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Title: History of American Abolitionism

Author: F. G. De Fontaine

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HISTORY

OF

AMERICAN ABOLITIONISM;

Its Four Great Epochs,

EMBRACING NARRATIVES OF THE

TOGETHER WITH A

HISTORY OF THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY.

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK HERALD.)

BY F. G. DE FONTAINE.

NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON & Co.
1861.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one,
By F. G. de FONTAINE,
in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York.

CHAS. CRASKE,
Stereotyper.

BARTON & SON,
Printers,
111 Fulton Street, N. Y.

[Pg 3]

INTRODUCTION.

The following pages originally appeared in the New York Herald, of February 2d, 1861. By request, they have been reproduced in their present shape, with the view of preserving, in a form more compact than that of a newspaper, the valuable facts embraced.

Without an extensive range of research it is almost impossible to acquire the information which is thus compiled, and, at the present time, especially, it is believed that the publication of these facts will be desirable to the reading community.

F. G. de F.

HISTORY OF AMERICAN ABOLITIONISM.

CHAPTER I.

One of the commanding characteristics of the present age is the spirit of agitation, collision and discord which has broken forth in every department of social and political life. While it has been an era of magnificent enterprises and unrivalled prosperity, it has likewise been an era of convulsion, which has well nigh upturned the foundations of the government. Never was this truth more evident than at the present moment. A single topic occupies the public mind—Union or Disunion—and is one of pre-eminently absorbing interest to every citizen. Upon this issue the entire nation has been involved in a moral distemper, that threatens its utter and irrevocable dissolution. Union—the child of compact, the creature of social and political tolerance—stands face to face with Disunion, the natural off-spring of that anti-slavery sentiment, which has ever warred against the interests of[Pg 4] the people and the elements of true government, and struggles for the maintenance of that sacred pledge by which the United States have heretofore been bound in a common brotherhood. Like the marvellous tent given by the fairy Banou to Prince Achmed, which, when folded up, became an ornament in the delicate hands of women, but, spread out, afforded encampment to mighty armies; so is this question of abolitionism, to which the present overwhelming trouble of our land is to be traced, in its capacity to encompass all things, and its ability to attach itself even to the amenities and refinements of life. It has entered into everything, great and small, high and low, political, theological, social and moral, and in one section has become the standard by which all excellence is to be judged. Under the guise of philanthropic reform, it has pursued its course with energy, boldness and unrelenting bitterness, until it has grown from “a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand” into the dimensions of the tempest which is to-day lowering over the land charged with the elements of destruction. Commencing with a pretended love for the black race, it has arrived at a stage of restless, uncompromising fanaticism which will be satisfied with nothing short of the consummation of its wildest hopes. It has become the grand question of the day—of politics, of ethics, of expediency, of justice, of conscience, and of law, covering the whole field of human society and divine government.

In this view of the subject, and in view also of the surrounding unhappy circumstances of the country which have their origin in this agitation, we give below a history of abolition, from the period it commenced to exist as an active element in the affairs of the nation down to the present moment.

ABOLITIONISTS AND THEIR OBJECTS.

There are two classes of persons opposed to the continued existence of slavery in the United States. The first are those who are actuated by sentiments of philanthropy and humanity, but are at the same time no less opposed to any disturbance of the peace or tranquility of the Union, or to any infringement of the powers of the States composing the confederacy. Among these may be classed the society of “Friends,” one of whose established principles is an abhorrence of war in all its forms, and the cultivation of peace and good will amongst mankind. As far back as 1670, the ancient records of their society refer to the peaceful and exemplary efforts of the sect to prevent the holding of slaves by any of their number; and a quaint incident is related of an eccentric “Friend,” who, at one of their monthly meetings, “seated himself among the audience with a bladder of bullock’s blood secreted under his mantle, and at length broke the quiet stillness of the worship by rising in full view of the congregation, piercing the bladder, spilling the blood upon the floor and seats, and exclaiming with all the solemnity of an inspired prophet, ‘Thus shall the Lord spill the blood of those that traffic in the blood of their fellow men.’”

The second class are the real ultra abolitionists—the “reformers” who, in the language of Henry Clay, are “resolved to persevere at all hazards, and without regard to any consequences, however calamitous they may be. With them the rights of property are nothing; the deficiency of the powers of the general government is nothing; the acknowledged and incontestible powers of the State are nothing; civil war, a dissolution of the Union, and the overthrow of a government in which are concentrated the fondest hopes of the civilized world, are nothing. They are for the immediate abolition of slavery, the prohibition of the [Pg 5]removal of slaves from State to State, and the refusal to admit any new State comprising within its limits the institution of domestic slavery—all these being but so many means conducive to the accomplishment of the ultimate but perilous end at which they avowedly and boldly aim—so many short stages, as it were, in the long and bloody road to the distant goal at which they would ultimately arrive. Their purpose is abolition, ‘peaceably if it can, forcibly if it must.’”

Utterly destitute of Constitutional or other rightful power; living in totally distinct communities, as alien to the communities in which the subject on which they would operate resides, as far as concerns political power over that subject, as if they lived in Asia or Africa, they nevertheless promulgate to the world their purpose to immediately convert without compensation four millions of profitable and contented slaves into four millions of burdensome and discontented negroes.

This idea, which originated and still generally prevails in New England, is the result of that puritanical frenzy which has always characterized that section of the country, and made it the natural breeding ground of the most absurd “isms” ever concocted. The Puritans of to-day are not less fanatical than were the Puritans of two centuries ago. In fact, they have progressed rather than retrograded. Their god then was the angry, wrathful, jealous god of the Jews—the Supreme Being now is the creation of their own intellects, proportioned in dimensions to the depth and fervor of their individual understandings. Then the Old Testament was their rule of faith. Now neither old nor new, except in so far as it accords with their consciences, is worth the paper upon which it is written. Their creeds are begotten of themselves, and their high priests are those who best represent their peculiar “notions.” The same spirit which, in the days of Robespierre and Marat, abolished the Lord’s day and worshipped Reason, in the person of a harlot, yet survives to work other horrors. In this age, however, and in a community like the present, a disguise must be worn; but it is the old threadbare advocacy of human rights, which the enlightenment of the age condemns as impracticable. The decree has gone forth which strikes at God, by striking at all subordination and law, and under the specious cry of reform it is demanded that every pretended evil shall be corrected, or society become a wreck—that the sun must be stricken from the heavens if a spot is found upon his disc.

The abolitionist is a practical atheist. In the language of one of their congregational ministers—Rev. Henry Wright, of Massachusetts:—

“The God of humanity is not the God of slavery. If so, shame upon such a God. I scorn him. I will never bow to his shrine; my head shall go off with my hat when I take it off to such a God as that. If the Bible sanctions slavery, the Bible is a self-evident falsehood. And, if God should declare it to be right, I would fasten the chain upon the heel of such a God, and let the man go free. Such a God is a phantom.”

The religion of the people of New England is a peculiar morality, around which the minor matters of society arrange themselves like ferruginous particles around a loadstone. All the elements obey this general law. Accustomed to doing as it pleases, New England “morality” has usually accomplished what it has undertaken. It has attacked the Sunday mails, assaulted Free Masonry, triumphed over the intemperate use of ardent spirits, and finally engaged in an onslaught upon the slavery of the South. Its channels have been societies, meetings, papers, lectures, sermons, resolutions, memorials, protests, legislation, private discussion, public addresses; in a word, every conceivable method whereby appeal may be brought to mind. Its spirit has been agitation!—and its language, fruits and measures have partaken throughout of a character that is thoroughly warlike.

[Pg 6]“In language no element ever flung out more defiance of authority, contempt of religion, or authority to man. As to agency, no element on earth has broken up more friendships and families, societies and parties, churches and denominations, or ruptured more organizations, political, social or domestic. And as to measures! What spirit of man ever stood upon earth with bolder front and wielded fiercer weapons? Stirring harangues! Stern resolutions! Fretful memorials! Angry protests! Incendiary pamphlets at the South! Hostile legislation at the North! Underground railroads at the West! Resistance to the Constitution! Division of the Union! Military contribution! Sharpe’s rifles! Higher law! If this is not belligerence enough, Mohammed’s work and the old Crusades were an appeal to argument and not to arms.”

What was philanthrophy in our forefathers has become misanthrophy in their descendants, and compassion for the slave has given way to malignity against the master. Consequences are nothing. The one idea preeminent above all others is abolition!

It is worthy of notice in this connection that most abolitionists know little or nothing of slavery and slaveholders beyond what they have learned from excited, caressed and tempted fugitives, or from a superficial, accidental or prejudiced observation. From distorted facts, gross misrepresentations, and frequently malicious caricatures, they have come to regard Southern slaveholders as the most unprincipled men in the Universe, with no incentive but avarice, no feeling but selfishness, and no sentiment but cruelty.

Their information is acquired from discharged seamen, runaway slaves, agents who have been tarred and feathered, factious politicians, and scurrilous tourists; and no matter how exaggerated may be the facts, they never fail to find willing believers among this class of people.

In the Church, the missionary spirit with which the men of other times and nobler hearts intended to embrace all, both bond and free, has been crushed out. New methods of Scriptural interpretation have been discovered, under which the Bible brings to light things of which Jesus Christ and his disciples had no conception. Assemblings for divine worship have been converted into occasions for the secret dissemination of incendiary doctrines, and thus a common suspicion has been generated of all Northern agency in the diffusion of religious instruction among the slaves. Of the five broad beautiful bands of Christianity thrown around the North and the South—Presbyterian, old school and new, Episcopalian, Methodist and Baptist, to say nothing of the divisions of Bible, tract and missionary societies—three are already ruptured—and whenever an anniversary brings together the various delegates of these organizations, the sad spectacle is presented of division, wrangling, vituperation and reproach, that gives to religion and its professors anything but that meekness of spirit with which it is wont to be invested.

Politically, the course of abolition has been one of constant aggression upon the South.

At the time of the Old Confederation, the amount of territory owned by the Southern States was 647,202 square miles; and the amount owned, by the Northern States, 164,081. In 1783, Virginia ceded to the United States, for the common benefit, all her immense territory northwest of the river Ohio. In 1787, the Northern States appropriated it to their own exclusive use by passing the celebrated ordinance of that year, whereby Virginia and all her sister States were excluded from the benefits of the territory. This was the first in the series of aggressions.

Again, in April, 1803, the United States purchased from France, for fifteen millions of dollars, the territory of Louisiana, comprising an area of 1,189,112 square miles, the whole of which was slaveholding territory. In 1821, by the[Pg 7] passage of the Missouri Compromise, 964,667 square miles of this was converted into free territory.

Again, by the treaty with Spain, of February, 1819, the United States gained the territory from which the present State of Florida was formed, with an area of 59,268 square miles, and also the Spanish title of Oregon, from which they acquired an area of 341,463 square miles. Of this cession, Florida only has been allowed to the Southern States, while the balance—nearly six-sevenths of the whole—was appropriated by the North.

Again, by the Mexican cession, was acquired 526,078 square miles, which the North attempted to appropriate under the pretence of the Mexican laws, but which was prevented by the measures of the Compromise of 1850. Of slave territory cut off from Texas, there have been 44,662 square miles.

To sum this up, the total amount of territory acquired under the Constitution has been, by the

Of all this territory the Southern States have been permitted to enjoy only 283,713 square miles, while the Northern States have been allowed 2,083,889 square miles, or between seven and eight times more than has been allowed to the South.

The following are some of the invasions that have been from time to time proposed upon the Constitution in the halls of Congress by these agitators:

1. That the clause allowing the representation of three-fifths of the slaves shall be obliterated from the Constitution; or, in other words, that the South, already in a vast and increasing minority, shall be still further reduced in the scale of insignificance, and thus, on every attempted usurpation of her rights, be far below the protection of even a Presidential veto.

Next has been demanded the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, in the forts, arsenals, navy yards and other public establishments of the United States. What object have the abolitionists had for raising all this clamor about a little patch of soil ten miles square, and a few inconsiderable places thinly scattered over the land—a mere grain of sand upon the beach—unless it be to establish the precedent of Congressional interference, which would enable them to make a wholesale incursion upon the constitutional rights of the South, and to drain from the vast ocean of alleged national guilt its last drop? Does any one suppose that a mere microscopic concession like this would alone appease a conscience wounded and lacerated by the “sin of slavery?”

Another of these aggressions is that which was proposed under the pretext of regulating commerce between the States—namely, that no slave, for any purpose and under any circumstances whatever, shall be carried by his lawful owner from one slaveholding State to another; or, in other words, that where slavery now is there it shall remain forever, until by its own increase the slave population shall outnumber the white race, and thus by a united combination of causes—the fears of the master, the diminution in value of his property and the exhausted condition of the soil—the final purposes of fanaticism may be accomplished.

Still another in the series of aggressions was that attempted by the Wilmot Proviso, by which Congress was called upon to prohibit every slaveholder from[Pg 8] removing with his slaves into the territory acquired from Mexico—a territory as large as the old thirteen States originally composing the Union. It appears to have been forgotten that whether slavery be admitted upon one foot of territory or not, it cannot affect the question of its sinfulness in the slightest degree, and that if every nook and corner of the national fabric were open to the institution, not a single slave would be added to the present number, or that, if excluded, their number would not be a single one the less.

We might also refer to the armed and bloody opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law, to the passage of Personal Liberty Bills, to political schemes in Congress and out, and to systematic agitation everywhere, with a view to stay the progress of the South, contract her political power, and eventually lead, at her expense, if not of the Union itself, to the utter expurgation of this “tremendous national sin.”

In short, the abolitionists have contributed nothing to the welfare of the slave or of the South. While over one hundred and fifty millions have been expended by slaveholders in emancipation, except in those sporadic cases where the amount was capital invested in self-glorification, the abolitionists have not expended one cent.

More than this: They have defeated the very objects at which they have aimed. When Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, or some other border State has come so near to the passage of gradual emancipation laws that the hopes of the real friends of the movement seemed about to be realized, abolitionism has stepped in, and, with frantic appeals to the passions of the negroes, through incendiary publications, dashed them to the ground, tightening the fetters of the slave, sharpening authority, and producing a reaction throughout the entire community that has crushed out every incipient thought of future manumission.

Such have been the obvious fruits of abolition. Church, state and society! Nothing has escaped it. Nowhere pure, nor peaceable, nor gentle, nor easily entreated, nor full of mercy and good fruits; but everywhere forward, scowling, uncompromising, and fierce, breaking peace, order and structure at every step, crushing with its foot what would not bow to its will; defying government, despising the Church, dividing the country, and striking Heaven itself if it dared to obstruct its progress; purifying, pacifying, promising nothing, but marking its entire pathway by disquiet, schism and ruin.

We come now to the train of historical facts upon which we rely in proof of the foregoing assertions.

[Pg 9]

THE FIRST EPOCH.

From 1787 to 1820.

CHAPTER II.

The first great epoch in the history of our country at which the spirit of abolitionism displayed itself was immediately preceding the formation of the present government. From the close of the Revolutionary War, in 1783, to the sitting of the Constitutional Convention, was a space of only four years. Two years more brings us to the adoption of the Constitution, in 1789. It was in the summer of 1787, and at the very time the Convention in Philadelphia was framing that instrument, that the Congress in New York was framing the ordinance which was passed on the 13th of July, 1787, by which slavery was forever excluded from all the territory northwest of the river Ohio, which, three years before, had been generously ceded to the United States by Virginia, and out of which have since been organised the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa.

According to the first census, taken in 1790, under the Constitution, when every State in the Union, with one exception, was a slave State, the number of slaves was as follows:—

In 1820, New York had 10,088 slaves. In 1827, however, by virtue of an Act, passed in 1817, they were declared free, and emancipated, without compensation to their owners. Even in 1830, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania had slaves: New Jersey containing 2,254. Since 1790, the increase of slaves has been at the rate of thirty per cent. each decade.

At this period numerous emancipation societies were formed, comprised principally of the Society of Friends, and petitions were presented to Congress, praying for the abolition of slavery. These were received with but little comment, referred, and reported upon by a committee. The reports stated that the general government had no power to abolish slavery as it existed in the several States, and that the States themselves had exclusive jurisdiction over the subject.[Pg 10] This sentiment was generally acquiesced in, and satisfaction and tranquility ensued, the abolition societies thereafter limiting their exertions, in respect to the black population, to offices of humanity within the scope of existing laws.

In fact, if we carry ourselves by historical research back to that day, and ascertain men’s opinions by authentic records still existing among us, it will be found that there was no great diversity of opinion between the North and the South upon the subject of slavery. The great ground of objection to it then was political; that it weakened the social fabric; that, taking the place of free labor, society was less strong and labor less productive; and both sections, with an exhibition of no little acerbity of temper and violence of language, ascribed the evil to the injurious and aggrandizing policy of Great Britain, by whom it was first entailed upon the Colonies. The terms of reprobation were then more severe in the South than the North. It is a notorious fact that some of our Northern forefathers were then the most aggravated slave dealers. They transported the miserable captives from Africa, sold them at the South, and were well paid for their work; and, when emancipation laws forbade the prolongation of slavery at the North, there are living witnesses who saw the crowds of negroes assembled along the shores of the New England and the Middle States to be shipped to latitudes where their bondage would be perpetual. Their posterity toil to-day in the fields of the Southern planter.

It is a remarkable fact, also, that of the slaves imported into the United States during a period of eighteen years, from 1790 to 1808, not less than nine-tenths were imported for and by account of citizens of the Northern States and subjects of Great Britain—imported in Northern and British vessels, by Northern and British men, and delivered to Northern born and British born consignees.

The trade was thus carried on, with all its historic inhumanity, by the sires and grandsires of the very men and women, who, for thirty years, have been denouncing slavery as a sin against God, and slaveholders as the vilest class of men and tyrants who ever disgraced a civilised community; and the very wealth in which, in a large degree, these agitators now revel, has descended to them as the fruit of the slave trade in which their fathers grew fat.

The following statistics of the port of Charleston, S. C., from the year 1804 to 1808, will more plainly illustrate this remark:—

[Pg 11]It is related, that during the debate on the Missouri question, a Senator from South Carolina introduced in the Senate of the United States a document from the Custom House of Charleston, exhibiting the names and owners of vessels engaged in the African slave trade. In reading the document the name of De Wolfe was repeatedly called. De Wolfe, who was the Senator elect from Rhode Island, was present, but had not been qualified. The Carolina Senator was called to order. “Order!” “Order!” echoed through the Senate Chamber. “It is contrary to order to call the name of a Senator,” said a distinguished gentleman. The Senator contended he was not out of order, for the Senator from Rhode Island had not been qualified, and consequently was not entitled to a seat. He appealed to the Chair. The Chair replied, “You are correct, sir; proceed;” and proceed he did, calling the name of De Wolfe so often, that before he had finished the document, he had proved the honorable gentleman the importer of three-fourths of the “poor Africans” brought to the Charleston market, and the Rhode Island abolitionist bolted, amid the sympathies of his comrades and the sneers of the auditors.

Such was the aspect of affairs with reference to this question at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. The spirit of affection created and fostered by the revolution—the cords binding together a common country in a common struggle and a common destiny—were too strong in the breasts of our revolutionary fathers for them to countenance the feeble efforts even of those prompted by motives of humanity for the immediate emancipation of the slaves, and by almost the entire North of that period they were regarded with general disfavor, as an unwarrantable interference with an already established institution of the country. The consequence was that they sank into disrepute, and the country was blessed with and prospered under their comparative cessation for a number of years. This hostile feeling long lay dormant, and it was not until the year 1818, when Missouri applied for admission into the Union as a State, that the period of quiet was interrupted, and the little streams of abolitionism that had been quietly forming, merged into the foul and noisome current which is now devastating the land, has undermined and destroyed the Union, and is exerting its blighting influence upon every department of the political and social fabric.

[Pg 12]

SECOND EPOCH.

CHAPTER III.

Probably there has never been in the history of the United States, except at the present time, a more critical moment, arising from the violence of domestic excitement, than the agitation of the Missouri question from 1818 to 1821. On the 18th day of December, 1818, the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States presented before that body a memorial of the Legislature of the Territory of Missouri, praying that they might be admitted to form a Constitution and State government upon “an equal footing with the original States.” Here originated the difficulty. Slavery existed in the Territory proposed to be erected into an independent State. The proposition was therefore to admit Missouri as a slave State, which involved three very essential and important features. These were:—

1. The recognition of slavery therein as a State institution by the national sovereignty.

2. The guarantee of protection to the ownership of her slave property by the laws of the United States, as in the original States under the Constitution.

3. That the right of representation in the National Legislature should be apportioned on her slave population, as in the original States. This was a recognition of slavery, which at once aroused the interest of the people in every section of the Union.

The petition was received, read and reported upon, and in February, 1819, Mr. Tallmadge, of New York, proposed an amendment “prohibiting slavery except for the punishment of crimes, and that all children born in the said State after the admission thereof into the Union, shall be free at the age of twenty-five years.”

This passed the House, but was lost in the Senate. The excitement, not only in Congress, but throughout the Union, soon became intense, and for eighteen months the country was agitated from one extreme to the other. In many of the Northern States meetings were called, resolutions were passed instructing members how to vote, prayers ascended from the churches, and the pulpit began to be the medium of the incendiary diatribes for which it has since become so famous.

In both branches of Congress amendments were passed and rejected without number, while the arguments on both sides brought out the strongest views of the respective champions.

On one hand it was maintained that the compromise of the federal constitution regarding slavery respected only its existing limits at the time; that it was remote from the views of the framers of the Constitution to have the domain of slavery extended on that basis; that the fundamental principles of the American Revolution and of the government and institutions erected upon it were hostile to slavery; that the compromise of the Constitution was simply a toleration of things that[Pg 13] were, and not a basis of things that were to be; that these securities of slavery, as it existed, would be forfeited by an extension of the system; that the honor of the republic before the world, and its moral influence with mankind in favor of freedom, were identified with the advocacy of principles of universal emancipation; that the act of 1787, which established the Territorial government north and west of the river Ohio, prohibiting slavery forever therefrom, was a public recognition and avowal of the principles and designs of the people of the United States in regard to new States and Territories north and west; and that the proposal to establish slavery in Missouri was a violation of all these great and fundamental principles.

On the other hand, it was urged that slavery was incorporated in the system of society as established in Louisiana, which comprehended the Territory of Missouri, when purchased from France in 1803; that the faith of the United States was pledged by treaty to all the inhabitants of that wide domain to maintain their rights and privileges on the same footing with the people of the rest of the country; and consequently, that slavery, being a part of their state of society, it would be a violation of engagements to abolish it without their consent. Nor could the government, as they maintained, prescribe the abolition of slavery to any part of said Territory as a condition of being erected into a State, if they were otherwise entitled to it. It might as well, as they said, be required of them to abolish any other municipal regulation, or to annihilate any other attribute of sovereignty. If the government had made an ill-advised treaty in the purchase of Louisiana, they maintained it would be manifest injustice to make its citizens suffer on that account. They claimed that they were received as a slaveholding community on the same footing with the slave States, and that the existence or non-existence of slavery could not be made a question when they presented themselves at the door of the Capitol of the republic for a State charter.

After much bitter and acrimonious discussion, the question was finally, through the exertions of Henry Clay, settled by a compromise, and a bill was passed for the admission of Missouri without any restriction as to slavery, but prohibiting it throughout the United States north of latitude thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes.

Missouri was not declared independent until August, 1821. Previous to the passage of the bill for its admission, the people had formed a State constitution, a provision of which required the Legislature to pass a law “To prevent free negroes from coming to and settling in the State.” When the constitution was presented to Congress, this provision was strenuously opposed. The contest occupied a greater part of the session; but Missouri was finally admitted on condition that no laws should be passed by which any free citizen of the United States should be prevented from enjoying those rights within the State to which he was entitled by the Constitution of the United States.

Such was the Missouri Compromise, and though its settlement once more brought repose to the country and strengthened the bonds of fraternity and union between the States, its agitation in Congress was like the opening of a foul ulcer—the beginning of that domineering, impertinent, ill-timed, vociferous and vituperative opposition which has ever since been the leading characteristic of the abolition movement.

The “settlement” of the question in Congress seemed to be merely the signal[Pg 14] for its agitation among the non-slaveholding States. Fanatics sprang up like mushrooms, and, “in the name of God,” proclaimed the enormity of slavery and eternal damnation to all who indulged in the wicked luxury.

Among the earliest and most notable of these philanthropic reformers was one Benjamin Lundy, who, in the year 1821, commenced the publication of a monthly periodical called the “Genius of Universal Emancipation,” which was successively published at Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington City, and frequently en route during his travels wherever he could find a press. It is related of him that at one time he traversed the free States lecturing, collecting, obtaining subscribers, stirring up the people, writing for his paper, getting it printed where he could, stopping to read the “proof” on the road, and directing and mailing his papers at the nearest post-office. Then, packing up in his trunk his column-rules, type, “heading” and “direction book,” he pushed along like a thorough-going pioneer. What this solitary “Friend”—for such he was—in this manner accomplished, he himself states in an appeal to the public in 1830. He says:—

“I have within the period above mentioned (ten years) sacrificed several thousands of dollars of my own hard earnings; I have travelled upwards of five thousand miles on foot and more than twenty thousand in other ways; have visited nineteen States of this Union, and held more than two hundred public meetings—have performed two voyages to the West Indies, by which means the emancipation of a considerable number of slaves has been effected, and I hope the way paved for the enfranchisement of many more.”

INSURRECTION AT CHARLESTON, S. C.

The year 1822 was marked by one of the most nefarious negro plots ever developed in the history of the country. The first revelation was made to the Mayor of the city of Charleston on the 30th of May, 1822, by a gentleman who had on the morning of the same day returned from the country, and obtained on his arrival an inkling of what was going on from a confidential slave, to whom the secret had been imparted.

Investigations were immediately set on foot, and one of the slaves who was apprehended, fearing a summary execution, confessed all he knew. He said he had known of the plot for some time; that it was very extensive, embracing an indiscrimate massacre of the whites, and that the blacks were to be headed by an individual who carried about him a charm which rendered him invulnerable. The period fixed for the rising was on Sunday, the 16th of June, at twelve o’clock at night.

Through the instrumentality of a colored class-leader in one of the churches, this information was corroborated, and it was ascertained that enlistment for the insurrection was being actively carried on in the colored community of the church. It appeared that three months before that time, a slave named Rolla, belonging to Governor Bennett, had communicated intelligence of the intended rising, saying that when this event occurred they would be aided in obtaining their liberty by people from St. Domingo and Africa, and that if they would make the first movement at the time above named, a force would cross from James Island and land at South Bay, march up and seize the arsenal and guardhouse; that another body would at the same time seize the arsenal on the Neck, and a third would rendezvous in the vicinity of his master’s mill. They would then sweep the town with fire and sword, not permitting a single white soul to escape.

[Pg 15]Startled by this terrible intelligence, the military were immediately ordered out and preparations made to suppress the first signs of an outbreak. Finding the city encompassed with patrols and a strict watch kept upon every movement, the negroes feared to carry out their designs, and when the period had passed for the explosion of the plot, the authorities proceeded with vigor to arrest all against whom they possessed information.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Pg 16]Religious fanaticism also had its share in the conspiracy at Charleston, as well as politics. The secession of a large body of blacks from the white Methodist church formed a hot-bed, in which the germ of insurrection was nursed into life. A majority of the conspirators belonged to the “African church,” an appellation which the seceders assumed after leaving the white Methodist church, and among those executed were several who had been class-leaders. Thus was religion made a cloak for the most diabolical crimes on record. It is the same at this day. The tirades of the North are calculated to drive the negro population of the South to bloody massacres and insurrections.

BRITISH INFLUENCE AND INTERFERENCE.

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

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

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

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

The first abolition society in Great Britain was established in 1823, and it is a fact worthy of note that the first public advocate in England of the doctrine of immediate and unconditional abolition was a woman—Elizabeth Herrick. In 1825, the Anti-Slavery Society commenced the circulation of the Monthly Anti-Slavery Reporter, which was edited by Zacharay Macaulay, Esq., the father of the late Thomas B. Macaulay, the essayist, historian and lord. Petitions began to be circulated, public meetings were held, and the Methodist Conferences took an active part in the movement, exhorting their brethren, “for the love of Christ,” to vote for no candidates not known to be pledged to the cause of abolition. Rectors, curates, doctors of divinity, members of Parliament and peers engaged in the work, and converts rapidly increased. Riots and disturbances resulted. In 1832, an [Pg 17]insurrection, fomented by abolition missionaries, broke out in the island of Jamaica, which was only terminated by a resort to the musket and gibbet—the usual fruit of these incendiary doctrines, wherever they have been circulated. In 1833, a bill was passed by the British government, by which, for a compensation of one hundred millions of dollars, eight hundred thousand slaves in the British West Indies received their liberation. This was followed, in 1843, by the abolition of slavery throughout the British dominions, which emancipated twelve millions more in the East Indies. The cause thus received a new impetus; societies sprang into life all over the United Kingdom; a correspondence was opened in every part of the world where negroes were held in bondage; lecturers were sent abroad, especially to the United States, to disseminate their doctrines and stir up rebellion, both among the people and the slaves; earnest endeavors were made to influence the policy of the non-slaveholding States of the North, and create a hatred for the South; and, in short, the abolition movement settled down in a determined warfare against the institution of slavery wherever it existed.

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

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

From this time forward the coalesced efforts of British and Northern influence to disturb the institution of slavery in the South, to render slave labor less valuable and incite the negroes to rebellion, have been continued with more or less system, occasionally threatening the stability of the Union; the whole object of Great Britain being, not the welfare of the slave, but the destruction of slave labor, whereby, through a system of conquest and forced labor, she would be able to supplant the United States, by producing her cotton from the fields of the Eastern world. With this end in view, and coupled perhaps with the idea that the abolition of slavery would break down our republican form of government, she resorted to every species of intrigue that promised success. Dissensions have been sown between the North and South; the “underground railroad” system has been established leading to her Canadian possessions; agitation and assault have been perseveringly maintained; the country has been flooded with tirades of every hue and kind against the institution; the Northern pulpit has been desecrated in its dedication to the work of stirring up strife; churches have been severed in twain, and Southern Christians denied fellowship with their Northern brethren, until the grand political climax has been reached of secession and revolution. It is safe to[Pg 18] say that from the time this plan of operation was digested in England, thirty years ago, there is scarcely a movement that has taken place on the chess-board of American abolitionism, which, under the guise of philanthropy, has not been dictated at Exeter Hall for the purpose of destroying the production of cotton and breaking down the free government of this country.

Among the more far-seeing and practical statesmen of Great Britain, however—men who have ever dissented from the ultra views of abolitionists—there is an evident alarm that this headlong policy that has been pursued will rebound upon the interests of the mother country. Already the subject has become a source of anxious consideration, and the people of England are beginning to look around for some relief from that dependence upon American institutions which has heretofore been the reliance and support of millions of their workers. They find that the example they have set, and the policy they have urged, does not promise to be altogether so beneficial to them as they supposed. In this connection it will be interesting, as a matter of history, to preserve the master rebuke of Lord Brougham to the unconditional abolitionists of Boston, who invited him to be present at the John Brown anniversary of the past year. He says:—

CHAPTER IV.

Probably no period in the history of the country has been more characterized by the spirit of reform and innovation than that embraced between the years 1825 and 1830. It then seemed as if all the social, moral and religious influences of the community had been gathered in a focus that was destined to annihilate the wickedness of man. Missionary enterprises, though in their youth, were full of vigor. Anniversaries were the occasion of an almost crazy excitement; religion assumed the shape of fanaticism; the churches were thrilled with the sudden idea that the millennium was at hand—the “evangelization of the world” never was blessed with fairer prospects—the “awakenings to grace” were on the most tremendous scale. Peace societies were formed—temperance societies flourished more than ever—Free Masonry was attacked, socially and politically—the Sabbath mail question became one of the absorbing topics of the day—theatres, lotteries, the treatment of the “poor Indian” by the general government—all came under the most rigorous religious review—the Colonization Society, established in 1816, enlarged its [Pg 19]operations, and, in short, the spirit of reform became epidemic, and the period one of unprecedented moral and political inquiry.

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

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

Various plans having the same end in view were likewise proposed, some of them evincing a remarkable ingenuity. One of these, in 1817, was to encourage, by all proper means, emancipation in the South; then to make arrangements with the non-slaveholding States to receive the freed negroes, and compel the latter, by law, if necessary, to reside in those States. By this means it was thought that a gradual change of “complexion” could be effected from natural causes, which would not take place unless the blacks were scattered, and that thus, from simple association and adventitious mixtures, the sable color would retire by degrees, and after a few generations a black person would be a rarity in the community.

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

Another proposition, which emanated from a distinguished gentleman in one of the Southern States, and filling one of the highest offices in the government of the United States, was that a grade of color should be fixed in all the slaveholding States at which a person should be declared free and entitled to all the rights of a citizen, even if born of a slave. He contended that this act would separate all such[Pg 20] persons from the negro race, and present a very considerable check to the progress of the black population, giving them at the same time new interests and feelings. The children thus emancipated, even if the parents should not be wholly fitted for it, would come into society with advantages nearly equal to those of the poorer classes of white people, and might work their way to independence as well, without any counteracting detriment to the public good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In its issue of October 30, 1828, we find the following:—

Another of its editorials on November, 15, 1828:—

“We are all equally interested in demolishing the fabric (of slavery) and we may as well go to work peaceably and reduce it brick by brick as to make it a matter of warfare, and throw our enterprise and industry into the opposite scale.”

In the course of time changes were made in the ownership of the paper, but one of its original proprietors is still its senior editor.

About this period William Lloyd Garrison made his appearance upon the stage, and he has been probably one of the most intensely hated, as well as one of the most sternly, severely and vociferously enthusiastic men in the Union. He is a native of Massachusetts, and at a very early age was placed in a printing office in Newburyport by his mother. Shortly after he was twenty-one years of age he set up a paper which he called the Free Press, which was read chiefly by a class of very advanced readers at the North. After this he removed to Vermont, and edited the Journal of the Times. This was as early as 1828. In September, 1829, he removed to Baltimore for the purpose of editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation, in company with Benjamin Lundy. While performing these duties, a Newburyport merchant, named Francis Todd, fitted out a small vessel, and filled it in Baltimore with slaves for the New Orleans market. Mr. Garrison noticed this fact in his paper, and commented upon it in terms so severe that Mr. Todd directed a suit to be brought against him for libel. He was thereupon tried, convicted and thrown in jail for non-payment of the fine (one hundred dollars and costs.) After an incarceration of fifty days, he was released on the payment of his fine, by Mr. Arthur Tappan, of this city, who, and his brother Lewis, before and since that time, have been chiefly celebrated for their efforts in the cause of abolition. In 1831, he[Pg 22] wrote a few paragraphs that bear out the idea we have advanced—that there was then more real philanthropy in the South than at the North. He says:—

“I issued proposals for the publication of the “Liberator” in Washington City, during my recent tour, for the purpose of exciting the minds of the people on the subject of slavery. Every place I visited gave fresh evidences of the fact that a greater revolution in public sentiment was to be effected in the free States, and particularly in New England, than at the South. I found contempt more bitter, opposition more active, detraction more relentless, prejudice more stubborn and apathy more frozen, than among the slaveowners themselves. I determined at every hazard to lift up the standard of emancipation in the eyes of the nation, within sight of Bunker Hill, and in the birthplace of liberty. I am in earnest; I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch. I will be heard. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue lift from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.”

From this time it may be said that the anti-slavery cause took its place among the moral enterprises of the day. It assumed a definite shape, and commenced that system of warfare which has since been unremittingly waged against the South.

During this year—1830—Mr. Tappan, Rev. S. S. Jocelyn, and others, projected the establishment of a seminary of learning at New Haven for the benefit of colored students; but, opposition manifesting itself, it was abandoned.

The first regularly organized convention of colored men ever assembled in the United States for a similar purpose also held a meeting this year, and aided and abetted by the Tappans, Jocelyns and other agitators of the period, attempted to devise ways and means for bettering their condition and that of their race. They reasoned that all distinctive differences made among men on account of their origin was wicked, unrighteous and cruel, and solemnly protested against every unjust measure and policy in the country having for its object the proscription of the colored people, whether state, national, municipal, social, civil or religious. In fact, white men and black seem to have started in the race together, consorting like brothers and sisters together in their aims and projects to accomplish the same end.

About this time publications began to be scattered through the South, whose direct tendency was to stir up insurrection among the slaves. The Liberator found its way mysteriously into the hands of the negroes, and individuals, under the garb of religion, were discovered in private consultation with the slaves. Suddenly, in August, 1831, the whole Union was startled by the announcement of an outbreak among the slaves of Southampton County, Va; and now commences the history of a career of violence and bloodshed that has marked every footstep of the abolition movement.

THE NAT TURNER INSURRECTION.

The leader of this outbreak was a slave named Nat Turner, and from him its name has been derived. Impelled by the belief that he was divinely called to be the deliverer of his oppressed countrymen, he succeeded in fixing the impression upon the minds of two or three others, his fellow slaves. Turner could read and write, and these acquirements gave him an influence over his associates. He was possessed, however, of little information, and, is represented to have been cowardly, cruel, and as he afterwards confessed, “a little credulous.” It was a matter of notoriety that “secret agents of abolition had corrupted and betrayed him.” However that may be, Nat declared that “he was advised” only to read[Pg 23] to the slaves, that “Jesus came not to bring peace, but a sword!” Such a tree produced fitting fruits.

About midnight on the Sabbath of the 21st of August, 1831, Turner, with his confederates, burst into his master’s house, and murdered every one of the white inmates. They were armed with knives and axes, and, in order to strike terror into the whites, most shockingly mangled the bodies of their victims. Neither helpless infancy nor female loveliness were spared. They then, by threats of death, compelled all the slaves to join them who would not do it voluntarily, and, exciting themselves to fury by ardent spirits, they proceeded to the next plantation. The happy family were reposing in the sound and quiet slumbers which precede the break of day, as the shouts of the raving insurgents fell upon their ears. It was the work of a moment, and they were all weltering in their gore. Not a white individual was spared to carry the tidings. The blow which dashed the infant left its brains upon the hearth. The head of the youthful maiden was in one part of the room and her mangled body was in another. Here again the number of insurgents was increased by those who voluntarily joined them, and by others who did it through compulsion. Stimulating their passions still more by intoxication, and arming themselves with such guns as they could obtain, some on horseback and others on foot, they rushed along to the next plantation. The morning now began to dawn, and the shrieks of those who fell under the sword and the axe of the negro were heard at a distance, and thus the alarm was soon spread from plantation to plantation, carrying inconceivable terror to every heart. The whites supposed it was a plot deeply laid and widely spread, and that the day had come for indiscriminate massacre. One gentleman who heard the appalling tidings hurried to a neighboring plantation, and arrived there just in time to hear the dying shrieks of the family and triumphant shouts of the negroes. He hastened in terror to his own home, but the negroes were there before him, and his wife and daughter had already fallen victims to their fury. Thus the infuriated slaves went on from plantation to plantation, gathering strength at every step, and leaving not a living white behind. They passed the day, until late in the afternoon, in this work of carnage, and numberless were the victims of their rage.

The population in this country is not dense, and, rapidly as the alarm spread, it was impossible for some time to collect a sufficient number to make a defence. Every family was entirely at the mercy of its own slaves. It is impossible to conceive of more distressing circumstances of apprehension. It is said that most of the insurgent slaves belonged to kind and indulgent masters, and consequently no one felt secure.

Late in the afternoon, a small party of whites, well armed, collected at a plantation for defence. The slaves came on in large numbers, and, emboldened by success, they at first drove back the whites. The slaves pressed on, thirsting for blood, and shouting with triumphant fury as the whites slowly retreated, apparently destined to be butchered, with their wives and children. Just at this awful moment a reinforcement of troops arrived, which turned the tide of victory and dispersed the slaves.

Exhausted with the horrible labors of the day, the insurgents retired to the woods and marshes to pass the night.

[Pg 24]Early the next morning they commenced their work again. But the first plantation they attacked—that of Dr. Blount—they were driven from by the slaves, who rallied around their master, and fearlessly hazarded their lives in his defence. By this time the whites were collected in sufficient force to bar their further progress. The fugitives were scattered over the country in small parties, but every point was defended, and wherever they appeared they were routed, shot, taken prisoners, and the insurrection quelled. The leader, Nat Turner, for a few weeks succeeded in concealing himself in a cave in Southampton county, near the theatre of his bloody exploits; but was finally taken, and suffered the extreme penalty of the law.

To describe the state of alarm to which this outbreak gave rise is impossible. Whole States were agitated; every plantation was the object of fear and suspicion; free negroes and slaves underwent the most rigid examination; armed bodies of men were held in constant readiness for any emergency which might arise; every slave who had participated in the insurrection was either shot or hung, and for months the entire South remained in a fever of excitement.

All this time the abolition journals of the North were singing their hallelujahs over the event. They circulated through the South then much more freely than at present, and the following extract was read from one of these by a gentleman to his terrified family, in the presence of the gentleman from whom the above particulars were derived:—

“The news from the South is glorious. General Nat is a benefactor of his race. The Southampton massacre is an auspicious era for the African. The blood of the men, women and children shed by the sword and the axe in the hand of the negro is a just return for the drops which have followed the master’s lash.”

Another extract, of similar rhetoric, from the record of that day, is from a speech by the “Reverend” Mr. Bayley, then of Sheffield, Mass.:—

“It is time that the ice was broken—time that the blacks considered they have the same right to regain their liberties, and even the present property of their owners, as the Hebrews had in despoiling the heathen round about them. The blacks should also know that it is their duty to destroy, if no other means offer conveniently, the monstrous incubuses and tyrants, yclept planters; and I, for one, would gladly lend a helping hand to lay them in one common grave! The country would be all the better for ridding the world of such a nest of vampyres.”

Whether the abolitionists of the present time have modified the ideas they promulgated then, we shall see hereafter from a few among the ten thousand specimens that might be adduced.

The effect of these tirades upon the South cannot be well conceived.

Public opinion, just then opening to a free discussion of the question, drew back and shut itself within its castle. The bonds of slavery were bound tighter, the rivets were more strongly fastened, and a reactionary movement commenced that has never yet terminated.

[Pg 25]

CHAPTER V.

In the year 1832, January 30, the New England or Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society went into operation, but with limited means. From this society have sprung the American Anti-Slavery Society and all its numerous auxiliaries. It was the first organized body that attacked slavery on the principle of its inherent sinfulness, and enforced the consequent duty of “immediate emancipation.” All the events of a historical character which have marked the annals of the last thirty years, may be traced directly to the agitation which this society first set on foot in this country. Men have been forced to throw aside their disguises and stand forth either as the open defenders of slavery or as propagators of the abolition movement. The two great antagonistic parties of the present day are the children of its vile creation. It has excited the very fury of antagonism; it has shaken the pulpit with excommunicating thunders; it has indulged in the most bitter invective, deluged the country with invented instances of Southern barbarity, denounced the Constitution as a “league with hell,” and scattered its venom in every household of the free States, until men, women and children have become imbued with its contaminating infection. Their discourses have all been tirades; their exordium, argument and peroration have turned on epithets, slanders, inuendoes; Southerners have been reviled as “tyrants,” “thieves,” “murderers,” “atrocious monsters,” “violators of the laws of nature, God and man,” while their homes have been designated as “the abodes of iniquity,” and their land “one vast brothel.”

More abolition papers sprang into existence. The New York Evangelist, then conducted by the Rev. Samuel Griswold, espoused the cause. Through the influence of the Tappans, millions of anti-slavery tracts were circulated monthly, and sent by mail to all portions of the country, and especially to clergymen. These publications were likewise scattered through the South, their direct tendency being to stir up the slaves to further insurrection. Recruits of all ages and professions came forward, and the cause numbered amongst its adherents many of the theologians and professional men of the period.

THE NEW YORK CITY ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY.—1833.

On the 2d of October, 1833, a New York City Anti-Slavery Society was organized, though not without some demonstrations of opposition. In fact, a large majority of the most respectable citizens were opposed to the enterprise, and they accordingly determined, if possible, to crush the dangerous project in the bud. The meeting was advertised to be held in Clinton Hall, but during the course of[Pg 26] the day the public feeling was excited by the posting through the city of a large placard, of which the following is a copy:—

Southerners, however, had nothing to do with the meeting. At an early hour people began to assemble in crowds in front of Clinton Hall, but the trustees, or some others, had closed the premises. The throng, however, still increased, and it soon became evident from the execrations mutually indulged in by the people, that the authors of the projected meeting were acting with discreet valor in staying away. William Lloyd Garrison, who had then just returned from England, where he had been engaged in fomenting excitement against this country, traducing its people and institutions, and who was expected to take part in the proceedings of the meeting, was an especial object of popular abhorrence and disgust, and it is said that many grave and respectable citizens would have gladly assented to his decoration in a coat of tar and feathers. Notwithstanding the notification of “No meeting,” Clinton Hall was opened and crowded to suffocation. Speeches were delivered by a number of citizens, and a series of resolutions, prepared by Mr. F. A. Tallmadge, were adopted, deprecating any interference in the question of slavery, and expressing a determination to resist every attempt on the part of the abolitionists to effect their object.

It appears, however, that the purposes for which the meeting was originally called were indirectly attained. Finding it much easier to raise a popular whirlwind than to ride securely upon it, they prudently and privately changed their place of meeting to Chatham street chapel. Here the New York City Anti-Slavery Society was duly organized, having for its object the “total and immediate abolition of slavery in the United States.” Its first officers were:—

The proceedings of the night appear to have terminated in a broad farce, for after the breaking up of the citizens’ meeting, the crowd proceeded to Chatham street Chapel to see what was going on there. They found the doors open and the lights burning, but the meeting had suddenly dispersed. The dignified philosophers, unable to “stand fire,” had retreated “bag and baggage,” through the back windows. To have the frolic out, a black man was put upon the stage, a series of humorous resolutions were passed, good-natured speeches on the burlesque order were made, and, instead of the angry frowns with which the evening was commenced, the whole affair terminated amid the broad grins of a numerous multitude. Precisely one week after the above occurrence, another meeting of the citizens was held, over which the Mayor of the city presided. Among the orators[Pg 27] was Hon. Theodore Frelinghuysen, then United States Senator from New Jersey, afterwards a candidate for Vice-President of the United States on the ticket with Henry Clay, and he directly charged the abolitionists with “seeking to dissolve the Union;” declared that nine-tenths of the horrors of slavery were imaginary, and that “the crusade of abolition was merely the poetry of philanthropy.” Chancellor Walworth was likewise in attendance, and denounced their efforts as unconstitutional, and the individuals instigating them as “reckless incendiaries.”

THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY.—1833.

On the 4th, 5th and 6th of December, 1833, a National Anti-Slavery Convention was held in the city of Philadelphia, when, pursuant to previous notice, sixty delegates from ten States assembled, viz:—Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Beriah Green, President of Oneida Institute, was chosen President, and Lewis Tappan and John G. Whittier, Secretaries. The resolutions were prepared in committee by William Lloyd Garrison. This convention organized the American Anti-Slavery Society, of which Arthur Tappan was chosen President; Elizur Wright, Jr., Secretary of Domestic Correspondence; William L. Garrison, Secretary of the Foreign Correspondence; A. L. Cox, Recording Secretary, and William Green, Jr., Treasurer. The Executive Committee was located in New York city, the seat of the society’s operations, which were now prosecuted with vigor. The Emancipator became the organ of the society. Tracts, pamphlets and books were published and circulated; a large number of agents were employed in different guises to promote the work throughout the country, North and South; State, county and local anti-slavery societies were organized throughout the free States; funds were collected; the New England Anti-Slavery Society became the Massachusetts State Society, and the whole machinery of agitation was put in thorough working order.

Among the earliest principles adopted by the abolition societies was the following:—

So perfect was this system of operations, that in 1836 the society numbered two hundred and fifty auxiliaries in thirteen States. In eighteen months afterwards it had increased to one thousand and six. In one week alone, $6,000 were raised in Boston and $20,000 in the city of New York. To such an extent was the abolition furor carried at this time, that many prominent individuals had their dinner service, plates, cups, saucers, &c., embellished with figures of slaves in chains, and other emblems of the same character.

Similar prints, or pictorial illustrations of the natural equality before God of all men, without distinction of color, and setting forth the happy fruits of a universal acknowledgment of this truth by the exhibition of a white woman in no equivocal relations to a black man, were circulated in the South. The infection also broke out on Northern pocket handkerchiefs made for Southern children, candy wrappers, fans and anti-slavery seals, all being made to represent the [Pg 28]prevailing idea. The reaction shortly took place. Laws were passed forbidding the reception or circulation of these incendiary articles in the Southern States. Mobs broke into the post-offices and burned all abolition prints that could be found, and rewards were offered for the detection and punishment of any person found tampering with the slave population. Nor was this reaction confined to the Southern section of the country; it was largely developed in the North. Churches soon began to be the theatres of discussions on the subject, and a conservative spirit sprang into life among all the principal religious sects. Merchants began to suffer in their business; manufacturers found their wares of no avail for the Southern market; and, in short, a strong spirit of opposition to the revolutionary doctrines of the abolitionists was manifested throughout the Northern States.

THE FIRST ABOLITION RIOT IN NEW YORK.—1834.

This excited feeling soon culminated in an outbreak. On the 8th of July, 1834, the New York Sacred Music Society attempted to assemble, as was their wont, in Chatham street Chapel, for the purpose of practising sacred harmony. They found the place, however, filled with an audience of whites and blacks who had gathered to listen to an abolition address, and who obstinately refused to remove. But this was not all. The anger of the negroes was aroused in consequence of the request to remove, and they attacked several of the gentlemen with loaded canes and other implements, knocking some down and severely injuring others. The alarm was raised, crowds assembled, a fight ensued in the church, the congregation were expelled, and the building was closed. As Mr. Lewis Tappan was returning to his house, the mob, supposing him to have been instrumental in producing the disorder, followed him home and threw stones at his house.

On the 9th, three more riots occurred. The crowd proceeded to the Bowery Theatre, took possession of the house, and put an end to “Metamora,” without waiting the tragic conclusion to which it was destined by the author. A great number then proceeded to the house of Lewis Tappan, in Rose street, broke open the door, smashed the windows and threw the furniture into the street. A bonfire was lighted, and beds and bedding made the flames. Fuel was added to the excitement by publications in the Emancipator, over the signature of Elizur Wright, Jr., in which intimations were thrown out covertly, inviting to a forcible resistance to the laws which authorize the recapture of runaway slaves. Placards were posted through the streets in great numbers, and the demon of disorder appeared to have taken possession of the city.

On the night of the 10th, the crowd again assembled and made their way to Dr. Cox’s church, then on the corner of Laight and Varick streets, which they assaulted with stones, breaking the windows and doing a variety of mischief. They then proceeded to Dr. Cox’s house, No. 3 Charlton street, but, anticipating an attack, he had packed up and sent away his furniture, and removed with his family into the country on the previous afternoon. The mob commenced the work of destruction by breaking in the two lower windows; but they had scarcely effected an entrance before they were driven from the premises by the police officers and a detachment of horse. They were thenceforward kept at bay, but as far east as Thompson street, the streets were filled[Pg 29] with an excited multitude, armed with paving stones, which they smote together, crying “All together.” A fence was torn down and converted into clubs, and a barricade of carts was built across the street to impede the horsemen. After a while order was gradually restored and the tumult subsided for the night.

On the 11th, it broke out again, when an attack was made on the store of Arthur Tappan, in Pearl street. The rioters were driven away, however, by the police, without further damage than the smashing of a few windows. A second attack was likewise made on Dr. Cox’s church, and also on the church of Rev. Mr. Ludlow, in Spring street. The latter was almost completely sacked, nearly the entire interior being torn up and carried into the street to erect barricades against the horse and infantry which had assembled at various rendezvous at an early hour, in compliance with the proclamation of the Mayor. The excitement continued to increase. The bells were rung, and the Seventh (then the Twenty-seventh) regiment, under Col. Stevens, charged upon the rioters, driving them from their position and clearing Spring street. The crowd next proceeded to the residence of Rev. Mr. Ludlow, whose family had retired, and after breaking the windows and doors, left the ground. Later in the night an immense riot occurred in the neighborhood of the Five Points. St. Phillip’s Episcopal Church (colored), in Centre street, was nearly torn down, while several houses occupied by negroes in the vicinity were entirely demolished. Several days elapsed before quiet was effectually restored. All the military of the city during this time were under arms.

Similar outbreaks also occurred at Norwich, Conn., Newark, N. J., and other places, where the negroes, under the effect of abolition teachings, grown bold and impudent, were compelled to leave town. In Norwich the mob entered a church during the delivery of an abolition sermon, took the parson from the pulpit, walked him into the open air to the tune of the “Rogue’s March,” drummed him out of the town, and threatened if he ever made his appearance in the place again they would give him “a coat of tar and feathers.”

Similar scenes were enacted in Philadelphia, where a large hall was burned, and other public and private buildings in which the negroes and abolitionists were in the habit of meeting, were either injured or demolished.

NEGRO CONSPIRACY IN MISSISSIPPI.

On the 28th of June, 1835, it was discovered that the negroes of Livingston, in Madison county, Miss., under the lead of a band of white men, contemplated a general rising. A committee of safety was instantly organized, and two of the white ringleaders were arrested, tried, and, after a confession, forthwith hanged. By this confession, it appeared that the plan was conceived by the notorious John A. Murrel, a well known Mississippi pirate at that time, and that it embraced the destruction of the entire population and liberation of the slaves in the South generally. For two years the disaffection had thus been spreading, and, with few exceptions, adherents existed on every plantation in the county. Arms and ammunition had been secreted for the purpose, and everything made ready for a general outbreak. The confession involved numerous white men and black, many of whom were arrested and suffered for their diabolical designs. Among these was one Ruel Blake, of Connecticut. The summary proceedings adopted, however, had the desired effect, and in a few months tranquillity was restored to the unsettled and excited district.

 [Pg 30]

AN ERA OF EXCITEMENT.

The year 1835 was one of the most exciting eras of agitation in the early history of anti-slavery. The events of the preceding few months had aroused the entire country to a realizing sense of the dangerous tendency of the abolitionists and the rapid progress of their cause. In Congress the subject had again begun to be agitated, through petitions presented by various individuals and bodies in the free States, praying the interference of the government in the abolition of slavery, and in society at large a more decided sentiment was evidently being formed pro and con. than had previously been manifested.

In the South, incendiary publications were circulated to such an alarming extent, that the press and people of that section rose en masse to put down the growing evil. Following the insurrection to which allusion has been made above, at a public meeting held in the town of Mississippi, it was unanimously resolved that any “individual who dared to circulate incendiary tracts or publications, likely to excite the slaves to rebellion, was justly worthy, in the sight of God and man, of immediate death.” And at a similar meeting in Williamsburgh, Va., no less a personage than General John Tyler, afterwards President of the United States, endorsed a resolution to the effect that the circulation of these incendiary documents was an act of treasonable character, and that when offenders were detected in the fact, condign punishment ought and would be inflicted upon them without resort to any other tribunal. In this state of alarm, the gallows and stake soon found victims, and within a period of a few months, no less than a dozen individuals, white and black, who were found among the slaves, inciting them to insurrection, received the just award of their crime. Efforts were also made at this time by several Southern communities to get some of the prominent abolitionists in their power, so that an example might be made of those who were too cowardly to appear in the field of this species of missionary labor themselves. Among others, a reward of five thousand dollars was offered by the Legislature of Georgia for the apprehension of either of ten persons named in a resolution, citizens of New York and Massachusetts, and “one George Thompson, a subject of Great Britain.” An offer of ten thousand dollars was likewise made for the arrest of Rev. A. A. Phelps, a clergyman of New York, and fifty thousand dollars was offered to any one who would deliver into their hands the famous Arthur Tappan or Le Roy Sunderland, a well known Methodist minister.

Even the clergymen added their voice to the general cry of indignation that rose from the Southern heart; and when, in July, 1835, a few days after the forcing of the Post-office, and the destruction of the abolition publications there found, by a crowd in Charleston, S. C., a public meeting was held for completing measures of protection, the clergy of all denominations attended in a body to lend their sanction to the proceedings. About this time one of the Methodist preachers of South Carolina addressed the following novel letter to Rev. Le Roy Sunderland, editor of Zion’s Watchman of New York:—

[Pg 31]Laws of the most stringent character were passed by nearly all the Southern States to prevent the further dissemination among the Southern people of abolition doctrines, and an appeal was made to the Legislatures of the North to do the same thing. Indeed, the entire policy of that section as regards the previous license allowed to slaves and free negroes was changed so as to render it difficult, if not impossible, for any future influence of an insurrectionary character to be exerted upon them. Public meetings were also held, at which resolutions were passed declaratory of the determination to put down at all hazards these repeated attempts on the part of abolitionists to deluge their families and firesides in blood. In many of the principal cities a list of all persons arriving and departing was kept, that it might be known who were and who were not to be regarded with suspicion.

The effect upon the North was not less marked, and this prompt action on the part of their Southern brethren found thousands of sympathizers. Indignation was almost universal. The press teemed with articles upon the subject, and among the majority of the order-loving journals of the day, it was generally agreed that if the madmen who were scattering firebrands, arrows and death, could not be persuaded or rebuked to silence, no other alternative was allowed to the slaveholding States to protect themselves, except by the system of passports, examinations and punishments, which to some extent they had adopted, and in which they were justified.

The people, too, were smarting under the insults that were poured out upon the nation by the English emissaries and agents who were in the country lending their assistance to the prevailing mischief. Among these individuals was the famous George Thompson, an agent and orator of the British Anti-Slavery Society. Such was the excitement produced by his opprobrious language towards the South, that in many places where he appeared he was greeted with demonstrations of anything but a complimentary character. At Lynn, Mass., he was assaulted by females with rotten eggs and stones, and driven off the ground; and at New Bedford, in the language of the poet,

“When to speak the man essayed,
Gods! what a noise the fiddles made.”

He was emphatically “sung down.” At Boston the matter was still more serious. It having been announced that Garrison and Thompson would speak before a female anti-slavery meeting, the following hand-bill was circulated:—

“Thompson the Abolitionist.—That famous foreign scoundrel, Thompson, will hold forth this afternoon, at the Liberator office, No. 48 Washington street. The present is a fair opportunity for the friends of the Union to ‘snake Thompson out!’ It will be a contest between the abolitionists and the friends of the Union. A purse of $100 has been raised by a number of patriotic citizens to reward the individual who shall first lay hands on Thompson, so that he may be brought to the tar-kettle before dark. Friends of the Union, be vigilant.”

It is needless to say that Thompson did not appear. Garrison did, however, or rather he was found ensconced, martyr-like, under a pile of shavings in a carpenter’s shop. A rope was then fastened around his neck, and he was gently lowered out of a window to the ground. A general exclamation from the assembled crowd, “Don’t hurt him,” indicated the gentleness of the mob, and, pale and convulsed, he was thus led to the Mayor’s office in the City Hall. Afterwards he was conducted to jail, and, as he sank exhausted into his place, he made the[Pg 32] remark, “Never was man so rejoiced to get into jail before.” The rabble, which by the by, was of an unexceptionable character, soon after dispersed, their object having been effected, and the next morning Garrison was liberated from confinement. In Utica and Rochester, N. Y., Worcester, Mass., Canaan, N. H., and at various places in the New England States, the abolitionists met with similar treatment. Their assemblages were either disturbed or broken up, and they often found it required a large amount of determination to resist the indignation which their fanaticism had aroused against them. Meetings were also held in every portion of the North, at which influential citizens attended to denounce the policy of the abolitionists as subversive of the Union and Constitution, and to express their sympathy for the South. Several of the post-masters of the North, participating in this reactionary sentiment, on their own responsibility, even refused to allow the incendiary documents to pass through the mails. Such was the activity of the abolitionists, however, that in the month of August alone over 175,000 copies of their publications were circulated through the United States; and their presses, under the direction of the Tappans and Garrison & Co., were employed night and day to foment the excitement. It was said that these individuals had then planned an insurrectionary movement throughout the South, which was to have been developed on a certain day; but the whirlwind they raised in every section of the country rendered this impossible, and they were compelled to change their programme of operations.

Though somewhat modified by the restrictions with which public opinion had surrounded the abolitionists, this state of affairs continued through the year 1836. The subject of excluding from the mails the whole series of publications came under the consideration of government, and the proposition of the President, Andrew Jackson, regarding the propriety of passing a law for this purpose, being acted upon in Congress, resulted in a bill rendering it unlawful for any deputy postmaster to deliver to any person any pamphlet, newspaper, handbill or pictorial representation, touching the subject of slavery, where, by the laws of the State, Territory or District their circulation was prohibited. This healthy measure was defeated, however, on the final vote.

THE RIOT AT ALTON, ILL., AND DEATH OF REV. E. P. LOVEJOY.

The principal anti-slavery event of the year 1837 was a riot at Alton, Ill. For a long time the community of that town had been agitated by the abolitionists, and finally, on an attempt being made to resuscitate the Alton Observer, a newspaper previously edited by the Rev. E. P. Lovejoy, (brother of Owen Lovejoy, the present member of Congress from Illinois,) a journal which, in his hands, had become conspicuous for the violence of its denunciations against the South and its institutions, a terrible riot ensued. It had been announced for several days that a printing press was hourly expected to arrive, intended for the purpose above named. This gave rise to an intense excitement and to open threats, that its landing would be resisted, if necessary, by force of arms. It was landed, however, and placed in a warehouse, under the protection of a guard of twenty or thirty gentlemen who had volunteered for the purpose. Almost immediately there were indications of an attack. The press was demanded by the mob,[Pg 33] who insisted that they would not be satisfied with anything less than its destruction. The party in the building determined it should not be given up, and during the angry altercation which ensued, a shot was fired from one of the windows, which mortally wounded a man named Lyman Bishop. The crowd then withdrew, but with the death of Bishop the excitement increased to such an extent that they shortly appeared in greater numbers, armed with guns and weapons of different kinds, more than ever intent upon carrying out their original purpose. A rush was made upon the warehouse with the cries of “Fire the house,” “Burn them out,” &c. The firing soon became fearful. The building was surrounded, and the inmates threatened with extermination and death in the most frightful form imaginable. Fire was applied, and all means of escape by flight were cut off. The scene now became appalling.

About the time the fire was communicated to the building, Rev. E. P. Lovejoy received four balls in the breast, near the door of the warehouse, and fell a corpse. Several persons engaged in the attack were also severely wounded. The contest raged for more than an hour, when the party in the house intimated that they would abandon the premises and the press, if allowed to pass out unmolested. This was granted, and they made their escape, though several shots were fired in the act. A large number of persons then rushed into the building, threw the press upon the wharf, where it was broken in pieces and thrown into the river. The fire was then extinguished, and without further attempts at violence, the mob dispersed. No further indications of disorder were manifested.

For a long time this outbreak served as a check upon the aggressive policy of the abolitionists, and, though not thoroughly cowed, both principals and agents found that the agitation of the subject was like the handling of a sword whose double edges cut in both directions. After this event, with the exception of the burning of a hall in 1838, in which they held their meetings, in Philadelphia, the country for a number of years became comparatively quiet, and the agitators took good care not to give occasion for further public demonstrations.

[Pg 34]

THIRD EPOCH.

CHAPTER VI.

The decade embraced between the years 1835 and 1845 may be termed the third epoch in the history of this movement. In that period, the grand experiment of the abolitionists was most effectually tried. They had felt the public pulse, developed their power and resources, had the benefit of experience, and ascertained to what extent the public mind could be prejudiced by the course of agitation which they had pursued. It was in fact an era of lessons, as well to the country as to themselves. From a mere handful, the original organization had grown to be a power within itself—a power at the ballot-box—a power for right or wrong, for good or mischief, too self-reliant and too strong to be disregarded. Neither legislative enactments, nor riots, nor personal chastisement, nor public opinion, had been able to restrain its rapid advances towards the consummation of its hopes. It lost ground nowhere, and in every non-slaveholding State its friends and funds were greatly multiplied. As an indication of its extraordinary growth, the number of anti-slavery societies in the United States, in the year 1838, may be safely estimated at two thousand, with at least two hundred thousand persons enrolled as members.

These, however, were not all entitled to the suffrages of the party. They were the children and wives of fanatics who learned their lessons of abolition in the Bible classes, Sunday and secular schools, and from their parents and husbands. The sentiment was intruded, indeed, in all the relations of life—social, financial and domestic, and even in the affairs of love, Cupid himself was made subservient to its ascendancy. The belles of the day would hardly look upon a suitor who was not as well a worshipper at the shrine of their political passion, as of their beauty, and no youngster’s domestic destiny was at all certain of fruition who was not sound upon what was then regarded as the soul-saving question of abolitionism. The youths of 1840 have become the men of 1860, and in the enormous increase of the republican party, we see the result of the early influences thus set at work.

For the first time in its history, the organization began to be regarded as a political element in the land, and worthy of a courtship by those who desired its influence and support. Candidates for office began to be catechised, and such men as William H. Seward, Levi Lincoln, William L. Marcy and others, found time to give lengthy replies to the authors of this new inquisition, setting forth their views. In local politics, it was the moral and political test by which men were measured, and it lay at the foundation of all the subsequent State action of the Northern Legislatures upon the subject of anti-slavery.

[Pg 35]In both branches of Congress, also, the question of abolition for the first time occupied a large share of the deliberations, and was discussed under every possible aspect. From 1831, when John Quincy Adams presented fifteen petitions in a single bunch, for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, similar documents, got up and circulated by anti-slavery societies, poured into both branches of the National Legislature in a steady stream. They also called for a prohibition of what was termed an “internal slave trade” between the States, avowing at the same time that their ultimate object was to abolish slavery, not only in the District, but throughout the Union. It was, indeed, the only mode in which the fanatics could agitate the question in Congress, and was a part of the scheme by which they expected to accomplish their purposes. Under the influence of the feelings excited by these causes, the Southern Senators and members declared, almost to a man, that if the Southern States could not remain in the Union without having their domestic peace continually disturbed by the systematic attempts of the abolitionists to produce dissatisfaction and revolt among the slaves and incite their wild passions to vengeance, the great law of self-preservation would compel them to separate from the North. This persistent demand of the abolitionists, through petitions, continued from session to session, until, becoming a nuisance, an effort was made to prevent their farther reception. The effort was, for a time, successful, and resulted in what was called the “era of gags”—these gags being simply a rule of the House, “That all petitions, memorials, resolutions and propositions relating in any way or to any extent to the question of slavery shall, without either being printed or referred, be laid on the table, and no further action whatever shall be had thereon.”

This was respectively passed in 1836, 1837 and 1838, and in 1840 it was incorporated into the standing rules of the House—being thenceforward known as the “Twenty-first Rule.” The vote upon this was—yeas, 128; nays, 78.

The excitement produced in the House on the occasion of these several votes was intense, and speeches were made upon the question by the most distinguished men of the country.

In 1837, the immediate occasion of the contest was the pertinacious effort of Mr. Slade, of Vermont, to make the presentation of abolition petitions the ground of agitation and action against the institution of slavery in the Southern States. Mr. Rhett, of South Carolina, warned him of the consequences of such inflammatory harangues, and his refusal to desist from them was the signal for a general disorder and uproar. The next morning a resolution similar to that above quoted was adopted by a vote of 135 yeas to 60 nays—the full two-thirds and fifteen. “This,” says Thomas H. Benton, “was one of the most important votes ever delivered in the House.” Upon its issue depended the quiet of the House on one hand, and on the other the renewal and perpetuation of the scenes of the day before—ending in breaking up all deliberation and all national legislation.

Thus were stifled, and in future, for a few years at least, prevented in the House the inflammatory debates on these disturbing petitions. It was the great session of their presentation, being offered by hundreds and signed by hundreds of thousands of persons—many of them women, who forgot their sex and their duties to mingle in the inflammatory work; and some of them clergymen, who forgot their mission of peace to stir up strife among those who should be brethren. After[Pg 36] long and protracted efforts by John Quincy Adams, who was then champion of the abolitionists on the floor of the House, this restriction upon the right of petition was removed in December, 1845, by a vote of 108 to 80. Among the acts of this statesman in 1839, was the presentation of a resolution that the following amendments to the Constitution of the United States should be proposed to the several States of the Union:—

This proposition of course received no favor either North or South, and was speedily laid aside. Subsequently he presented a petition praying for a dissolution of the Union—the first of the kind ever offered to the government—whereupon a resolution was submitted to Congress to the effect that Mr. Adams in so doing had offered the deepest indignity to the House and insult to the people of the United States, and that, for thus permitting, through his instrumentality, a wound to be aimed at the Constitution and existence of his country he merited expulsion from the national council and the severest censure. It concluded—“This they hereby do for the maintenance of their own purity and dignity; for the rest, they turn him over to his own conscience and the indignation of all true American citizens.”

The resolution was discussed for several days, in which Mr. Adams and his anti-slavery propagandism were handled without gloves; but finally the whole subject was laid upon the table.

THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS.

Another source of discussion, both in and out of Congress, about this time, was the Texas question. As far back as 1829, the annexation of Texas was agitated in the Southern and Western States, being urged on the ground of the strength and extension it would give to the slaveholding interest. This fact at once enlisted opposition from the entire anti-slavery sentiment of the North, in which British abolitionism took part, and every effort was made on the other side of the water to increase the sectional jealousy already known to be existing. The English press, Parliament and statesmen, all treated the proposed acquisition as one in which they felt called upon to interfere. The famous “Texan plot,” which was matured at the “World’s Anti-Slavery Convention,” held in London in 1840, was one of the results.

The part to be performed by the British government embraced a double object. The large territory claimed by Texas was known to contain most of the remaining cotton lands of North America. A virtual control of these lands would, therefore, be invaluable to British commerce. The country was but thinly settled, and the number of slaves was small enough to render emancipation of easy attainment. Thus, if by a timely interposition of her influence and diplomacy, Great Britain could establish a rival cotton producing country at our very door, and prevent the growth of slavery there, she would partially prevent a growing dependence[Pg 37] on the slave products of the United States, and at the same time set up a barrier to the further extension of Southern civilization in that direction. There was but one obstacle in the way. Texas preferred annexation to the United States, and, notwithstanding British assistance, believed to have been proffered to Santa Anna in 1842, when he resolved to send an invading army into the territory for the purpose of declaring emancipation, and other objects; notwithstanding the resolutions of Northern Legislatures and acrimonious debates in Congress; notwithstanding every effort, home and foreign, to prevent annexation; through the patriotic efforts of General Jackson, President Tyler, Mr. Calhoun and other statesmen, on the 16th of December, 1845, Texas was admitted into the Union.

Though thus defeated in their immediate designs, one point was gained by the friends of anti-slavery. They succeeded in obtaining a position in Congress which enabled them to agitate the whole Union. From that time their power began to increase, until the infection has diseased the great mass of the people of the North, who, whatever may be their opinion of the original abolition party, which still keeps up its distinctive organization, never fail, when it comes to acting, to co-operate in carrying out their measures.

THE BEGINNING OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY—THE LIBERTY PARTY.

The year 1840 was marked by two important events, namely, the formation of a distinct political party of abolitionists, and a division in the two leading anti-slavery societies of the country. The Liberty Party arose from the fact that, after a protracted experiment, the candidates of the old parties could not, to any extent, however questioned or pledged, be depended upon to do the work which the abolitionists demanded of them. Such an organization was advocated by Mr. Garrison as early as 1834; but it was not until the annual meeting of the New York Anti-Slavery Society at Utica, in September, 1838, that a series of resolutions or a platform was adopted, setting forth the principles of political action, and solemnly pledging those who adopted them to vote for no candidates who were not fully pledged to anti-slavery measures. In July, 1839, a National Anti-Slavery Convention was held at Albany, and the mode of political action against slavery, including the question of a distinct party, was fully discussed, but without coming to any definite decision by vote farther than to refer the question of independent nominations to the judgment of abolitionists in their different localities. The Monroe county convention for nominations at Rochester, N. Y., September, 1839, adopted a series of resolutions and an address prepared by Myron Holly, which have been regarded as laying the real corner-stone of the Liberty party. He may, therefore, be regarded, more than any other man, as its founder.

In January, 1840, a New York State Anti-Slavery Convention was held in Genesee county. The traveling at that season of the year was bad, and delegates were in attendance from only six States. Among these were Myron Holly and Gerrit Smith. By this convention, a call was issued for a National Convention, and accordingly, April 1, 1840, it assembled at Albany—Alvan Stuart presiding. After a full discussion, the Liberty party was organized, and James G. Birney and Thomas Earle were nominated for President and Vice-President of the United States. At the Presidential election in the autumn of that year, the entire vote of the Liberty party amounted to 7,059. In 1844, the Liberty candidates, James G.[Pg 38] Birney and Thomas Morris, received 62,300 votes. These, however, were but a small part of the professed abolitionists of the United States, the great majority voting for the nominees of the old parties—Harrison, Van Buren, Polk and Clay.

The other event of the year 1840, to which we have alluded, was the division in the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in Boston, and a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society of New York, the causes in each case being more or less identified with each other. Without going into the subject, it may be briefly stated that the principal cause in both instances was a difference of opinion on theological questions as applied to politics and reformatory measures, and especially theological jealousies. The most rabid among the abolitionists have been infidels, or little less, from the start, and have absorbed every species of fanaticism, in whatever shape it has appeared since. Another question resulting in the division appears to have been “Woman’s Rights,” or, in other words, what position females ought to occupy in the society. As early as 1835, these moral hermaphrodites were in the habit of delivering public lectures and scattering publications through the land; but their wagging tongues finally became such a nuisance that several clergymen published a pastoral letter in 1837, strongly censuring all such unwomanly interference. The result was, as has been stated, great excitement and a subsequent separation of the respective opponents.

Shortly after this division, we find the American Anti-Slavery Society, at one of its annual meetings, raising the flag of “No Union with Slaveholders,” demanding a dissolution of the Union, and denouncing the federal constitution as pro-slavery—“a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”

To resume the history of the progress of the party. In 1835 a State Convention of abolitionists was held at Port Byron, New York, at which an address was presented embodying the views of a number of individuals, who, while they were abolitionists at heart, were not rabid or ultra enough to be prepared to act with the Liberty party. This was printed, circulated, and gained adherents, and upon its basis, in 1847, a convention assembled at Macedon, New York, when Gerrit Smith and Elihu Burrit were nominated for President and Vice-President of the United States; but the latter declining, the name of Charles C. Foote was afterwards substituted. This party was known by the name of the Liberty League. Subsequently its principles became merged into the Buffalo platform of 1847. Gerrit Smith was then again proposed as a candidate for the Presidency; but the course of leading men in the convention required the nomination of a different man. Accordingly, Hon. John P. Hale, of New Hampshire—an “independent democrat,” as he termed himself—and Hon. Leicester King, of Ohio, were nominated. This, however, was only temporary; and another convention was called, and held at Buffalo, August 9, 1848, composed of “the opponents to slavery extension, irrespective of parties,” and including, of course, all those committed to the one idea of abolition. It was one of the most remarkable political meetings on record, for it was the beginning of the political drama which has since resulted in a dissolution of the Union. Vast multitudes, from all parts of the non-slaveholding States, of all political parties, came together, and seemed to be melted into one by their common zeal against the aggressions of slavery. Though they looked only to the restraint of slavery within the bounds which they claimed our fathers had erected for its protection, still the opposition sprang from the strong[Pg 39] anti-slavery sentiment already pervading the country. It was the springing up of the green blade, and the forming of the ear from the many years sowing of the abolitionists. The nomination of Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams, of Massachusetts, was made with great unanimity and enthusiasm, though by a body composed of original elements of the most extreme contrariety. Messrs. Hale and King, as was expected, withdrew their names. The old Liberty party was absorbed in the new organization, whose platform was broad enough to satisfy any reasonable abolitionist. Mass meetings were held in every village to hear the new word, and within a few months an impulse was communicated to the great mass of the Northern mind which has constituted the basis of its action ever since. The number of votes cast for these candidates in 1848 was 291,263.

The platform was substantially as follows:—That the people propose no interference by Congress with slavery within the limits of any State; that the federal government has no constitutional power over life, liberty or property without due legal progress; that Congress has no more power to make a slave than to make a king—no more power to establish slavery than to establish a monarchy; that Congress ought to prohibit slavery in all the territories; that the issue of the slave power is accepted—no more slave States and no slave territory; no more compromises; and finally, the establishment of a free government in California and New Mexico.

In 1852, this same party nominated John P. Hale and George W. Julian. The number of votes then cast was 155,825. The platform was much the same as that which preceded it four years before, though more progressive and revolutionary in several of its ideas, one of its clauses being “that slavery is a sin against God and a crime against man, which no human enactment nor usage can make right, and that Christianity, humanity and patriotism, alike demand its abolition.” Another clause was to the effect that the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, being repugnant to the principles of Christianity and the principles of the common law, had no binding force upon the American people.

The republican party of 1856 was merely an enlargement or extension of the old free-soil organization of the preceding eight years. It was modified, it is true, by many of the events of the time, but its foundation was laid upon precisely the same principles that had been enunciated during the previous twelve years. It was emphatically a Northern party, extending only here and there by some straggling outposts over the slave boundary. It was so far anti-slavery as to resent the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and oppose the introduction of slavery into new territory. As events progressed, the forces combatting on either side of the great question of the day became more concentrated and determined, and more inspirited by a single purpose, until the one idea of anti-slavery became distinctly developed and firmly fixed in the Northern mind.

The Republican Convention assembled at Philadelphia, June 18, 1856, when John C. Fremont and Wm. L. Dayton were nominated for President and Vice President of the United States, and in the following November received 1,341,264 votes.

The election for 1860 has only recently terminated in the elevation to the head of the Federal Government of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin, by a purely anti-slavery vote of 1,865,840. The events which preceded it are too fresh to require repetition; but, for the first time in the history of our confederacy, we look[Pg 40] upon the spectacle of a sectional party, defiant, unyielding and uncompromising, whose principles aim a blow direct at the annihilation of one of the institutions of the South, in the full flush of victory, singing pœans of glory over its success, with a Union dissolving around it, while another portion of the country is agitated to its very centre in preparations for self-protection against the usurpations which, from press and pulpit, and floor of Congress, have been so boldly threatened. Whether as abolition, liberty, free-soil or republican, the party has always shown the cloven hoof, and the best efforts of its more considerate friends have never been able to cover the deformity. Into the masses it has instilled the most unrelenting hatred to slavery, until all other ideas, feelings and passions have, for the time, been swallowed up in this one overwhelming sentiment.

It has dissolved the Union, though formed and cemented in the blood of our fathers, rather than it should tolerate an institution which is older than the Union. It has shed the blood of innocent white men while engaged in the discharge of their sworn duty, and made widows and orphans rather than return an escaped servant to his master and obey the Constitution of the country. Such is the spirit which controls this party, by whatever name it may be known.

Its leaders, claiming to stand by principle, hug to their bosom the most damning political heresies. Pretending to obey God and reverence the Bible, some of them are the most unblushing infidels, who boldly proclaim that the Sacred Word is not worth the paper upon which it is printed, unless it denounce slavery and applaud abolitionism, and would teach that the Constitution of our country is the consummation of every iniquity. Some of them aspire to be the followers of Jesus, but convert their sacred desks into political rostrums, from which are fulminated the falsest denunciations that a diseased mind can conjure into existence. Claiming to be teachers of religion and peace, they prove the authenticity of their holy commission by exhorting to civil war, making collections for Sharpe’s rifles, and playing the role of spiritual demagogues among the falling ruins of the republic.

The year 1841 was marked by another attempt at insurrection. On the 22d of July, during a hot night, several negroes were overheard conversing in their quarters, on a plantation, near New Orleans, respecting an insurrection in which they intended to join. An investigation was made the next day, and resulted in tracing out a widely-extended organization among the slaves of the neighborhood, having a general rising in view. This early discovery of the plot of course prevented its consummation, and the execution and punishment of the instigators soon quelled every design of an outbreak.

In 1845 we find Cassius M. Clay mobbed in Lexington, Ky., and his paper, the True American, stopped, the presses, type, &c., being packed up and forwarded to Cincinnati, for advocating the incendiary doctrines of the abolitionists, and thereby producing an excitement among the slaves, and arousing apprehensions in the community lest they should rise in rebellion against the whites.

THE MEXICAN WAR.

We have already brought our chronological history down to the year 1845, when Texas was admitted as a State. It was during the progress of annexation that the government of Mexico served a formal notice on the United States that[Pg 41] annexation would be viewed in the light of a declaration of war. This notice, however, was of little avail, and before the close of the year 1845, Congress had consummated the act. The war broke out in April, 1846, the second year of Mr. Polk’s administration, and on the 11th of May the President issued his proclamation to that effect. A large portion of the western domain of Texas, as now described, was disputed territory, occupied by Mexicans and under Mexican rule at the time of and after annexation. General Taylor was ordered to march from Corpus Christi, and take up his position on the Rio Grande, opposite Matamoras, thus traversing the disputed territory from its eastern to its western border. The Mexican army, on the opposite side of the river, immediately commenced hostilities, and soon after followed the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. How the war was continued and terminated are matters of general history. Peace was at last dictated to Mexico on the 30th of May, 1848, and resulted in a surrender by her of a large belt of her northern territories, extending from the Rio Grande to the Pacific, including California, though at that time its immense wealth and great importance were not fully appreciated. In Congress and among the people of the North the war was not popular. It was said to be a scheme for the acquirement of more slave territory, and this fact of itself excited contention throughout the land.

THE WILMOT PROVISO.

On the 12th of August, 1846, a bill being under consideration in the Committee of the Whole, making further provision for the expenses attending the intercourse between the United States and Mexico, Mr. David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, moved the following amendment:—

“Provided, that as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of territory from the republic of Mexico, by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted.”

This amendment was adopted by a vote of yeas 77, nays 58. The bill was not voted on in the Senate, that body adjourning sine die before it reached that stage.

On the 8th of February, the Three Million Bill being under consideration, a similar amendment was offered in the House, and on the 15th was adopted by a vote of 115 yeas and 106 nays. The Senate having passed a similar bill, which came before the House on the 3d of March, 1847, Mr. Wilmot moved to amend the same by adding his proviso thereto; but it was rejected by a vote of yeas 97, nays 102. The Senate bill, without the amendment of Mr. Wilmot, then became a law. This celebrated proviso has been offered, by different senators and representatives, to various bills since. Its popular use, in fact, since that time, constitutes a great chapter in the political history of the country. For a long time it has rung in the ears of the public, and it will never cease until the question of slavery ceases to be a political question in the organization of new Territories and new States.

In 1848, Connecticut, which had never passed a law completely abolishing slavery, and which then contained some eight or ten slaves, through her Legislature enacted its total abolition forever, compelling the masters of the few slaves existing to support them for life.

[Pg 42]The escape of slaves from the South has been one of the principal practical effects of abolition ever since the idea assumed shape, in 1830. Men and women have been found, North and South, who, either from philanthropic motives or under the pecuniary inducements of abolition societies, have aided in their escape. Among these, New England “schoolmarms” and schoolmasters have played an active part, and several were from time to time arrested.

One Delia Webster suffered for such an interference with other people’s affairs by an incarceration in the penitentiary at Lexington, Ky., in 1845, for two years. Another, Rev. Charles Torrey, for similar offences, was sentenced to six years in the Maryland penitentiary, but died before the expiration of the sentence.

Many other instances of a similar nature might be cited; but these are enough to indicate the extent to which fanaticism carried its followers.

The year 1848 was characterized by the usual venom which the anti-slavery societies industriously endeavored to distil into the community. Fred. Douglas, Edmund Quincy, Francis Jackson, Abby Kelly, Garrison, Phillips, Pillsbury, Lucy Stone, Theodore Parker, and a retinue of negro orators, escaped slaves and others, regularly held their meetings and indulged in their customary rhodomontades. At the New England Convention, which assembled during this year, a series of one hundred conventions for the purpose of agitating the question of dissolution of the Union was commenced in Massachusetts, and funds were raised for the purpose. Some of these meetings were broken up by indignant mobs, but they were mainly allowed to go on, and accumulated disciples.

THE FOURTH EPOCH.

CHAPTER VII.

The next important move upon the political chessboard with reference to slavery preceded the adoption of the celebrated measures familiarly known by the above title, or as the “Omnibus Bill of 1850.” The events which led to this measure may be briefly stated thus:—

Ever since 1848, a storm had been lowering in the political horizon of the country on the slavery question, threatening to dissolve the Union, which necessarily burst over Congress in Legislating for the new Territories brought into the Union by the result of the Mexican war. Probably no subject has been presented since the adoption of the federal constitution involving questions of such deep and vital importance to the inhabitants of the different States of the confederacy as that in reference to the territory thus acquired. Not only was the sentiment avowed of the existence of danger to the Union, but in various quarters was heard an open and undisguised declaration of a necessity and desire for its dissolution. General Taylor was elected, a new administration came into power, and being[Pg 43] somewhat identified with the Northern anti-slavery elements, as opposed to the Democratic party, a tremendous agitation was at once created, and the whole question of slavery thrown again into the crucible.

The Thirtieth Congress had adjourned without organizing the new Territories, or settling any great principle as to their future government and destiny. California had gone forth without asking leave, formed a State government prohibiting slavery, and put its machinery in operation. Utah was governed by a high and arbitrary spiritual despotism, and New Mexico was under military rule, ordered from the seat of federal power at Washington. In addition to this, it was discovered that Mexico had abolished slavery, and consequently that the lex loci of all the countries ceded by Mexico to the United States excluded slavery. The Wilmot Proviso had been carried in the House, but failed in the Senate, and waited only for the admission of California, which would give sixteen free States against fifteen slave States.

Of course the whole South rose in arms against the consequences of this disappointment. They would not admit California; they declared that slavery did exist in the territories acquired from Mexico; that in any case the Constitution of the United States would carry it there and protect it there; and that they would dissolve the Union if the Wilmot Proviso became a law.

In this state of affairs, Henry Clay, on the 29th of January, brought forward in the Senate his famous resolutions of compromise, and laid the basis of an adjustment which might have lasted till this day but for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854. Subsequently, a Committee of Thirteen was appointed by the Senate, charged with the duty of considering all the subjects, of which Mr. Clay was appointed chairman. On the 8th of May, 1850, this committee reported a series of measures, differing but inconsiderably from the original resolutions of Mr. Clay. These were:—

1. The admission of California as a free State, according to the expression of the will of her people.

2. The establishment of Territorial governments, without the Wilmot Proviso, for New Mexico and Utah, embracing all the territory recently acquired by the United States from Mexico, not contained in the boundaries of California. The question of slavery was left without any other restriction than the will of the people.

3. The establishment of the western and northern boundary of Texas, and the exclusion from her jurisdiction of all New Mexico, with the grant to Texas of a pecuniary equivalent.

4. More effectual enactments for the recovery of fugitive slaves.

5. Abstaining from abolishing slavery, but under a heavy penalty prohibiting the slave trade, in the District of Columbia.

Separate bills were drawn embodying all the main features of this compromise, and eight months having been consumed in their discussion, the two houses were at last brought to a vote on each bill by itself.

The Utah Territorial Bill passed the Senate, August 10, 1850, by a vote of yeas 32, nays 18.

The Texas Boundary Bill passed the Senate, August 10, 1850, by a vote of yeas 30, nays 20.

[Pg 44]The bill for the admission of California passed the Senate, August 13, 1850, by a vote of 34 to 18.

The New Mexico Bill passed the Senate, August 14, 1850, by a vote of 27 to 10.

The Fugitive Slave Bill passed the Senate on the 23d of August, 1850, by a vote of 27 to 12.

The bill abolishing the slave trade in the District of Columbia passed the Senate, September 14, 1850, by a vote of 33 to 19.

In the House, the vote on the several bills was:—

New Mexico and Texas boundary, Sept. 6, 1850, yeas 180, nays 97.

Admission of California, Sept. 7, 1850, yeas 150, nays 53.

Utah Bill, Sept. 7, 1850, yeas 97, nays 85.

Fugitive Slave Bill, Sept. 12, 1850, yeas 109, nays 76.

Slave trade in the District of Columbia, Sept. 17, 1850, yeas 124, nays 59.

Out of Congress the abolitionists were aroused almost to a pitch of frenzy by the passage of the Compromise measures and the Fugitive Slave Law. Addresses were immediately issued by thousands, which were freely circulated in all the Northern States, counseling resistance to the law under every circumstance. Conventions were held of whites and negroes, in which was proclaimed death to every slaveholder who attempted to carry out the provisions of the infamous enactment. The tide of runaway slaves from the South, which had been flowing for so many years, swelled into a flood. Where one slave formerly made a successful escape, scores made good their flight now. New England became the goal of the fugitives, and here they found friends without number, who furnished them with the means of extending their journey to the Canadian provinces.

One of the first and most successful attempts to resist the Fugitive Slave Law was in Boston, in April, 1851, when one Thomas Sims, who had escaped from Georgia, was taken in custody by the city authorities, on a warrant issued by the United States Commissioner. A mob was the result. The military was called out, and for several days the most intense excitement ensued. The law finally triumphed, however, and amid the cry of “Sims, preach liberty to your fellow slaves,” he was put on a steamtug and sent where he belonged.

Shortly after this, a meeting was called by the Vigilance Committee, which was presided over by Hon. Horace Mann, when Anson Burlingame, Henry Wilson, Remond, Higginson and several other negroes appeared and made denunciatory speeches against the law and in favor of the resolutions, which proclaimed the necessity of resistance to the uttermost.

On September 11, 1851, occurred the celebrated Christiana affair. Edward Gorsuch, of Maryland, his son and a party of friends, accompanied by a United States Commissioner, appeared in the neighborhood of Christiana, Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, in pursuit of a slave. An attack was made upon them by negroes, and both father and son were killed. The United States marines were ordered to the spot, and for several days the place was under martial law. The slave, of course, escaped. We might also refer to the rescues of Shadrack, Anthony Burns, the slave Jerry at Syracuse, and similar incidents that occurred in various parts of the Northern States; but the circumstances are most of them too recent and familiar to require more than a passing allusion.

It is only necessary to say that this kind of agitation—resistance to the laws and[Pg 45] disturbance of the peace—has been a part of the tactics of abolitionists down to the present moment. They have never allowed an opportunity to pass of showing their utter disregard for law and order, and of interposing every obstacle in the way of those whose sincere desire it is to promote the peace and prosperity of the country. The breeze has become a gale, and the gale has swelled into a tempest, under the influence of which the mind of a portion of the North has been lashed into insane fury.

THE REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE, AND FORMATION OF THE
TERRITORIAL GOVERNMENTS OF KANSAS AND NEBRASKA.

It was reserved for the years 1853 and 1854 to be a period of agitation—revived under the auspices of such men as Stephen A. Douglas, Franklin Pierce, Caleb Cushing, David Atchinson and other politicians intent upon the Presidency—unrivalled in the annals of the country.

The new danger came up in the shape of a proposition to establish a Territorial government in Nebraska (then embracing Kansas), a Territory which, with Missouri, originally constituted the upper part of the province of Louisiana, and was acquired from the French in 1803 by the payment of 60,000,000 francs.

As early as Dec. 11, 1844, Mr. Douglas gave notice to the House of his intention to introduce a bill for this purpose, which he did on the 17th instant following. After being favorably reported upon, it was referred to the Committee of the Whole, where, owing to the importance of other measures pending, it was not again acted upon during the session. On the 15th of March, 1848, he introduced a similar bill, and again it met a similar fate. In the Senate, in 1852, Mr. Dodge, of Iowa, early introduced a resolution, which was passed, instructing the Committee on Territories to inquire into the expediency of organizing the Territory; but no further action was taken upon it until the House of Representatives had passed its bill for that purpose. On December 17, the petition of Mr. Guthrie for a seat as a delegate from Nebraska, was received and referred, and on the 2d day of February, 1853, the Committee on Territories, through Mr. Richardson, of Illinois, their chairman, reported their bill for organizing Nebraska, which, after three days consideration, was passed on the 10th, by a vote of 98 to 43. It was silent on the subject of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The Senate received it the next day, and on the 17th instant, the Committee on Territories reported it without amendment. On the 3d of March, 1853, it was laid upon the table. In the debate which immediately preceded this disposition, Senator Atchison, of Missouri, openly avowed the ground of his opposition to be that the law excluding slavery from the Territory of Louisiana, north of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes, would be enforced in the new Territory, “unless specially rescinded.” He did not appear, however, to entertain any hope that this desirable object could be effected. He said he should, therefore, oppose the organization, unless the whole South could go into the Territory with rights and privileges, respecting property, equal to other people of the Union. The idea of the possibility of a repeal of the Missouri Compromise was thus, for the first time, thrown out and left to take root in the minds of the nation, with the chance of growing up to perfection. Even the most ultra among the Southerners then regarded this as a thing rather to be hoped for than realized.

[Pg 46]On the 4th of January, 1854, Mr. Douglas, from the Committee on Territories, (which consisted of Messrs. Douglas, of Illinois; Houston, of Texas; Johnson, of Arkansas; Bell, of Tennessee; Jones, of Iowa, and Everett, of Massachusetts,) to whom had been referred the bill of Mr. Dodge, reported back the same with amendments and a report which contained the first open, and as it were official, declaration of the impending coup d’etat. This report assumed as its basis that the Compromise acts of 1850, which, it will be recollected, leave to the people of the Territories to decide for themselves whether or not there shall be slavery in their midst, were the supreme, authentic law of the land, and the Missouri Compromise was cited and put aside as immaterial, because it came in collision with this latest legislation and adjustment of the question. This perpetual prohibition Mr. Douglas proposed incidentally to repeal by the following provision in the bill:—

“And when admitted as a State or States, the said Territory, or any portion of the same, shall be received in the Union with or without slavery, as their constitutions may prescribe at the time of their admission.”

Later in this month the same committee submitted an amended bill by which two Territories—Kansas and Nebraska—were to be created out of the domain in question.

On the 22d of January, Messrs. Chase and Sumner, of the Senate, and Messrs. Giddings, Wade, Dewitt and Gerrit Smith, of the House, issued a stirring appeal to the people of the United States, urging and imploring instant action to avert the pending calamity. This was circulated over the whole country, and aided not a little in adding fuel to the already furious flame of excitement.

The discussion of the bill in the Senate was continued from time to time through January. It swallowed up all other interests, and was the absorbing topic throughout the country. The vote was finally reached at five o’clock in the morning of March 4, 1854, when the bill passed the Senate by a vote of thirty-seven to fourteen. Fourteen of the votes in its favor were given by Senators from the free States, and two of those against it by Senators from the slave States—Messrs. Houston, of Texas, and Bell, of Tennessee.

On the 14th of March Mr. Everett presented the famous mammoth memorial, signed by 3,050 clergymen of New England, protesting against the passage of the bill.

In the House of Representatives the bill was brought up on the 31st of January, 1853. The debate upon it was closed on the 19th of May, 1854, and on the 22d of May, 1854, it passed the House by the following vote:—Yeas, 113; nays, 100. The vote of the Senate on the final passage of the bill was, yeas, 35; nays, 13.

On the 20th of December, 1854, the Hon. John H. Whitfield, delegate elect from the Territory of Kansas, was sworn in and admitted to a seat in the House. It was alleged that his election had been carried by an importation of Missourians into the Territory, but no contest was made on his right, and he held his position during the remainder of the Thirty-third Congress.

During the recess between the 4th of March and the 1st of December, 1855, the history of Kansas was marked by the most exciting events. The removal of the seat of government by the Territorial Legislature from the place which had been fixed by Governor Reeder, was deemed by the latter to have made void, ab initio, all acts enacted by them subsequent to such removal, on the ground that the power to locate the same was vested in him alone.

[Pg 47]The free State party backed up Governor Reeder, while the pro-slavery party endorsed the action of the Legislature. Governor Reeder was in the meantime removed from office.

The free State party met at Big Springs and resolved to repudiate the acts of the Territorial Legislature and organize a State government. A Convention was accordingly called and held at Topeka, on the 4th Tuesday of October, framed what was called the Topeka Convention, and set on foot a State Government which soon came in conflict with the regularly constituted authorities, and resulted in the indictments against the former for treason, which followed.

Meanwhile, finding opposition to the principles of the Kansas-Nebraska act unavailing in Congress and under the forms of the Constitution, combinations were entered into at the North to control the political destinies and form and regulate the domestic institutions of these Territories through the machinery of emigrant aid societies, by which means large numbers of persons were forwarded to the debatable ground. In order to give consistency to the movement and surround it with the color of legal authority, an act of incorporation was procured from the Legislature of Massachusetts for an association by the name of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, the ostensible purpose of which was to enable emigrants to settle in the West. It was a powerful corporation, with a capital of five millions of dollars, invested in houses and lands, in merchandise and mills, in cannons and rifles, in powder and lead—in all the implements of art, agriculture and war, and employing a corresponding number of men under the management of directors who remained at home and pulled the wires of this immense political automaton. In a measure they succeeded. Thousands of these emigrants poured into the Territory, armed with Sharpe’s rifles and the Word of God, and located themselves wherever their votes were most necessary. The result might have been anticipated. Under the influence of inflammatory appeals and stung by the irritating threats of the free-state men, the most intense indignation was aroused in the States near the Territory of Kansas, and especially in Missouri, whose domestic peace was thus the most directly endangered. Counter movements consequently ensued. Bands of men came over the State border and appeared at the polls, and on both sides angry accusations followed that the elections were carried by fraud and violence. In the meantime, statements entirely unfounded or grossly exaggerated concerning events within the Territory, were sedulously diffused through remote States to feed the flame of sectional animosity there, and the agitators in the States in turn exerted themselves to encourage and stimulate strife within the Territory.

During the Presidential campaign of 1856 Kansas may be said to have been in a state of civil war. Life was nowhere safe. Armed men espousing both sides of the question roamed throughout the country, committing depredations and atrocities which find their equal only in the records of savage barbarity. Men, women and children were murdered in their beds, and few could aver themselves either as free-state men or pro-slavery men without danger of being shot down in their tracks. It was during this period that the notorious John Brown, with his band, made his appearance and commenced those villanies for which he has since met a just reward upon the gallows.

To return to Congress, however: on the 7th of April, 1856, a memorial of the[Pg 48] Senators and Representatives of the so-called State of Kansas, accompanied by the Constitution adopted at Topeka, praying the admission of the same into the Union, was presented in the House of Representatives and referred. The Committee on Territories reported a bill to that effect, which was rejected on the 30th of June by a vote of yeas 106, nays 107.

On motion of Mr. Barclay, of Pennsylvania, the question was reconsidered, and the vote being taken on the passage of the bill, it was carried by yeas 107, nays 106, the abovenamed gentleman changing his ballot, and one other voting aye who was not present before.

The bill being brought before the Senate, that body substituted for it a bill of its own, which was returned to the House, where no action was taken upon it. Several other attempts were subsequently made in both the Senate and House, during 1856, to pass bills to authorise the people of Kansas to form a Constitution and State government, but without success—neither body endorsing the act of the other.

On the 29th of July, 1856, a bill reported by Mr. Grow, from the Committee on Territories, “To annul certain acts of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Kansas,” being before the House, Mr. Dunn, of Indiana, moved an amendment to the same, which substantially re-established the compromise of 1820. This was carried by a vote of 89 yeas and 77 nays. The bill reached the Senate, and a report upon it was made by the Committee on Territories on the 11th of August, 1856, recommending that it be laid upon the table, which was done, by a test vote of 35 to 12.

On the 11th of July, 1856, the committee appointed by the House to proceed to Kansas and investigate all matters connected with the contested election case between A. H. Reeder and John W. Whitfield, each of whom claimed to have been elected a delegate to Congress, made a majority and minority report, Messrs. W. A. Howard, of Michigan, and Lewis Campbell, of Ohio, affirming that everything connected with the Territorial Legislature and the election of Whitfield was wrong; and Mr. Mordecai Oliver, of Missouri, affirming that everything was right, and that Mr. Reeder was not duly elected according to law.

These reports were acted upon on the 29th of July, when Mr. Whitfield was declared not to be entitled to a seat in the House by a vote of 110 yeas to 92 nays, and Mr. Reeder was likewise declared not to be entitled to a seat by a vote of 88 yeas and 113 nays. On the 1st Of December, 1856, however, Mr. Whitfield, having again been elected a delegate, was sworn in by a vote of 112 yeas to 108 nays.

The effect of this agitation in Congress upon the people was immense, and every power that could be brought to bear to influence the result one way or another was unsparingly employed. It was almost the sole hinge upon which, for a time, swung the welfare of the country. The immediate admission of Kansas, with her free constitution, formed at Topeka, was engrafted upon the republican platform of 1856, and men were arraigned at the bar of public opinion and proved guilty or innocent by their standing with reference to this great question. Happily, however, the election of Mr. Buchanan threw oil upon the troubled waters, and with his inauguration the country relapsed once more into a state of comparative quiet. The predatory bands engaged in Kansas in acts of rapine, under cover of existing political disturbances, were arrested or dispersed, the troops were withdrawn, and tranquillity was once more restored to the hitherto agitated territory.

[Pg 49]On the first Monday of September, 1857, a Convention was called together by virtue of an act of the Territorial Legislature, whose lawful existence had been recognized by various enactments of Congress, to frame a constitution for Kansas. A large proportion of the citizens did not think proper to register their names and vote at the election for delegates; but an opportunity to do this having been afforded, in the language of Mr. Buchanan, “their refusal to avail themselves of their right, could in no manner affect the legality of the Convention.” But little difficulty occurred except on the question of slavery, and after an excited and angry debate on this subject, by a majority of only two, it was decided to submit the question of slavery to the people.

This was the famous Lecompton Convention. They adopted a constitution, and the form of submission was “constitution with slavery,” or “constitution without slavery.” A great many people were indignant because the constitution was made thus imperative, and more than one-half stayed away from the polls. The constitution was consequently adopted by the party voting for it with slavery. In that form it was submitted to the President, and the President submitted it to Congress. After a protracted discussion in both houses, the admission of Kansas under that instrument was defeated, and a compromise was adopted to submit the Lecompton constitution back to the people, with the condition that if accepted they should immediately come into the Union by a proclamation of the President, and that, if rejected, they should wait until they had ninety-three thousand inhabitants, to be ascertained by a census. They rejected the constitution by some ten thousand majority. In the meantime, under the operation of the Territorial Legislature and the Lecompton Convention acting in conjunction with each other, the anti-slavery elements rallied and elected an anti-slavery Legislature. There were, however, bogus returns from two or three counties, which, if admitted, would have changed the complexion of the Legislature into a pro-slavery body; but these were cast out by Governor Walker, and the Legislature was thus left in the possession of the free-soil party.

After the rejection of the Lecompton constitution, the people called another Convention, which assembled at Wyandot, and adopted an anti-slavery constitution. This they laid before Congress, and at the same time elected a Legislature and a member of Congress, the Legislature in turn electing two Senators, in anticipation of the admission of the State under the Wyandot constitution. The bill for the admission of the State was taken up in Congress during the present session and passed, and on Wednesday, the 30th of January, was returned to Congress with the signature of the President, thus forever setting at rest a question which has so long disturbed the country.

The following are the State officers of Kansas elected under the Wyandot constitution, and who will assume to administer the new State government:—

[Pg 50]In the Supreme Court, under the Dred Scott decision, the right has been established of every citizen to take his property of every kind, including slaves, into the common Territories, belonging equally to all the States of the confederacy, and to have it protected there under the Constitution.

It is hardly necessary to advert further to the progress of the anti-slavery element in Congress than to merely recal the tumults excited at the beginning of every session by the election of a Speaker, and the constant ebb and flow of agitation upon the one absorbing theme which has at last, through the efforts of the abolitionists and their allies, come to be the single sentiment, upon which hang suspended the destiny and hopes of a nation.

In 1857, a State Convention assembled in Worcester, Mass., “to consider the practicability, probability and expediency of a separation of the free and slave States.” In the language of one of the orators, they felt that the time had come when they should “sever for ever the bloody bond which united them to the slaveholders, slave-breeders and slave-traders of the nation.” The meeting found its sympathizers, and made converts in every portion of the North, and from that day to the present, have been spreading among a certain class the following sentiments, with which Wendell Phillips closed one of his speeches:—

“If the slaveholder loves the Union, I hate it. The love of so sagacious a tyrant is authority enough for my hate. If the slaveholder clings to the Union, it is instinct. When they set horses to run in the Roman races, each horse bears about him a little network of pointed pricks, that the faster he goes, make him run yet faster. I would set the slaveholder running with four millions of slaves for the pricks. Dissolution is my method for that race. Dissolution, in other words, is only another method of letting natural causes have free play. I would take down the dam of the Union and let loose the torrent of God’s own water-courses, and, like every current, you may be sure it will clear every channel for itself.”

In an address delivered by Wm. Lloyd Garrison, July 20, 1860, at the Framingham celebration, he declares:

“Our object is the abolition of slavery throughout the land; and whether in the prosecution of our object, this party goes up, or the other party goes down, it is nothing to us. We cannot alter our course one hair’s breadth, nor accept a compromise of our principles, for the hearty adoption of our principles. I am for meddling with slavery everywhere—attacking it by night and by day, in season and out of season—(no, it can never be out of season)—in order to effect its overthrow. (Loud applause.) Higher yet will be my cry. Upward and onward. No union with slaveholders. Down with this slaveholding government. Let this covenant ‘with death and agreement with hell’ be annulled. Let there be a free, independent, Northern republic, and the speedy abolition of slavery will inevitably follow. (Loud applause.) So I am laboring to dissolve this blood-stained Union, as a work of paramount importance. Our mission is to regenerate public opinion.”

This has been the point, end and object at which the practical abolitionists of the country have aimed from the start. If they have advocated a measure, its purpose has been dissolution. If they have prevented the execution of the laws, the purpose has been dissolution; if they have made war or made peace, or taken any step during their unholy career, the one end and object has been the overthrow of the government and the freedom of the slave, no matter what may be the consequence.

The conventions of the abolitionists are now held every year, and they have gathered about them a galaxy of congenial followers—

“Black spirits and white,
Red spirits and gray”—

well worthy of the cause they espouse. No stone remains unturned that obstructs the accomplishment of their designs. Until of late their agents have circulated in every nook and corner of the country, and from Maine to Texas these serpents of[Pg 51] society have been distilling their venom among the people. We have seen the result within the past two years in poisoned families, executed slaves, a John Brown insurrection, and all the enormities which attend the movement of a band of infatuated individuals who are spurred on to deeds of desperation by those who stay at home to preach that which they leave their deluded victims to practise.

As a party they have become so strong that,

“Having both the key
Of officer and office, they set all hearts
To what tune they please.”

CHAPTER VIII.

One of the principal agencies by which this extraordinary revolution in the public sentiment of the North has been brought about is the Church. The history of anti-slavery in this connection, however, is too extended to admit of anything more than a narration of general facts. It is sufficient to say that the abolitionists have had the co-operation of a portion of the principal religious sects of the free States ever since the year 1820, since which time their conferences, sessions, assemblies and meetings have been the theatres of the most rancorous discussion, abusive debate and irremediable discord. They have ruptured the Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist churches, and divided into antagonistic parties the American Board of Foreign Missions, the American Home Missionary Society, the American Tract Society, and every other benevolent organization which embraces within its scope of good the common country. They have thus prevented the dissemination of the Bible, the establishing of missionaries, the distribution of tracts, and interrupted all efforts that have been made for the Christian elevation of the slave or the welfare of the master. Instead of that feeling of attachment and devotion to the interests of religion which was formerly felt, they are now arrayed against each other, two hostile bodies, whose sole occupation is individual abuse, political harangues, and the profanation of the sacred desk. Personal holiness has given way to party spirit, and while men’s hearts around them are blazing with the carnalities of their own fallen nature, ministers have forgotten their vocation in preaching havoc, subverting the Scriptures and setting up as the God of worship the comfortable negroes of the South. Their sentiment is “If the Bible tolerates slavery for an instant, away with it. And God himself!—if he sanctions this hell-born monster, even he is unworthy of respect.” The black portrait of Southern slavery has been indelibly painted upon their imaginations until the pure, solid, consistent religion of our forefathers no longer exists. These reverend Pecksniffs can hardly bear to look upon a Southern man without a feeling of revenge; they seldom look at a Bible without muttering a blasphemy, and cannot speak of the South and its institutions without letting out their dream of blood and desire.

Witness some of their effusions. The Rev. Daniel Foster, one of the chaplains of the Massachusetts Legislature in 1855-6, referring to the Southern clergy, said:—

[Pg 52]“He stood on that floor as an orthodox clergyman, but he would as soon exchange with the devil as one of those hireling priests—those traitors to humanity. The professed Church of Christ is false, and its hireling priesthood unworthy of confidence.”

The Rev. Mr. Griswold, of Stonington, said:—

“For the church which sustains slavery, wherever it be, I am ready to say I will welcome the bolt, whether it come from heaven or hell, which shall destroy it. Its pretensions to Christianity are the boldest effrontery and the vilest imposture.”

The Rev. Mr. Howell says, when speaking of the Bible arguments in behalf of slavery:—

“Give up my advocacy of abolition? Never! I will sooner, Jonas like, throw the Bible overboard, and execrate it as the Newgate calendar, denounce God as a slaveholder, and his angels and Apostles as turnkeys and slavedrivers.”

The Rev. Mr. Blanchard, in a speech in the Detroit Convention:—

“Damned to the lowest hell all the pastors and churches of the South, as they were a body of thieves, adulterers, pirates and murderers—that the Episcopal Methodist Church is more corrupt and profligate than any bawdy house in the Union—that the Southern ministers of that body are desirous of perpetuating slavery for the purpose of debauchery, and that every clergyman among them is guilty of enormities that would shock a savage.”

The same Rev. Mr. Blanchard, in a discussion in Cincinnati, in 1845, in reply to Dr. Rice, who held up to the abolitionists’ imitation the example of the “Angel of the Lord who advised Hagar, the slave of Abraham, to return to her master,” said:—“Well, if the angel did so advise her, I think he was a ruffian.”

We might quote sentiments like the above ad libitum; but these are sufficient to show the drift of a portion, at least, of the clerical mind at the North.

What has been the influence of these clerical fanatics? They have contributed to the formation of revolutionary societies, throughout the length and breadth of the land, and invited all men to join in the holy crusade. Appealing to their congregations, they have worked with honied phrase and flattering carresses upon the tender imaginations of women until they have learned to look upon a slaveholder as a sort of moral monstrosity. Sewing parties have been turned into abolition clubs, while little children in the Sunday schools have been taught that A. B. stands for abolition, from books illuminated with graphic insignia of terror and oppression; with pictorial chains, handcuffs and whips, in the act of application to naked and crouching slaves. This latter remark is truer of the past than the present generation; but we see the influence around us in the millions of young men that now constitute the bulk of the republican party, who may trace their opinions upon the question of slavery to the early prejudices thus acquired.

John Randolph, of Roanoke, once said, “that the worst government on earth was a government of priests, and the next worst was a government of women.” There is little doubt that if the present movement goes on, we shall have a government of both priests and females. As the revolution of France was hurried forward by the fish-women of Paris, many of the horrible atrocities of that time being perpetrated by them, so the same misguided spirit urges on the women of the present day, until they have become not only regardless of the human suffering which may result from their course, but of the inevitable tendencies of their influence towards the overthrow of the government itself.

Some of these women edit newspapers, write books, peddle tracts, deliver lectures, and constantly, in one shape or another, keep themselves notorious in the public prints. One of the most effective of these feminine offsprings ever brought to bear upon the public mind was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—a story which [Pg 53]originally appeared in the National Era, at Washington, in 1852, was afterwards published in a book, and soon created an extraordinary excitement on both sides of the Atlantic. No other book ever passed through so many editions, either in America or Europe. It has been translated into most of the Continental languages, and placed upon the stage in a dramatic form in almost every city of the Union. It served its purpose. What truth could not accomplish, fiction did, and Harriet Beecher Stowe has had the satisfaction of throwing a firebrand into the world, which has kept up a furious blaze ever since. Others have followed in her wake, but their success has been more moderate, making proselytes by hundreds, where she made them by thousands.

Among the publications of a more recent date is that of Hinton Rowan Helper, on the “Impending Crisis,” which appeared in 1858, filled with the most ultra abolition doctrines that could be accumulated, and received the endorsement of the principal leaders of the republican party. It thereafter became the Shibboleth of the organization, by which its members have sworn, and the standard by which its principles have since been measured. While it is a work intrinsically false and worthless, yet, being the production of a Southern man, it had a fictitious value in the eyes of Northern fanatics who were only too glad to use it against the people of the South.

Contemporaneous with the excitement produced by this book, and partially growing out of it, was

THE HARPER’S FERRY INSURRECTION.

The facts are briefly as follows:—On the 17th of October, 1859, the country was startled with the announcement that a party of armed men, whites and blacks, had entered the village of Harper’s Ferry, Va., taken possession of the United States armory at that place, shot two or three whites, placed guards on the railroad bridge, and stopped the passenger trains of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

The President promptly dispatched a detachment of marines to the spot. The insurrectionists were found to number about twenty white men and negroes, under the leadership of the notorious Kansas Free-State man, John Ossawatomie Brown. After some time spent in parley, made for the purpose of saving a number of prominent citizens who were held prisoners by Brown within the enclosures of the United States Armory, the marines made an attack, beat down the gates, and took all who were not killed prisoners.

Among the latter was Brown himself, who had received a number of severe wounds. Brown confessed that his object was to liberate and run off all the slaves in the adjoining counties of Virginia and Maryland. At a farm-house which Brown had hired a few miles from Harper’s Ferry, were found ammunition and arms, consisting of a large number of Sharpe’s rifles, revolvers, pikes and other implements of war, together with a great amount of correspondence, consisting of letters of Gerrit Smith and Fred Douglas. During the whole affair, there were killed ten of the insurrectionists, six citizens and one United States marine, and a number on both sides were wounded.

Brown was found guilty of treason and conspiracy against the United States on the 2d of November, was sentenced to be hung, which sentence was carried into effect on the 2d of December, 1859.

[Pg 54]It has since been discovered that the following is a portion of the plans of abolitionists, matured in Kansas by Brown and others, and which he attempted in part to carry out:—

THE END.

We have before given a table of the number of slaves in the United States in 1790. It was then 697,696. The following is a similar estimate for the year 1850, as determined by the seventh census:

Adding to this sum thirty per cent, a fair estimate of the increase for the last ten years, and we have in 1860, 3,965,651 slaves in the United States, or four millions in round numbers. There were in the United States 347,525 persons owning slaves. Of this number two owned 1,000 each; both resided in South Carolina. Nine only owned between 500 and 1,000, of whom two resided in Georgia, four in Louisiana, one in Mississippi. Fifty-six owned from 300 to 500, of whom one resided in Maryland, one in Virginia, three in North Carolina, one in Tennessee, one in Florida, four in Georgia, six in Louisiana, eight in Mississippi, twenty-nine[Pg 55] in South Carolina, one hundred and eighty-seven owned from 200 to 300, of whom South Carolina had sixty-nine, Louisiana thirty-six, Georgia twenty-two, Mississippi eighteen, Alabama sixteen, North Carolina twelve, five other States fourteen, and four States none. Fourteen hundred and seventy-nine owned from 100 to 200. All the slaveholding States, except Florida and Missouri, are represented in this class, South Carolina having one-fourth of the whole; 29,733 persons owned from ten to twenty slaves each. South Carolina, from this statement, owns more slaves in proportion to her population than any other State in the South.

A few general considerations, and we conclude our narrative. After tracing the course of events recorded in the foregoing pages, the questions naturally arise—What has been the result? what have the abolitionists gained? The answers may be briefly summed up as follows:—

1. They have put an end to the benevolent schemes of emancipation which originated among the real philanthropists of the South, and were calculated, in a proper time and manner, beneficent to all concerned, to produce the desired result. In their wild and fanatical attempts they have counteracted the very object at which they have aimed. Instead of ameliorating the condition of the slaves, they have only aroused the distrust of the master, and led to restrictions which did not before exist. The truth is, the lot of the people of the South is not more implicated in that of the slaves than is the lot of the slaves in the people of the South. In their mutual relations, they must survive or perish together. In the language of another, “The worst foes of the black race are those who have intermeddled in their behalf. By nature, the most affectionate and loyal of all races beneath the sun, they are also the most helpless: and no calamity can befal them greater than the loss of that protection they enjoy under this patriarchal system. Indeed, the experiment has been tried of precipitating them upon a freedom which they know not how to enjoy; and the dismal results are before the world in statistics that may well excite astonishment. With the fairest portions of the earth in their possession, and with the advantage of a long discipline as the cultivators of the soil, their constitutional indolence has converted the most beautiful islands of the sea into howling wastes. It is not too much to say, that if the South should, at this moment, surrender every slave, the wisdom of the entire world, united in solemn council, could not solve the question of their disposal. Freedom would be their doom. Every Southern master knows this truth and feels its power.”

2. Touch the negro, and you touch cotton—the mainspring that keeps the machinery of the world in motion. In teaching slaves to entertain wild and dangerous notions of liberty, the abolitionists have thus jeopardized the commerce of the country and the manufacturing interests of the civilized world. They have likewise destroyed confidence. Northern institutions are no longer filled with the young men and women of the South, but find rivals springing up in every State south of Mason and Dixon’s line. Northern commerce can no longer depend upon the rich places of wealth it has hitherto found in Southern patronage. Northern men can no longer travel in the South without being regarded as objects of suspicion and confounded with the abolitionists of their section. In short, all the kind relations that have ever existed between the North and the South have been[Pg 56] interrupted, and a barrier erected, which, socially, commercially and politically, has separated the heretofore united interests of the two sections, and which nothing but a revolution in public sentiment, a higher sense of the moral obligations due our neighbor, a religious training, which will graft upon our nature a truer conscience and inculcate a purer charity, and finally a recognition of abstract right and justice, can ever remove.

3. They have held out a Canadian Utopia, where they have taught the slaves in their ignorance to believe they could enjoy a life of ease and luxury, and having cut them off from a race of kind masters and separated them from comfortable homes, left the deluded beings incapable of self-support upon an uncongenial soil, to live in a state of bestiality and misery, and die cursing the abolitionists as the authors of their wretchedness.

4. They have led a portion of the people of the North, as well as of the South, to examine the question in all its aspects, and to plant themselves upon the broad principle that that form of government which recognizes the institution of slavery in the United States, is the best, the condition of the two races, white and black being considered, for the development, progress and happiness of each. In other words, to regard servitude as a blessing to the negro, and under proper and philanthropic restrictions, necessary to their preservation and the prosperity of the country.

5. Step by step they have built up a party upon an issue which has led to a dissolution of the Union. They have scattered the seeds of abolitionism until a majority of the voters of the free States have become animated by a fixed purpose not only to prevent the further growth of the slave power, but to beard the lion in his den.

The power of the North has been consolidated, and for the first time in the history of the country it is wielded as a sectional weapon against the interests of the South. The government is now in the hands of men elected by Northern votes, who regard slavery as a curse and a crime, and they will have the means necessary to accomplish their purpose.

The utterances that have heretofore come from the rostrum or from irresponsible associations of individuals now come from the throne. “Clad with the sanctities of office, with the anointing oil poured upon the monarch’s head, the decree has gone forth that the institution of Southern slavery shall be constrained within assigned limits. Though Nature and Providence should send forth its branches like the banyan tree to take root in congenial soil, here is a power superior to both, that says it shall wither and die within its own charmed circle.”

If this be not believed, let the following selections from the speeches of the leaders of the Republican party be the proof:—

Hon. Charles Sumner, United States Senator from Mass.:—

“This slave oligarchy will soon cease to exist as a political combination. Its final doom may be postponed, but it is certain. Languishing, it may live yet longer, but it will surely die. Yes, fellow-citizens, surely it will die—when disappointed in its purposes—driven back within the States, and constrained within these limits, it can no longer rule the Republic as a plantation of slaves at home; can no longer menace Territories with its five-headed device to compel labor without wages; can no longer fasten upon the constitution an interpretation which makes merchandise of men, and gives a disgraceful immunity to the brokers of human flesh, and the butchers[Pg 57] of human hearts; and when it can no longer grind flesh and blood, groans and sighs, the tears of mothers and the cries of children into the cement of a barbarous political power! Surely, then, in its retreat, smarting under the indignation of an aroused people, and the concurring judgment of the civilized world it must die;—it may be, as a poisoned rat dies, of rage in its hole. (Enthusiastic applause.) Meanwhile all good omens are ours. The work cannot stop. Quickened by the triumph, now at hand,—with a Republican President in power, State after State, quitting the condition of a territory, and spurning slavery, will be welcomed into our plural unit, and joining hands together, will become a belt of fire about the slave States, in which slavery must die.”

Hon. John Wentworth, Editor of the Chicago Democrat, and Mayor of Chicago:—

Hon. Wm. H. Seward, Secretary of State (his Rochester speech of Oct. 25, 1858):

At a later period, in the Senate of the United States, the same Senator uttered the following language:—

Hon. Joshua Giddings, Member of Congress from Ohio:—

“I look forward to the day when there shall be a servile insurrection in the South; when the[Pg 58] black man, armed with British bayonets, and led on by British officers, shall assert his freedom, and wage a war of extermination against his master; when the torch of the incendiary shall light up the towns and cities of the South, and blot out the last vestige of slavery. And though I may not mock at their calamity, nor laugh when their fear cometh, yet I will hail it as the dawn of a political millennium.”

Hon. Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States:—

These are a few only of the extracts of a similar nature which may be selected from multitudes of speeches that have been delivered by the leading men of the party. The same sentiment, however, runs through them all, and abolition, in one way or another, is not less a doctrine of the Republican party of 1860 than it was of the Liberty party of 1840, to which it owes its birth. “Abolitionism is clearly its informing and actuating soul; and fanaticism is a blood-hound that never bolts its track when it has once lapped blood. The elevation of their candidate is far from being the consummation of their aims. It is only the beginning of that consummation; and if all history be not a lie, there will be coercion enough till the end of the beginning is reached, and the dreadful banquet of slaughter and ruin shall glut the appetite.”

And now the end has come. The divided house, which Mr. Lincoln boastfully said would not fall, has fallen. The ruins of the Union are at the feet as well of those who loved and cherished it as of those who labored for its destruction. The Constitution is at length a nullity, and our flag a mockery. Fanaticism, too, must have its apotheosis.

HISTORY OF THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY.

CHAPTER IX.

On Saturday, February 9, 1861, six seceding States of the old Union organized an independent government, adopted a constitution, and elected a President and Vice President. These States passed their respective ordinances of dissolution as follows:—

Only two of the seceding States—South Carolina and Georgia—were original members of the confederacy. The others came in in the following order:—

[Pg 59]The Convention which consummated this event assembled on the 4th of February, at Montgomery, Alabama. Hon. R. M. Barnwell, of South Carolina, being appointed temporary chairman, the Divine blessing was invoked by Rev. Dr. Basil Manly.

We give this first impressive prayer in the Congress of the new Confederacy below, and further add, as an illustration of the religious earnestness by which the delegates were one and all animated, that the ministers of Montgomery were invited to open the deliberations each day with invocations to the Throne of Grace:—

Oh, Thou God of the Universe, Thou madest all things; Thou madest man upon the earth; Thou hast endowed him with reason and capacity for government. We thank Thee that Thou hast made us at this late period of the world; and in this fair portion of the earth, and hast established a free government and a pure form of religion amongst us. We thank Thee for all the hallowed memories connected with our past history. Thou hast been the God of our fathers; oh, be Thou our God. Let it please Thee to vouchsafe Thy sacred presence to this assembly. Oh, Our Father, we appeal to Thee, the searcher of hearts, for the purity and sincerity of our motives. If we are in violation of any compact still obligatory upon us with those States from which we have separated in order to set up a new government—if we are acting in rebellion to and in contravention of piety towards God and good faith to our fellow man, we cannot hope for Thy presence and blessing. But oh, Thou heart searching God, we trust that Thou seest we are pursuing those rights which were guaranteed to us by the solemn covenants of our fathers and which were cemented by their blood. And now we humbly recognise Thy hand in the Providence which has brought us together. We pray Thee to give the spirit of wisdom to Thy servants, with all necessary grace, that they may act with deliberation and purpose, and that they will wisely adopt such measures in this trying condition of our affairs as shall redound to Thy glory and the good of our country. So direct them that they may merge the lust for spoil and the desire for office into the patriotic desire for the welfare of this great people. Oh God, assist them to preserve our republican form of government and the purity of the forms of religion, without interference with the strongest form of civil government. May God in tender mercy bestow upon the deputies here assembled health and strength of body, together with calmness and soundness of mind; may they aim directly at the glory of God and the welfare of the whole people, and when the hour of trial which may supervene shall come, enable them to stand firm in the exercise of truth, with great prudence and a just regard for the sovereign rights of their constituents. Oh, God, grant that the union of these States, and all that may come into this union, may endure as long as the sun and moon shall last, and until the Son of Man shall come a second time to judge the world in righteousness. Preside over this body in its organization and in the distribution of its offices. Let truth and justice, and equal rights be secured to our government. And now, Our Father in Heaven, we acknowledge Thee as our God—do Thou rule in us, do Thou sway us, do Thou control us, and let the blessings of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit rest upon this assembly now and forever. Amen.

A. R. Lamar, Esq., of Georgia, was then appointed temporary secretary, and the deputies from the several seceding States represented presented their credentials in alphabetical order, and signed their names to the roll of the Convention.

The following is the list:—

THE HALL OF THE SOUTHERN CONVENTION.

The following description is from a Southern paper:—

“On the extreme left, as the visitor enters the Hall, may be seen a list of the names[Pg 60] of the gallant corps constituting the Palmetto regiment of South Carolina, so distinguished in the history of the Mexican War; next to that is an impressive representation of Washington delivering his inaugural address; and still farther to the left, a picture of South Carolina’s ever memorable statesman, John C. Calhoun; and next to that, an excellent portrait of Albert J. Pickett, “the historian of Alabama.” Just to the right of the President’s desk is the portrait of Dixon H. Lewis, a representative in Congress from Alabama for a number of years. Immediately over the President’s desk is the portrait of the immortal General George Washington, painted by Stuart. There are a few facts connected with the history of this portrait which are, perhaps, deserving of special mention. It was given by Mrs. Custis to General Benjamin Smith, of North Carolina. At the sale of his estate it was purchased by Mr. Moore, who presented it to Mrs. E. E. Clitherall (mother of Judge A. B. Clitherall, of Pickens), in whose possession it has been for forty years. It is one of the three original portraits of General Washington now in existence. A second one, painted by Trumbull, is in the White House at Washington, and is the identical portrait that Mrs. Madison cut out of the frame when the British attacked Washington in 1812. The third is in the possession of a gentleman in Boston, Massachusetts. Next to the portrait of Washington is that of the Old Hero, Andrew Jackson; next in order is an excellent one of Alabama’s distinguished son, Honorable W. L. Yancey; and next, a picture of the great orator and statesman, Henry Clay; and next to that, a historical representation of the swamp encampment scene of General Marion, when he invited the British officer to partake of his scanty fare; and on the extreme right of the door, entering into the Hall, is another picture of General Washington, beautifully and artistically wrought upon canvas by some fair hand.”

The deputies having handed in their credentials, on motion of Mr. Rhett, of South Carolina, Honorable Howell Cobb, of Georgia, was chosen President of the Convention, and Mr. J. J. Hooper, Secretary. Thus permanently organized, the Convention proceeded with the usual routine of business.

A committee was appointed to report a plan for the Provisional Government upon the basis of the Constitution of the United States, and after remaining in secret session the greater part of the time for five days, the “Congress”—the word “Convention” being entirely ignored on motion of Honorable A. H. Stephens, of Georgia—at half past ten o’clock, on the night of February 8, unanimously adopted a provisional constitution similar in the main to the constitution of the old Union.

The vital points of difference are the following:—

The Congress shall have power—

In several other features the new constitution differs from the original. The old one commences with the words—“We the people of the United States,” &c. The new—“We the deputies of the sovereign and independent States of South Carolina,” &c., thus distinctly indicating their sovereign and independent character, and yet their mutual reliance.

Again, the new constitution reverentially invokes “the favor of Almighty God.” In the old, the existence of a Supreme Being appears to have been entirely ignored.

In the original, not only was the word “slave” omitted, but even the idea was so studiously avoided as to raise grave questions concerning the intent of the several clauses in which the “institution” is a subject of legislation, while in the new, the word “slaves” is boldly inserted, and the intention of its framers so clearly defined with reference to them that there is hardly a possibility of misapprehension.

Again, contrary to the expectation of the majority of the Northern people, who have persistently urged that the object of the South in establishing a separate government was to re-open the African slave trade, the most stringent measures are to be adopted for its suppression.

All this was done with a unanimity which indicated the harmony of sentiment that prevailed among the people of the seceding States, and among the delegates by whom they were represented in the Southern Congress.

THE ELECTION OF PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT.

The constitution having been adopted, the sixth day’s proceedings of the Southern Congress, on Saturday, February 9, were characterized by unusual interest, the galleries being crowded with anxious and enthusiastic spectators.

During the preliminary business several model flags were presented for consideration—one being from the ladies of South Carolina; and a committee was appointed to report on a flag, a seal, a coat of arms and a motto for the Southern confederacy. There were likewise appointed committees on foreign affairs, on finance, on military and naval affairs, on postal affairs, on commerce and on patents.

The Congress then proceeded to the election of a President and Vice President of the Southern confederacy, which resulted, by a unanimous vote, as follows:—

President—Honorable Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi.

Vice President—Honorable Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia.

This announcement was received with the grandest demonstrations of enthusiasm. One hundred guns were fired in the city of Montgomery in honor of the event, and in the evening a serenade was given to the Vice President elect, to[Pg 62] which he eloquently responded. Messrs. Chesnut and Keitt, of South Carolina, and Conrad, of Louisiana, likewise made appropriate speeches.

A resolution was adopted in Congress appointing a committee of three Alabama deputies to make arrangements to secure the use of suitable buildings for the use of the several executive departments of the Confederacy.

An ordinance was also passed, continuing in force, until repealed or altered by the Southern Confederacy, all laws of the United States in force or use on the first of November last.

The Committee on Finance were likewise instructed to report promptly a tariff for raising revenue for the support of the government. Under this law a tariff has been laid on all goods brought from the United States. The appointment of a committee was also authorized for the purpose of reporting a constitution for the permanent government of the Confederacy.

These are some of the measures thus far adopted by the new government. The legislation has been prompt, unanimous, and adapted to the exigency of the moment, and there is little doubt that when all the necessary laws have been passed, a strong, healthy, and wealthy confederation will be in the full tide of successful experiment.

The Southern Cabinet is composed of the following gentlemen:—

HON. JEFFERSON DAVIS, OF MISSISSIPPI, PRESIDENT.

Few men have led a life more filled with stirring or eventful incidents than Jefferson Davis. A native of Kentucky, born about 1806, he went in early youth with his father to Mississippi, then a Territory, and was appointed by President Monroe in 1822 to be a cadet at West Point. He graduated with the first honors in 1828 as Brevet Second Lieutenant, and at his own request was placed in active service, being assigned to the command of General (then Colonel) Zachary Taylor, who was stationed in the West. In the frontier wars of the time young Davis distinguished himself in so marked a manner that when a new regiment of dragoons was formed he at once obtained a commission as first lieutenant. During this time a romantic attachment sprang up between him and his prisoner, the famous chief Black Hawk, in which the latter forgot his animosity to the people of the United States in his admiration for Lieutenant Davis, and not until his death was the bond of amity severed between the two brave men.

In 1835 he settled quietly down upon a cotton plantation, devoting himself to a thorough and systematic course of political and scientific education. He was married to a daughter of Gen. Taylor.

In 1843 he took the stump for Polk, and in 1845, having attracted no little attention in his State by his vigor and ability, he was elected to Congress. Ten days after he made his maiden speech. Soon the Mexican war broke out, and a regiment of volunteers having been formed in Mississippi, and himself chosen Colonel, he resigned his post in Congress, and instantly repaired with his command to join the corps d’armee under General Taylor. At Monterey and Buena Vista he and his noble regiment achieved the soldiers’ highest fame. Twice by his[Pg 63] coolness he saved the day at Buena Vista. Wherever fire was hottest or danger to be encountered, there Colonel Davis and the Mississippi Rifles were to be found. He was badly wounded in the early part of the action, but sat his horse steadily till the day was won, and refused to delegate even a portion of his duties to his subordinate officers.

In 1848 he was appointed to fill the vacancy in the Senate of the United States occasioned by the death of General Speight, and in 1850 was elected to that body almost unanimously for the term of six years.

In 1851 he resigned his seat in the Senate to become the State Rights candidate for Governor, but was defeated by Governor Foote.

In 1853 he was called to a seat in the Cabinet of President Pierce, and was Secretary of War during his administration. In 1857 he was elected United States Senator from Mississippi for the term of six years, which office he held until his resignation on the secession of Mississippi from the Union.

Personally, he is the last man who would be selected as a “fire-eater.” He is a prim, smooth looking man, with a precise manner, a stiff, soldierly carriage and an austerity that is at first forbidding. He has naturally, however, a genial temper, companionable qualities and a disposition that endears him to all by whom he may be surrounded. As a speaker he is clear, forcible and argumentative; his voice is clear and firm, without tremor, and he is one in every way fitted for the distinguished post to which he has been called.

HON. ALEXANDER H. STEVENS, OF GEORGIA, VICE PRESIDENT.

This gentleman is known throughout the Union as one of the most prominent of Southern politicians and eloquent orators. His father, Andrew B. Stephens, was a planter of moderate means, and his mother (Margaret Grier) was a sister to the famous compiler of Grier’s almanacs. She died when he was an infant, leaving him with four brothers and one sister, of whom only one brother survives.

Mr. Stephens was born in Georgia on the 11th of February, 1812. When in his fourteenth year his father died, and the homestead being sold, his share of the entire estate was about five hundred dollars. With a commendable Anglo-Saxon love of his ancestry Mr. Stephens has since repurchased the original estate, which comprised about two hundred and fifty acres, and has added to it about six hundred more. Assisted by friends he entered the University of Georgia in 1828, and in 1832 graduated at the head of his class. In 1834 he commenced the study of the law, and in less than twelve months was engaged in one of the most important cases in the country. His eloquence has ever had a powerful effect upon juries, enforcing, as it does, arguments of admirable simplicity and legal weight. From 1837 to 1840 he was a member of the Georgia Legislature. In 1842 he was elected to the State Senate, and in 1843 was elected to Congress. He was a member of the whig party in its palmiest days, but since its dissolution has acted with the men of the South, and such has been the upright, steadfast and patriotic policy he has pursued, that no one in the present era of faction, selfishness or suspicion has whispered an accusation of selfish motives or degrading intrigues against him. In the House he served prominently on the most important committees, and effected the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill through the House at a time when its warmest friends despaired of success. He was subsequently appointed chairman of the[Pg 64] Committee on Territories, and was also chairman of the special committee to which was referred the Lecompton constitution. By his patriotic course on various measures, he has, from time to time, excited the ire of many of the Southern people, but he has always succeeded in coming out of the contest with flying colors, and his recent elevation is a mark of the profound respect entertained for his qualities as a man and a statesman.

Mr. Stephens is most distinguished as an orator, though he does not look like one who can command the attention of the House at any time or upon any topic. His health from childhood has been very feeble, being afflicted with four abscesses and a continued derangement of the liver, which gives him a consumptive appearance though his lungs are sound. He has never weighed over ninety-six pounds, and to see his attenuated figure bent over his desk, the shoulders contracted and the shape of his slender limbs visible through his garments, a stranger would never select him as the “John Randolph” of our time, more dreaded as an adversary and more prized as an ally in a debate than any other member of the House of Representatives. When speaking he has at first a shrill, sharp voice, but as he warms up with his subject the clear tones and vigorous sentences roll out with a sonorousness that finds its way to every corner of the immense hall. He is witty, rhetorical and solid, and has a dash of keen satire that puts an edge upon every speech. He is a careful student, but so very careful that no trace of study is perceptible as he dashes along in a flow of facts, arguments and language that to common minds is almost bewildering. Possessing hosts of warm friends who are proud of his regard, and enlightened Christian virtue and inflexible integrity, such is Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President elect of the Southern confederacy.

THE NEW CONFEDERACY.

At this particular juncture it will also be interesting, in view of coming legislation, to note some of the statistics of the several seceding States with reference to their population, State debt, &c. They are as follows:—

This is a population exceeding by 522,926 that of 1790, at the close of the Revolutionary war of the whole United States.

 [Pg 65]

THE CITY OF MONTGOMERY—THE PROVISIONAL CAPITAL OF THE NEW CONFEDERACY.

The city of Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, has assumed such a sudden importance as the capital of the Southern Confederacy and the seat of the federal operations of the new government, that we give below a brief sketch of its locality and surroundings. It is situated on the left bank of the Alabama River, 331 miles by water from Mobile, and 830 miles from Washington, D. C. It is the second city in the State in respect to trade and population, and is one of the most flourishing inland towns of the Southern States, possessing great facilities for communications with the surrounding country. For steamboat navigation the Alabama River is one of the best in the Union, the largest steamers ascending to this point from Mobile. The city is also the western termination of the Montgomery and West Point Railroad. It contains several extensive iron foundries, mills, factories, large warehouses, numerous elegant stores and private residences. The cotton shipped at this place annually amounts to about one hundred thousand bales. The public records were removed from Tuscaloosa to Montgomery in November, 1847. The State House was destroyed by fire in 1849, and another one was erected on the same site in 1851. The present population of the city is not far from 16,000, and it is probable that, with all its natural advantages, the fact of its present selection as the Southern capital, will soon place it in the first rank of Southern cities.

THE EFFECT OF THE SOUTHERN CONGRESS.

The united front and united action of the six States which have thus formed themselves into the pioneer guard, as it were, of the remaining nine, is an earnest that no one of them, in its sovereign capacity, will undertake a conflict with the old United States without the assent of its brethren. What they have thus far done “in Congress assembled,” they have done soberly and after mature consideration; and in their past action we may find assurance that no future movements will be undertaken—especially those of a nature likely to involve them in a civil war—without equal deliberation, calmness, and a just regard for the common welfare. If there should be, it will be the fault of the aggressive policy of some of the Legislatures of the North.

It will be observed that, notwithstanding Texas had already passed the ordinance of secession, as that act had not yet been endorsed by the people, at the time of the sitting of the Convention, she was not regarded as one of the new confederacy, and consequently was unrepresented. North Carolina also sent three Commissioners to deliberate with the delegates of the seceding States—namely, Messrs. D. L. Swain, J. L. Bridgers and M. W. Ransom.

The entire movement bears upon its face all the marks of a well developed, well digested plan of government—a government now as independent as were the old thirteen States after the Fourth of July, 1776, and possessing what our ancestors of that date did not fully have—the wealth, ability and power to meet almost any contingency that may arise. Meanwhile, judging from the disposition of republicans[Pg 66] in Congress and throughout the country, the ball thus set in motion will not stop. The States already united will undoubtedly remain so, and form the nucleus around which will gather others. The new Union will grow in strength as it grows in age. According to our recent intelligence from England and France, these two nations will rival each other in endeavoring to first secure the favor of the new Power. With them cotton will be the successful diplomat. Ministers and agents will be appointed, postal facilities will be re-arranged, a new navy will spring into existence, prosperity will begin to pour into the newly opened lap, and we shall witness at our very side the success of a people who, by the pertinacity of the selfish political leaders and the political domination of the North, have been driven to measures of defence which are destined to redound to their benefit, but to our cost and national shame.—New York Herald, Feb. 11, 1861.

Text of cover:

AMERICAN
ABOLITIONISM,
FROM 1787 TO 1861.

A COMPENDIUM OF HISTORICAL FACTS,

EMBRACING

LEGISLATION IN CONGRESS

AND

AGITATION WITHOUT.

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK HERALD.)

By F. G. de FONTAINE.

NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON & CO.
1861.

PRICE, TWENTY-FIVE CENTS.

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