The Crusade Against Slavery

1830-1860

Louis Filler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138534957
• eBook ISBN: 9781351484176
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Schiavitù

Perhaps no other crusade in the history of the U.S. provoked so much passion and fury as the struggle over slavery. Many of the problems that were a part of that great debate are still with us. Louis Filler has brought together much information both known and new on those who organized to defeat slavery. He has also re-examined the anti-slavery movement's ideals, heroes, and martyrs with historical perspective and precision. Contrary to popular belief, the anti-slavery movement was far from united. It included abolitionists as well as a variety of reformers whose activities place them among the anti-slavery forces. These included men as different in background and temperament as William Lloyd Garrison and John Quincy Adams. Portraits of the many protagonists, their hardships, and their quarrels with Southerners and Northerners alike, bring to life this exciting and tumultuous period. Filler also examines the many related reform movements that characterized the period: feminism, spiritualism, utopian societies, and educational reform. The volume traces the relationship of the antislavery movement to abolition and probes their connection with the several reforms that dominated the period. He brilliantly recaptures a sense of the contemporary consequences of the reformers efforts. This is an absorbing and important survey of the problems--political, social, and economic--that made this period so crucial in the history of the U.S.

CHAPTER 1

The Challenge of Slavery

THROUGHOUT the colonial period and after the American Revolution, slavery was accepted by most Americans as a normal and inevitable aspect of their affairs. True, it became more and more confined, as a working institution, to the southern states. True, also, relatively few Americans had a direct economic stake in its perpetuation. These few, however, included some of the most respected elements of society. They bought and sold slaves, rented them as laborers, and otherwise lived by money gained from their use. To no small degree, they involved in their fortunes non-slaveholding Northerners from whom they purchased goods and services and for whom they felt friendship. They enjoyed the good will of humbler classes of Southerners and Northerners who despised the Negro for his color or feared him as a possible competitor.

Yet curiously enough, during the decades which preceded the reform era, slavery inspired not one notable literary or legal defense. Many influential leaders of society assumed that it must ultimately give way to a more democratic order. Others deplored its workings and sought to hasten its end. Their compassion sometimes extended to the Indian, as well, who had also been marked for enslavement, though he was less tractable than the black man. In New England, back in the seventeenth century, John Eliot, “apostle to the Indians,” had been stirred to his saintly labors of Indian conversion. In the South, the following century, Christian Priber, from Saxony, adopted the Cherokees in western Carolina; he died a prisoner of Oglethorpe, English reformer and founder of Georgia.¹ Among others, Samuel Sew-all, notable Massachusetts diarist and penitent judge of the Salem witchcraft hysteria, had been concerned over the right and wrong of slavery, and had undertaken to pay his own slave for services rendered. Theirs were literally voices crying in the wilderness.

It would later become a major assumption in American history that the frontier had fostered freedom. There is, indeed, persuasive evidence that the frontier encouraged the creation of democratic ideas and attitudes and helped push democratic leaders to the fore, but it did not, on the other hand, help to undermine slavery. The frontier tended to reflect the prejudices and expectations of those who settled it. It permitted them almost unbounded opportunity, so that practical and experimental, progressive and patently reactionary, modes of behavior flourished according to the strength of their sponsors. Cosmopolitan Cincinnati in Ohio and Mormon Nauvoo in Illinois, Natchez with its Old South ways and atheistic New Harmony in Indiana—all were made possible by the open terrain.² It was part of the tragedy of the South that its rapidly tightening social system should have so dominated its own frontier as not to have permitted a leavening process between the new areas being developed in the South and the original states. Western Virginia—hilly, with few slaves, with large numbers of poor whites and individualists-—was not able to modify Old Virginia’s ways. Ultimately, they separated.³

The American Revolution and the years following excited new expectations that slavery must soon dwindle in strength and prestige. Such actual plans for ending it as maintaining high tariffs on the slave trade, or permitting slaves to buy their own freedom, were impractical.⁴ But the spirit of the times seemed to favor an expansion of civil and other liberties. Leading Southerners freely expressed abhorrence of the foreign slave trade and domestic slavery. Not a few rewarded loyal slaves with manumissions for services during the Revolutionary War. Dr. Samuel Hopkins, noted theologian and a disciple of the great Jonathan Edwards, expressed himself in behalf of the slave, and contributed a vital Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans (1776) to the Revolutionary debate. After the Revolution had been fought and won, it continued to influence the American imagination; identification with it would strengthen a demand for a specific reform. The Negro’s cause was seen as aided by his association with the Revolutionary effort, which was regarded as the most favorable era in Negro-white relations. In due course, antislavery views of the Revolutionary Fathers would be carefully collected and widely quoted.⁵

But with the war over, popular interest in the slave declined. Abolitionist petitions to the first Federal Congress were, according to one caustic observer, received “with a sneer” by John Adams, presiding, and with hostility by distinguished senators. Such acts as Virginia’s, officially manumitting Negroes who had served the Revolution, did not contribute to a landslide of manumissions, although well into the nineties it was customary for slaveowners to manumit some of their faithful Negroes by will.⁶

The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 made slavery profitable in cotton cultivation; thereafter, the southern leadership became more assertive in defense of its rights. Representative Northerners unequivocally expressed their antislavery sentiments, but they did not speak for a section united on the issue, nor were they themselves clear about what should be done. Sensibilities on the subject took time to form in the North. William Jay, soon to be one of the most distinguished of abolitionists, was proud of the career of his father, John Jay, and of the latter’s services as president of the pioneer Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves. His biography of the first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court placed Jay’s ownership of slaves in a special category:

In the year 1798, being called upon by the United States marshal for an account of his taxable property, [John Jay] accompanied a list of his slaves with the following observations:

“I purchase slaves, and manumit them at proper ages, and when their faithful services shall have afforded a reasonable retribution.”

As free servants became more common, he was gradually relieved from the necessity of purchasing slaves; and the last two which he manumitted he retained for many years in his family, at the customary wages.⁷

Thus, in this early period, antislavery leaders resorted to slaveowning for “humane” ends.

By 1825, North and South were clearly distinguishable in their attitude toward slavery, but not in their attitude toward the Negro. The celebrated visit of the Marquis de Lafayette, in that year, helped underscore how far the new nation had fallen from earlier expectations. The eminent Frenchman received an appeal from a public-spirited citizen to speak out against slavery, the latter having “a recollection of the notices in my early youth of thy generous efforts in the Cause of American liberty,” and being convinced that the General’s views would be received with enthusiasm.⁸ But Lafayette himself was dismayed by the amount of anti-Negro prejudice he observed, in the North as well as in the South, and remarked that during the Revolution “black and white soldiers messed together without hesitation.”⁹

Theodore Dwight and John Sergeant were typical of many Northerners who were sincerely antislavery in sentiment, but who inadvertently fell into the posture of mere sectionalists. Theodore Dwight, editor of the New York Daily Advertiser, not only favored the abolition of slavery; he denounced the flogging of soldiers, and cruelty toward Negroes, Indians, Eskimos, mental patients, and even lobsters. But besides being a reformer he was also an ardent Federalist, whose strictures on the virtues and vices of Thomas Jefferson were far from dispassionate.¹⁰ John Sergeant was an outstanding Philadelphia lawyer and congressman who earned the denunciation of Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina as being “a distinguished advocate of the Missouri restriction, an acknowledged abolitionist.” There is no evidence, however, that Sergeant had any regard for Negroes as individuals or as a people.¹¹ Having little firsthand knowledge of slavery’s workings, such partisans failed to acquire the information which would have added sinews to their arguments opposing it. Of different mettle was Benjamin Lundy, greatest of the pioneer abolitionists, who noted in 1826 that the governor of South Carolina had recommended that the custom of burning slaves in capital cases be stopped. “Is it possible that this has not been done long ago?” Lundy asked. “Will the cruelties of slaveholders hence be denied, as they have, by slaveite editors?”¹²

The majority of Lundy’s fellow Northerners remained indifferent to such practices; in fact, not a few of them were actively proslavery. The line between anti-Negro sentiment and proslavery feeling was sometimes shadowy, but Major Mordecai Manuel Noah, picturesque and popular Jacksonian, did not beat about the bush. Noah preached the rights of man, but also defended enslavement for the Negro. His point of view was shared by numerous elements throughout the North.¹³

Daniel Webster, in his greatest peroration, pleading in 1830 for “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” observed that suspicion had been fostered in the South against the North for political reasons. The North was represented as “disposed to interfere with them in their own exclusive and peculiar concerns.” The charge was untrue, Webster averred: “Such interference has never been supposed to be within the power of government; nor has it been, in any way, attempted.” Many other Northerners adopted an equally virtuous stand regarding their willingness to live with slavery as a system.¹⁴ Their insensitivity was a major challenge, not only to abolitionists, but to other antislavery partisans now coming to be frustrated in their hopes that southern spokesmen would support programs for freeing slaves. But as Theodore Parker was to point out in sermon after sermon, the supporter of the slave system would not let the North alone. Horace Greeley was one day to sum up the problem brilliantly:

“Why can’t you let Slavery alone?” was imperiously or querulously demanded at the North, throughout the long struggle preceding [the bombardment of Fort Sumter], by men who should have seen, but would not, that Slavery never left the North alone, nor thought of so doing. “Buy Louisiana for us!” said the slaveholders. “With pleasure.” “Now Florida!” “Certainly.” Next: “Violate your treaties with the Creeks and Cherokees; expel those tribes from the lands they have held from time immemorial, so as to let us expand our plantations.” “So said, so done.” “Now for Texas!” “You have it.” “Next, a third more of Mexico!” “Yours it is.” “Now, break the Missouri Compact, and let Slavery wrestle with Free Labor for the vast region consecrated by that Compact to Freedom!” “Very good. What next?” “Buy us Cuba, for One Hundred and Fifty Millions.” “We have tried; but Spain refuses to sell it.” “Then wrest it from her at all hazards!” And all this time, while Slavery was using the Union as her catspaw—dragging the Republic into iniquitous wars and enormous expenditures, and grasping empire after empire thereby—Northern men (or, more accurately, men at the North) were constantly asking why people living in the Free States could not let Slavery alone, mind their own business, and expend their surplus philanthropy on the poor at their own doors, rather than on the happy and contented slaves!¹⁵

Perhaps the pre-bellum South never harbored the vast conspiracy its enemies conjured up and it was unfair of Southerners to consider the North a vast seedbed of antislavery agitation.¹⁶ The fact is that one must distinguish conspiracies and conspiratorial methods from be-hind-door negotiations inseparable from politics. The latter were as common in the ante-bellum North as in the ante-bellum South. Thus, the entrance of Illinois into the Union, in 1818, was accomplished through the intrigues of pro- and antislavery leaders. The former agreed their state constitution must nominally come out against slavery, if ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Maps
• Editors’ Introduction
• Preface
• 1. The Challenge of Slavery
• 2. Abolition Before Garrison
• 3. Abolitionists and Reformers
• 4. The Antislavery Concert
• 5. The Politics of Freedom
• 6. Schisms and Debates
• 7. The Rise of Political Abolitionism
• 8. Fugitive Slaves and Politicians
• 9. The Compromise of 1850
• 10. Kansas and Abolition: The Irrepressible Conflict
• 11. Reform and Revolution
• Bibliography
• Index