gettysburg, and the first address of Wendell Phillips in Faneuil Hall.
If it was the purpose of Mr. Curtis to offer the three notable deliverances above mentioned as the best and foremost examples of American oratory, the author cannot agree with him. In his opinion we shall have but little difficulty in picking out the three entitled to that distinction, provided we go to the discussion of the slavery question to find them. That furnished the greatest occasion, being with its ramifications and developments, by far the greatest issue with which Americans have had to deal.
The three speeches to which the writer refers were the more notable because they were altogether impromptu. They were what we call "off hand." They were delivered in the face of mobs or other bitterly hostile audiences—a circumstance that probably contributed not a little to their effectiveness.
John Quincy Adams, who was unquestionably one of the greatest of American orators, made several speeches in Congress that will always command our highest admiration; but the one to which a somewhat extended reference is made in another chapter, when an attempt was made by the slaveholders to expel him from that body, easily ranks among the first three exhibitions of American eloquence.
I quite agree with Mr. Curtis in giving the Faneuil Hall speech of Wendell Phillips a pre-eminent place. A meeting had been called to denounce the murder of Lovejoy, the Abolitionist editor. The audience was composed in large part of pro-slavery rowdies, who were bent on capturing or breaking up the meeting. One of their leaders—a high official of the State of Massachusetts, by the way—made a speech in which he justified the murderous act. "That speech must be answered here and now," exclaimed a young man in the audience. "Answer it yourself," shouted those about him. "I will," was the reply, "if I can reach the platform." To the platform he was assisted, and although an attempt was made for a time to howl him down, he persisted, and before long so interested and charmed his hearers that his triumph was complete.
It did not take the country long to realize that in that young man, who was Wendell Phillips, a new oratorical luminary had arisen. He took up the work of lecturing as a profession, treating on other subjects as well as slavery; but when slavery was the subject no charge was made for his services. Said Frederic Hudson, the noted New York editor, in 1860: "It is probable that there is not another man in the United States who is as much heard and read as Henry Ward Beecher, unless the other man be Wendell Phillips."
The mention of Henry Ward Beecher's name is suggestive of oratory of the very highest order. It will not be denied by any competent and unprejudiced person that his great speech in England—there were five addresses, but the substance was the same—upon the American question (which directly involved the slavery issue) during our Civil War was far and away the finest exhibition of masterful eloquence that is to be credited to any of our countrymen. The world has never beaten it.
Mr. Beecher found himself in England by a fortunate accident at a most critical period in our national affairs. A crisis had there been reached. A powerful party, including a large majority of the public men of Great Britain, favored intervention in behalf of the South. Southern agents were at work all over the kingdom, and were remarkably effective in propagating their views. It looked as if the Rebel interest was on the point of winning, when Mr. Beecher appeared on the scene. He had not gone to England to make public speeches. He was there for health and recreation, but, realizing the situation with his quick perceptiveness, he took up the gage of battle. It was a fearful resolution on his part. The chances seemed to be all against him. It was one man against thousands. His victory, however, was complete. His five great speeches in the business centres of England and Scotland were not only listened to by thousands, but they went all over the country in the public prints. They completely changed the current of public opinion.
Mr. Beecher's first address was in Manchester, which, owing to the interest of the leading business men of that city in the cotton trade and the furnishing of ships and supplies for blockade running, was a seething hot bed of Rebel sentiment. When he arrived in that place on the day he was to speak, he was met at the depot by friends with troubled faces, who informed him that hostile placards—significantly printed in red colors—had been posted all over the city, and, if he persisted in trying to speak, he would have a very uncomfortable reception.
He was asked how he felt about trying to go on. "I am going to be heard," was his reply.
The best description of the scene that ensued is supplied in Mr. Beecher's own words:
"The uproar would come in on this side, and then on that. They would put insulting questions and make all sorts of calls to me, and I would wait until the noise had subsided and then get in about five minutes of talk. The reporters would get that down, and then up would come another noise. Occasionally I would see things that amused me, and I would laugh outright, and the crowd would stop to see what I was laughing at. Then I would sail in with another sentence or two. A good many times the crowd threw up questions that I caught and threw back. I may as well at this point mention a thing that amused me hugely. There were baize doors that opened both ways into side alleys, and there was a huge burly Englishman standing right in front of one of these doors and roaring like a bull of Bashan. One of the policemen swung his elbow round and hit him in the belly and knocked him through the doorway, so that the last part of his bawl was out in the alleyway. It struck me so ludicrously to think how the fellow must have looked when he found himself 'hollering' outside, that I could not refrain from laughing outright. The audience immediately stopped its uproar, wondering what I was laughing at. That gave me another chance, and I caught on to it. So we kept it up for about an hour and a half before the people became so far calmed down that I could go on peaceably with my speech. My audience got to like the pluck I showed. Englishmen like a man that can stand on his feet and give and take, and so for the last hour I had pretty much clear sailing. The next morning every great paper in England had the whole speech down. And when the vote came to be taken—for in England it is customary for audiences to express their decision on the subject under discussion—you would have thought it was a tropical thunder-storm that swept through the hall as the Ayes were thundered, while the Nays were an insignificant and contemptible minority. It had all gone on our side, and such enthusiasm I never saw.""
"It has been repeatedly stated, and to this day is generally believed,—is so stated in several of Mr. Lincoln's biographies, I believe,—that Mr. Beecher went to England at the President's request, and for the purpose of making a speaking tour. The best answer is that given by Mr. Beecher himself.
It has been asked, said he, "whether I was sent by the government. The government took no stock in me at that time. I had been pounding Lincoln in the earlier years of the war, and I don't believe there was a man down there, unless it was Mr. Chase, who would have trusted me with anything. At any rate, I went on my own responsibility."
But in referring to Abolition orators, and especially orators whose experience it was to encounter mobs, the writer desires to pay a tribute to one of them whose name he does not even know.
A meeting that was called to organize an Anti-Slavery society in New York City was broken up by a mob. All of those in attendance made their escape except one negro. He was caught and his captors thought it would be a capital joke to make him personify one of the big Abolitionists. He was lifted to the platform and directed to imagine himself an Anti-Slavery leader and make an Abolition speech. The fellow proved to be equal to the occasion. He proceeded to assert the right of his race to the privileges of human beings with force and eloquence. His hearers listened with amazement, and possibly with something like admiration, until, realizing that the joke was on them, they pulled him from the platform and kicked him from the building.
In speaking of the orators and oratory that were evolved by the Slavery issue, there are two names that cannot be omitted. These are Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. It was the good fortune of the writer to be an eye and ear witness of the closing bout, at Alton, Illinois, between those two political champions in their great debate of 1858. The contrast between the men was remarkable. Lincoln was very tall and spare, standing up, when speaking, straight and stiff. Douglas was short and stumpy, a regular roly-poly man. Lincoln's face was calm and meek, almost immobile. He referred to it in his address as "my rather melancholy face." Although plain and somewhat rugged, I never regarded Lincoln's face as homely. I saw him many times and talked with him, after the occasion now referred to. It was a good face, and had many winning lines. Douglas's countenance, on the other hand, was leonine and full of expression. His was a handsome face. When lighted up by the excitement of debate it could not fail to impress an audience.
Lincoln indulged in no gesticulation. If he had been addressing a bench of judges he would not have been more impassive in his manner. He was an animate, but not an animated, bean-pole. He poured out a steady flow of words—three to Douglas's two—in a simple and semi-conversational tone. He attempted no witticisms and indulged in no oratorical claptrap. His address was pure argument. Douglas's manner was one of excitement, and accompanied and emphasized by almost continuous bodily movement. His hands and his feet, and especially that pliable face of his, were all busy talking. He said sharp things, evidently for their immediate effect on his audience, and showed that he was not only master of all the arts of the practical stump orator, but was ready to employ them.
But the most noticeable difference was in the voices of the men. Douglas spoke first, and for the first minute or two was utterly unintelligible. His voice seemed to be all worn out by his speaking in that long and principally open-air debate. He simply bellowed. But gradually he got command of his organ, and pretty soon, in a somewhat laborious and painful way, it is true, he succeeded in making himself understood.
Lincoln's voice, on the contrary, was without a quaver or a sign of huskiness. He had been speaking in the open air exactly as much as Douglas, but it was perfectly fresh, not a particle strained. It was a perfect voice.
Those who wanted to understand Douglas had to press up close to the platform from which he was speaking, and there was collected a dense, but not very deep, crowd. There was no crowding in front of Lincoln when he was speaking. He could be heard without it. There was a line of wagons and carriages on the outskirts of the audience, and I noticed, when Lincoln was speaking, that they were filled with comfortably seated people listening to his address. They did not need to go any nearer to him. The most of the shouting was done by Douglas's partisans, composing a clear majority of the crowd, but it was very manifest that Lincoln commanded the attention of the greater number of those who were interested in the arguments. He did not act as if he cared for the applause of the multitude. He said nothing, apparently, simply to tickle the ears of his hearers.
Rather strange was it that the only points on which there did not appear to be much, if any, difference between the two men were reached when they came to the propositions they advocated. Douglas was avowedly pro-slavery. He was talking in southern Illinois and on the border of Missouri, to which many of his hearers belonged, and his audience was mostly Southern in its feelings. He was plainly trying to please that element. He not only approved of slavery where it was, but metaphorically jumped on the negro and trampled all over him. He denied that the negro was a "man" within the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln, however, as far as slavery in the States was involved, met Douglas on his own ground, and "went him one better." He said, "I have on all occasions declared as strongly as Judge Douglas against the disposition to interfere with the existing institution of slavery."
If a stranger who knew nothing of the speakers and their party associations had heard the two men on that occasion, he would have concluded that one was strongly in favor of slavery and the other was not opposed to it.
Their only disagreement was as to slavery in the Territories, and that was more apparent than real. Lincoln contended for free soil through the direct action of the general government. Douglas advocated a roundabout way that led up to the same result. His proposition, which he called "popular sovereignty," was to leave the decision to the people of the Territories, saying he did not care whether they voted slavery up or voted it down. That was a practical, although indirect declaration in favor of free soil. The outcome of the contests in Kansas and California showed that at that game the free States with their superior resources were certain to win. The shrewder slaveholders recognized that fact, and their antagonism to Douglas grew accordingly. They deliberately defeated him for the Presidency in 1860, when he was the regular candidate of the Democratic party, by running Breckenridge as an independent candidate. Otherwise Mr. Douglas would have become President of the United States. Out of a total of 4,680,193 votes, Mr. Lincoln had only 1,866,631. The rest were divided between his three antagonists.
As between Lincoln and Douglas, who together held the controlling hand, the slaveholders preferred Lincoln, against whom they had no personal feeling, while they knew that his policy was no more dangerous to their interests than the other man's, if faithfully adhered to and carried out. Besides that, by this time many of them had reached that state of mind in which they wanted a pretext for secession from the union. Lincoln's election would give them that pretext while Douglas's would not.
On a boat that carried a portion of the audience, including the writer, from Alton to St. Louis, after the debate was over, was a prominent Missouri Democrat, afterwards a Confederate leader, who expressed himself very freely. He declared that he would rather trust the institutions of the South to the hands of a conservative and honest man like "Old Abe," than to those of "a political jumping-jack like Douglas." The most of the other Southern men and slaveholders present seemed to concur in his views.
It is a fact that a good many of the Anti-Slavery leaders living outside of Illinois, and a good many of those living within it, wanted the Republicans of that State to let Douglas go back to the Senate without a contest, believing that he would be far more useful to them there than a Republican would be. It is not improbable that enough of the Illinois Republicans took that view of the matter, and helped to give Douglas the victory in what was a very close contest.
A portion of Douglas's speech was a spirited defense of his "squatter sovereignty" doctrine against the denunciations of members of his own political party, in the course of which he gave President Buchanan a savage overhauling. It showed him to be a master of invective.
Go it, husband; go it, bear, was Mr. Lincoln's comment on that part of Douglas's address. I went to the debate with a very strong prejudice against Douglas, looking upon him as one of the most time-serving of those Northern men whom the Abolitionists called "dough-faces." I confess that my views of the man were considerably modified. I admired the pluck he showed in speaking when his voice was in tatters. Still more did I like the resolution he displayed in defying those leaders of his own party, including the President, who wanted him to retreat from the ground he had taken, seeing that it had become practically Anti-Slavery.
At the same time I had an almost worshipful admiration for Lincoln, whom I had not before seen or heard. I expected a great deal from him. I thought his closing appeal in that great debate would contain some ringing words for freedom. He had, as I supposed, a great opportunity for telling eloquence. He stood almost on the ground that had drunk the blood of Lovejoy, the Anti-Slavery martyr. I felt that that fact ought to inspire him. I was disappointed. Mr. Lincoln's speech was altogether colorless. It was an argument, able but perfectly cold. It was largely technical. There was no sentiment in it. Lovejoy had died in vain so far as that address was concerned. I am free to say that I was led to doubt whether Mr. Lincoln was then in hearty sympathy with any movement looking to the freedom of the slave, and this impression was not afterwards wholly removed from my mind.
My father was a subscriber to the National Era, the Anti-Slavery weekly that was published in Washington City before the war by Dr. Gamaliel Bailey. Being the youngest member of the family, I usually went to the post-office for the paper on the day of its weekly arrival. One day I brought it home and handed it to my father, who, as the day was warm, was seated outside of the house. He was soon apparently very much absorbed in his reading. A call for dinner was sounded, but he paid no attention to it. The meal was delayed a little while and then the call was repeated, but with the same result. At last the meal proceeded without my father's presence, he coming in at the close and swinging the paper in his hand. His explanation, by way of apology, was that he had become very much interested in the opening installment of a story that was begun in the Era, and which he declared would make a sensation. "It will make a renovation," he repeated several times.
That story, it is almost needless to say, was Uncle Tom's Cabin, and it is altogether needless to say that it fully accomplished my father's prediction as to its sensational effects. Since the appearance of the Bible in a form that brought it home to the common people, there has been no work in the English language so extensively read. The author's name became at once a cynosure the world over. When Henry Ward Beecher, the writer's distinguished brother, delivered his first lecture in England, he was introduced to the audience by the chairman as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher Stowe.
The way in which the idea of writing the book came to the author was significant of the will that produced it. A lady friend wrote Mrs. Stowe a letter in which she said, "If I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make the whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is." When the letter reached its destination, and Mrs. Stowe came to the passage above quoted, as the story is told by a friend who was present, she sprang to her feet, crushed the letter in her hand in the intensity of her feeling, and with an expression on her face of the utmost determination, exclaimed, "If I live, I will write something that will do that thing."
The circumstances under which she executed her great task would ordinarily be looked upon as altogether prohibitory. She was the wife of a poor minister and school-teacher. To eke out the family income she took boarders. She had five children of her own, who were too young to be of any material assistance, and, in addition, she occasionally harbored a waif that besought her protection when fleeing from slavery. Necessarily the most of her time was spent in the kitchen. There, surrounded by meats and vegetables and cooking appliances, with just enough of the common deal table cleared away to give space for her writing materials, she composed and made ready for the publisher by far the most remarkable work of fiction this country has produced. Slavery is dead, but Mrs. Stowe's masterpiece lives, and is likely to live with growing luster as long as our free institutions survive, which it is to be hoped will be forever.
One of the most remarkable early workers in the Abolition cause was Mrs. Lucretia Mott, a little Quaker woman of Pennsylvania. The writer saw her for the last time shortly before her death. She was then acting as presiding officer of an "Equal Rights"—meaning equal suffrage—meeting. Sitting on one hand was Susan B. Anthony, and on the other Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and next to one of them sat a stately negro.
She was then an aged woman, but her eye seemed to be as bright and her movements as alert as they had ever been. Framed by her becoming Quaker bonnet, which she retained in her official position, the face of the handsome old lady would have been a splendid subject for an artist.
Mrs. Mott gave much of her time and all the means she could control to the cause of the slave. She was an exceedingly spirited and eloquent speaker. On one lecturing tour she traveled twenty-four hundred miles, the most of the way in old-fashioned stage-coaches. By a number of taverns she was denied entertainment.
Like other pioneers in the same movement, Mrs. Mott was the victim of numerous mobbings. One incident shows her courage and resourcefulness. An Anti-Slavery meeting she was attending was broken up by rowdies, and some of the ladies present were greatly frightened. Seeing this Mrs. Mott asked the gentleman who was escorting her, to leave her and assist some of the others who were more timid. "But who will take care of you?" he asked. "This man," she answered, lightly laying her hand on the arm of one of the roughest of the mob. The man, completely surprised, responded by respectfully conducting her through the tumult to a place of safety.
But before Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Mott had taken up the work for the bondman, two other remarkable women had become interested in his cause. Their history has some features that the most accomplished novel-writer could not improve upon. They were sisters, known as the Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, the latter becoming the wife of Theodore W. Weld, a noted Abolition lecturer. They were daughters of a Judge of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, their early home being in Charleston.
The family was of the highest pretension, being related to the Rhetts, the Barnwells, the Pickenses, and other famous representatives of the Palmetto aristocracy. It was wealthy, and of course had many slaves. The girls had their colored attendants, whose only service was to wait upon them and do their bidding. That circumstance finally led to trouble.
At that time there was a statute in South Carolina against teaching slaves to read and write. The penalties were fine and imprisonment. The Grimké girls, however, had little respect for or fear of that law. The story of their offending is told by Sarah.
Her attendant, when she was little more than a child, was a colored girl of about the same age. She says,
I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my long hair. The light was put out, the key-hole screened, and flat on our stomachs before the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the law of South Carolina.
South Carolina was long noted for its rebels, but it never had a more interesting one than the author of the above narrative; nor a braver one.
As the sisters grew up, they more and more showed their dislike of slavery and their disposition to aid such colored people as were within their circle. Such conduct could not escape observation, and the result was their banishment from their Southern home. They were given the alternative of "behaving themselves" or going North to live. They were not long in deciding, and they became residents of Philadelphia. Here they joined the Quakers, because of their coincidence of views on the slavery question. They had before been Presbyterians, having been raised as such. They became industrious and noted Anti-Slavery lecturers. To one of them is to be credited a notable oratorical achievement.
Being no longer able to ignore the growing Anti-Slavery sentiment of its constituency, the Massachusetts Legislature in 1838 appointed a committee to consider the part that that State had in the subject of slavery, and especially in connection with slavery in the District of Columbia. The committee asked an expression of their views from those entertaining different sentiments on the subject. The Anti-Slavery people invited Angelina Grimké to represent them. The sessions of the committee were to be held in the great hall of the Legislature in the State House, where, up to that time, no woman had ever spoken. The chairman of the committee, however, consented that Miss Grimké should be heard, and the fact that she was a woman probably helped to bring out an immense audience.
She spoke for two hours, and then, being asked to speak again, at the next meeting, she spoke for two hours more. The impression she produced may be inferred from the fact that the chairman of the committee was in tears nearly the whole time she was speaking. The effect upon all who heard her was admitted to be very great.
The sincerity of these women was put to an unusual test. They had a brother who remained in South Carolina, where he was a prominent citizen and a large slave-owner. Like many sharing the privileges of "the institution," he led a double life. He was married to a white woman by whom he had children. He also had a family by a colored woman who was one of his slaves. In his will he bequeathed his slave family to a son by his lawful wife, with the stipulation that they should not be sold or unkindly treated.
Of these things the Grimké sisters knew nothing until after the war which had freed their illegitimate relatives. Then all the facts came to their knowledge. What should they do about it? was the question that immediately confronted them. Should they—"Carolina's high-souled daughters," as Whittier describes them, and not without some part in the pride of the family to which they belonged—acknowledge such a disreputable relationship? Not a day nor an hour did they hesitate. They sent for their unfortunate kinspeople, accepted them as blood connections, and took upon themselves the duty of promoting their interests as far as it was in their power to do so.
Although a quiet and retiring person, and, moreover, so much of an invalid that the greater part of her time was necessarily passed in a bed of sickness, a New England woman had much to do with publishing the doctrines of Abolitionism, through the lips of the most eloquent man in the country. She was the wife of Wendell Phillips, the noted Anti-Slavery lecturer.
My wife made me an Abolitionist, said Phillips. How the work was done is not without its romantic interest.
It was several years before he made his meteoric appearance before the public as a platform talker, and while yet a law student, that Phillips met the lady in question. The interview, as described by one of the parties, certainly had its comical aspect. "I talked Abolitionism to him all the time we were together," said Mrs. Phillips, as she afterwards related the affair. Phillips listened, and that he was not surfeited nor disgusted appears from the fact that he went again and again for that sort of entertainment.
When Phillips asked for her hand, as the story goes, she asked him if he was fully persuaded to be a friend of the slave, leaving him to infer that their union was otherwise impossible.
My life shall attest the sincerity of my conversion, was his gallant reply.
In his Recollections, the Rev. Samuel T. May, who was one of the most faithful and zealous of the Anti-Slavery pioneers, and belonged to that band of devoted workers who were known as Abolition lecturers, tells of his experience in delivering an Anti-Slavery address in the sober New England city of Haverhill.
It was a Sabbath evening, he says. "I had spoken about fifteen minutes when the most hideous outcries—yells and screeches—from a crowd of men and boys, who had surrounded the house, startled us, and then came heavy missiles against the doors and the blinds of the windows. I persisted in speaking for a few minutes, hoping the doors and blinds were strong enough to withstand the attack. But presently a heavy stone broke through one of the blinds, scattered a pane of glass, and fell upon the head of a lady sitting near the center of the hall. She uttered a shriek and fell bleeding on the floor."
There was a panic, of course, and the Abolition lecturer would have been roughly handled by the mob if a young lady, a sister of the poet Whittier, had not taken him by the arm, and walked with him through the astonished crowd. They did not feel like attacking a woman.
There was nothing unusual, except the part performed by the young lady, in the affair described in the foregoing narrative. Mobs were of constant occurrence in the period of which we are speaking. It was not in the slave States that they were most frequent. Northern communities that were regarded as absolutely peaceable and perfectly moral thought nothing of an anti-Abolitionist riot now and then. They occurred "away up North" and "away down East." Even sleepy old Nantucket, in its sedentary repose by the sea, woke up long enough to mob a couple of Abolition lecturers, a man and a woman.
The community in which the writer resided when a boy, was fully up to the pacific standard of most Northern neighborhoods. Yet it was the scene of many turmoils growing out of Anti-Slavery meetings. The district schoolhouse, which was the only public building in the village that was open for such gatherings, called for frequent repairs on account of damages done by mobs. Broken windows and doors were often in evidence, and stains from mud-balls, decayed vegetables, and antiquated eggs, which nobody took the trouble to remove, were nearly always visible.
On one occasion, at an evening meeting, the lecturer was a young professor, who was "down" from Oberlin College, against which, as "an Abolition hole," there was a very strong prejudice. He had not got more than well started, when rocks, bricks, and other missiles began to crash through the windows. The mob was resolved to punish that young man, and had come prepared to give him a coating of unsavory mixture. He was a preacher as well as a teacher, and his "store clothes" were likely to betray him; but some thoughtful person had brought an old drab overcoat and a rough workman's cap, and arrayed in these garments he walked through the crowd without his identity being suspected.
But another party was not so fortunate. He was a respected citizen of the village, an elder in the Presbyterian church, and a strong pro-slavery man. He dressed in black and his appearance was not unlike that of the lecturer. By some hard luck he happened to be passing that way when the crowd was looking for the Abolitionist, and was discovered. "There he goes," was the cry that was raised, and a fire of eggs and other things was opened upon him. He reached his home in an awful plight, and it was charged that his conversation was not unmixed with profanity.
On another occasion the writer was present when the friends of the lecturer undertook to convey him to a place of safety. They formed a circle about him and moved away while the mob followed, hurling eggs and clods and sticks and whatever else came handy. We kept quietly on our way until we reached a place in the road that had been freshly graveled, and where the surface was covered with stones just suited to our use. Here we halted, and, with rocks in hand, formed a line of battle. It took only one volley to put the enemy to rout, and we had no further trouble.
At last, after several men had been prevented from speaking in our village, the services of a female lecturer were secured. The question then was, whether the mob would be so ungallant as to disturb a woman. The matter was settled by the rowdies on that occasion being more than usually demonstrative. The lecturer showed great courage and presence of mind. She closed the meeting in due form, and then walked calmly through the noisy throng that gave her no personal molestation or insult. Deliberately she proceeded to a place of safety—and then went into hysterics.
Finding that it was impossible to hold undisturbed public meetings, the Abolitionists adopted a plan of operations that was altogether successful. They met in their several homes, taking them in order, and there the subject they were interested in was uninterruptedly discussed. Intelligent opponents of their views were invited to attend, and frequently did so. So warm were the discussions that arose that the meetings sometimes lasted for entire days, and conversions were not unusual.
It was in one of these neighborhood gatherings that the writer first became an active Anti-Slavery worker. He had memorized one of Daniel O'Connell's philippics against American slavery, and, being given the opportunity, declaimed it with much earnestness. After that he was invited to all the meetings, and had on hand a stock of selections for delivery, his favorite being Whittier's Slave Mother's Lament over the Loss of Her Daughters:
"Gone, gone—sold and gone To the rice swamp dank and lone, Where the slave whip ceaseless swings, Where the noisome insect stings; Where the fever demon strews Poison with the falling dews; Where the sickly sunbeams glare Through the hot and misty air. Gone, gone—sold and gone To the rice swamp dank and lone, From Virginia's hills and waters— Woe is me my stolen daughters!
"It was marvelous how little damage all the mobs effected. Lovejoy of Illinois was killed—a great loss—and occasionally an Abolitionist lecturer got a bloody nose or a sore shin. Professor Hudson, of Oberlin College, used to say that the injury he most feared was to his clothes. He carried with him what he called "a storm suit," which he wore at evening meetings. It showed many marks of battle.
Among those who suffered real physical injury was Fred. Douglass, the runaway slave. While in bondage he was often severely punished, but he encountered rougher treatment in the North than in the South. He was attacked by a mob while lecturing in the State of Indiana; was struck to the earth and rendered senseless by blows on the head and body, and for a time his life was supposed to be in danger. Although in the main he recovered, his right hand was always crippled in consequence of some of its bones having been broken.
If any one is desirous of estimating the extent of the sacrifice of life, of treasure, of home and family comforts, and of innumerable fair hopes that the institution of slavery, in its struggle, not merely for existence, but for supremacy, cost this country, let him visit a government cemetery in the neighborhood of one of the great battle-fields of the Rebellion, and there, while looking down the long avenues lined with memorial stones that a grateful country has set up, make inquiry as to the number of those that are there bivouacked "in fame's eternal camping ground." Some idea—a faint one it is true—will then be had of the multitudes that gave up all they possessed that liberty might live and rule in this fair land of ours. They were martyrs in the very highest sense to Freedom's immeasurable cause. The war was the product of slavery. It was the natural outcome of the great moral conflict that had so long raged in this country. It was simply the development of an agitation that had begun on other lines.
But there were martyrs to the cause of freedom before the war. Everybody knows more or less of the story of John Brown, of Ossawatomie, whose soul kept "marching on," although his body was "a-mouldering in the grave."
There was another case involving the surrender of life to that cause, which has always struck me as having stronger claims to our sympathies than that of John Brown and his comrades in self-sacrifice.
I have already referred to Elijah P. Lovejoy who was a young Congregational clergyman, who went from the State of Maine to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1839. He became the editor of a religious journal in which he expressed, in very moderate terms, an opinion that was not favorable to slave-holding. The supporters of the institution were aroused at once. They demanded a retraction. "I have sworn eternal hostility to slavery, and by the blessing of God I will never go back," was his reply. He also declared, "We have slaves here, but I am not one of them."
It was deemed advisable by Mr. Lovejoy and his friends to move his printing establishment to Alton, opposite Missouri, in the free State of Illinois. There, however, a pro-slavery antagonism immediately developed. His press was seized and thrown into the Mississippi River. The same fate awaited two others that were procured. But, undismayed, Mr. Lovejoy and his friends once more decided that their rights and liberties should not be surrendered without a further effort. Another press was sent for. But in the meanwhile a violent public agitation had arisen. At the instance of certain pro-slavery leaders in the community a public meeting had been called to denounce the Abolitionists. Mr. Lovejoy was invited to attend it and declare what he would do.
Gentlemen, said he, "as long as I am an American citizen; as long as American blood runs in my 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."
The fourth press arrived. It was landed from a passing boat in the small hours of the morning, and was safely conveyed to a warehouse where Mr. Lovejoy and several of his friends assembled with a view to its protection. What followed is thus described:
An hour or two afterwards there came from the grog-shops a crowd of people who knocked at the door and demanded the press. One of the owners of the warehouse informed them it would not be given up. Presenting a pistol, the leader of the mob announced that they were resolved to have the press at any cost. Stones were thrown, windows broken, and shots were fired at the building. The cry of 'burn them out' was raised. Ladders were procured, and some of the rioters mounted to the roof of the building and set it on fire. Mr. Lovejoy at this point stepped out of the building for the purpose of having a talk with his enemies, when he was fired upon. He received five balls, three in his breast. He was killed almost instantly.
The animosity of his enemies was such that they followed his remains with scoffings and insults on its way to the grave.
But the most cruel and brutal persecutions by the slave power were not always those that involved the sacrifice of life.
In Canterbury, in the State of Connecticut, lived a Quaker lady of the name of Prudence Crandall. She conducted a school for young ladies. Among those she admitted was a colored girl. The fact becoming known, objection was raised by the citizens of the place. The position in which Miss Crandall was placed was a most trying one. Having invested all her means in the school building and its equipment, she was confronted with the alternative of losing her business and her property, or dismissing the colored student who had done no wrong. She chose to stand by her principles.
A public meeting was called, and a resolution to prevent the maintenance of the school, if colored students were admitted, was adopted by the citizens. Nevertheless, that brave Quakeress opened her doors to several colored young women. That brought the issue to a head, and then began a system of most remarkable persecutions. The school building was bombarded with clubs and stones, the proprietress found the stores of the village closed against her, and the young lady students were grossly insulted when they appeared upon the streets. Even the well from which drinking water was obtained was polluted.
Finding that there was no law in Connecticut under which the instruction of colored people could be prohibited and punished, the enemies of Miss Crandall went to the Legislature of the State and asked for such an enactment, and, to the eternal disgrace of that body, their request was complied with. It was made a crime in Connecticut to instruct colored people in the rudiments of an ordinary education.
Miss Crandall, as she made no change in her course of action, was arrested, brought before a committing magistrate, and sent to jail. A man had shortly before been confined in the same prison for the murder of his wife, and therefrom had gone to execution. Miss Crandall was confined in the cell this man had occupied. Other indignities were heaped upon this devoted and courageous lady. Physicians refused to attend the sick of her household, and the trustees of the church she was accustomed to attend notified her that she and the members of her family were denied admission to that sanctuary.
Miss Crandall was finally convicted of the crime with which she was charged, but the case, being carried to the highest court of the State, was dismissed on a technicality. But, although the legal prosecution of this poor woman reached an end, her enemies did not cease their opposition. The mob made an attack upon her dwelling, which was also her schoolhouse. Doors and windows were broken in, and the building was so thoroughly wrecked as to be uninhabitable. Having no money with which to make repairs, she was forced to abandon the structure and her educational business at the same time.
The Crandall family became noted for its martyrs. A brother of Prudence Crandall was Dr. Reuben Crandall, of Washington City. He was a man of high attainments, being a lecturer in a public scientific institution. While engaged in his office he received some packages that had been wrapped in newspapers, among which happened to be a copy or two of Abolition journals. At the request of a gentleman who was present at the unpacking he gave him one of the publications. Having looked it over the gentleman dropped it, where it was picked up by some one who was on the lookout for incendiary publications. No little excitement followed its discovery. The community was aroused. Indeed, so great was the agitation occasioned that Dr. Crandall, to whom the inhibited paper had been traced, was in great physical danger from mob violence. He was arrested, and, partly to save his life, was thrust into jail, where he remained for eight months. He was tried and, although acquitted, was really made the subject of capital punishment. Tuberculosis developed as the result of his incarceration, and death soon followed.
Of many cases of the kind that might be cited, perhaps none is more strikingly illustrative than that of Charles Turner Torrey, a New England man. He was accused of helping a slave to escape from the city of Baltimore, and being convicted on what was said to be perjured testimony, was sent to the penitentiary for a long term of years. The confinement was fatal, a galloping consumption mercifully putting a speedy end to his confinement. And then a remarkable incident occurred. Torrey was a minister in good standing of the Congregational denomination, and also a member of the Park Avenue Church of Boston. Arrangements were made for funeral exercises in that church, but its managers, taking alarm at the threats of certain pro-slavery men, withdrew their permission and locked the sanctuary's doors. Slavery punished the dead as well as the living.
The case of Amos Dresser, a young Southerner, may not improperly be mentioned here. He had gone to a Northern school, and had become a convert to Abolitionism. He went to Nashville, Tennessee, to canvass for a book called the Cottage Bible which would not ordinarily be supposed to be dangerous to well regulated public institutions. While peaceably attending to his business he was accused of Anti-Slaveryism. He did not deny the charge and was arrested, his trunk being broken open and its contents searched and scattered. He was taken before a vigilance committee and by it was condemned to receive twenty lashes on his bare back, "well laid on," and then to be driven out of town. The sentence was carried out, we are told, in the presence of thousands of people of both sexes.
Of the many somewhat similar instances that might here be referred to the writer will make room for only one more.
A seafaring man of the name of Jonathan Walker undertook to convey in a sloop of which he was the owner seven colored fugitives to the Bahama Islands, where they would be free. Owing to an accident to his boat, he and his companions were captured. He was sentenced, among other things, to have his hand branded with the letters S.S., signifying "Slave Stealer."
The incident just referred to inspired one of the finest productions of Whittier's pen. Singing of that "bold plowman of the wave" he proceeds:
"Why, that hand is highest honor, Than its traces never yet Upon old memorial hatchments was A prouder blazon set; And the unborn generations, as they Tread our rocky strand, Shall tell with pride the story of Their father's branded hand.
"The prescribed penalties for assisting in the escape of fugitive slaves were severe. By the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act, as it was called, any one convicted of that offense, besides a liability for one thousand dollars damages recoverable in a civil action, was subject to a five-hundred-dollars fine and imprisonment in a penitentiary for one year. As the writer has not "done time" for participation in certain transactions dating back to his earlier days, in which the legal rights of slave-owners were indifferently respected, he thinks it advisable to be somewhat reserved in his recital of personal experiences when taking the public into his confidence. The Fugitive Slave Law—and for that fact we should give "most hearty thanks"—is about as dead as any statute can be, but as in the case of a snake that has been killed, it may be the wiser course not to trifle with its fangs. Therefore, instead of telling my own story in the first person singular, I offer as a substitute the confession of one John Smith, whose existence no one will presume to dispute. Here is his statement:
"There was an old barn on my father's farm. It was almost a ruin. One end of the roof had fallen in, pretty much all the windows were gone, and there was a general air of dilapidation about the place. A dwelling-house, to which it was an appendage, had been burned and not rebuilt, and the barn had been left to fight a battle with the elements and other foes in pretty much its own way. Not that it was wholly abandoned. There was one mow that was kept pretty well supplied with grass, and there were two or three horse stalls that were in tolerable order, although but rarely used. There were a number of excellent hiding-places about the old rookery. In the basement all sorts of rubbish, including unused vehicles and machinery, had been stored away, and so wedged and packed was it that it would have taken hours to uncover man or beast seeking concealment there.
" "One of the curious features of the situation was that the building was in sight of none of the roads in the neighborhood, while less than a hundred feet from it was a strip of woods in which the removal of the larger trees had stimulated a sturdy and densely matted undergrowth that was penetrable only by means of paths that had been made by the cattle. It was what was called a 'woods pasture.' With this cover for his movements any one could approach or leave the old barn with little danger of discovery. Naturally enough, such a ramshackle was in ill-repute. There were tales about it in the neighborhood. Some children had gone there to play on one occasion, and had been badly frightened by a big—as big as a half-bushel, they asserted—black face that was seen to be watching them. They fled from the premises in great alarm, and for a time there was talk of an investigation by their friends. The incident, however, was soon forgotten.
" "That old barn was a regular station on one of the underground railroads that extended from the Ohio River to Canada. To but few persons was its true character known, and they were very close-mouthed about it. I was one of the few that were in the secret. Being the youngest member of the family, it fell to my lot to drive the horses and cows to and from the pasture in which the old barrack was located, and while there it was an easy matter to visit that establishment and ascertain if it sheltered any fresh arrivals. One day I had to report that two fugitives were in the barn, being a mother and child. Then came the question—which in that instance was a difficult one to answer—as to who should convey them to the next station on the line, twenty miles away. A brother, between five and six years older than I was, and who was something of a dare-devil, did the most of the work of transportation, but he was in bed with typhoid fever. A hired man, who was employed partly because he was in hearty accord with the humanitarian views of the household, and who on several occasions had taken my brother's place, was absent. There was nobody but myself who was ready to undertake the job, and I was only eleven years old. There was no help for it, however. The slaves had to be moved on, and I was greatly rejoiced in the prospect of adventure that was opened up to me. The journey had to be made at night, but for that I cared nothing, as I had repeatedly gone over the route by daylight, and thought I knew the road perfectly.
" "Midnight found me on the highway, and on the driver's seat of one of our farm wagons, to which was attached a span of horses moving in the direction of the north star. That luminary was not on this occasion visible. The sky was heavily overcast and the night was very dark. A light rain was falling. With all the confidence I had in my own ability, more than once would I have lost the way, but for the sagacity of the horses, which had gone over that route a number of times under similar circumstances. They acted as if altogether familiar with it. Those horses proved themselves to be excellent Abolitionists. The inclemency of the night was in one respect a great advantage. It kept at home those who might incline to be too inquisitive. The few travelers we met passed on with a word of greeting, while I whistled unconcernedly.
" "Over the bottom of the wagon was scattered some hay that might be used either as feed for the horses or as a bed for weary travelers. There was also an old-fashioned buffalo-robe, somewhat dilapidated, that could serve for concealment or as shelter from the elements. Two or three empty baskets suggested a return from the market. There was another article that one would hardly have looked for. This was a smoke-cured ham loosely wrapped in some old sacking. It had gone over that route a number of times. Its odor neutralized the smell by which the presence, immediate or recent, of negroes might be detected. My fellow-travelers, as my passengers might be called, were interesting companions. Both, in one sense, were children, the mother certainly not being over seventeen years old. She was a comely half-breed mulatto. Her baby—a pretty boy of two years—was one degree nearer white.
" "The girl was inclined to be confidential and talkative. She said she was 'old mas'r's' daughter. Her mother had been one of 'old mas'r's' people. She had grown up with the other slave children on the place, being in no way favored because of her relationship to her owner. The baby's father was 'young mas'r'—old master's son, as it appeared—and who, consequently, was a half-brother of the youthful mother. Slavery sometimes created singular relationships. As the story ran, all the people, including the narrator and her baby, when 'ole mas'r' died were 'leveled' on by the Sheriff's man. She did not quite understand the meaning of it all, but it was doubtless a case of bankruptcy.
"'Young mas'r,' she said, 'tole' her she had to run away, taking the baby of course. 'Oh, yes, she said very emphatically, 'I never would have left Kentuck without Thomas Jefferson'—meaning her little boy. 'Young mas'r,' according to her account, arranged the whole proceeding, telling her what course to take by night, where to stop and conceal herself by day, and what signal to give when she reached the 'big river.'
"When the Ohio had been crossed her young master met her, evidently to the great delight of the poor creature. He gave her some money, and told her that when she reached her destination he would send her some 'mo.' After putting her in charge of some kind people, evidently representatives of the underground line, they had parted, according to her description of the incident, in an affecting way. 'He kissed me and I cried,' was her simple statement. Notwithstanding the boasted superiority of one race over another, human nature seems to be very much the same, whether we read it in a white face or in a black one. The little girlish mother was very much alarmed for the safety of her boy and herself when we began our journey, wanting to get out and conceal herself whenever we heard any one on the road. After several detentions from that cause, the weary creature stretched herself upon the hay beside her sleeping infant and almost immediately fell into a heavy slumber. She could stand the strain no longer. I drew the buffalo-robe over the two sleepers, and there they rested in blissful unconsciousness until the journey was ended.
" "Half-way between the termini of my route was a village in which lived a constable who was suspected of being in the employ of the slave-owners. It was thought advisable that I should avoid that village by taking a roundabout road. That I did, although it added an extra half to my trip. The result was that the sun was just peeping over the eastern hills, as I reached a set of bars showing an entrance into a pasture lot on one side of the highway. Removing the bars, I drove into the field, and passing over a ridge that hid it from the road, I stopped in front of a log cabin that had every appearance of being an abandoned and neglected homestead. That was the station I was looking for. Arousing my sleeping passengers, I saw them enter the old domicile, where I bade them good-by, and received the tearful and repeated thanks of the youthful slave mother, speaking for herself and her offspring. I never saw them again, but in due time the news came back, over what was jocularly called the 'grape-vine telegraph,' that they had safely reached their destination. At the home of the station agent I was enthusiastically received. That a boy of eleven should accomplish what I had done was thought to be quite wonderful. I was given an excellent breakfast, and then shown to a room with a bed, where I had a good sleep. On my awakening I set out on the return journey, this time taking the most direct route, as I had then no fear of that hireling constable.
" "Subsequently I passed through several experiences of a similar kind, some of them involving greater risks and more exciting incidents, but the recollection of none of them brings me greater satisfaction than the memory of my first conductorship on the Underground. All of which is respectfully submitted by
"JOHN SMITH.
I have had a good deal to say about Anti-Slavery societies. There was another society which was called into existence by the slavery situation. Whether it was pro-slavery or anti-slavery was a question that long puzzled a good many people. It was the Colonization Society. A good many Anti-Slavery people believed in it for a time and gave it their support. "I am opposed to slavery, but I am not an Abolitionist: I am a Colonizationist," was a declaration that, when I was a boy, I heard many and many times, and from the lips of well-intending people.
It did not take the sharp-sighted leaders of the Abolition movement very long to discover that one of the uses its managers expected to make of the Colonization Society was as a shield for slavery. It kept a number of excellent people from joining in an aggressive movement against it, took their money, and made them believe that they were at work for the freedom of the negro.
Strangely as it might appear, the negroes, who were assumed to be the beneficiaries of the colonization scheme, were opposed to it. Quicker than the white people generally did, they saw through its false pretense, and, besides, they could not understand why they should be taken from the land of their nativity, and sent to the country from which their progenitors had come, any more than the descendants of Scotch, English, and German immigrants should be deported to the lands of their ancestors.
Equally strange was it that the Colonization Society, if really friendly to the negro, should find its most zealous supporters among slaveholders. Its first president, who was a nephew of George Washington, upon learning that his slaves had got the idea that they were to be set at liberty, sent over fifty of them to be sold from the auction block at New Orleans. That was intended as a warning to the rest. One of its presidents was said to be the owner of a thousand slaves and had never manumitted one of them. The principal service that the colonization movement was expected to do for the slave-owners was to relieve them of the presence of free negroes. These were always regarded as a menace by slave-masters. They disseminated ideas of freedom and manhood among their unfortunate brethren. They were object-lessons to those in bondage. The slave-owners were only too glad to have them sent away. They looked to Liberia as a safety-valve. It did not take long for intelligent people who were really well-wishers of the black man to perceive these facts.
The severest blow that the Colonization Society received in America was from the pen of William Lloyd Garrison, who, under the title of Thoughts on African Colonisation, published a pamphlet that had wide distribution. It completely unmasked the pretended friendship of the Colonizationists for the negroes, free or slave. From that time they lost all support from real Anti-Slavery people. There was, however, to be a battle fought, in which the Colonization Society figured as a party, that furnished one of the most interesting episodes of the slavery conflict.
England, at the time of which we are speaking, was full of Anti-Slavery sentiment. Slavery, at the end of a long and bitter contest, had been abolished in all her colonies. Her philanthropists were rejoicing in their victory. The managers of the Colonization Society resolved, if possible, to capture that sentiment, and with it the pecuniary aid the British Abolitionists might render. It was always a tremendous beggar. They, accordingly, selected a fluent-tongued agent and sent him to England to advocate their cause. He did not hesitate to represent that the Colonization Society was the especial friend of the negro, working for his deliverance from bondage, and, in addition, that it had the support of "the wealth, the respectability, and the piety of the American people."
When these facts came to the knowledge of the members of the newly formed New England Anti-Slavery Society, they were naturally excited, and resolved to meet the enemy in this new field of operations. This they decided to do by sending a representative to England, who would be able to meet the colonization agent in discussion, and otherwise proclaim and champion their particular views. For this service the man selected was William Lloyd Garrison, who was then but twenty-eight years old.
Remarkable it was that one who was not only so young, but imperfectly educated, being a poor mechanic, daily toiling as a compositor at his printer's case, should be chosen to meet the most polished people in the British Empire, and hold himself ready to debate the most serious question of the time. That such a person should be willing to enter upon such an undertaking was almost as remarkable. But Garrison showed no hesitation in accepting the task for which he was selected.
On his arrival in England, Garrison sent a challenge to the colonization agent for a public debate. This the Colonizationist refused to receive. Two more challenges were sent and were treated in the same way. Then Garrison, at a cost of thirty dollars, which he could ill afford to pay, published the challenge in the London Times, with a statement of the manner in which it had been so far treated. Of course, public interest was aroused, and when Garrison appeared upon the public platform, as he at once proceeded to do, he was greeted with the attendance of multitudes of interested hearers. Exeter Hall in London was crowded. The most distinguished men in England sat upon the stage when he spoke, and applauded his addresses. Daniel O'Connell, the great Irish orator, paid them a most florid compliment. They were, unquestionably, most remarkable samples of effective eloquence—plain in statement, simple in style, but exceedingly logical and forcible. They were widely published throughout England at the time of their delivery.
One of the results was that the leading emancipationists of Great Britain signed and published a warning against the colonization scheme, denouncing it as having its roots in "a cruel prejudice," and declaring that it was calculated to "increase the spirit of caste so unhappily predominant," and that it "exposed the colored people to great practical persecution in order to force them to emigrate."
As for the poor agent of the Colonizationists, seeing how the battle was tending, he left England in a hurry, and was nevermore heard of in that part of the world.
Garrison's personal triumph was very striking, and it was splendidly earned. He was made the recipient of many compliments and testimonials. A curious incident resulted from this great popularity. He was invited to breakfast by Sir Thomas Buxton, the noted English philanthropist, with a view to making the acquaintance of a number of distinguished persons who were to be present. When Mr. Garrison presented himself, his entertainer, who had not before met or seen him, looked at him in great astonishment.
Are you William Lloyd Garrison? he inquired.
That is who I am, replied Mr. Garrison, "and I am here on your invitation."
But you are a white man, said Buxton, "and from your zeal and labors in behalf of the colored people, I assumed that you were one of them."
Garrison left England in what, metaphorically, might be described as "a blaze of glory." Hundreds attended him when he went to embark on his homeward voyage, and he was followed by their cheers and benedictions. Wonderfully different was the treatment he received on his arrival in his own country. Not long afterwards he was dragged through Boston streets by a hempen rope about his body, and was assigned to a prison cell, as affording the most available protection from the mob.
Nevertheless, we have had some excellent people—not slave-owners—who, out of compassion for the black man, or from prejudice against his color, and, perhaps, from a little of both, have favored a policy of colonization in this country. Mr. Lincoln was one of them. "If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do with the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free the slaves and send them to Liberia." So said Mr. Lincoln in one of his debates with Douglas.
I cannot make it better known than it already is, said Mr. Lincoln in a message to Congress, dated December 1, 1862, "that I strongly favor colonization."
At Lincoln's instance Congress appropriated several large sums of money—then much needed in warlike operations—for colonizing experiments. One of these has a curious and somewhat pathetic history. A sharper by the name of Koch, having worked himself into the confidence of the President and some other good people, got them to buy from him an island in the West Indies, called Ile a'Vache, which he represented to be a veritable earthly paradise. Strangely enough, it was wholly uninhabited, and therefore ready for the uses of a colony. Several hundred people—colored, of course—were collected, put aboard a ship, and dumped upon this unknown land. It will surprise no one to learn that pretty soon these people, poisoned by malaria, stung by venomous insects and reptiles, and having scarcely anything to eat, were dying like cattle with the murrain. In the end a ship was sent to bring back the survivors.
Nevertheless, the kind-hearted President did not give up the idea. At his request a delegation of Washington negroes called upon him. He made them quite a long speech, telling them that Congress had given him money with which to found a colony of colored people, and that he had found what seemed to be a suitable location in Central America. He appealed to them to supply the colonists. The negroes, not anxious for exile, diplomatically said they would think the matter over. In the end it was discovered that Central America did not want the negroes, and that the negroes did not want Central America.
A story that is curiously illustrative of Mr. Lincoln's attachment to the policy of removing the colored people is told by L.E. Chittenden in his Recollections of President Lincoln. Mr. Chittenden was a citizen of Vermont and Register of the Treasury under Lincoln, with whom he was in intimate and confidential relations:
During one of his welcome visits to my office, says Mr. Chittenden, "the President seemed to be buried in thought over some subject of great interest. After long reflection he abruptly exclaimed that he wanted to ask me a question.
"'Do you know any energetic contractor?' he inquired; 'one who would be willing to take a large contract attended with some risk?' 'I know New England contractors,"" I replied, 'who would not be frightened by the magnitude or risk of any contract. The element of prospective profit is the only one that would interest them. If there was a fair prospect of profit, they would not hesitate to contract to suppress the Rebellion in ninety days.""
" "'There will be profit and reputation in the contract I may propose,' said the President. 'It is to remove the whole colored race of the slave States into Texas. If you have any acquaintance who would take that contract, I would like to see him.' 'I know a man who would take that contract and perform it,' I replied. 'I would be willing to put you into communication with him, so that you might form your own opinion about him.'
" "By the President's direction I requested John Bradley, a well-known Vermonter, to come to Washington. He was at my office the morning after I sent the telegram to him. I declined to give him any hint of the purpose of my invitation, but took him directly to the President. When I presented him I said: 'Here, Mr. President, is the contractor whom I named to you yesterday.' I left them together. Two hours later Mr. Bradley returned to my office overflowing with admiration for the President and enthusiasm for his proposed work. 'The proposition is,' he said, 'to remove the whole colored race into Texas, there to establish a republic of their own. The subject has political bearings of which I am no judge, and upon which the President has not yet made up his mind. But I have shown him that it is practicable. I will undertake to remove them all within a year.'""
"It is unnecessary to state that the Black Republic of Texas was a dream that never materialized.
Messrs. Nicolay and Hay, who were Mr. Lincoln's private secretaries during the time he was President, and afterwards the authors of his most elaborate biography, say: "The blessings of an enfranchised race must forever hail him as their liberator."
Says Francis Curtis in his History of the Republican Party, in speaking of the President's Emancipation Proclamation: "On the 1st day of January, 1863, the final proclamation of freedom was issued, and every negro slave within the confines of the United States was at last made free."
Other writers of what is claimed to be history, almost without number, speak of the President's pronouncement as if it caused the bulwarks of slavery to fall down very much as the walls of Jericho are said to have done, at one blast, overwhelming the whole institution and setting every bondman free. Indeed, there are multitudes of fairly intelligent people who believe that slaveholding in this country ceased the very day and hour the proclamation appeared. In a recent magazine article, so intelligent a man as Booker Washington speaks of a Kentucky slave family as being emancipated by Mr. Lincoln's proclamation, when, in fact, the proclamation never applied to Kentucky at all.
The emancipationists of Missouri were working hard to free their State from slavery, and they would have been only too glad to have Mr. Lincoln do the work for them. They appealed to him to extend his edict to their State, but got no satisfaction. The emancipationists of Maryland had much the same experience. Both Missouri and Maryland were left out of the proclamation, as were Tennessee and Kentucky and Delaware, and parts of Virginia and Louisiana and the Carolinas. (See Appendix.) The explanation is that the proclamation was not intended to cover all slaveholding territory. All of it that belonged to States that had not been in rebellion, or had been subdued, was excluded. The President's idea was to reach only such sections as were then in revolt. If the proclamation had been immediately operative, and had liberated every bondman in the jurisdiction to which it applied, it would have left over a million slaves in actual thraldom. Indeed, Earl Russell, the British premier, was quite correct when, in speaking of the proclamation, he said: "It does not more than profess to emancipate slaves where the United States authorities cannot make emancipation a reality, and emancipates no one where the decree can be carried into effect."
For the failure of the proclamation to cover all slaveholding territory there was a plausible reason. Freedom under it was not decreed as a boon, but as a penalty. It was not, in theory at least, intended to help the slave, but to chastise the master. It was to be in punishment of treason, and, of course, could not consistently be made to apply to loyal communities, or to such as were under government control. The proclamation, it will be recollected, was issued in two parts separated by one hundred days. The first part gave the Rebels warning that the second would follow if, in the meanwhile, they did not give up their rebellion. All they had to do to save slavery was to cease from their treasonable practices. Had the Rebels been shrewd enough, within the hundred days, to take the President at his word, he would have stood pledged to maintain their institution, and his proclamation, instead of being a charter of freedom, would have been a license for slaveholding.
The proclamation did not, in fact, whatever it may have otherwise accomplished at the time it was issued, liberate a single slave. What is more, slavery as an institution was altogether too securely rooted in our system to be abolished by proclamation. The talk of such a thing greatly belittles the magnitude of the task that was performed. Its removal required a long preliminary work, involving, as is made to appear in previous chapters of this work, almost incalculable toil and sacrifice, to be followed by an enormous expenditure of blood and treasure. Its practical extinguishment was the work of the army, while its legal extirpation was accomplished by Congress and the Legislatures of the States in adopting the Thirteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, which forbids all slaveholding. That amendment was a production of Congress and not of the Executive, whose official approval was not even required to make it legally effective.
The story of the proclamation, with not a few variations, has often been told; but the writer fancies that the altogether correct account has not always been given. It may be presumptuous on his part, but he will submit his version.
To understand the motive underlying the proclamation we must take into account its author's feeling toward slavery. Notwithstanding various unfriendly references of an academic sort to that institution, he was not at the time the proclamation appeared, and never had been, an Abolitionist.
Not very long before the time referred to the writer heard Mr. Lincoln, in his debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois, declare—laying unusual emphasis on his words: "I have on all occasions declared as strongly as Judge Douglas against the disposition to interfere with the existing institution of slavery."
Judge Douglas was what was then called a "dough-face" by the Abolitionists—being a Northern man with Southern principles, or "proclivities," as he called them.
Only a little earlier, and several years after Mr. Lincoln had claimed to be a Republican, and a leader of the Republicans, he had, in a speech at Bloomington, Illinois, asserted that, "the conclusion of it all is that we must restore the Missouri Compromise."
Now the adoption of the Missouri Compromise was the hardest blow ever inflicted on the cause of free soil in America. It did more to encourage the supporters of slavery and to discourage its opponents than anything else that ever happened. Its restoration would undoubtedly have produced a similar effect. Although he is not to be credited with any philanthropic motive, Stephen A. Douglas did an effective work for freedom when he helped to overthrow that measure. Leading Abolitionists have accorded him that meed of praise.
But there was that proposition which Mr. Lincoln was so fond of repeating, that the nation could not remain half free and half slave—"a divided house"—but the remedy he had to propose was not manumission at any proximate or certain time, but the adoption of a policy that, to use his own words, would cause "the public mind to rest in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction." Practically that meant very little or nothing. What the public mind then needed was not "rest," but properly directed activity.
But the declarations above quoted were all before Mr. Lincoln had become President or had probably thought of such a thing. Did the change of position lead to a change of opinion on his part? We are not left in uncertainty on this point. His official views were declared in what might be called a State paper. Soon after his inauguration, his Secretary of State sent Minister Dayton, at Paris, a dispatch that he might use with foreign officials, in which, in speaking of the Rebellion, he said: "The condition of slavery in the several States will remain just the same whether it succeeds or fails.... It is hardly necessary to add to this incontrovertible statement the further fact that the new President has always repudiated all designs, whenever and wherever imputed to him, of disturbing the system of slavery as it has existed under the Constitution and laws."
About the same time Mr. Lincoln stated to a party of Southern Congressmen, who called upon him, that he "recognized the rights of property that had grown out of it and would respect those rights as fully as he would similar rights in any other property."
No steps were taken by Mr. Lincoln to recall or repudiate the foregoing announcements. On the contrary, he confirmed them in his official action. He annulled the freedom proclamations of Frémont and Hunter. He did not interfere when some of his military officers were so busy returning fugitive slaves that they had no time to fight the masters. He approved Hallock's order Number Three excluding fugitives from the lines. He even permitted the poor old Hutchinsons to be sent away from the army very much as if they had been colored people, when trying to rouse "the boys" with their freedom songs. In many ways Mr. Lincoln showed that in the beginning and throughout the earlier part of his Administration he hoped to re-establish the union without disturbing slavery. In effect he so declared in his introduction to his freedom proclamation. He gave the rebel slaveholders one hundred days in which to abandon their rebellion and save their institution. In view of such things it is no wonder that Henry Wilson, so long a leading Republican Senator from Massachusetts, in his Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, in speaking of emancipation, said "it was a policy, indeed, which he did not personally favor except in connection with his favorite idea of colonization."
It is needless to say that the President's attitude was a great surprise and a sore disappointment to the more radical Anti-Slavery people of the country, who had supported him with much enthusiasm and high hopes. They felt that they had been deceived. They said so very plainly, for the Abolitionists were not the sort of people to keep quiet under provocation. Horace Greeley published his signed attack (see Appendix) entitled, The Prayer of Twenty Millions, which is, without doubt, the most scathing denunciation in the English language. Henry Ward Beecher "pounded" Mr. Lincoln, as he expressed it. Wendell Phillips fairly thundered his denunciations. There was a general under-swell of indignation.
Now, Mr. Lincoln was not a man who was incapable of reading the signs of the times. He saw that he was drifting towards an irreparable breach with an element that had previously furnished his staunchest supporters. As a politician of great native shrewdness, as well as the head of the Government, he could not afford to let the quarrel go on and widen. There was need of conciliation. Something had to be done. We know what he did. He issued his Emancipation Proclamation.
As far as freeing any slaves was concerned, he knew it amounted to very little, if anything. He said so. Less than two weeks before the preliminary section of the proclamation appeared, Mr. Lincoln was waited on by a delegation of over one hundred Chicago clergymen, who urged him to issue a proclamation of freedom for the slaves. "What good would a proclamation from me do, especially as we are now situated?" asked Mr. Lincoln by way of reply. "I do not want to issue a document that the whole world would see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope's bull against the comet. Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel States?"
In contemplating a proclamation applicable to the rebel States, it is hardly to be supposed that Mr. Lincoln did not understand the situation two weeks earlier quite as well as when the document appeared.
If Mr. Lincoln had been told, when he entered on the Presidency, that before his term of office would expire he would be hailed as "The Great Emancipator," he would have treated the statement as equal to one of his own best jokes. Slavery was a thing he did not then want to have disturbed. He discountenanced all radical agitators of the subject, and especially in the border slave States, where he was able to hold them pretty well in check, except in Missouri. There they stood up and fought him, and in the end beat him. One of the rather curious results of this condition of things was that, when the States came to action on the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment, the one absolutely abolishing slavery, the three border slave States of Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, over which the President's influence was practically supreme, gave an adverse vote of four to one, while Missouri, with whose radical emancipationists he had continuously been at loggerheads, ratified the amendment by a legislative vote of one hundred and eleven ayes to forty nays.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding the President, at the beginning of his official term, opposed Anti-Slavery agitation and Anti-Slavery action with all his might, he promptly faced about as soon as he discovered that the subject was one that would not "down." No one ever worked harder to find a solution of a difficult problem than he did of the slavery question. He began to formulate plans to that end, the most distinguishing feature, however, being the spirit of compromise by which they were pervaded. All of them stopped before an ultimatum was reached. Besides his proclamation, which, as we have seen, applied to only a part of the slaves, he devised a measure that would have been applicable to all of them. In his special message of December, 1863, he proposed to Congress the submission of a constitutional amendment that would work universal liberation. There were conditions, however. One was that the slaves should be paid for by the Government; another that the masters might retain their uncompensated services until January 1, 1900; that is, for a period of thirty-seven years, unless they were sooner emancipated by the grave, as the most of them would be. (See Appendix.)
The President's somewhat fantastic proposition was not claimed by him to be for the bondman's benefit. He urged it as a measure of public economy, holding that, as slavery was the admitted cause of the Rebellion, the quickest and surest way to remove that cause would be by purchase of all the slaves, which, he insisted, "would shorten the war, and thus lessen the expenditure of money and blood."
The public did not take to the President's plan at all, especially the Abolitionists did not. They no more favored the buying of men by the Government than by anybody else. They held that if the master had no right to the person of his bondman, he had no right to payment for him. And as for an arrangement that might prolong slaveholding for thirty-seven years, they saw in it not only a measure of injustice to the men, women, and children then in servitude, the most of whom would be doomed to bondage for the rest of their natural lives, but a possible plan for side-tracking a genuine freedom movement.
In the proposition just considered we have not only the core of the President's policy during much of his official tenure, but an explanation of his mental operations. He was sentimentally opposed to slavery, but he was afraid of freedom. He dreaded its effect on both races. He was opposed to slavery more because it was a public nuisance than because of its injustice to the oppressed black man, whose condition, he did not believe, would be greatly, if at all, benefited by freedom. Hence he wanted manumission put off as long as possible. It was "ultimate extinction" he wanted, to be attended with payment to the master for his lost property. Another thing he favored—and which he seems to have thought entirely practicable—as a condition to liberation, was the black man's removal to a place or places out of contact with our white population.
But in entire fairness to Mr. Lincoln, it should be said that, although his proclamation was inoperative for the immediate release of any slaves, it was by no means wholly ineffectual. Its moral influence was considerable. It helped to hasten a movement that had, however, by that time become practically irresistible. Its political results were far more marked and important. If it did not fully restore cordiality between the President and the Abolition leaders, it prevented an open rupture. It served as a bridge between them. Although they never took Mr. Lincoln fully into their confidence again, the Abolitionists interpreted his proclamation as a concession and an abandonment of his previous policy, which it was much more in appearance than actually. At all events, it was splendid politics. The somewhat theatrical manner in which it was worked up and promulgated in installments, thus arousing in advance a widespread interest and curiosity, showed no little strategic ability. No more skillful move is recorded in the history of our parties and partisans than this act of Mr. Lincoln, by which he disarmed his Anti-Slavery critics without giving them any material advantage or changing the actual situation. I am not now speaking of the motive underlying the proclamation of the President, but of its effect. Without it he could not have been renominated and re-elected.
Another observation, in order to be entirely just to Mr. Lincoln, after what has been stated, would at this point seem to be called for. There is no doubt that from the first he was at heart an Anti-Slavery man, which is saying a good deal for one born in Kentucky, raised in southern Indiana and southern Illinois, and who was naturally of a conservative turn of mind. Nevertheless, he was never an Abolitionist. He was opposed to immediate—what he called "sudden"—emancipation. He recognized the "right"—his own word—of the slave-owner to his pound of flesh, either in the person of his bondman or a cash equivalent. He was strongly prejudiced against the negro. Of that fact we have the evidence in his colonization ideas. He favored the banishment of our American-born black people from their native land. It was a cruel proposition. True, the President did move from his first position, which, as we have seen, was far from that occupied by the Abolitionists, but from first to last he was more of a follower than leader in the procession.
And here the author wishes to add, in justice to himself, that if, by reason of anything he has said in this chapter, or elsewhere in this work, in criticism of Mr. Lincoln's dealings with the slavery issue, he should be accused of unfriendliness toward the great martyr President, he enters a full and strong denial. He holds that, in view of all the difficulties besetting him, Mr. Lincoln did well, although he might have done better. Much allowance, must be made to one situated as he was. He undoubtedly deserves the most of the encomiums that have been lavished upon him. At the same time, the conclusion is inevitable that his fame as a statesman will ultimately depend less upon his treatment of the slavery issue than upon any other part of his public administration. The fact will always appear that it was the policy of Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, and other advocates of the radical cure, with whom the President was in constant opposition, that prevailed in the end, and with a decisiveness that proves it to have been feasible and sound from the beginning. Mr. Lincoln's most ultra prescription—his Emancipation Proclamation—was ineffective. If it was intended to eradicate slavery altogether, it was too narrow; if to free the slaves of Rebels only, it was too broad. So with his other propositions. His thirty-seven-year-liberation scheme, his "tinkering off" policy (as he called it) for Missouri, his reconstruction proposals, and his colonization projects, all failed. Indeed, if we take his official action from first to last, it is a question whether the President, owing to his extreme conservatism, was not more of an obstructionist than a promoter of the Anti-Slavery cause.
Not that any change of opinion on the point just stated will materially affect the general estimate in which Mr. Lincoln is held. Although his popularity, due, in part at least, to the extravagance of over-zealous admirers, has without much doubt already passed its perihelion, it can never disappear or greatly diminish. His untiring and exhaustive labors for the union, the many lovable traits of his unique personality, his unquestionable honesty, his courage, his patriotism, and, above all, his tragic taking off, have unalterably determined his place in the regard of his countrymen. Indeed, so strong is the admiration in which he is held, that it would be vain to attempt to disabuse many, by any amount of proof and argument, of the opinion that African slavery in this country was actually and exclusively killed by a presidential edict. So firmly fixed in the popular belief is that historical myth that it will undoubtedly live for many years, if not generations, although history in the end will right it like all other misunderstandings.
Mr. Lincoln had his weaknesses and limitations, like other men. All must admit that his treatment of the slavery question was not without its mistakes. It has always seemed to the writer that his most ardent admirers seriously blunder in claiming superlativeness for him in that regard, and more especially in giving him credit for results that were due to the efforts of other men. His fame is secure without such misappropriation. He would not ask it if living, and it will in due time be condemned by history.
The original and distinctive Abolition movement that was directed against slavery in all parts of the land without regard to State or territorial lines, and because it was assumed to be wrong in principle and practice, may be said, as far as the country at large was concerned, to have culminated at the advent of the Republican party. To a considerable extent it disappeared, but its disappearance was that of one stream flowing into or uniting with another. The union of the two currents extended, but did not intensify, the Anti-Slavery sentiment of the country. It diluted it and really weakened it. It brought about a crisis of great peril to the cause of Anti-Slaveryism—in some respects the most critical through which it was called upon to pass. Many of those attaching themselves to the Republican party, as the new political organization was called, were not in sympathy with Abolitionism. They were utterly opposed to immediate emancipation; or, for that matter, to emancipation of any kind. They wanted slavery to remain where it was, and were perfectly willing that it should be undisturbed. They disliked the blacks, and did not want to have them freed, fearing that if set at liberty they would overrun what was then free soil.
The writer recollects hearing a prominent man in the new party, who about that time was making a public speech, declare with great emphasis that, "as for the niggers, they are where they ought to be." The speaker on that occasion was one of many who belonged to the débris of the broken-up Whig party, and who drifted into Republicanism because there was no other more attractive harbor to go to. One of these men was Abraham Lincoln, whom I heard declare in his debate with Douglas at Alton, Illinois: "I was with the old-line Whigs from the origin to the end of their party." The Whigs were never an Anti-Slavery party. The recruits to Republicanism from that quarter were generally very tender on "the nigger question," and the most they were prepared to admit was that they were opposed to slavery's extension. These men largely dominated the new party. They generally dictated its platforms, which, compared with earlier Abolition utterances, were extremely timid, and they had much to do with making party nominations. Their favorite candidates were not those whose opinions on the slavery question were positive and well understood, but those whose views were unsettled if not altogether unknown. When General Frémont was nominated for the Presidency, not one in ten of those supporting him knew what his opinions on that subject were, and a good many of them did not care. Mr. Lincoln was accepted in much the same way.
It is true that, from certain expressions about the danger to our national house from being "half free" and "half slave," and other generalizations of a more or less academic sort, it was known that Mr. Lincoln was antagonistic to slavery; but as to whether he favored that institution's immediate or speedy extinguishment, and, if so, by what measures, was altogether unknown. We now know, from what has been set forth in another chapter, that at the time of his first nomination and election, he had very few things in common with the Abolitionists. He then evidently had no thought of being hailed as the "liberator of a race." He preferred, for the time at least, that the race in question should remain where it was, and as it was, unless it could be bodily transported to some other country and be put under the protection of some other flag.
He did not break with the Abolitionists, although he kept on the edge of a quarrel with them, and especially with what he called the "Greeley faction," a good part of the time. He never liked them, but he was a shrewd man—a born politician—and was too sagacious to discard the principal round in the ladder by which he had climbed to eminence. He managed to keep in touch with the Anti-Slavery movement through all its steady advancement, but, as elsewhere stated, it was as a follower rather than as a leader.
While a resident of the slave State of Missouri, I twice voted for Mr. Lincoln, which was some evidence of my personal feeling toward him. Both times I did it somewhat reluctantly. On the first occasion there were four candidates. Breckenridge and Bell were Southern men—both by residence and principle—and had no claim on Anti-Slavery support. But with Douglas the case was different. He had quarreled with the pro-slavery leaders, although of his own party. He had defied President Buchanan in denouncing border-ruffianism in Kansas. He had refused to give up his "popular sovereignty" dogma, although it clearly meant ultimate free soil. The slave-masters hated him far more than they did Lincoln. I heard them freely discuss the matter. They were more afraid of the vindictiveness of the fiery Douglas than of the opposition of good-hearted, conservative Lincoln. In my opinion there was good reason for that feeling. Douglas, as President, would undoubtedly have pushed the war for the union with superior energy, and slavery would have suffered rougher treatment from his hands than it did from Mr. Lincoln's. There was another reason why the slaveholders preferred the election of Lincoln to that of Douglas. Lincoln's election would furnish the better pretext for the rebellion on which they were bent, and which they had already largely planned. They were resolved to defeat Douglas at all hazards, and they succeeded.
Douglas had been very distasteful to the Abolitionists. They called him a "dough-face." Nevertheless, quite a number of them where I lived in Missouri voted for him. Missouri was the only State he carried, and there he had less than five hundred majority. He got more than that many free-soil votes. I was strongly tempted to give him mine. Chiefly on account of political associations, I voted for Lincoln.
When it came to the second election, I again voted for Mr. Lincoln with reluctance. The principal reason for my hesitancy was his treatment of the Anti-Slavery people of the border slave States, and especially of Missouri. The grounds for my objection on that score will appear in the next chapter, which deals with the Missouri embroglio, as it was called.
From what has just been stated, it will be seen that the cause of Anti-Slaveryism had, at the formation of the Republican party, reached a most perilous crisis. It was in danger of being submerged and suffocated by unsympathetic, if not positively unfriendly, associations. It ran the risk, after so many years of toil and conflict, of being undone by those in whose support it was forced to confide. Such would undoubtedly have been its fate if, owing to circumstances over which no political party or other organization of men had control, the current of Anti-Slavery sentiment had not risen to a flood that swept all before it.
It is rather a curious circumstance that, at the crisis just alluded to, the nearest approach to original Abolitionism that was to be found, was in a slave State. In Missouri there was an organized opposition to slavery that had been maintained for several years, and which was never abandoned. The vitality displayed by this movement was undoubtedly due in large measure to the inspiration of the man who was its originator, if not its leader. That man was Thomas H. Benton. Whether Benton was ever an Abolitionist or not, has been a much-disputed question, but one thing is certain, and that is that the men who sat at his feet, who were his closest disciples and imbibed the most of his spirit—such as B. Gratz Brown, John How, the Blairs, the Filleys, and other influential Missourians,—were Abolitionists. Some of them weakened under the influence of the national administration, but not a few of them maintained their integrity. Even in the first days of the Civil War, when all was chaos there, an organization was maintained, although at one time its only working and visible representatives consisted of the members of a committee of four men—a fifth having withdrawn—who were B. Gratz Brown, afterwards a United States Senator; Thomas C. Fletcher, afterwards Governor of the State; Hon. Benjamin R. Bonner, of St. Louis, and the writer of this narrative. They issued an appeal that was distributed all over the State, asking those in sympathy with their views to hold fast to their principles, and to keep up the contest for unconditional freedom. To that appeal there was an encouraging number of favorable responses.
And thus it was that when Abolitionism may be said to have been lost by merger elsewhere, it remained in its independence and integrity in slaveholding Missouri, where it kept up a struggle for free soil, and in four years so far made itself master of the situation that a constitutional State convention, chosen by popular vote, adopted an ordinance under which an emancipationist Governor issued his proclamation, declaring that "hence and forever no person within the jurisdiction of the State shall be subject to any abridgment of liberty, except such as the law shall prescribe for the common good, or know any master but God."
The writer entered on this work with no purpose of relating or discussing the story of the Republican party, in whole or in any part. His subject was Abolitionism, and his task would now be completed but for the movement in the State of Missouri, to which reference has just been made. That manifestation, he thinks, is deserving of recognition, both on its own account and as a continuation of the original movement, and he is the more inclined to contribute to its discussion because he was then a Missourian by residence, and had something to do with its successful prosecution.