Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles
by
Rev. Parker Pillsbury
(Concord, N.H., 1883)
"And they went everywhere preaching the word."—Acts, viii:4.
INTRODUCTION.
Some books, judged by their titles, are more remarkable for what they do not contain, than for what they do. This work is only Acts, not the Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles. It is only a small portion of a very small part of those apostles.
There were many in the great west, as well as not a few in the east, whose labors, sacrifices and sufferings entitle them to volumes of well-written biography, who can scarcely be mentioned here, even by name.
At this time of my life of nearly three score and fourteen years, more than forty of which have been spent in the field of moral, peaceful and religious agitation for the rights of humanity, it seemed presumption in me to attempt a labor of even this magnitude. And it was only earnest, continued importunity on the part of my very few surviving associates in the conflict, and their friends, that finally determined my course. Truth only has been sought. Not the whole truth; for that were impossible. But strict truth and exact justice, to the full extent of my time and space.
The present generation knows little of the terrible mysteries and meanings of slavery or anti-slavery; the outrages and horrors of the former, or the desperate and deadly encounters with the monster by the latter, long before the cannonade of Fort Sumpter, or the dreadful war chorus of the subsequent rebellion. And all which is now attempted is some disclosure of those mysteries.
By anti-slavery apostles are meant those only whose work was in the lecturing field; who literally "went everywhere preaching the word;" often as with their
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lives in their hands. Nor will only few of them, however worthy and deserving, be mentioned even by name. This work will be rather pictures and sketches than history. It will hardly enter more than two states, New Hampshire and Massachusetts; never go beyond New England. But in New England every type and phase of anti-slavery experience, doing, suffering and triumphing was represented to the fullest possible extent. What was true there was true everywhere in the country.
And the truth on slavery and anti-slavery can be presented on so small space, and in time equally limited, as well as if the whole country were included, and all the thirty years of the moral and peaceful, and so, truly religious, agitation of the mighty problem were covered and all the heroes and martyrs named. The whole, as originally intended, would have comprised acts and experiences of some of those heroes, with brief personal sketches of them, together with short biographical notices of William Lloyd Garrison, of The Liberator and Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, of the Herald of Freedom.
[Lying Clergy]
But, as the work of writing went on, articles began to appear from our old opponents or their children, not only declaring that they or their fathers abolished the evil, but that it could have been sooner and more easily done, "had Garrison and his small, but motley following" been out of their way!
So some chapters of acts of the pro-slavery apostles, became necessary; at cost of both extending the volume, and also excluding some worthy names and noble deeds that had earned good right to grace these pages. These misrepresentations came mainly from the clergy, as did most of our bitterest opposition while prosecuting our anti-slavery labors, as will be hereafter shown beyond all question or contradiction.
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So now the order of the book will be:
A chapter on Mr. Garrison [1805-1879];
a second, on Mr. Rogers [1794-1846];
a third on slavery—as it was;
then one on anti-slavery, what it was not, and what it was; and
then follow the acts of the anti-slavery apostles;
with acts of the pro-slavery apostles subjoined; the latter generally telling their own story in their own words, works and ways, no cross-questioning ever entering into their truly Judgment-day assizes, as will be made fully to appear to a surrounding world.
And it scarcely need be added that the abundant testimony adduced, is only a small part of what the churches and their ministers have treasured up against themselves, to be hereafter unfolded from their own archives, should occasion for it ever arise.
| CONCORD, N.H., 1883. | | P. P. |
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Abolitionist Reunion - 1893
Danvers, Massachusetts Historical Society
CONTENTS
—•—
| CHAPTER | |
| INTRODUCTION | iii
| I. | William Lloyd Garrison | 9
| II. | Nathaniel Peabody Rogers | 28
| III. | Slavery—As it Was | 47
| IV. | Anti-Slavery—What it Was Not, and What it Was | 72
| V. | Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles, with some
Personal Sketches and Experiences 85
| VI. | Conventions and Meetings with Rogers and Foster—
Digression or New Organization 102
| VII. | Acts of the Apostles Continued, with
Personal Sketches of Stephen Symonds Foster 123
| VIII. | Acts of the Apostles Continued—Letter of Concord
Women—Clerical Usurpation—More
Revelations of New Organisation—Riotous
Proceedings at Dover—By the Editor of the
Herald of Freedom 156
| IX. | Meetings in West Chester—Riotous and Shameful
Conduct—Ride to Derry, and what came of it—
Franklin Mob Described in a Letter by Mr.
Foster 182
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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| X. | Dartmouth College—Riotous Behavior of the Students
—Strafford County Anniversary—Eastern
Railroad and its Jim Crow Cars—Outrage on
Colored Passengers
204
| XI. | Discussion on Church Organization by Rev. Mr.
Putnam and Rev. Mr. Sargent—Hillsborough
County Convention at Hancock—and Meeting at
Nashua, by Mr. Foster, and what came of it
241
| XII. | The Martyr Period—Imprisonment of Allen, Brown,
Beach, Harriman and Foster
283
| XIII. | Conventions at Nantucket and New Bedford—
Frederick Douglass Discovered — Letter from
Mr. Garrison—Meetings and Mob Demonstra-
tions in Salem—Operations in Maine—Mobs in
Portland and Harwich
324
| XIV. | Some Acts of the Pro-Slavery Apostles—Personal
Encounter with the Hennicker, N. H. Church and
Suffolk, Mass., Association of Ministers-—Rev.
Dr. Bacon and Son on Slavery and Who
Abolished it—the Church and Clergy in the
Mexican War
364
| XV. | Acts of Pro-Slavery Apostles—General Assembly of
the Presbyterian Church—American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions—the
Baptist Church—Methodist-Episcopal Church—
Protestant Episcopal Church—Campbellities—
American Bible and Tract Societies—Fugitive
Slave Law
386
| XVI. | Some Personal Sketches and Reminiscences—a Last
Speech in an Anti-Slavery Anniversary
Gathering
479
| | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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ACTS OF THE ANTI-SLAVERY APOSTLES.
—•—
CHAPTER I.
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.
The Acts of the twelve apostles are not the history of Christianity. Nor will the Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles be a history of the anti-slavery movement in the United States. My own beginning in that sublime enterprise was in the year 1840, when, dating from the establishment of The Liberator in Boston, by William Lloyd Garrison, it was about ten years old. At that time, so far as can be shown, was first announced the doctrine of immediate unconditional emancipation to
every slave, without compensation to master or expatriation to the slave.
Most of my anti-slavery work was of the missionary character, as was that of the first Christian apostles, who "went everywhere preaching the word." And the purpose of this Scripture is to present a true record, as far as practicable, of what passed under my own immediate observation, and in which it was my honor to bear some humble part. My earliest associates, editors as well as lecturers, are mostly now no more, and some personal account of a part of them is also in my present contemplation.
My first anti-slavery newspapers were The Liberator, The Emancipator, published in New York, organ and property of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and Herald of
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Freedom of Concord. New Hampshire. Through some changes occurring in 1840, The Emancipator passed out of the society's hands, but was immediately succeeded by the National Anti-Slavery Standard, which continued with unswerving integrity till slavery was abolished in the country by presidential proclamation, and the male slave at least was made secure in his right of suffrage and citizenship.
The first issue of his Liberator by Mr. Garrison was on January 1, 1831. It was a most humble, unpretentious little sheet of four pages, about fourteen inches by nine in size, but charged with the destiny of a race of human beings whose redemption from chattel, brutal bondage, was one day to shake to its foundations the mightiest republic ever yet existing on the globe.
My first introduction to Mr. Garrison was in the early spring of 1839. I had just concluded to undertake a short lecturing and financial agency for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and was invited to a meeting of its executive committee, to mature my arrangements. It was an evening business session, in West street, Boston, and at the close Mr. Garrison invited me to his home, then of unassuming pretensions, in Seaver Place, to pass the night.
The next day was Saturday, and I went by stage to Fitchburg, about fifty miles, and on Sunday evening delivered my first address on slavery, as agent of my association.
And though I did in the course of that year, and the beginning of 1840, accept and occupy the position of a minister for a very small Congregational church and society in an obscure New Hampshire town, it seems on the whole more pertinent, proper and desirable, to date the beginning of my life mission and labor from that anti-slavery committee meeting in Boston and introduction to Mr. Garrison, and first work as an anti-
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slavery agent in Fitchburg and through the county of Worcester in the spring of 1839.
Of the boyhood history of Mr. Garrison this may not be the place to speak. Like many men of high eminence, he commenced life among the lowly. Nor was his native town, Newburyport, Massachusetts ever distinguished for any but most conservative ideas in government, religion or social policy.
His excellent mother, a devout member of the Baptist church, early sent him to learn the trade of a shoemaker. Fortunately too early, for his knees could not support the lap-stone, the anvil of the shoemaker of that day, and he was soon discharged, and entered as an apprentice to a cabinet maker. But neither was this a success.
Nor did he even approach nor tend to his future high calling, until, while still a youth, he entered a printing office. That, as has been truly said, was to him high school, college and university, from which he graduated with honors, after long and faithful apprenticeship.
His first business enterprise was to establish a little newspaper in his native town, which he characteristically named the Free Press. He soon learned, how ever, that the time for a Free Press was not yet. But the voice of his genius still said, Cry! and he responded next in Boston, with the National Philanthropist devoted doctrinally and practically to entire abstinence from all intoxicating drinks. His motto was, "Moderate drinking, the down-hill road to drunkenness." This undertaking was in the year 1827, when he was twenty-two years old. But the Philanthropist like the Free Press proved a premature birth. In 1828, his powers of mind and heart coming to be better appreciated, he had and accepted a proposition to go to Bennington, Vermont, and establish a political paper to be known as The Journal
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of the Times, and to advocate the claims of John Quincy Adams to the Presidency of the United States. Here, again, was a failure, and this journal soon slept with its predecessors.
However, the valiant, persevering young editor was still full of courage and hope, and held on his way. He soon made acquaintance with Benjamin Lundy, an early, brave and true-hearted Quaker anti-slavery man, though hardly yet a pronounced abolitionist. Of kindred spirit, in the main, the two men formed a partnership in the autumn of 1829, and together published the Genius of Universal Emancipation.
But though of one spirit, there was in methods between the two men a difference wide as earth and heaven. Mr. Lundy, in common with the highest humanities of the time, only demanded a gradual removal of slavery. Mr. Garrison, instead of gradual, almost stunned the nation with the new and more excellent evangel: "IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL EMANCIPATION!"
Here, then, was a new problem to be solved, or reconciled. An organized existence with one heart, but two voices: one serene, quiet, such as men might hear but not fear; the other the seven unloosed Apocalyptic thunders that men should hear, and hearing, tremble, as had Thomas Jefferson already, even in anticipation, almost half a century before the terrible utterance was heard by mortal ear! But Friend Lundy's persuasion prevailed for the present. After long, honest consideration and discussion, he finally said to Mr. Garrison: "Well, thee may put thy initials to thy editorial articles and I will put my initials to mine."
But the stern logic of events soon showed that iron and clay could never be so welded together. This
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was in Baltimore, a slave-breeding, slave-trading, slave-holding city; indeed, had already become a great shipping emporium of the domestic slave trade of the United States! where, as has been said, slave pens flaunted their signs in open day on the principal streets, their rich owners the best city society and most devout worshippers in Christian churches. The wonder was that the gradualism of Lundy could be tolerated. And he soon learned who had struck at the great tap root of the deadly upas. Mr. Garrison wrote:
| "My demand for immediate emancipation so alarmed and excited the people everywhere, that where Friend Lundy would get one new subscriber I would knock off a dozen." |
And so the Genius of Universal Emancipation would undoubtedly have soon been buried in the tomb of its three predecessors who owed their paternity to Mr. Garrison. But his intrepidity and fidelity in denouncing the domestic slave trade and exposure of its great cruelty, in the action of a ship captain engaged in it from his own native town of Newburyport, led to his arrest on a charge of libel, and conviction, fine, and imprisonment in a Baltimore jail. Nor had he one friend in the city to prevent it, if even to deplore his fate.
Released from prison, his fine and court expenses being paid by Mr. Arthur Tappan of New York, and his partnership with Friend Lundy dissolved by mutual consent and in most cordial spirit, Mr. Garrison conceived the thought of establishing a paper at Washington, where the slave power and the domestic slave trade, in all their terrors, had established themselves under the sheltering wing and by direct authority of the Federal Government. Having in August, 1830, issued his prospectus, he visited the principal cities between Baltimore and Boston to test
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the tone of the public feeling for such an enterprise. But though he found Boston scarcely more friendly to his doctrines and determinations against slavery than even Baltimore itself, he finally concluded that it, rather, than Washington, was the ground whereon The Liberator should be set up.
Writing, after his tour of observation, he said:
| "During my recent tour for the purpose of exciting [informing] the minds of the people by a series of discourses on the subject of slavery, every place I visited gave fresh evidence 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 slave owners themselves. Of course there were individual exceptions to the contrary. This state of things afflicted but did not dishearten me.
"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 birth-place of liberty. That standard is now unfurled, and long may it float, unhurt by the spoilations of time or the missiles of a desperate foe, till every chain be broken and every bondman set free! Let Southern oppressors tremble. Let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble!
"Assenting to the self-evident truth maintained in the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population. In Park Street Church, on the fourth of July, 1829, in an address on slavery, I unsuspectingly assented to the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition. I seize this opportunity to make a full and unequivocal recantation, and thus publicly to ask pardon of my God, of my country, and of the poor slaves, for having uttered a sentiment so full of timidity, injustice and absurdity. A similar recantation from |
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| my pen was published in the Genius of Universal Emancipation, at Baltimore, in September, 1829. My conscience is now satisfied.
"I am aware that many object to the severity of my language. But is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present!
"I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch. And I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead!* |
Thus, at last, had come the hour and the man. The great clock of the eternities struck the hour. And out of the dread silences came the prophetic word which was to finish the work of Washington and the Revolution, proclaiming "LIBERTY throughout all the land, to all the inhabitants thereof [Leviticus 25:10]."
In a Baltimore prison he had learned to "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them [Hebrews 13:3];" and this was his self-consecration, in the earnest strains of Thomas Pringle:
"Oppression! I have seen thee face to face,
And met thy cruel eye and cloudy brow;
But thy soul-withering glance I fear not now—
For dread to prouder feelings doth give place
Of deep abhorrence! Scorning the disgrace
Of slavish knees that at thy footstool bow,
I also kneel; but with far other vow
Do hail thee and thy herd of hirelings base;—
I swear, while life-blood warms my throbbing veins,
Still to oppose and thwart, with heart and hand,
Thy brutalizing sway—till Afric's chains
Are burst, and Freedom rules the rescued land—
Trampling Oppression and his iron rod:
Such is the vow I take: SO HELP ME GOD!" |
____________
*The Liberator, Vol. 1, No. 1: Saturday, January 1, 1831.
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This was the man in his sixth and twentieth year. His work and word, if not his name, was The Liberator. And to the end this was his motto: "My country is the world ; my countrymen are all mankind."
Of the philosophy and method of Mr. Garrison as the acknowledged leader of the anti-slavery movement, a few words cannot here be out of place. In scripture phrase it might be sufficient to say, "the weapons of his warfare were not carnal." He was ever pre-eminently a man of peace. At this time he was a devout believer in the truest, best interpretation of the New Testament, especially of the Sermon on the Mount and the story of the Good Samaritan.
He held his mission to be a completion of the work begun in the Revolutionary War; but in magnitude, sublimity and solemnity, as well as in probable results on the destiny of the world, as far transcending that, as moral truth and right transcend physical force. All war, he held to be inherently, intrinsically wrong. And so he early declared all carnal weapons, even for deliverance from bondage, contrary to the spirit of Christ as well as of His teachings; and even counselled the slaves earnestly against any resort to them in achieving their liberty. And the Constitution of the American Anti-Slavery Society, work of his hand, contained such a provision.
In a "Declaration of Principles adopted by a convention assembled in Philadelphia to organize a national anti-slavery association," are words like these from the same brain, heart and hand:
|
"The right to enjoy liberty is inalienable; to invade it is to usurp the prerogative of Jehovah. Every man has a right to his own body, to the products of his labor, to the protection of law, and to the common advantages of society. It is piracy by our laws to buy or steal a native African and subject him to servi- |
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| tude: surely the sin is as great to enslave an American. Every American citizen who detains a human being in involuntary bondage is (according to Exodus 21:16 [and Deuteronomy 24:7],) a man stealer. The slaves ought instantly to be set free, and brought under the protection of law." |
After much more in similar strain, follows this:
| "These are our views and principles—these our designs and measures. With entire confidence in the over-ruling justice of God, we plant ourselves upon the Declaration of our Independence and the truths of Divine Revelation as upon the Everlasting Rock. We shall send forth agents to lift up everywhere the voice of remonstrance, of warning, of entreaty and of rebuke.
"We shall circulate unsparingly and extensively, anti-slavery tracts and periodicals.
"We shall enlist the pulpit and the press in the cause of the suffering and the dumb.
"We shall aim at a purification of the churches from all participation in the guilt of slavery.
"We shall spare no exertions nor means to bring the whole nation to speedy repentance.
"Our trust for victory is solely in God. We may be personally defeated, but our principles, never! Truth, Justice, reason, humanity, must and will gloriously triumph! |
In youth, Garrison had been a pronounced politician of the conservative party, as were most of the leading men of his native town. It was the sound of the Greek revolution against Turkish despotism which first filled his ear, and fired his young soul with the spirit of freedom. The powerful appeals of Daniel Weebster and Henry Clay in the American Senate fed the flame. Webster became to him the divinity of the forum. He even contemplated at one time a brief term at the West Point military school that he might take the field in person in the cause of the struggling Greeks. John Randolph had not yet told him and Webster and Clay that "the Greeks were at their own doors."
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But as Mr. Garrison increased in wisdom and spiritual stature, and it became evident that he was to be the divinely constituted leader in the sublimest movement in behalf of liberty and humanity of many generations, his vision was so anointed that he saw clearly that, though he was indeed to wrestle with principalities and powers, and with spiritual wickedness in high places also, his weapons were to be drawn from no earthly magazines. The sword of the spirit of Truth only, was to be made mighty in his hands, to an extent such as had not been beheld before, from the day when an apostate Christianity in the person of Constantine the Great, mounted the throne of the Cæsars and most ingloriously proclaimed herself mistress of the world!
When the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed in Philadelphia, in 1833, Garrison was a New Testament Christian, as he understood the word, in all the word can rightly be made to mean. And most of all, did he reverence the doctrines of freedom and peace. Peace on earth, liberty and good-will to men, to all men, and all women, were then his proclamation and song. Human life he came to regard as sacred above all other things. And so capital punishment and war, as well as slavery, were to him an abhorrence. Hence, logically, he renounced all allegiance to human governments founded in military force, and openly proclaimed himself disciple of the Prince of Peace, in these memorable words:
| "O Jesus! noblest of patriots, greatest of heroes, most glorious of martyrs! Thine is the spirit of universal liberty and love, of uncompromising hostility to every form of injustice and wrong. But not with weapons of death dost thou assail thy enemies, that they may be vanquished or destroyed. For thou dost not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against prin- |
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| cipalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Therefore hast thou put on the whole armor of God; having thy loins girt about with truth, and having on the breast-plate of righteousness, and thy feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; going forth to battle with the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the sword of the spirit! [Eph. 6:12-17]
"Worthy of all imitation art thou, in overcoming the evil that is in the world. For, by the shedding of thy own blood, but not the blood of thy bitterest foes even, shalt thou at last obtain a universal victory." |
"The Christian's victory alone
Hostility forever ends;
Erects an undisputed throne
And turns his foes to friends.
Ye great, ye mighty of the earth!
Ye conquerers, learn this secret true!
A secret of celestial birth—
By suffering to subdue!"
—LETTER TO KOSSUTH.
|
The New England Non-Resistance Society was organized in 1838, and Mr. Garrison was elected corresponding secretary and member of the executive committee; and many of its first official papers and records, besides breathing his spirit, bear unmistakable imprint of his brain and hand. A portion of the preamble to its constitution reads thus:
| Whereas, The penal code of the first covenant has been abrogated by Jesus Christ, and whereas our Savior has left man example that we should follow his steps in forbearance, submission to injury and non-resistance, even when life itself is at stake; and whereas the weapons of a true Christian are not carnal but spiritual, and therefore mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds; and whereas we profess to belong to a kingdom not of this world, which is without local or geographical boundaries, in which there is no division of caste, nor inequality of sex; therefore, we, the undersigned, etc., etc. |
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A part of Article II of the constitution reads:
|
"The members of this society agree in the opinion that no man nor body of men, however constituted or by whatever name called, have right to take the life of man as penalty for transgression; that no one who professes to have the spirit of Christ can consistently sue a man at law for redress of injuries, or thrust any evil-doer into prison; or hold any office in which he would come under obligation to execute any penal enactments, or take any part in the military service; or acknowledge allegiance to any human government. * * *" |
At this time it cannot be doubted that the belief of Mr. Garrison in both the inspiration and authority of the Bible, the Trinity and Atonement, but especially in all the teachings and precepts of Christ, was almost precisely such as was then, and still is professed, by the whole Evangelical church. Among his many devout poetical effusions this will be found:
|
SONNET TO THE BIBLE.
"O Book of books! Though skepticism flout
Thy sacred origin, thy worth decry;
Though transcendental folly give the lie
To what thou teachest: though the critic doubt
This fact; that miracle; and raise a shout
Of triumph o'er each incongruity
He in thy pages may perchance espy;
As in his strength, the effulgent sun shines out,
Hiding innumerous stars, so dost thou shine,
With heavenly light all human works excelling.
Thy oracles are holy and divine,
Of free salvation through a Savior telling.
All truth, all excellence dost thou enshrine,
The mists of sin and ignorance expelling."
|
Such was Mr. Garrison as a Christian, as a follower of the Christ of the New Testament. And wondrously consistent with his faith were his spirit, his life, and his whole character.
At home or abroad; in private or in public; as writer or as speaker; as husband, father, friend,
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neighbor, or in whatever relation; after long, wide, and intimate acquaintance with men in pulpit, church, politics, and the world at large; for the constant exercise of what we call the Christian virtues and graces, I surely have seen few the peer, none the superior of William Lloyd Garrison.
And yet he was called an infidel by almost all the universal church of the nation, from the university and theological seminary down to the humblest village pastors, churches, and Sunday-schools. With a life pure and spotless as the white plumage of angels, his whole character and conduct unsullied by the slightest breath of reproach, blessing many temporally and spiritually with whom he had intercourse, gentle and patient with ignorance, forbearing and long-suffering with prejudice and perverseness, and yet bold and brave, unconcealing and uncompromising where oppression and iniquity, injustice and cruelty were to be exposed and rebuked, no matter in what high places entrenched—yet was he branded, blasted as infidel, even atheist, when those words were made to stand for, were presumed to stand for all that is to be dreaded, shunned, execrated and exterminated at whatever cost!
Revering the New Testament as law divine, he studied and respected its teachings. Did he read "Resist Not Evil?" He observed the sacred requirement, preached it in his journal, The Liberator, and practiced it everywhere. Hence arose the Non-Resistance Society, as well as a great national anti-slavery movement, which, without proscription, rested substantially and was largely sustained on a similar foundation.
With him "love your enemies" never meant shoot them in war, nor hang nor imprison them in peace.
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And so The Liberator, which was his own property from first to last, was not only a proclamation of peace, liberty and love on earth, but of general, universal unfolding, progressing and perfecting to all man and womankind.
But, joining himself to no religious sect nor party, chained down to no narrow, dogmatic ringbolt, he had ever eye and ear, as well as heart and hospitality, for whatever new truth might appear—in whatever book, science or religion it might be found. And what wonder if years of violent opposition and persecution from almost the whole American church and clergy on account of his fidelity to the Christian doctrines of peace, purity and liberty as they were taught in the sermon on the mount, and the unswerving example of its great Author, should have clarified and quickened his vision mentally and spiritually! At any rate, he subsequently re-examined the faiths and formulas of the professedly evangelical sects in religion, including their avowed belief in plenary inspiration of Holy Scripture.
As one result of his farther investigations, he attended a convention at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1853, called especially to consider the claim and character of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. The meeting was very large, having representatives, men and women, from east and west, continuing four days, with three long sessions each. In one of them Mr. Garrison offered and ably defended a series of resolutions, the first of which was to this purport:
| "Resolved, That the doctrines of the American church and priesthood, that the Bible is the word of God; that whatever it contains was given by divine inspiration, and that it is the only rule of faith and practice, is self-evidently absurd; is exceedingly injurious both to the intellect and the soul; is highly per- |
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| nicious in its application, and a stumbling block in the way of human redemption." |
And yet, to the end of life, no man more venerated or made wiser use of the Bible than did Mr. Garrison. A late testimonial of his reads thus:
| "I have lost my traditional and educational notions of the holiness of the Bible, but I have gained greatly, I think, in my estimation of it. * * * I am fully aware how grievously the priesthood have perverted it and wielded it as an instrument of spiritual despotism and in opposition to the sacred cause of humanity; still to no other volume do I turn with so much interest; no other do I consult or turn to so frequently; to no other am I so indebted for light and strength; no other is so identified with the growth of human freedom and progress. To no other have I appealed so effectively in aid of the various reformatory movements which I have espoused. And it embodies an amount of excellence so great as to make it, in my estimation, THE BOOK OF BOOKS." |
Garrison early learned to doubt nothing only because it was new, and he accepted nothing unless he saw on it more than the mold and moss of age and time. He found the world, even its most enlightened people, dead in the trespasses and sins of intemperance, slavery, war, capital punishment, and woman's enslavement. He lived to set on foot, or largely and liberally co-operate in enterprises and instrumentalities for correcting all these abuses, for righting all these fearful wrongs.
But at last there came another stranger to his door. With characteristic hospitality that door was again opened. Francis Jackson, one of the noblest, bravest, most steadfast supporters of Mr. Garrison and his life work, once said with respect to sheltering and protecting the fugitive slave:"When I unfeelingly shut my door against a hunted, fleeing slave, may the God of compassion close the door of his mercy against me!"
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So no slave, nor even stranger, ever appealed in vain to Garrison. The new guest was Spiritualism. That was a "sect everywhere spoken against" as fast as it grew in numbers—as anti-slavery had been in the generation preceding it. Even many of the best abolitionists, men and women who had bravely suffered persecution for and with the slave, treated it with contempt and scorn. Not so, never so, with Mr. Garrison. Many of his truest friends, some of them Quakers, as well as of other religious denominations, became early and devoted spiritualists, and that alone would have forever prevented him from dismissing, still less condemning, any stranger or defendant uncondemned, or even unheard.
And in finally giving the new and mysterious idea recognition, he found, and to the end of his life believed, that he had literally entertained angels, and angels not unawares.
Nor did he hesitate to make proclamation of the new and sublime Evangel. In The Liberator of March 3d, 1854, is an article from his pen, of which the following are but the opening paragraphs, giving a detailed account of a highly demonstrative seance he had just attended in New York, where writing, rapping, drumming, "drumming in admirable time and most spiritual manner," and other wondrous phenomena were witnessed. He wrote:
We are often privately asked what we think of the "spiritual manifestations," so called, and whether we have had any opportunities to investigate them.
"When we first heard of the "Rochester knockings" we supposed (not personally knowing the persons implicated) that there might be some collusion in that particular case, or if not, that the phenomena would, ere long, elicit a satisfactory solution, independent of any spiritual agency. As the manifestations
-24-
have spread from house to house, from city to city, from one part of the country to the other, across the Atlantic into Europe, till now the civilized world is compelled to acknowledge their reality, however diverse in accounting for them; as these manifestations continue to increase in variety and power, so that all suspicion of trick or imposture becomes simply absurd and preposterous; and as every attempt to find a solution for them in some physical theory relating to electricity, the odic force, clairvoyance, and the like, has thus far proved abortive—it becomes every intelligent mind to enter into an investigation of them with candor and fairness, as opportunity may offer, and to bear such testimony in regard to them as the facts may warrant: no matter what ridicule it may excite on the part of the uninformed or sceptical.
"As for ourselves, most assuredly we have been in no haste to jump to a conclusion in regard to phenomena so universally diffused, and of so extraordinary a character. For the last three years, we have kept pace with nearly all that has been published on the subject; and we have witnessed, at various times, many surprising "manifestations;" and our conviction is that they cannot be accounted for on any other theory than that of spiritual agency. This theory, however is not unattended with discrepancies, difficulties, and trials. It is certain that, if it be true, there are many deceptive spirits, and that the apostolic injunction to "believe not every spirit," but to try them in every possible way, is specially to be regarded, or the consequences may prove very disastrous. We might write a long essay on what we have seen and heard touching the matter, but this we reserve for some other occasion.
At the burial of his friend Henry C. Wright, who died on the 16th of August, 1870, he made one of the most eloquent and impressive addresses of his whole life. Mr. Wright had been for several years a pronounced and active spiritualist, and this is the
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tribute, or a portion of it, which Mr. Garrison paid to that part of his life work:
| "I see it reproachfully stated in one newspaper at least, that he was a spiritualist. What if he was? That is simply a question of evidence. What has been possible in any age of the world as to spiritual phenomena, is possible in ours. And if we cannot believe what transpires in our days, before our own eyes, we certainly do not and cannot believe what is merely reported to have taken place ages ago.
"What shall be said of the intelligence or sincerity of those who say they implicitly accept all the marvels and miracles recorded as having taken place thousands of years ago, with not a living witness to attest to any one of them; while they scout as arrant imposture perfectly analogous wonders and revelations, though these are confirmed by multitudes of living witnesses whose faithfulness cannot be questioned, and whose critical judgment and profound caution refute every imputation of folly or ignorance." |
When spiritualism was on trial at the bar of the judgment of this world, some of Mr. Garrison's friends saw with deep regret his hospitality and charity towards it. There were those who even denied positively that he was, or was in any danger of becoming, a spiritualist. So doutbtless his early political and religious associates felt and reasoned, when they saw his heart warmed, and his hand and voice were lifted in behalf of the imbruted slave and his few devoted, but despised and persecuted friends. With his shining talents and deep devotion to his then sincerely cherished political and religious principles, both of respectable and popular character, how could he ever become an Abolitionist?
-26-
But there's a Divinity that shapes our ends; and Garrison was a young man when he wrote:
"I am an Abolitionist,
Oppression's deadly foe;
In God's great name will I resist
And lay the monster low.
In God's great name do I demand
To all be Freedom given,
That peace and joy may fill the earth
And songs go up to heaven." |
And spiritualism he yoked to his chariot of salvation so soon as he espoused it in its fullness and conscious truth, as had already his friend Henry C. Wright, a few years before, and doubtless in the full faith and hope of Lord Brougham, when he wrote: "Even in the most cloudless skies of Skepticism, I see a rain-cloud, if it be no bigger than a man's hand, and its name is Spiritualism."
-27-
CHAPTER II.
NATHANIEL PEABODY ROGERS
When some discerning Romans saw how many statues were reared in their city to persons of only indifferent merit, while Cato, one of their wisest and best, had none, they wondered. But the great man had answered the question beforehand: "Better that posterity should ask why Cato has not a monument, than why he has."
In the cemeteries of Concord, New Hampshire, are many memorial stones. Some of great beauty and cost, with proportionally elaborate and, perhaps, appropriate inscriptions. But situated among them is one lot of the ordinary family size, protected by no iron railing, no granite embankment, and whose dead level surface would seem never to have been invaded for burial, agricultural or any other human purpose.
And yet to that hallowed spot I have conducted many devout pilgrims from east and west, both women and men. For there, since Sunday, the 18th day of October, 1846, exactly thirty-six years ago this very [1882] day, and almost hour, have slumbered the mortal remains of Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, surely one of the brightest, noblest, truest and every way most gifted sons, not only of the Granite state, but of any state of this union of states, departing at the early age of only fifty-two years.
And no visitor from near or remote, ever fails to ask, sometimes with almost stunning emphasis: "Why has Rogers no monument?"
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Should that sacred spot speak out from its silence of six and thirty years, doubtless its answer to the eminently pertinent inquiry would be, as was that of Cato, so well remembered, so much admired, so often repeated now, after more than two thousand years.
Such as was Rogers, never die. They need no monuments reared by other hands than their own. Time mows down all marble and granite, tramples out all inscriptions in bronze or brass. And so such registers are soon lost for evermore.
It has been said of the immortal Senator [Charles] Sumner [1811-1874] and his humble tombstone at Mount Auburn, and lowly indeed it is:
"The grass may grow o'er the lowly bed
Where the noblest Roman hath laid his head;
But mind and thought a nation's mind
Embalm the lover of mankind."
|
Ed. Note:
Speeches by Sen. Sumner, A.B. 1830, LL.B. 1834, LL.D. 1859
"Freedom National, Slavery Sectional," Congressional Globe, 32th Cong, 1st Sess, App, 1102-1114 (26 Aug 1852)
"The Landmark of Freedom," Congressional Globe, 33d Cong, 2d Sess (21 Feb 1854)
"The Crime Against Kansas," Cong Globe, 34th Cong, 2d Sess, 19-20 May 1856;
and Works, vol. IV (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1870-1873), pages 125-249
"The Barbarism of Slavery," Congressional Globe, 36th Cong, 1st Sess 2590-2603 (4 June 1860)
|
And scarcely of any man departed or still visible to mortal sight, could this be sung more appropriately than of the subject of this chapter {Nathaniel P. Rogers]; and for some seven years editor of the Herald of Freedom, published in Concord, New Hampshire, ten or twelve years.
|
Ed. Note: Rogers was an early writer on the unconstitutionality of slavery,
as early as January 1837,
an example thereafter followed by
Smith (1840),
Mellen (1841),
Spooner (1845),
Shaw (1846),
James (1849),
Tiffany (1849),
Goodell (1852),
Lincoln (1854),
Douglass (1860),
as per list cited infra, p 75).
|
Mr. Rogers was born at Plymouth, on the 3d of June, 1794, and was one of the tenth generation from him who is so well, widely and honorably known as "Rev. John Rogers," the first in that blessed company of martyrs who suffered in the reign of the bigoted and bloody [English Queen] Mary, in the year 1555.
And surely the blood of the martyr, literally and spiritually, flowed in the veins of his remote descendant, answering "heart to heart," as well as "face to face."
For those who have been privileged to see both our departed editor in the flesh and form, and a singularly well preserved portrait of the martyr in the American Antiquarian Society hall at Worcester, Massachusetts, have wondered at the remarkable resemblance in the
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shape of head and face, in complexion, color of eye and hair, and the whole general expression of the two memorable men.
He graduated with honors at Dartmouth college, in the year 1816. He studied law with the distinguished Richard Fletcher, and then settled down to its practice in his native town, marrying a daughter of Hon. Daniel Farrand, of Burlington, Vermont. He conducted a flourishing and successful law practice in Plymouth for about twenty years before moving to Concord to take charge of the Herald of Freedom.
As student in general literature, especially in history and poetry, none of his day were before him. Few ever heard Shakespeare, Scott, Byron and Burns read more beautifully, more thrillingly, than at his fireside, surrounded by his estimable wife and seven children, with sometimes a few invited friends. But general reading and home delights never detracted from the duties of his profession. When he died, an intimate friend, who had known him long and well, wrote that so accurate was his knowledge of law, and so industrious was he in business, that the success of a client was always confidently expected from the moment his assistance was secured. His life mission, however, was neither literature nor law. He was in due time ordained, consecrated as a high priest in the great fellowship of humanity, and wondrously, divinely did he magnify his office in the ten or twelve last years of his earthly life.
In the year 1835, he made acquaintance with Garrison, and soon placed himself at his side as the hated, hunted, persecuted champion of the American slave, as by this time Garrison was known to be. And from that time, too, Rogers was ever found the firm, unshaken, uncompromising friend and advocate of not
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only the anti-slavery enterprise, but of the causes of temperance, peace, rights of woman, abolition of the gallows and halter, and other social and moral reforms.
Here may be the place to say what certainly should be said at some time and place, a few words on the early religious character of Mr. Rogers. For it is neither known to this generation nor presumed what manner of men and women were most of those who early espoused the cause of the American slave; especially in their relations to the popular and prevailing religion of their time. Both Mr. and Mrs. Rogers were active and honored members in the Congregational church at Plymouth, when they espoused the cause of the slave. And they naturally looked, as did other anti-slavery Christians, to the church and pulpit as the divinely appointed instrumentality for emancipating the bondmen, especially of their own country, enslaved, too, by laws of their own enactment and religious sanction and approval.
Perhaps a few excerpts from an early editorial in the Herald of Freedom will illustrate the quality of the religious sentiment and opinion of the editor, as well as the tone and temper of his heart and spirit. The whole article is in the Herald of August 11, 1838, and is a review of a contribution to the Christian Examiner, entitled "The Presence of God." The Examiner was a Unitarian journal, the sect at that time quite alien to the more evangelical views of Mr. Rogers:
"We wander a moment from our technical anti-slavery sphere, to say, with permission of our readers, a word or two on a beautiful article in the Christian Examiner. It is from the pen of one of our gifted fellow citizens, to whom the unhappy subjects of insanity in this state owe so much for the public charity now contemplated in their behalf. It is written with great eloquence, perspicuity and force of
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style; and what is more, it seems scarcely to want that spirit of heart-broken Christianity so apt to be missing in the peaceful speculation of reviews, and may we not say in the speculations of the elegant corps among whom the writer of the article is here found. We will find briefly what fault we can with the article.
"Its beauties need not be pointed out. They lie scattered profusely over its face. It is an article on "The Presence of God," and treats of our relations to Him. But does it set forth that relation as involving our need of the Lord Jesus Christ, in order that we may be able to stand in it?
"For ourselves we cannot contemplate God, and dare not look towards Him unconnected with Christ. Our writer seems boldly to look upon Him as the strong-eyed eagle gazes into the sun. God is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. He cannot look upon sin but with abhorrence. We have sinned; therefore we fear to behold him. In Christ alone is He our Father in heaven, and we His reconciled children. In Christ we dare take hold of His hand, and of the skirts of His almighty garments. The Lord Jesus Christ and Him crucified is the medium through whom alone we dare look upon God, in His works, His providence, or His grace. Sinless man might, without this medium. Fallen man may not. * * *
"The writer contemplated God in His works—but he seems, though awed, elevated and delighted at their grandeur, beauty and wisdom, to feel still baffled of the great end in their contemplation. Does he not, we would ask him, feel the absence of some link in the chain of communication with this ineffable being, which might, if not interrupted, anchor his soul securely within the veil, which after all continues to shroud him from communion and sight? Can he, in sight of the works of God, speak out and sing in the strains of the Singer of Israel? * * *
"The writer speaks of the communion of God with our minds. This he seems to regard with chief interest. He speaks of "the need of having attention," meaning intellectual attention, "waked up to these old truths." "Listlessness of mind," he continues, "an inveterate habit of inattention to the exis-
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tence of the Eternal Spirit, needs to be broken in upon. We need to help each other to escape a fatuity of mind on this subject that we may feel that God's ark still rides o'er the world's waves, and that the burning bush has not gone out."
"There is an "inattention," it is true, but it is of the heart, not merely of the mind, of the nature and not of "habit" merely; a spiritual inattention, or rather alienation from God, which must be broken in upon. It is not the creature of habit. Adam felt it in all its force on the very day of his first transgression. He heard the voice of God, which, in his innocency, he had hailed with joy, beyond all he felt at the beauties of Paradise; heard it walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and he hid himself from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
"His wife also hid herself, for she, too, had transgressed, and we, their moral heirs, hide ourselves so to this day. They could walk in the garden in sight of the beautiful works of God, perhaps admire the splendors of Eden, but when they heard His voice, they hid themselves.
"Not from habit surely, that not being the creature of a day. There was "inveteracy," not of habit, but of fallen nature. It is that which must be "broken in upon" before we shall incline to come out from among the trees to welcome the presence of God.
"It may be there is a figurative meaning in this hiding among the trees from the presence of Him who made those trees. And may we not deceive ourselves in supposing we contemplate God in His works, when, in truth, we are seeking to hide ourselves from His presence among the glorious trees of this earth's garden? * * *
"We have revolted from God. We are born universally in a state of alienation from Him. The Scriptures and all experience teach this. We do not more certainly inherit the transmitted form of our fallen first-parents, than their descended nature. We are born with the need of being "born again." Of this we are sure. We cannot evade it. It is our fate in the wisdom of God. We cannot escape it any more than the Old World could the deluge. * * *
"We have an ark of safety, to be sure, capacious enough to save
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the entire race of man. It will save only those who will enter it. And the time of entering, as it was at the flood, is before the sky of probation is overcast. The door is that now, as then, before the falling of the first great drops of the eternal thunder shower.
"The ark of safety, we need not say, is Christ. He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. No man can come to the Father but by Him. Whoever hath seen Him hath seen the Father. And by Him is the only manifestation of the presence of God. The presence of His power may be seen in all objects around us. But His strong love to the children of men, cannot be seen but through Christ. * * *
"But we are forgetting that our Herald is a small sheet. We have not space to notice the exquisite beauties of our writer's production as a composition merely; or the argument it draws of God's presence from his works; and as it purports to notice merely this evidence of his presence, we will not here express our regret that the name of Christ is not mentioned in the article. May the gifted writer if he be out of the ark of safety, not delay to enter in. Let him not tarry without to gaze with the eye of elegant curiosity on the scenery of this Sodom world—but bow his neck, "and enter while there's room." And as we bespeak his immediate heed to "the one thing needful," so we demand his pen, voice, influence, prayer and action and open cooperation in the deliverance of his fellow countrymen from the CHAIN OF SLAVERY."
Thus loyal was the editor of the Herald to the religious doctrine and teaching of his time in the church of his choice. The church of his fathers through nine generations. Thus diligently had he studied and considered them; and thus eloquently and faithfully, though tenderly and affectionately, did he present, recommend and enforce them, whenever and wherever he had opportunity.
In 1838 he removed from Plymouth to Concord, and became sole editor of the Herald of Freedom,
-34-
He had, from its establishment in 1834, furnished many most brilliant and trenchant articles for its columns. To the readers of the paper, now alas! the most of them, with its editor, no more, nothing need be said of his power with his pen. Only a single duodecimo volume of three hundred and eighty pages of his editorial writings has been reprinted and preserved, and that long ago disappeared from the market. Ten dollars, it is said, have been offered for a single copy; though that perhaps might have been before most of the early readers had passed away. Some of its descriptive articles have been pronounced as unsurpassed in life and vigor, brilliancy and beauty, as were their rebukes of slave holders and their abettors and accomplices, scathing, withering, but always eminently just.
His "Jaunt to the White Mountains" with Garrison in the year 1841, was copied from the Herald columns into a neat tract and was a capital contribution to the tourist literature of that period. Its length precludes possibility of insertion here; but one of less volume and of scarcely less power entitled "Ailsa Craig," may not so reasonably be rejected. For the world never knew the sublimely gifted writer as it should have known him, and doubtless would, but for his too early removal to higher spheres. Young readers will surely pardon a page or two when they have read them, introduced here for their profit as well as pleasure, showing not only the power of the writer, but also giving them a description of one of the most remarkable as well as interesting spots in the British realm. It is from the Herald of Freedom of April 30, 1841:
AILSA CRAIG.
This famous rock in the Irish Sea, we meant to have said something about when we saw it, long
-35-
before this time. But anti-slavery makes us omit and forget the wonders of the Old World. We passed it on a trip from Scotland to Ireland. We left Glasgow on the twenty-eighth of July, 1840, at ten in the morning, for Dublin. William Lloyd Garrison in company, our fellow passenger to the Irish Capital. * * *
"We went on board a steamer and rode down the ship-thronged Clyde. Nothing can exceed its beauty below the great city of Glasgow. To be sure, they have robbed it of its native banks,-and commerce has substituted for the green slope, a sloping wall of neat and firm stone masonry on each side, and straightened its once indented shores. But the utility of the metamorphosis is so mighty, and so palpable, making this narrow stream, far away inland, the highway for the commerce of one of the great ports of Britain; of a city as large as New York or Liverpool, where the largest ships may ride as freely as in the ocean for depth of water, that it gives it a most imposing, singular, and interesting appearance. It is hardly broader than some of the widest streets of London.
"Our little steamer elbowed its way among the keels that thronged it like "the full tide of human existence," along the slippery pavements and broad side-walks of Cheapside, or Glasgow's Broadway, the swarming Irongate. It was amusing to see the ploughed up water roll along the stone banks, half way up their slopes, in waves that coiled and convolved like the folds of the sea serpent. The walls were a good deal higher than the natural shores, which were wet and low. They had filled in behind them with earth, and made high, wide and level land on either side which was now covered with old verdure, and planted with stately trees:-and the promenader might take his rural walk there, side by side with the winged commerce of every quarter of the globe:-the "white sail gliding by the tree," and the smoky plumage of the steamers streaming off over among the glorious woodlands.
"We made our way steadily, though not rapidly down the widening channel, and came to where the "bonnie" Vale of Leven, came upon the Clyde from Loch Lomond and its
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enclosing mountains which we could descry in the misty distance, up the Vale.
"All abolitionists have heard of the Vale of Leven, and remember its Remonstrance to the Women of America, sent over here some four years ago, and unfurled over the heads of thousands in Broadway Tabernacle at an anti-slavery anniversary. The four thousand Scottish women who signed it, dwelt in the Vale of Leven. We saw John Summerville, the minister who obtained their signatures. What would induce one of our clergy, with any "weight of influence" to be seen going about for women's signatures to an abolition petition? Where Leven Vale meets the Clyde rises a tremendous rock, in the clefts of which lodges the grim old fortress of Dumbarton Castle, famous in the history of Sir William Wallace.
"The river soon broadened into a frith, as the Scotch call their bays. The mountains retreated from each other, and sails were to be seen here and there at anchor in the coves and harbors of the wide waters near their bases. We met a naval horse race on the frith of eight beautiful little vessels at the very top of their speed. They were running the heats, in a wide circle, and leaning down hard to the sea close on each other's heels; all sail crowded they made the water foam white about their prows. It was quite an animating sight, with none of the painful sensations at seeing poor quadruped horses scourged and pressed beyond their powers. There was no distress, nor faltering of wind, in these graceful little racers, as they swept the frith of Clyde.
"A Mr. McTear had come aboard the steamer at Greenock for Dublin. He was a Greenock merchant. We were talking with him on the deck when we spied a conical rock, as it seemed, rising out of the water some distance ahead. It appeared through the thin mists like a hay stack, and about as large. We spoke of it to Mr. McTear, and he told us it was Ailsa Craig. We remembered mention of it by [Scottish poet Sir Walter] Scott [1771-1832], in the "Lord of the Isles," where he calls it rock instead of craig, in the mouth of Robert Bruce [1274-1329; King of Scotland, 1306-1329]:
"Lord of the Isles, my trust in thee
Is firm as Ailsa rock!" |
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"We had supposed it was in the Forth on the other side of Scotland. As we were looking at it, Mr. McTear asked us to guess the distance to it. Strangers he said, were apt to greatly mistake the distance. We looked at the rock along the intervening water. We could get no aid from the shores which were at great distance, quite out of sight on one hand. We supposed of course, we should underrate the distance. So we stretched it liberally, as we thought, and guessed two miles, though it did not look like that distance.
"You have made the common mistake, he said; it is over twenty. We could hardly credit it; but he told us we should see it was so, for we would be over two hours getting to it and were going at ten knots. And over two hours it was; and such was the deceptive character of the way, that when we thought we were coming right upon it, and wanting our friend Garrison, who was asleep below, to see it, we went down and told him to hurry up and see "Ailsa Rock." It proved, to the amazement of us both, that we were then nearly ten miles from it. And the little prominence, that looked so like a hay stack, or a hay cock, when we descried it first, grew as we neared it, a mighty mountain, nine hundred and eighty feet high, rising abruptly out of the sea, and two miles about the base.
"He had been himself governor of the Craig some years before, and had great sport and some danger in killing the birds. His way of killing them was with a club, and he told us how many thousands, we dare not say how many he had killed in a single day of a famous kind of goose. He had let himself down to a quarter of the cliffs where they hunted to get the young and eggs, and the old ones attacked him and he fought them with his club till he was covered with blood, theirs and his own.
"He had a good mind, he said, to give them one gun, just to let us see them fly, as we were strangers. As he had been the Marquis's governor, he said, he would venture that he would overlook it in him. He ordered his boy to bring the musket. The boy returned and said it was left behind at Glasgow.
"Load up the swivel then," said
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the captain. "It will be all the better. It will make quite a flight, ye'll find. Load her up pretty well." The steamer meanwhile kept nearing the giant craig, which was a bare rock from summit to sea, and all of a dull, chalky whiteness, occasioned, as the captain said, by the excrement of the birds. We saw caves in the sides of the mountain and down by the water; the retreats, our informant told us, in former times, of the smugglers who used to frequent the craig and carry on an extensive trade from these places of concealment. We had got so near as to see the white birds flitting across the entrances to the caverns like bees about the hive. With the spy-glass we could see them distinctly and in very considerable numbers; and at length approached so that we could see them on the ledges all over the sides of the mountain.
"We had passed the skirt of the craig, and were within a half mile, or less, of its base. With the glass we could now see the entire mountain side peopled with the sea fowl, and could hear their whimpering, household cry as they moved about, or nestled in domestic snugness on the ten thousand ledges. The air, too, about the precipices, seemed to be alive with them. Still we had not the slightest conception of their frightful multitude. We got about the center of the mountain, when the swivel was fired. The shot went point blank against it and struck the stupendous precipice, as from top to bottom with a reverberation like the discharge of a hundred cannon.
"And what a sight followed! They rose up from that mountain, the countless myriads and millions of sea birds, in a universal, overwhelming cloud that covered the whole heavens, and their cry was like the cry of an alarmed nation. Up they went, millions upon millions, ascending like the smoke of a furnace; countless as the sands on the sea shore; awful, dreadful for multitude, as if the whole mountain were dissolving into life and light, and with an unearthly kind of lament, took up their line of march in every direction off to sea.
"The sight startled the people on board the steamer, who had often witnessed it before, and for some
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minutes there ensued a general silence. For our own part, we were quite amazed and overawed at the spectacle. We had seen nothing like it before. We had seen White Mountain Notches and Niagara Falls in our own land, and the vastness of the wide and deep ocean, which was separating us from it. We had seen something of art's magnificence in the old world; its cloud-capped towers, gorgeous palaces and solemn temples, but we had never witnessed sublimity to be compared to that rising of sea-birds from Ailsa Craig. They were of countless varieties in kind and size, from the largest goose to the smallest marsh bird, and of every conceivable variety of dismal note. Off they moved in wild and alarmed route, like a people going into exile, filling the air far and wide, with their reproachful lament at the wanton cruelty that had broken them up and driven them into captivity.
"We really felt remorse at it; and the thought might have occurred to us how easy it would have been for them, if they had known that the little, smoking speck that was laboring along the sea-surface beneath them had been the cause of their banishment, to have settled down upon it and engulfed it out of sight forever.
"We felt astonished that we had never heard before of this wonderful haunt of sea-fowl, and that no one had ever written a book upon it. It struck us really as one of the wonders of the world. And not us alone. Others, not at all given to the marvellous, declared it surpassed everything they had ever before witnessed. We supposed the mountain must have been quite deserted from the myriads that had flown away; but lifting the glass to it, as we were leaving its border, we were appalled to find it still alive with the myriads that were left behind. They kept leaving and leaving until our steamer got far beyond the Craig, and till we could no longer discern their departure with the telescope.
"And it was miles off into the dusky Irish Sea, before we saw the ebbing of their mighty movement, and that they were beginning to return. We felt relieved to see them going back. It had scarcely occurred to us in our surprise, that they were not
-40-
leaving their native cliffs forever. Slowly and sadly they seemed to return, while the eye sought in vain to ken the outskirts of their mighty caravan. And Ailsa Craig had sunk far into our rear, and quite sensibly diminished in the distance, before the rearmost of the feathered host had disappeared from our sight.
"The excitement occasioned us considerable depression of spirits, from which we were not entirely relieved until night came down upon the St. George's Channel, and the protracted northern twilight could no longer disclose objects to our wearied vision. Then after refreshing ourselves with some substantial confectionery, with which dear George Thompson had kindly stuffed our pockets from a shop at Greenock, before leaving "the land of cakes," our beloved fellow-passenger and ourself, after sundry fond remembrances of the other side of the ocean, some expectations of next day's greeting in Dublin, and some grateful sense, as we trust, of the goodness that had not forgotten us amid all our dangers by sea and land, we forgot what we had seen, and whereabouts we were, in the arms of oblivious sleep."
To do justice to the memory of Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, to his character and work, would require genius and inspiration like his own.
Nor, perhaps, would this cheap age even then understand nor comprehend it.
It manufactures sham and shoddy at too many of its mills, political, literary, social, moral and religious.
It quotes Pope and Burns about an "honest man," but seems not to know him when he comes.
It celebrated the birthday of [Scottish poet] Robert Burns [1759-1796] with much pomp and demonstration in less than one month after it hung [abolitionist] John Brown [1800-1859] for a heroism and devotion to freedom and humanity, which began, rekindled with divine fervor, where the zeal of LaFayette for a white man's liberty paled out of human sight.
And socially, morally and religiously it [this "cheap age"] had hung Rogers long before, in the same
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persecuting spirit that burned his illustrious ancestor [the first English Protestant martyr, Rev. John Rogers (1500-1555] in the [1555] Smithfield pyre [under English Queen Mary (1553-1558)].
In the true spirit of martyrdom did Rogers, like John Brown, join the anti-slavery movement in an hour of peril. Garrison had been mobbed in Boston, as was said, "in broad day, by Boston's best men in broadcloth, gentlemen of property and standing"; driven from a female anti-slavery concert of prayer which he had been invited to attend and address. Mr. Garrison said of the spectacle when all the streets near the place of meeting were thronged with a mob burning with murderous intent:
"It was an awful, sublime and soul-thrilling scene—enough, one would suppose, to melt adamantine hearts, and make even fiends of darkness stagger and retreat. Indeed the clear, untremulous voice of that Christian heroine, Miss Parker, in prayer occasionally awed the ruffians into silence, and she was heard distinctly, even in the midst of their hisses and yells and curses." Garrison withdrew from the prayer meeting and the mayor entered in obedience to the wishes of the fiendish crew, and dispersed it. Then the cry, the shriek, the yell was,"we must have Garrison." "Out with him! Lynch him!" Some of the rioters discovered and seized him. They drew him furiously to a window and were about to thrust him out, when one of them relented and said,"Let us not kill him out-right." But they coiled a rope about his body, nearly stripped him of his clothing, then dragged him through the streets till he was finally rescued by posse comitatus and at frightful peril was at length got to the mayor's office. There he was provided with clothing and from thence sent to jail, as "a disturber of the peace," the mayor and his advisers declaring that "the only way to preserve his life."
In Alton
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Rev. Elijah Parish Lovejoy, too, another anti-slavery editor, had been shot and killed by a mob, five bullets being taken from his body, three from his breast, and that, too, in 1837, only a few months before Mr. Rogers removed with his family to Concord to conduct the Herald of Freedom.
| Ed. Note: See also p 84. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Key (1853), p 228, provides more details on Rev. Lovejoy's murder, in reprisal for exercising First Amendment freedom-of-the-press rights. |
So that in assuming such position, he also, as might be said, "took his life in his hand." For Concord itself was no stranger to the mob at that time and for years afterward was the consecrated guardian of slavery.
As a member of the Plymouth Congregational church, both Mr. and Mrs. Rogers had cooperated earnestly, faithfully in works of religious benevolence and charity. But when they demanded that those in bonds in their own country should be remembered even "as bound with them," they were repulsed as disorderly, contumacious disturbers of the peace of the church and its minister, who, at that time, was among the most virulent opposers of the whole anti-slavery enterprise.
But they did not withdraw from their church connection till they saw that southern slaveholders were more welcome to the pulpit and sacramental table, than were faithful, devoted abolitionists, whose moral and religious integrity of character, as well as soundness of opinion, were above reproach or suspicion. Rogers, beyond most public men, ever had unshaken faith in the people, though conservative while a politician, and orthodox in his religious faith. When he left the church he investigated its character anew and for himself. The claims of the clergy to prerogative in things temporal as well as spiritual, he soon learned to hold in profound disesteem. To no one man then living, or who has appeared since, does the world owe more than to him for exposing and rebuking the
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arrogance and insolence not to say down-right fraud and dishonesty, of a ministry whose ruling, directing power in all the great popular demonstrations of the land, north as well as south, was exerted in support and sanctification of slavery. The exceptions to this charge were too few to change the result, as will appear in the progress of this work.
Mr. Rogers never doubted for a moment that the people, well and wisely taught, would abolish slavery and cease to oppress one another. And so like the Great Emancipator of Nazareth, he directed all his sternest strokes and rebukes at the priests and rulers, who really "bound the heavy burdens and laid them on men's shoulders [Matthew 23:4]," as in Judea, two thousand years ago. He and his associates of the Garrison school of abolitionists relied solely on the power of moral and spiritual truth to rescue the slave as well as to redeem and save the world.
They formed, they joined no political party. They abjured the ballot altogether as a reforming or restoring agency, as much as they did the bullet, the only specie redemption of the ballot, in every government of force. Both Mr. and Mrs. Rogers were members and officers of the New England Non-Resistance Society. And none ever more highly adorned the doctrine of their profession than they.
As one with vision anointed to perceive all moral and spiritual truth, Rogers seemed to stand almost alone. His editorial writings are witness to this, and will be to more than the next generation. It were well for man and womankind, if whole volumes of them, judiciously selected, could be reproduced and scattered everywhere, like the shining constellation among the dimmer stars. His words to-day are, many of them, wondrously fresh and new.
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The temperance cause had no firmer or mure consistent friend. The peace societies had best of reasons to be proud of his support, in word and deed. To him human life was sacred as the life of God. Once, at a grand Peace gathering, it was strenuously argued by most of the members who spoke, that human life could and should be taken by divine command. And the president of the society himself made an argument in defence of all the slaughters of the Canaanites and other tribes and peoples, men, women and children, by Moses, Joshua and their destroying hosts, because perpetrated by command of God.
It was at one of the last meetings Rogers ever attended, and he was then too feeble to bear an active part m the deliberations. But after listening a good while to scripture text and learned logic under Levitical law, he rose to his feet and in low voice asked: "Does our brother yonder say that if God commanded him, he would take a sword and use it in slaying human beings, and innocent, helpless human beings? "Yes, if God commanded," was the answer. "Well, I wouldn't," responded Rogers, and sank back into his seat, amid loud cheers of evident approval and admiration.
Woman, to him, was in all rights, privileges and prerogatives, the full equal of man. He was a Christian in the divinest, sublimest sense of that still mysterious and much abused word. And as such his kingdom was not of this world. And so he could neither vote in, nor ask others to vote in nor to fight for any government based on military power.
As husband and father, none ever knew one in whom his family were more supremely felicitated. As companion and friend, blessed and happy were all those who enjoyed his confidence and esteem. Gentle,
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simple, tender, kind, ready to sacrifice his own comfort; sharing on occasion, like General Washington, his room and bed with a colored man, and yet always discriminating in high degree; with tastes most refined; ever ready to criticise, even censure a friend, however dear, when he deemed it just and
demanded; firm as his own Ailsa Craig, whenever or wherever, or however a moral principal was in jeopardy; running over with music, poetry, and culture of every kind, he was a man, the like of whom the world has seldom seen—may not soon see again.
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CHAPTER III.
SLAVERY—AS IT WAS.
Everybody now is anti-slavery. It is honorable now to be a child of the man who "cast the first anti-slavery vote in our town;" or called "our first anti-slavery meeting;" or first entertained Garrison as guest, or Abby Kelley, or Frederick Douglass; or rescued Stephen Foster or Lucy Stone from the hands of a ferocious mob; or raised, or commanded the first company of colored troops in the war of Rebellion, at the time when not a musical band could be found in the whole city of New York to play for a colored regiment, as it marched from the New Haven Railway station to the steamer at the foot of Canal street to embark for the seat of war!
"Paid pipers" the venerable Dr. Tyng with withering scorn called them all on the same evening in Cooper Institute, where he presided at a lecture by George William Curtis. "Paid pipers," with wind too immaculate to blow away in escort of a gallant battalion of our country's saviors, "when there was no other name under heaven given among men," whereby the nationality could be saved but the negro name; despised as he was and rejected of men; "a man of sorrows" and acquainted all his dreary life with grief!
Everybody now is [claims to be] an abolitionist, or son, or grandson of an anti-slavery parentage, and so all seem to claim equal honor, so far as honor is due, for ridding the world of the sublimest scourge and curse that ever afflicted the human race.
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Few now, however, have much conception of what slavery was; or what was genuine, effective anti-slavery, when slavery sat supreme "on its throne of skulls," and ruled the whole nation, state, church and school, literature, trade, commerce, manufactures and agriculture, as with rod of iron!
And its first command, great command, only command was, "Thou shalt have no god but me." Not, as from Mount Sinai, "no other gods before me," but no other god. Not "no other gods before me," but "no other gods with, or above or below me!" So it was. Anti-slavery then, was more than a name; more than profession; or denomination in religion; or party in the government.
So Christianity had mighty meanings when the great apostle to the Gentiles wrote: "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ." [Rom 1:16.] And "I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified." [I Cor. 2:2.] It had fearful meanings when the gardens of Nero were illumined with the burning bodies of martyred saints, both men and women, young and old! When to name the Christ of God was death in lingering torments—when crucifixions were so multiplied that, as in grim epigram it was said, "space was wanted for crosses, and crosses for christians." And yet so sublime was Christian heroism at that hour, that it could have well been added, but christians are never wanting for crosses.
But what was our slave system, that so many now proudly claim to have aided to destroy? And whose fathers and mothers were those who really did bear active, effective part in the thirty years moral and peaceful conflict, inaugurated by Garrison with "sword of the spirit;" whose only weapons were
"The mild arms of truth and love,
Made mighty through the living God?"
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Or whose sons and brothers rushed at last to the field of mortal combat, and fought the bloodiest, mightiest, everyway, most frightful war, that has shaken the earth and darkened the skies in all the Christian years? Slavery! What is it? What was it on the American plantation? "Peculiar Institution," some called it. "Patriarchal Institution," others!
But what was it? All language pales and is silent in its dread presence. Slave-holding! "Deed without a name!" In cant phrase we said slavery degrades man to the brute, sinks woman to the dead level of the horse. And then who knows the height and depth, the length and breadth of those stunning words; insulting blasphemies against the Holy Spirit of Humanity!
Let one advertisement, distributed by large handbills, as well as published in the daily newspapers of New Orleans, aid the imagination :
| RAFFLE. MR. JOSEPH JENNINGS respectfully informs his friends and the public that, at the request of many acquaintances, he has been induced to purchase from Mr. Osborne, of Missouri, the celebrated DARK BAY HORSE, "STAR," aged five years, square trotter and warranted sound, with a new, light Trotting Buggy and Harness; Also the dark, stout Mulatto Giri, "Sarah," aged about twenty years, general house servant, valued at nine hundred dollars, and guaranteed: and will be RAFFLED for at four o'clock P.M., February first, at the selection hotel of the subscribers. The above is as represented, and those persons who may wish to engage in the usual practice of raffling will, I assure them, be perfectly satisfied with their destiny in this affair.
The whole is valued at its just worth, fifteen hundred dollars; fifteen hundred CHANCES at One Dollar each. The Raffle will be conducted by gentlemen selected by the interested subscribers present. Five nights will be allowed to complete the Raffle. Both of the above described can be seen at my store, No. 78 Common street, second door from Camp, at from nine o'clock A.M., to two P.M.
Highest throw to take the first choice; the lowest throw the remaining prize, and the fortunate winners will pay Twenty Dollars each for the refreshments furnished on the occasion.
N. B. No chances recognized unless paid for previous to the commencement.
JOSEPH JENN1NGS.
|
In the light of a spectacle like this, it is possible to fancy slightly what should be understood when it is said that slavery degrades human beings to the plane of brute beasts.
Or reverse the order of illustration, if we dare, and imagine a brute beast raised to the dignity and honor,
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the privilege and prerogative of a man, an immortal being. History or fable tells us of a Roman Sovereign who made a favorite horse first Consul of the Empire. Such mockery might have been. But suppose in a Christian country, in a Christian sanctuary, it were proposed to admit, not a horse, but some dogs into full fellowship and communion with the church. It is on a delightful Sunday of early summer, in a pleasant New England country town. The village gardens are already abloom with early flowers, the orchards are white with prophecy of abundant fruit, and every tree is an orchestra of cheerful birds, whose worship-notes almost charm the Sabbath silence into sweet accord with the songs of paradise.
All the village and the districts around assemble at their, to them, "house of God." At the appointed hour, the baptized communicants of the accepted faith are invited to seats at the sacramental board. The unregenerate of the congregation retire to the outer seats, paying silent but respectful attention. The first scene in the solemn service is admission of new members, who are invited forward to the altar. There, in presence of the congregation, they listen and bow silent assent to the Articles of Faith and the Covenant Vows, and receive the seal of baptism, in the name of the triune God. Solemn and impressive as this may be, it may excite no unusual emotions, being neither new nor infrequent.
But slavery, we used to say with lip only, "degrades man and woman to a level with the brutes;" puts the "bay horse, Star," and the "Mulatto girl, Sarah," into the same raffle, or on the same auction-block. Now change the order. Elevate the brutes to the place of immortal beings at the baptismal font and sacramental table. Whistle up two or three dogs and solemnly read over to them the creed and
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covenant, and sprinkle them with the holy drops of baptism, calling them by their appropriate brute names, "Lion, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Tiger, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." And let the third be a female: "Topsy, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."
Let such a spectacle be enacted on a delightful summer Sunday afternoon, in a beautiful New England village, in its pleasant white meeting-house, and at the memorial supper of that crucified Redeemer in whom the church and its pastor devoutly believed, and through whom they humbly hoped for salvation. Can the effect on the beholders of such a daring spectacle be described, or even imagined? As well, but no better, attempt a description of that slavery which truly did degrade human beings to a level with horses and with dogs.
This whole scene was once supposed as illustration, in the days of slavery, in just such town and house of worship as here described, and not only that town, but the pulpit and religious press of both the hemispheres almost shrieked as with holy horror at what they called so audacious, so diabolical blasphemy. And the cry came up from near and far for immediate punishment of him who had so illumined slavery, to the fullest demand of the statute, which was long confinement, it was held, in the State prison!
But one thing was made clear. The words, Slavery degrades man to a level with beasts, were seen and felt as perhaps never before. The congregation where the illustration was presented saw and solemnly felt that from beasts up to men—to men exalted to angelic heights—was no farther than those deeps down which
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immortal man is plunged, to reach the level of the beasts that perish. And that frightful pit was reached by every chattel slave ever born.
But the question, What was American slavery? is not yet answered. To call it robbery, by only our dictionary definition, would pay it high compliment. Its fell work began where all ordinary robbery leaves off.
John Wesley saw it and pronounced it, "Sum of all villainies."
And if he did not pronounce the slave holder sum of all villains, he did address him in words like these:
| "What I have said to slave-traders, equally concerns all slave-holders, of whatever rank and degree, seeing man-buyers are exactly on a level with man-stealers. You say, I pay honestly for my goods, and am not concerned to know they are honestly come by.
"Nay, but you are. * * * You know they are not honestly come by; you know they are procured by means nothing near so innocent as picking pockets, house-breaking, or robbery on the highway. You know they are procured by a deliberate species of more complicated villainy, of fraud, robbery and murder, than was ever practiced by Mohammedans or Pagans; in particular, by murders of all kinds; by the blood of the innocent poured upon the ground like water.
"Now it is your money that pays the African butcher. You, therefore, are principally guilty of all these frauds, robberies and murders. You are the spring that puts all the rest in motion. They would not stir a step without you; therefore the blood of all these wretches who die before their time lies upon your head. "The blood of thy brother crieth against thee from the earth." [Gen. 4:10]
"O, whatever it costs, put a stop to its cry before it be too late; instantly, at any price, were it the half of your goods, deliver thyself from blood-guiltiness! Thy hands, thy bed, thy furniture, thy house, and thy lands, at present are stained with blood. Surely it is enough; accumulate no more guilt; spill no more the blood of the innocent. Do not hire another to shed blood; do not pay him for |
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| doing it. Whether you are a Christian or not, show yourself a man! Be not more savage than a lion or a bear." |
Slavery is not robbery therefore, because it is so much more, and worse. Indeed, to rob man of manhood, and beastialize him down with not only animals, but the dead matter on which brutes feed and tread, makes any farther spoliation simply impossible.
Or shall we pronounce American slavery adultery, wholesale, unblushing adultery? If not, it must be because, as with robbery, it was something so much worse. For, first, what is adultery but setting aside all rights, privileges and responsibilities, human and divine, of both the marriage and parental relations? Slavery knew no more of marriage and parentage among slaves than among swine. Logically, as well as legally, it could not. And the statutes and court decisions so declared.
But such abomination had not only state sanction, but church sanctification as well. Judge Birney, of Kentucky, once a slave-holder, in his memorable tract entitled: "The American Churches, the Bulwarks of American Slavery," second edition [pp 26-27], revised by the author, cites this instance:
| "In 1835 the following query referring to slaves was presented to the Savannah River Baptist Association of Ministers: "Whether in case of involuntary separation of such a character as to preclude all prospect of future intercourse, the parties ought to be allowed to marry again.'" |
The following was the answer:
| "* * * Such separation among persons situated as are our slaves, is civilly a separation by death. And we believe that in the sight of God, it would be so viewed! * * * The slaves are not free agents, and a dissolution by death is not more entirely without their consent and beyond their control than by such separation." |
| Ed. Note: See also other analyses of this, by, e.g.,
Deacon James Birney, Bulwarks (1840), pp 26-27
Rev. William Goodell, Slavery and Anti-Slavery (1852), p 185
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Key (1853), p 205
Rep. Owen Lovejoy, "The Barbarism of Slavery" (5 April 1860), p 204b
Sen. Charles Sumner, "The Barbarism of Slavery" (4 June 1860) p 312.
|
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James G. Birney was at one time a slaveholder as well as judge in the courts, and a ruling elder in the Presbyterian church. He was induced to emancipate his slaves, as well as to provide for their future support, taking them over into the free state of Ohio for that purpose, by the faithful and earnest argument and appeal of Theodore D. Weld, an early, eloquent and everyway most efficient apostle and laborer in the anti-slavery field.
Washing his own hands from the blood and guilt of slave holding, Judge Birney set himself to the work of abolishing the foul system. Among his first endeavors was an attempt to purify the churches, beginning with his own. But neither his official standing in both state and church, nor his high consequent social status availed to shield him from every possible indignity and outrage at the hands of infuriated mobs, composed largely sometimes of members of the churches. Driven from Kentucky he removed to Ohio.
His descent on Cincinnati, where he had now become known, was a signal to waken all the vengeance of both church and state against him. Meetings were at once called, "to see if the people will permit abolition papers to be published in this city." At the first meeting the postmaster, who was also a minister, presided. A committee of thirteen, all eminent citizens, and eight of them church members, was appointed to wait on Mr. Birney and assure him that his paper must stop, or the meeting would not be responsible for the consequences of its continuance. The chairman of the committee declared that "if the paper were not promptly suspended, a mob, unusual in numbers, determined in purpose, and desolating in its ravages, would be inevitable!" All of which proved true, for the paper did not stop. In the darkness of midnight the mob entered and carried
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press, types and all else of contents and sunk them in the Ohio river. And twice afterwards was the same outrage perpetrated. No wonder Mr. Burney entitled his memorable tract, published at the time, "The American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery." For the title was more than justified on every subsequent page, as will hereafter be made to appear.
And the word of divine truth uttered by Mr. Weld, and the baptism of fire and water three times administered by the fiendish mob, with full approval of state, church and pulpit, were sufficient consecration of the author of the memorable tract to his subsequent anti-slavery ministry and apostleship.
But returning to the argument. Not only was slavery adultery, as sanctified and committed by the churches, in thus sundering all marriage rights and responsibilities; it was legally and in solemn compact annihilation of human marriage and parentage. The court decisions contained sentiments such as these: "With consent of their masters, slaves may marry; but in a state of slavery it can produce no civil effect, because slaves are deprived of all civil rights." [Judge Matthews of Louisana]. Attorney-General Delany, of Maryland, held that slaves would not be admonished for incontinence, or punished for adultery or fornication; or prosecuted for petty treason, or for killing a husband, being a slave. The code of Louisiana declared,"a slave could not contract matrimony. The association which takes place among slaves, and is called marriage, being properly designated contubernium, a relation without sanctity, and to which no civil rights adhere." So the plain, unquestionable fact was, slavery was wholesale, legalized, sanctified concubinage, or adultery, from first to last. Our government was based on the prostrate bodies, souls, and civil,
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social, marital, parental, educational, moral and religious rights of half a million of immortal beings. In three-quarters of a century their numbers multiplied till at the downfall of the institution there were four millions, and not one legal marriage ever existed in all their generations! And yet, compelled by law thus to live and herd like brute beasts, hundreds of thousands of them were admitted to baptism and sacramental communion and fellowship in all the great evangelical denominations in the land!
One other attribute of the dreadful system remains to be exposed, and that was murder. Under the written law of slavery, more than seventy offences, when committed by slaves, were punishable with death. One law read, "if any slave shall presume to strike any white person, such slave may be lawfully killed." Of course killed on the spot. A woman or girl would have been killed (undoubtedly many were killed) for defending her person against the lustful attack of her overseer or other white assailant.
Special laws existed for recapturing escaped slaves at any cost of life to the victims, by first proclaiming them outlaws. The following legal instrument with its accompaniments will suffice to show the way:
| STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA, | }
| Lenoir County, | } | |
Whereas, complaint hath been this day made to us, two of the Justices of the Peace for the said county, by William D. Cobb, of Jones county, that two negro slaves belonging to him, named Ben (commonly known by the name of Ben Fox) and Rigdon, have absented themselves from their said master's service's and are lurking about in the counties of Lenoir and Jones, committing acts of felony;—these are, in the name of the State, to command the said slaves forthwith to surrender themselves, and return home to their said master.
And we do hereby, by virtue of an act of the Assembly of this State, concerning servants and slaves, intimate and declare, if the said slaves do not surrender themselves and return home to their master immediately after the publication of these presents, that any person may kill and destroy said slaves by such means as he or they think fit, without accusation or impeachment of any crime or offence for so doing, or without incurring any penalty or forfeiture thereby.
Given under our hands and seals, this 12th day of November, 1836.
|
B. COLEMAN, J. P. [Seal.]
| JAMES JONES, J. P. [Seal.] | |
|
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TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS REWARD,—Ran away from the subscriber, a certain negro man named Ben, (commonly known by the name of Ben Fox). Also, one other negro, by the name of Rigdon, who ran away on the 8th of this month.
I will give the reward of one hundred dollars for each of the above negroes, to be delivered to me or confined in the jail of Lenoir or Jones county, or for the killing of them, so that I can see them.
November 13, 1836. W. D. COBB.
|
Another advertisement, from the Sumpter County (Alabama) Whig will illustrate the methods of slave hunting in other States besides North Carolina:
NEGRO DOGS.—The undersigned having bought the entire pack ofNEGRO DOGS of the Hay & Allen stock, he now proposes to catch runaway negroes. His charge will be three dollars a day for hunting and fifteen dollars for catching a runaway. He resides three and one-half miles north of Livingston, near the lower Jones' Bluff road.
November 6, 1845. WM. GAMBEL.
|
The New York Commercial-Advertiser of June 8th, 1827, contained the following item of news, not uncommon at that time, as the irresponsibility of slave-holders over the lives of their slaves had hardly been questioned:
"HUNTING MEN WITH DOGS.—A negro who had absconded from his master, and for whom a reward of a hundred dollars was offered, has been apprehended and committed to prison in Savannah."
The editor who states the fact adds, with as much coolness as though there were no barbarity in the matter, that he did not surrender till he was considerably maimed by the dogs that had been set on him—desperately fighting them, and badly cutting one of them with a sword.
The St. Francisville (La.) Chronicle of February 1st, 1839, reports a slave-hunt after this sort:
"Two or three days ago a gentleman of this parish, in hunting runaway negroes, came upon a camp of them in the swamp on Cat Island. He succeeded in arresting two of them, but the third made fight. On being shot in the shoulder, he fled to a sluice, where the dogs succeeded in drowning him before assistance could arrive."
Had "assistance arrived," would it have been tendered to the dogs or their victim? is a question, to
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this day. But calling off the dogs altogether, let the subject be illumined a little farther with lights like this, from the Charleston (S. C.) Courier, in 1825.
| TWENTY DOLLARS REWARD.—Ran away from the subscriber, on the 14th instant, a negro girl named Molly. She is 16 or 17 years of age slim made, lately BRANDED ON HER LEFT CHEEK THUS, "R," AND A PIECE IS TAKEN OFF HER EAR ON THE SAME SIDE; THE SAME LETTER IS BRANDED ON THE INSIDE OF BOTH HER LEGS.ABNER ROSS, Fairfield District, S. C. |
True, the killing is here omitted, possibly by accident, but if such an atrocity does not involve murder sublimated, what shall be said of this from the Wilmington (N. C.) Advertiser of July 13th, 1838?
| RANAWAY—MY NEGRO MAN. RICHARD.—A reward of twenty-five dollars will be paid for his apprehension, DEAD OR ALIVE! Satisfactory proof will only be required of his being killed. He has with him, in all probability, his wife, Eiza, who ran away from Colonel Thompson, now a resident of Alabama. |
But no more such evidences of the murderous spirit of slavery, can be needed; though the last advertisement suggests an incident in South Carolina, so late as 1844, which is too instructive and assuring not to be given.
That "wife, Eliza, who ran away from Colonel Thompson," possibly might have a tale unfolded, whose lightest word would have harrowed up the soul. There were many such tales. A young man in South Carolina was seen walking with a young woman, a slave, to whom it was known he was tenderly attached, and whom, it was farther shown, he married and aided to escape from slavery. That was his crime. He was arrested, tried, and found guilty. Sentence of death was pronounced upon him by Judge J. B. O'Neale, in word and spirit as now reproduced:
"JOHN L. BROWN—It is my duty to announce to you the consequences of the conviction which you heard at Winnsboro', and of the opinion you have just heard read, refusing your two-fold motion in arrest of judgment for a new trial.
"You are to die! To die an ignominious death—the death on the gallows! This announcement is, to
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you, I know, most appalling. Little did you dream of it when you stepped into the bar with an air as if you thought it was a fine frolic. But the consequences of crime are just such as you are realizing. Punishment often comes when it is least expected.
"Let me entreat you to take the present opportunity to commence the work of reformation. Time will be furnished you to prepare for the great change just before you. Of your past life I know nothing, except what your trial furnished. That told me that the crime for which you are to suffer was the consequence of a want of attention on your part to the duties of life. The strange woman snared you. She flattered you with her words, and you became her victim. The consequence was, that, led on by a desire to serve her, you committed the offense of aiding a slave to run away and depart from her master's service; and now, for it you are to die!
"You are a young man, and I fear you have been dissolute; and if so, these kindred vices have contributed a full measure to your ruin. Reflect on your past life, and make the only useful devotion of the remnant of your days in preparing for death.
"Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, is the language of inspired wisdom. This comes home appropriately to you in this trying moment.
"You are young; quite too young to be where you are. If you had remembered your Creator in your past days, you would not now be in a felon's place, to receive a felon's judgment. Still, it is not too late to remember your Creator. He calls early, and He calls late. He stretches out the arms of a Father's love to you—to the vilest sinner—and says: "Come unto me and be saved."
"You can perhaps, read. If so, read the Scriptures; read them without note, and without comment; and pray to God for His assistance; and you will be able to say when you pass from prison to execution, as a poor slave said under similar circumstances: 'I am glad my Friday has come.' If you cannot read the Scriptures, the ministers of our holy religion will be ready to aid you. They will read and
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explain to you until you will be able to understand; and understanding, to call upon the only One who can help you and save you—Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world. To Him I commend you. And through Him may you have that opening of the Day-Spring of mercy from on high, which shall bless you here, and crown you as a saint in an everlasting world, forever and ever.
"The sentence of the [pro-slavery] law is that you be taken hence to the place from whence you came last; thence to the jail of Fairfield District; and that there you be closely and securely confined until Friday, the 26th day of April next; on which day, between the hours of ten in the forenoon and two in the afternoon, you will be taken to the place of public execution, and there be hanged by the neck till your body be dead. And may God have mercy on your soul!"
No event in anti-slavery history up to that time so stirred the two hemispheres as did this frightful sentence of Judge O'Neale. Even in the British House of Lords, two illustrious members, Brougham and Denman, gave it pathetic and powerful consideration. One London journal said:"The dreadful case of John L. Brown has created throughout Great Britain, a sensation of deepest and most painful character. Addresses to the churches in South Carolina have been extensively signed by the independent churches in England and Scotland."
The Glasgow Argus, among the most important journals of Scotland, twice published the Charge on account of its fearful character, and said of it,"we know of nothing more atrocious in the judicial annals of modern times. * * * And what are we to think of a judge, who in passing sentence for what in our country, our land of Freedom, would be looked upon as a praiseworthy act, invokes the sacred name of Deity and the Holy Book of Inspiration as lending sanction to the atrocity about to be committed!"
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But perhaps the most imposing movement in Great Britain, on this terrible perversion of all justice, as well as outrage on all decency, humanity and charity, was a "Memorial addressed to the Churches of Christ in South Carolina, as representing those of other states," signed by more than thirteen hundred ministers and office-holders in the churches and other benevolent associations of London, and other portions of the kingdom, in solemn protest against it. But it need hardly be told, that all the sympathy felt, all the effort made, all the appeals and memorials sent, eloquent, tender, pathetic, devout as many, if not all of them were, seemed almost wholly thrown away on the press, pulpit, and vast majority of the people of the United States, even though South Carolina did yield to foreign pressure at last, and commuted the sentence to fifty lashes on the bare back; and even they were said to have been remitted on condition that the young man quit the state forever.
But this account though already extended, would not be complete unless the feelings excited in the hearts of the American Abolitionists, in view of the whole scene, could have utterance.
Let then their favorite and faithful poet, [John Greenleaf] Whittier [1807-1892], be their oracle:
ON THE SENTENCE OF JOHN L. BROWN.
Ho! thou who seekest late and long
A License from the Holy Book
For brutal lust and hellish wrong,
Man of the Pulpit look!
Lift up those cold [unfeeling] and atheist eyes,
This ripe fruit of thy [atheist] teaching see;
And tell us how to heaven will rise
The incense of this sacrifice—
This blossom of the gallows tree!
Search out for slavery's hour of need
Some fitting text of sacred writ;
Give heaven the credit of a deed
Which shames the nether pit.
|
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Kneel, smooth blasphemer, unto Him
Whose truth is on thy lips a lie—
Ask that His bright winged cherubim
May bend around that scaffold grim
To guard and bless and sanctify.
Ho! champion of the people's cause—
Suspend thy loud and vain rebuke
Of foreign wrong and Old World's laws—
Man of the Senate, look!
Was this the promise of the free,
The great hope of our early time—
That slavery's poison vine should be
Upborne by Freedom's prayer-nurs'd tree
O'erclustered with such fruits of crime?
Send out the summons East and West,
And South and North, let all be there
 Where he who pitied the oppressed
Swings out in sun and air.
Let not a Democratic hand
The grisly hangman's task refuse;
There let each loyal patriot stand,
Awaiting slavery's command,
To twist the rope and draw the noose!
But vain is irony—unmeet
Its cold rebuke for deeds which start
In fiery and indignant beat
The pulses of the heart.
Leave studied wit and guarded phrase
For those who think but do not feel—
Let MEN speak out in words which raise
Where'er they fall, an answering blaze
Like flints which strike the fire from steel.
Still let a mousing priesthood ply
Their garbled text and gloss of sin,
And make the lettered scroll deny
Its living soul within:
Still let the place-fed, titled knave
Plead robbery's right with purchased lips,
And tell us that our fathers gave
For Freedom's pedestal, a slave,
The frieze and moulding, chains and whips!
But ye who own that Higher Law
Whose tablets in the heart are set,
Speak out in words of power and awe
THAT GOD IS LIVING YET!
Breathe forth once more those tones sublime
Which thrilled the burdened prophet's lyre, |
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And in a dark and evil time
Smote down on Israel's fast of crime
And gift of blood, A RAIN OF FIRE!
Oh, not for us the graceful lay
To whose soft measures lightly move
The Dryad and the woodland fay,
O'er-locked by mirth and love!
But such a Stern and startling strain
As Britain's hunted bards flung down
From Snowden to the conquered plain,
Where harshly clanked the Saxon chain,
On trampled field and smoking town.
By Liberty's dishonored name,
By man's lost hope and failing trust,
By words and deeds which bow with shame
Our foreheads to the dust;
By the exulting Tyrant's sneer,
Borne to us from the Old World's thrones,
And by his victims' griefs who hear,
In sunless mines and dungeons drear,
How Freedom's land her faith disowns!
Speak out in ACTS, the time for words
Has passed; and DEEDS alone suffice;
In the loud clang of meeting swords
The softer music dies!
Act—act in God's name, while ye may!
Smite from the CHURCH, her leprous limb!
Throw open to the light of day
The bondman's cell, and break away
The chains the STATE has bound on him!
Ho! every true and living soul,
To Freedom's perilled altar bear
The Freeman's and the Christian's whole
Tongue, pen, and vote, and prayer!
One last, great battle for the right—
One short, sharp struggle to be free!
To do is to SUCCEED—our fight
Is waged in Heaven's approving sight;
The smile of God is Victory."
|
Severity of punishments inflicted on slaves short of death, were often a thousand times more cruel than death by the halter; not unfrequently terminating in death, though only by whipping. But hanging was not always severe enough, as witness a law of Maryland, enacted in 1729:
"The slave shall first have the
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right hand cut off, then be hanged in the usual manner; the head be severed from the body, the body divided into four quarters, and the head and quarters be set up in the most public places of the county where such act was committed." And this horrible barbarity could be inflicted by a simple justice's court.
But it may be said this legislation was before the foundations of this republic were laid. That is true. But in the year 1836, in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, an act was perpetrated, of which the following was the accepted newspaper account, on the spot and over the country:
On the 28th of April, 1836, in the city of St. Louis, a black man named Mcintosh, who [in attempting self-rescue as per precedents] had stabbed an [extortioner, i.e., felony-committing] officer who had arrested him,
- was seized by the multitude [lynch mob],
- fastened to a tree in the midst of the city,
- wood piled around him, in open day, and in the presence of an immense throng of citizens,
- he was burned to death.
The Alton Telegraph thus describes a part of the scene:
"All was silent as death while the executioners were piling the wood around the victim. He said not a word till he felt that the flames had seized him. He then uttered an awful howl, attempting to sing and pray, then hung his head and suffered in silence.
"After the flames had surrounded their prey, his eyes burned out of his head, and his mouth apparently parched to a cinder, some one in the crowd more compassionate than the rest, proposed to end his misery by shooting him.
"But it was replied that he was already out of his pain. "No, no," cried the wretch, "I am not. I am suffering as much as ever. Shoot me! Shoot me!"
"No," exclaimed one of the fiends standing by the roasting sacrifice, " no, he shall not be shot. I would sooner slack the fire if that would increase his misery!"
A St. Louis correspondent of a New York paper sent an account of the diabolical deed, of which this is an excerpt:
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"The shrieks and groans of the victim were loud and piercing, and to observe one limb after another drop into the fire, was awful indeed. In dying, he was about fifteen minutes.
"I visited the place this morning and saw the body, or the remains of it, burned to a crump. The legs and arms were gone, and only a part of the head and body was remaining."
A subsequent Judicial decision by judge Luke E. Lawless, of the Circuit Court of Missouri, made at a session of court in St. Louis, was, that as the burning of Mcintosh was the act, directly or indirectly, by countenance of a majority of the citizens, it is a case which transcends the jurisdiction of the grand jury!
And so the dreadful sacrament was sanctified and solemnized by high judicial decision. And as such atrocities were common while slavery lasted, why need the law of Maryland be shorn of its odium and terror in the popular apprehension, only because it was older than the Declaration of American Independence?
Assuming that nations are not better than their laws, or that laws are never made till needed, what shall be said of legislation like this? A law of North Carolina provided that:
If any person shall wilfully kill his own slave, or of any other person, every such offender shall, on conviction, forfeit and pay the sum of seven hundred pounds, and shall forever be rendered incapable of holding or exercising any office.
And this law was not repealed till the year 1821, if ever. Another section of the same act provided:
If any person shall, in sudden heat of passion, or by undue correction, kill his own slave, or the slave of any other person, he shall forfeit the sum of three hundred and fifty pounds.
A still further provision of the same act read thus:
If any person shall wilfully cut out the tongue, put out the eye, castrate, or cruelly scald or burn any
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slave, or deprive any slave of any limb or member, or shall inflict any other cruel punishment, other than by whipping or beating with a switch, horse-whip or cow-skin, or by putting on irons, or imprisoning such slave, such person, for every such offence, shall forfeit and pay one hundred pounds.
Judge Stroud, in his carefully prepared "Sketch of Laws Relating to Slavery," says in his latest edition, (1856): "This, so far as I can learn, has been suffered to disgrace the statute book to the present hour. Amid all the mutations which Christianity has effected within the last century, she has not been able to conquer the spirit which dictated this law."
And not to speak of the shameful outrage, so denounced in Deuteronomy, xxiii, i, what must be thought of the decency, humanity, not to say religion, of a people that enacts, supports, sanctifies a law which beats without limit, without mercy, with horse-whip, cowskin or other missile, a human being, man, woman, child, unrebuked, unless the last stroke should produce immediate death?
With one more well authenticated fact and one other witness, and he none other than Thomas Jefferson himself, the question as to the character of slavery shall be submitted to readers, to history, to posterity. The outrage to be described was witnessed by John James Appleton, Esq., whom Hon. David Lee Child and his illustrious wife, Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, endorse as "a gentleman of high attainments and accomplishments," a secretary of legation at Rio Janeiro, Madrid and the Hague, commissioner at Naples and charge d'affaires at Stockholm. Mr. Appleton was present at the burial of a female slave in Mississippi, who had been whipped to death by her master, for being gone longer on an errand than was thought necessary. She protested under the terrible
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torture that she was ill and had to rest in the fields. To complete the climax of horror, she was delivered of a dead child while undergoing the punishment!! Is it strange that she had to rest by the way? But we will hasten to our last witness.
To-day as I write, the Democratic party, party of Thomas Jefferson, is celebrating here in Massachusetts, a political success, almost unexampled under the circumstances, in state elections, since the party was first inaugurated. The tribes of Israel never claimed Abraham as their father with more devout pride and filial reverence, than have the Democrats of this nation Thomas Jefferson as theirs, since their party first learned to lisp his name.
And those tribes crying, "Crucify Him, crucify Him," in the court-room of Pilate, or mocking their victim as he climbed Mount Calvary, bearing his cross in sweating agony, did not more dishonor their patriarchal father and founder than did the Democratic party and their Whig accomplices on the plains of Texas, murdering the Mexicans in a bloody war to reinstate slavery where the Mexican government, with its Roman Catholic religion, had not many years before, abolished it, as all humanity hoped, forever. That was almost forty years ago. Undoubtedly, devotion to slavery sent the old Whig party to a scarcely too early grave. Worship of the same unclean and bloody Moloch, stove down democratic rule, from the kindled wrath of the Infinite Justice around Fort Sumter, until the victories won yesterday in so many States of this Union, and proudly celebrated to-day, give sign almost unmistakable, of its probable return at the next presidential election.
And now the next and last witness as to the whole quality and character of slavery, even as he saw it
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and himself embraced it, is the patriarchal American Democrat, Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826] himself.
His memorable "Notes on the State of Virginia," so often cited in the past, so greatly disregarded while slavery continued, were revised and published in 1787, when the problem of slavery was shaking the new republic to its foundation.
The section relating to slavery contains so many general observations on human relations and obligations, individual as well as collective, social as well as civil and governmental, with a profoundly reverent recognition of higher authority than any man-made institutions, or constitutions, that it surely is not too much to declare that a return of the Democratic party to power will be a blessing or scourge and curse, exactly in proportion as it shall follow, or reject the doctrines and counsels of its justly venerated founder and progenitor, as laid down in the passage from his "Notes on the State of Virginia," here reproduced:
| "There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people, produced by the existence of Slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other.
"Our children see this and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality in him is the germ of all education. From his cradle to his grave, he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive, either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed and educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by |
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| it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.
"And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who, permitting one-half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of one part and the amor patriæ of the other! For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labor for another; in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature; contribute, as far as depends on his individual endeavors, to the evanishment of the human race, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him.
"With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate no man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves, a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labor. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis-a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?
"Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of Fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest!
"But it is impossible to be temperate and pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history, natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force their way into every mind. I think a change already perceptible since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating; that of the slave rising from the dust; his condition molifying; the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total |
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| emancipation, And that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation." |
Such was American slavery. Jefferson proved its historian as well as prophet, to wondrous extent. Happy for the nation, had it heeded his wise and timely counsels. Happy for it would it even now learn to regard them.
When, before or since our slave system, did governments ever punish with death for seventy offences, and then forbid, under penalties almost as severe as death, to teach one of the victims of such tyranny to read one law of man or God, in any book, the Bible not excepted? It may have been, But when, or where? What but cold-blooded murder must such governing have been! To rid the land of such a plague, no wonder it required an army on our side only, of more than two million seven hundred thousand men, half a million of whom never returned!
And then, as a crowning, sealing sacrifice, an idolized president [Ed. Note: Abraham Lincoln] massacred, murdered, and his tall form stretched across their premature graves, while not this nation only, but foreign peoples stood aghast! All this, not to speak of moneyed cost and loss; nor counting the sighs and tears, bereavements and mournings of mothers, sisters, widows and orphans! All this, not reckoning moral and spiritual, as well as financial impoverishment and desolation, not to be restored perhaps till our third and fourth generations! Such was part of the price paid to redeem the land from its uncommon curse.
Men called the war of sword and bayonet, Rebellion. It might have been rebellion on the part of slavery and the South. But to the North it was Retribution. The. South claimed as property, the slave. But the North, by the terms of the Federal
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Union, held him pinned down to the earth as with the point of the bayonet. From the torture-chambers of the imprisoned slave our guilt ascended, by silent but sure evaporation, until it hung in threatening clouds over all the sky, waiting the dread hour when the Infinite Patience could endure it no longer!
At last the command was given, and the tempest and thunder shook the very heavens, saying to the North, "Give up;" to the South, "Keep not back." No lightning-rod shielded either; and Slavery, with all its reeking, shrieking altars, and ghastly paraphernalia of whips, fetters, bloodhounds and red-hot branding irons, was swept away in cataclysms of blood and fire!
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CHAPTER IV.
ANTI-SLAVERY — WHAT IT WAS NOT.
AND WHAT IT WAS.
Such account could slavery give of itself, "Peculiar Institution " it was often called. But it was not peculiar to the southern states. Fortunes were made by the African slave trade, even in little Rhode Island. The history of slavery and slave trading in Massachusetts is one of the most surprising volumes ever issued by the American press. New Hampshire held slaves.
General Washington himself while President of the United States, hunted a slave woman and her child all the way into that then remote state.
Vermont, had a fugitive slave case in 1808. But the brave Judge Harrington stunned the remorseless claimant with his decision that "nothing less than a bill of sale from the Almighty could establish ownership" in his victim.
And he [Judge Harrington], too, returned home despoiled and shamed.
Slavery was the sin and crime of north as well as south. It was sustained by the government, it was sanctified by almost the whole religion of the nation. I have read that even the Quakers gravely considered the question, not whether it was right to hold slaves, but whether it was proper to brand them with red hot marking irons. To the credit of that sect, however, it should be told that it was among the first, if not the very first, to cast the accursed thing forever out of its fellowship.
Three clauses in the federal constitution were so interpreted as to brand the whole nation as slave-holders, slave-hunters and slave-traders; and one of
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those clauses was in two words, "suppress insurrections." And another was in this apparently innocent, inoffensive period:
"No person held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."
And under that guarantee, which, as president, he was solemnly sworn to execute, did George Washington himself pursue a slave mother [Ona Maria Judge] and her child from the Potomac to the Piscatauqua as remorselessly as though they had been a sheep and her lamb. Fortunately, however, for the victims, they escaped and lived and died in the old Granite State.
Our African slave trade was a piracy that paled all ordinary buccaneering into innocence. That traffic, with all its nameless terrors and tortures, was secured to the United States and positively protected by this specious and apparently inoffensive phrase in the ninth section of Article I in the federal constitution:
"The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importations, not exceeding ten dollars for each person."
And Mr. Madison, afterwards president, declared, and it is part of our history, that "the southern states would not have entered the union without the temporary permission of that trade."
The first fugitive slave law was enacted in 1793. But as anti-slavery sentiment increased, through the faithful and persistent labors of the uncompromising Abolitionists, "underground railroads," as they
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were called, multiplied, and Judge Harrington's decisions became more frequent.
Underground railroads were only lines of travel through the northern states to Canada, over which, under cover of night, great numbers of slaves were conveyed, sometimes in whole families; one anti-slavery man hurrying them from his town to the next, or farther, if necessary, and then another taking them in charge, and so on till they were safely landed in Canada, beyond reach of further pursuit or danger.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" [by Harriet Beecher Stowe] has no more interesting chapter than that in which "Senator Bird's" adventure is described with his night express train over that memorable but dark and dangerous highway out of democratic despotism to freedom in a land of kings and queens. And large numbers escaped with greater security, as their friends multiplied along the way, by their own unaided efforts.
So [Ed. Note: pursuant to Southern slaver reaction to escapes to freedom, like when the East German Communists built the Berlin Wall in 1961, to keep people in] another and severer fugitive law was demanded, and in 1850 enacted.
That law, in the first place,
- made every inch of our country, and the deck of every vessel, on sea, lake or river, hunting ground for slave-holder and kidnapper.
- And whoever refused to aid in the bloody, brutal business of chasing, seizing and holding the human prey, when called into the service, or harbored or concealed the victims so that they escaped, was punished "by fine not exceeding six thousand dollars, and imprisonment not exceeding six months."
- And, moreover, could be then held in an action for damages to the slave claimant, for one thousand dollars for every slave lost through refusal to obey that most shameful as well as unrighteous and inhuman edict.
And many of the best families in the land were beggared only for religiously observing the Golden Rule and remembering and-
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regarding them who were in bonds as bound with them. [Heb. 13:3].
As early as the year 1840 [Ed. Note: meaning, next election after anti-slavery newspapers raised the issue], efforts began to be made by some anti-slavery men, who had faith or hope in political action against slavery, to change the interpretations of the constitution and decisions of the Supreme Court so as to make not only the clauses just now cited, but the whole instrument a proclamation and protection of universal liberty. Foremost among these men was Mr. Gerrit Smith [1797-1874], of New York.
A third political party was inaugurated, and James G. Birney, whose name has already had honorable mention in these pages, was the first nominated anti-slavery candidate for the presidency, and whose first anti-slavery works, as a repentant slave-holder, entitled him to such distinction. But his name was withdrawn after his first vote was given in 1844, and John P. Hale of New Hampshire, succeeded him. He also was superseded in the candidacy for one who undoubtedly might control a larger vote, Martin Van Buren [1782-1862], but whose anti-slavery reputation was surely of most questionable character.
But the popular sentiment, press, pulpit, everything, everywhere prevailed over all such [anti-slavery parties'] innovation [attempts to get an anti-slavery man elected President] till the [formation in 1854 of the new Republican Party; the 1860 split in the Democrat Party; and the] election of Abraham Lincoln, who in his [widely circulated] inaugural address on March 4th, 1861, declared for slave-holding and slave-hunting in these strange [legalese], but surely ever memorable words:
| "I understand a proposed amendment, which amendment I have not seen, has passed Congress, to the effect that the federal government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the states, including that of persons held to service.
"To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I now depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments, so far as to say, that holding such a provision |
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Mark the words, "express and irrevocable." Express: not implied; not doubtful. Irrevocable: not to be revoked; more than statute of Medes and Persians. [Dan. 6:15].
Ed. Note: Observe Lincoln's brilliance in making this type comment. While it superficially appeared to give the South permanent slavery,
Lincoln knew in reality as per his 1854 speech, above-cited, that slavery would be endable, not by federal government action per se, but by standard litigation getting court orders enforcing the already existing common law!! as per the Somerset v Stewart precedent!
Note that Lincoln was for "service" (meaning in law, apprenticeship or indentured servants/employees), not "servitude." The words are sharply distinguished in law, legalese. The former requires a contract between the two parties!
Southern politicians were not fooled by Lincoln's legalese words; they rejected his 'no objection[!!]' words as the legalese technicalities they were (granting the South nothing in reality).
Note denunciation of the May 1860 nomination process of Lincoln for the Presidency: that it “was not 'eminently respectable,' nor distinguished for its 'dignity and decorum.' On the other hand, the satanic element was very strongly developed.”-Quoted on page 245 of The Glorious Burden: The American Presidency (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) by Stejan Lorant.
Southern politicians, Confederates, themselves demonized, therefore continued their 1861-1865 rebellion, as they themselves were well aware of the unconstitutionality of slavery themselves, but as dirty low-life politicians, they preferred pandering to their immoral constituents who wanted slavery continued regardless of the rule of law.
Kindly anti-slavery clergymen such as Rev. Pillsbury WERE fooled though!! (as Pillsbury's immediate paragraphs here show) by Lincoln saying he was for "service." They did not realize the word distinction from "servitude."
They did not see that Lincoln's immediate concern at the moment, 4 March 1861, around 12:30 pm, was trying to head off the upcoming war with a million casualties. Lincoln deemed THAT a more immediate crisis, than explaining legal-stylistic technicalities' wording (meaning the opposite of what's on the surface), to kindly peace-loving clergymen such as Rev. Pillsbury. Such individuals, Lincoln knew, of course, were not a mass-killer threat to anybody(!); peace-loving clergy such as Rev. Pillsbury were not massing troops to maim and kill Yankees in the hundreds of thousands!!
In this context, here are what Lincoln's words actually meant:
| "I understand a proposed amendment, which amendment I have not seen [has not been ratified by 3/4 of the states, thus has no legal effect whatever!], has passed Congress, to the effect that the federal government [the political portion, Congress, as distinct from courts] shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the states [thus excluding slavery, as it had never been constitutionalized or even established in any of the states!!], including that of persons held to service [of which
there were none!, as slavery never involved a contract between slave and master, holding the slave to service!].
"To avoid [really, to cause!!] misconstruction of what I have said, I now depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments, so far as to say, that holding [assuming arguendo something he denied as per his 1854 speech!!] such a provision to be now implied [by the Supreme Court in rulings he would appoint judges to reverse!!] constitutional law [because
slavery was NOT in the Constitution], I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable [meaning, already passed by Congress before he took office!!; Congress' log books or 'parliamentary procedure minutes,' of what it has voted on are 'express and irreversible,' meaning, you cannot pretend that something Congress voted on, was not voted on!!]." |
Excellent word choices, his! They gave the South nothing! And they fooled abolitionists such as Rev. Pillsbury who would favor Emancipation by court orders!! But sadly, they didn't fool slavers!
|
Thus to slave-breeding as well as slave-working; to slave-buying, selling, holding and hunting, was the whole nation and government committed under the presidency, not of a southern, but a northern man; not of the Democratic, but the Republican party, and, as was claimed, the very best of that party. And the whole national domain was made human hunting ground, from Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill, to the wilds of Alaska, and the Golden Gate.
And by the fugitive slave law, every man and woman was held to the bloodhound business of hunting slaves, when required by the officers, under heavy fines and cruel imprisonments. Such, in the Christian year one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one, was the culmination of all anti-slavery political parties.
The American Anti-Slavery Society had also a constitution. Its declared aim was,
| "to convince all our fellow-citizens, by arguments addressed to [slavers, e.g., to their] the understanding and conscience, that slave-holding is a heinous crime in the sight of God; and that the duty, safety and best interests of all concerned, require its immediate abandonment, without expatriation." Another declaration was this: "The society will never in any way countenance the oppressed in vindicating their rights by resorting to physical force." |
A declaration of sentiment, issued at the inauguration of the society, spoke thus:
| Our trust for victory is solely in God. We may be personally defeated, but our principles never. Truth, justice, reason, humanity, must and will gloriously |
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| triumph. * * * We shall send forth agents to lift up the voice of remonstrance and warning. We shall circulate unsparingly, anti-slavery tracts and periodicals. We shall enlist the pulpit and the press. |
And faithfully, consistently, persistently, without concealment, without compromise, did the true abolitionists continue so to act to the end. In an enterprise solely moral and religious, as well as philanthropic, the first, most earnest appeal was to the church and pulpit. A more devoutly religious man than was Mr. Garrison at the outset, or more soundly orthodox and evangelical in sentiment, could not be found. That has already been sufficiently shown. And his strongest, kindest, most affectionate appeals in behalf of the enslaved were first made to the ministers and churches of Boston, the then venerable Dr. Beecher being most eminent among them.
I was a very humble unordained minister in a little New Hampshire town, where I was preaching as a candidate for settlement, when my first official testimony was asked and cheerfully given in relation to the crime and curse of slavery.
The county anti-slavery society where I was, issued, through a committee whose chairman was the afterwards well and widely known Stephen S. Foster, a Circular to all the ministers of the county, respectfully asking their several answers to the following questions, relative to the duty of the church and clergy of the country on the subject of slavery:
| 1. Do you, or do you not believe that a man's right to liberty is derived from God, and is therefore inalienable?
2. Do you regard slave-holding, under all circumstances, as a sin against God, and an immorality?
3. Do you approve and support the principles and measures of the American Anti-Slavery Society and kindred organizations? |
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| 4. Do you allow the claims of the Anti-Slavery Society the same prominence in the pulpit exercises of the Sabbath as those of other benevolent institutions?
5. Are the slave-owners excluded from the communion of the church to which you minister, and slave-owning ministers from the pulpit?
6. Are you in favor of withdrawing all Christian fellowship from slave-owners?
The recommendation of, e.g.,
Rev. George Bourne, An Address to the Presbyterian Church, Enforcing the Duty of Excluding All Slaveholders from The "Communion of Saints" (New York: 1833)
Rev. John G. Fee, Non-Fellowship With Slaveholders The Duty of Christians (New York: John A. Gray, 1849) |
7. Are you in favor of supporting such benevolent institutions as admit slave-owners to participate in their management, and knowingly receive into their treasuries the avails of the unrequited toil of the slave, and the human-flesh auctions of the south? |
Readers, young and old, can see by these crucial questions what stern demands were made on the abolitionists at that day, who would keep their hands clean, their garments unspotted from the guilt of slavery, whose victims then numbered two and a half millions.
Many ministers, to whom the letter of inquiry was sent, paid no attention to it. Some answered cautiously and prudently, having in their churches and societies influential men whose political party ties, if not their own personal opinions, bound them as with iron bands, to the accursed institution. A very few ventured as far in testimony or protest against the system as possible without periling their denominational position and fellowship. Perhaps the only satisfactory response in all respects to the questions propounded, was in part as given below :
| Your sixth question is: "Are you in favor of withdrawing all Christian fellowship from slave-owners?"
A step so important as this should not be rashly taken. * * * And yet to those who would be separate from all sin, who would "have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness [Eph. 5:11]," what question |
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| could be of easier solution? With those fell demons of darkness, whose awful cruelties are equalled only by their shameless and unblushing licentiousness, none should expect me to hold "Christian fellowship."
But shall I with the more humane and outwardly moral? For my part, I can conceive of no possible circumstances where one person can claim property in another, under our slave system, without being guilty of iniquity and oppression, and of giving countenance and sanction to whatever abuses may result from that system. I might own a slave, and so far as simple treatment is concerned, do him no injustice. I might feed, blanket, bed and house him as tenderly as I do my horse. I might give him mental and moral instruction so far as the laws regulating slavery allowed; and, were it possible, make him as happy as the angels before the heavenly throne. * * * But what then? If I own him under the slave system of this nation, I lend my influence, countenance, sanction and sanctification to all the atrocities connected with that system. Not one pain nor pang could be inflicted on the tortured slave, by cart-whip or cat-hauling; the poison tooth of blood-hound, the murderous rifle-bullet, or red hot branding-iron, or the soul-crushing agonies of the mother torn from her helpless babes and sold on the auction block, forever from their sight, not one of these, nor any other of the nameless and horrible outrages and cruelties of the accursed plague, might not be justly chargeable to my account!
My very virtues as a slave-holder might do more to perpetuate the system than all the vices which cluster around it, till I might indeed be the most wicked slave-holder in the land. What better palliation could the average slave-holder plead than that such a man as I was a breeder and holder of slaves? * * *
In my own opinion, the most guilty of all among the slave-holders are those whose professions are loudest and strongest in favor of morality and religion; the minister, the elder, the deacon and private member of the church.
In one word, as Judge Birney, a ruling elder in the Presbyterian church, has already proclaimed and proved: "The American Churches are the Bulwarks |
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| of American Slavery." Did not their influence, sanctify slavery, its own odiousness would be its overthrow. And must I commune in sacramental fellowship with those who of all others are guiltiest in relation to the most daring system of iniquity that ever cursed the earth or scourged the inhabitants thereof ? O, my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honor, be not thou united!" [Gen. 49:6]. |
To-day, when everyone is, or would be thought an abolitionist, or the descendant of an abolitionist, such sentiments seem only reasonable and right; only logical and consistent; slavery being everywhere and always a heinous sin and crime. But in 1840, when slavery had yet before it almost a quarter of a century in which to plague us, it was not so. Slave-holders were welcomed to the pulpits and sacramental suppers of the churches in every state and county, if not in every single town, where churches existed. And the faithful and devout abolitionists, however evangelical in sentiment, were as universally cast out. There were exceptions, but so rare as rather to affirm and confirm than impeach the rule.
And the political test of the time was not less stern and severe. The great political parties vied with each other in zeal and devotion to the demands of the national idol. Louisiana and Florida had already been purchased by the government, in obedience to its behest, though in avowed violation of the federal constitution. All the Indian tribes in the southern seaboard states had been driven from their homes, their churches and school-houses, their printing presses, and the graves of their ancestors, with unheard of haste and cruelty, that their coveted lands might be seized and doomed to slave-holding, the Seminoles in Florida only excepted. And General Taylor, with government troops, supplemented by imported Cuban
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blood-hounds, was soon to complete the bloody business by exterminating such as presumed to resist, and capturing and banishing the rest to the western wilds, then unexplored and almost unknown.
Arrangements were making, secret and open, to seize Texas from Mexico, at whatever cost of national dishonor and war, to reinstate slavery, which Roman Catholic Mexico had abolished almost twenty years before, and then annex it [as a pro-slavery entity] to the United States.
Ed. Note: Mexican anti-slavery writings date as far back as Bartolomé de Albornoz, Prof of Law, University of Mexico, Anti-Slavery (1573).
"In 1829 [Mexico's President] Vicente Guerrero issued a decree for the abolition of slavery. Slavery scarcely existed in Mexico outside [American-dominated] Texas. . . . —Henry Bamford Parkes, A History of Mexico (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co, 1938-1970), p 201.
Under President Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), "the Neutral Ground Treaty [was made and] remained in effect until 1821, when ratification of the Treaty of Amity, Settlement and Limits between the United States of America and His [Spain's] Catholic Majesty recognized the Sabine [River, not the Rio Grande River 120 miles further south] as the official boundary between [the U.S.] Louisiana and Texas."
—Milton Lomask, Aaron Burr: The Conspiracy and Years of Exile 1805-1836 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982), p 169.
And "by [Jefferson] endorsing a neutral region admittedly bounded on the west by [then] Spanish soil, the United States had relinquished its often-asserted claim to most if not all of Texas" (p 170).
So when the U.S. committed aggression against Mexico, pretending the Rio Grande River 120 miles into Mexico was the boundary, it was lying, and its own records show it was lying. The 1821 Treaty is in the U.S.' own records!—the American State Papers—Foreign Relations, Vol. IV.
See also Rev. William Goodell, Slavery and Anti-Slavery (New York: William Harned Pub, 1852), Chapter 24, pp. 272-279; and Sen. Thomas Corwin, "Unjust National Acquistions" (Washington: 11 Feb 1847).
For background on the war of aggression against Mexico, see, e.g., Benjamin Lundy, The War in Texas: A Review of the Facts and Circum-stances Showing that This Contest is A Crusade against Mexico, Set on Foot and Supported by Slaveholders, Land-Speculators, Etc. In Order to Re-Establish, Extend, and Perpetuate The System of Slavery and the Slave Trade (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Gunn, 1837).
Starting a war of aggression is a war crime. “Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions.”—Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, in his opening statement to the tribunal (1946). "To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”—Justice Jackson, supra, cited by Scott Ritter, "Let history judge" (27 February 2006).
The U.S. presidents promoting the war of aggression against Mexico were thus war criminals. |
Both the whig and democratic parties were emulating each other in their zeal and devotion to so vile an object by such unhallowed means. And so the anti-slavery demand on the parties, as well as on the churches, was to come out of them.
No religious or theological opinions were questioned, no political party preferences were challenged, Baptist, Congregationalist, Methodist or Presbyterian might remain true to their chosen creed, only treat slavery in the church as other robbery, adultery, and murder. So whig and democrat, only let the equality of all men, as announced in the Declaration of Independence, be solemnly observed and applied, might remain whig and democrat forever.
For themselves, the American Anti-Slavery Society abolitionists, at their national anniversary in 1844, adopted the resolution below, to which they adhered till the slave-holders' rebellion made sure the end of slavery:
"Resolved, That secession from the present United States government is the duty of every abolitionist; since no one can take office or cast a vote for another to hold office under the United States constitution, without violating his anti-slavery principles, and rendering himself an abettor of the slave-holder in his sin."
To expect to find editors, missionaries and apostles able, ready, willing to adopt, inculcate and defend doctrines and measures thus uncompromising and extreme,
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was to pay high compliment to human nature, courage and character. But such appeared, both women and men.
Indeed, long before this time [1844], the slave power had revealed itself in almost every possible way, both in state and church, as ready to execute terrible vengeance on any who dared refuse quick obedience to its behests, or even to question its right to reign supreme.
Ed. Note: Slave-Power
Vengeance Continues
|
At the opening of the anti-slavery apocalypse [revelation] by Garrison in 1830, the whole nation—state, church, government, religion, education, trade, commerce,—all were held subservient to its sovereign will and pleasure. Every conceivable human interest, nearly every distinguished clergyman, politician, office-seeker as well as office-holder, bowed reverently in our temple of Moloch, humbly exclaiming, "Not my will, but thine be done."
Already had Garrison been heavily fined, and imprisoned in Baltimore, only for exposing in a newspaper an atrocious instance of cruelty in our coastwise slave trade. In Boston he had been mobbed, stripped nearly naked, dragged by a rope through the streets till rescued by the authorities and shut in the strongest jail, to save his imperilled life.
A worthy minister in New Hampshire, engaged to give an anti-slavery lecture, was arrested as a "common brawler," jerked from his knees and pulpit to trial as he was offering his opening prayer.
Churches, school-houses, orphan asylums and dwellings of colored people, in Providence, New York, Philadelphia and Cincinnati, had been mobbed, sacked, burned down; twelve in New York and one church; more than forty in Philadelphia and two churches; and one church and many dwellings in Cincinnati.
And many colored men were severely injured in their persons, and girls and women grossly outraged by their diabolical assailants. So were they hated for their color; and because
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millions of their kindred were slaves to democratic, republican and Christian masters. Pennsylvania Hall, in Philadelphia, was erected at cost of forty thousand dollars, wholly for anti-slavery and other philanthrophic purposes.
During an anti-slavery convention, in 1838, that spacious and beautiful structure was mobbed, set on fire, and burned to ashes, with all its contents. A valuable library and much other property were consumed in the flames. Nor did the city authorities, from mayor and aldermen to sheriff and police, utter a protest; still less proffer any protection, or word of sympathy to the innocent and peaceful sufferers.
Rev. Elijah Parish Lovejoy, native of Maine, graduate of Waterville College, and brother of Owen Lovejoy, afterwards member of Congress, perished in an attempt to protect his press and printing office from the fate of Pennsylvania Hall. [Details].
It was in Alton, Illinois, north of St. Louis, on the opposite bank of the Mississippi, that the most heart-rending and horrible instance of burning a slave to death over a slow fire in St. Louis-in the year 1837, had just been made public, as has been already described [pp 64-65].
The St. Louis newspapers, though generally approving the devilish deed, stirred the civilized world with their account of it. Of course the editorial pen of Lovejoy was hot with hallowed fire at the awful recital. His office and life were soon threatened. He appealed to the authorities for protection. He might as well have looked to the murderers of the poor slave. His friends counselled him to flee. He answered:
| "I dare not flee away from Alton. The crisis has come and I have counted the cost. Should I attempt to flee I should feel that the Angel of the Lord was pursuing me with flaming sword, wherever I went. And it is because I fear God, that I am not afraid of all |
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| who oppose me in this wicked city!" |
This was the fourth printing press he [Rev. Lovejoy] had set up. All the others had been ruthlessly destroyed by the same mob violence that now assailed this. Refused all municipal protection, he and a few brave friends entered the building alone. They fearlessly faced the mob till the building was in flames. As they came out, Lovejoy received five bullets and fell dead. Three of the bullets were taken out of his breast. He was but thirty-two and left a young wife and babes. When his mother read the account of his death, she said: "It is well; I had rather he died defending his principles, than that he should have forsaken them!" So it became all who entered the conflict to count well the cost.
| Ed. Note: See also p 43. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Key (1853), p 228, elaborates on this slaver-committed murder in reprisal for exercising First Amendment freedom-of-the-press rights against slavery. |
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CHAPTER V.
ACTS OF THE ANTI-SLAVERY APOSTLES, WITH SOME
PERSONAL SKETCHES AND EXPERIENCES.
My first intimate acquaintance and companion in travel in the missionary field, was Stephen Symonds Foster. To him was largely due my first and best lessons in anti-slavery work.
My preparation for the Congregational Ministry was all made in less than four years from the reaper and the plough. The three years regular theological course was at Gilmanton, New Hampshire, where attempt was made to stretch the charter of an academical institution to cover an entire theological department. The enterprise failed, though in those years, the little, remote hamlet of "Gilmanton Corner," aspired and strove hard to become famous as the seat of Gilmanton Theological Seminary, I was first to enter the new department, and for several days one professor, and he not inaugurated nor installed, and one student, were all that were visible of that "School of the Prophets."
But during my three years, the usual three regular classes were formed, though with small numbers, and two professors were elected and inaugurated. Some good and useful men were graduated, but in a few years, "Gilmanton Theological Seminary" ceased to be, and was known no more. My own three years' course seemed to me so short, preceded as it had been by neither collegiate nor academical study, that I determined on a year at Andover. It continued, however, only through the long fall and winter term;
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and then, after a short anti-slavery traveling agency, I commenced the work of a parish minister in a small New Hampshire town, but without ordination. My religious sentiments were of the true Gilmanton and Andover complexion. The creed of both was the same, though my printed copy was the Andover, a pamphlet of thirty pages octavo. A few extracts may be interesting to readers in these stirring theological times:
"Every person appointed or elected a professor in this seminary shall, on the day of his inauguration into office, and in presence of the trustees, publicly make and subscribe the following declarations:
"I believe that there is one, and but one, living and true God;
that the word of God contained in the scriptures of the Old and New Testament, is the only perfect rule of faith and practice;
* * * that in the Godhead are three Persons: The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost;
that these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory;
that Adam, the federal head and representative uf the human race, was placed in a state of probation, and that, in consequence of his disobedience, all his descendants were constituted sinners;
that by nature every man is personally depraved, destitute of holiness, unlike, and opposed to God, and that previously to the renewing agency of the Divine Spirit, all his moral actions are adverse to the character of God;
that being morally incapable of recovering the image of his Creator which was lost in Adam, every man is justly exposed to eternal damnation;
* * * that God of his mere good pleasure elected some to everlasting life;
and that he entered into a covenant of grace to deliver them out of this state of sin and misery by a Redeemer;
that the only Redeemer of the elect is the eternal Son of God;
* * * that the souls of believers are at their death made perfect in holiness and do immediately pass into glory; that their bodies, being still united to Christ, will at the resurrection, be raised up to glory; and
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that the saints will be made perfectly blessed in the full enjoyment of God to all eternity;
but that the wicked will awake to shame and everlasting contempt, and with devils, will be plunged into the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone forever and ever. * * *
I moreover believe that God, according to the counsel of His own will, and for His own glory, hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass;
* * * that God's decrees perfectly consist with human liberty, God's universal agency with the agency of man, and man's dependence with his accountability. * * *
"And, furthermore, I do solemnly promise that I will open and explain the Scriptures to my pupils with integrity and faithfulness;
that I will maintain and inculcate the Christian faith as expressed in the creed by me now repeated, together with all the other doctrines and duties of our holy religion so far as may appertain to my office, according to the best light God shall give me;
and in opposition not only to Atheists and Infidels, but to Jews, Mahometans, Arians, Pelagians, Antinomians, Arminians, Socinians, Unitarians and Universalists. * * *
"The preceding declaration shall be repeated by every professor in the seminary, in the presence of the trustees, at the expiration of every successive period of five years;
and no man shall be continued as president or professor in this institution who shall not continue to approve himself to the satisfaction of the trustees, a man of sound and orthodox principles in divinity, agreeably to the system of evangelical doctrines contained in the said Westminster Shorter Catechism, and more concisely delineated in the aforesaid Creed."
These extracts are copied from the Laws of the Theological Institution in Andover printed at Andover by Gould & Newman, in 1837, one year before my entrance there. Nor had I openly dissented from any of these doctrines, as I understood them, when I left the Congregational church and its pulpit for the divine ministry of freedom, humanity and holiness.
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(pp 88-99)
has risen up among us;" and he immediately called him to order; adding, "I think I have the spirit of God. I am a Christian!"
This, and the Haverhill and Littleton ministers already described, with the Hopkinton association of divines, were only true representatives of the great majority of the popular New England clergy of that day.
Their plainness of speech well accorded with the rest. And besides, much larger bodies than the Hopkinton association, were alike audacious in utterance, as well.
That campaign in northern New Hampshire, made in the autumn after the society secessions, separations and new organizations, fully convinced me, had other hopes been entertained before, that the church and its ministry would be found in very deed the "bulwarks," if not at last "the forlorn hope of slavery," in complete confirmation of the declarations of Hon. James G. Birney [1792-1857].
It was no less plain, too, that very few of the abolitionists themselves were aware of the terrible contest before them; as many later withdrawals from their always scanty ranks proved.
In a subsequent account rendered to the society through their paper, the Herald, I hazarded the prediction, that
| "before the fell demon of slavery should be cast out, there would be contortions, foamings and wallowings to rend our civil, social, and ecclesiastical organizations, in so much that many would say, 'They are dead.' For it is of a kind that goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.
"Other foul spirits, too, will be discovered; their very name, legion. All the foundations of the great deep will be broken up.
"On earth must be perplexity and distress of nations; the sea and the waves roaring, and the hearts of men failing them for fear, |
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| and for looking at the things that are coming on the earth; for the powers of heaven shall be shaken." |
If our thirty years war of moral and peaceful agitation failed to fulfill all these prophecies, what shall be said of the subsequent four years war of rebellion, with all their frightful costs of blood and treasure? War, whose thunders shook the land, the sea, the skies! Whose reverberations still go sounding down towards the night of the nineteenth century!
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CHAPTER VI.
CONVENTIONS AND MEETINGS WITH MR. ROGERS
AND MR. FOSTER—DIGRESSION ON
NEW ORGANIZATION.
New Hampshire continued my field of operations through 1840. Following the Grafton county campaign were two or three quite notable anti-slavery conventions, the best everyway, perhaps, at Milford, when all parts of Hillsboro county had representation. Mr. Garrison, Mr. Rogers, Mr. Foster, and some others were present to assist in the proceedings.
The genius and spirit of our movement at that time may be gathered somewhat from the Resolutions generally, most thoroughly considered and usually adopted with few, if any, dissenting voices. At Milford the following passed after a searching and able discussion:
Resolved, That slavery is a national, not a local, institution, and the whole people are involved in all its guilt, evils and dangers.
Resolved, That the churches, rebuked by anti-slavery and pronounced unworthy the name of Christian, and the clergymen whom it declares unworthy of support as religious teachers, are those, and only those, who connive at the existence of American slavery, or refuse to bear faithful, public testimony against it.
Resolved, That the anti-slavery society was originally constituted on principles of perfect equality and justice, and any attempt to change that construction, and to new organize it, is a departure from those principles and a practical betrayal of the cause of the slave.
Milford was early an anti-slavery town. With such resolutions most ably discussed, and almost unanim-
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ously adopted by a large congregation, the meeting was everyway a success. It commenced on Thanksgiving evening, with an opening address by Mr. Garrison, in the spacious and then new Congregational meeting-house, the minister, Mr. Warner, another Gilmanton classmatc of mine. Himself and church, however, were already far on the road to new organization. Those who remained faithful to the anti-slavery cause soon after withdrew from the church, and were henceforth known as comeouters, infidels, non-resistants, Garrisonians, or whatever other name, honorable or opprobrious, was fastened upon them and others like them.
It may be worthy of mention that the Concord attendants drove over to Milford in two open carriages, leaving home early on Thanksgiving morning, in a cold November rain, from which umbrellas were a poor protection. But the joyous greeting and reception which awaited us at our half-way house, the hospitable and sumptuous home of the farmers, Luther and Lucinda Melendy, on Chestnut hill, in Amherst, very soon dispelled all memory of outside storms, or other exposure or inconvenience. Rogers, in
his Herald account of the convention, said of this incident:
We were received at the Melendys with the welcome which compensates for months of pro-slavery scowling round about our path of life. Cordiality and brotherly love adorned the face of the household—the bounties of the season, the hospitable board ; and the Bible, the Liberator, Herald of Freedom, and National Anti-Slavery Standard the reading table. Here were the circumstances and conditions of genuine anti-slavery. * * * We were obliged to leave the interesting .spot too soon. We reached Milford, brother and sister Melendy in company, just as friend Warner's meeting-house was lighted up for a
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(pp 104-119)
anti-slavery ministers among them all, told us to what purpose. "Let the individual fellowship of the churches be left to themselves," he said after cutting connexion with the larger ecclesiastical bodies. But even that to any effective extent, was never done.
In 1842, Judge Birney revised and made more conclusive the argument in his work entitled "The American Churches, the Bulwarks of American Slavery;" himself a leading member and ruling elder of the Presbyterian church when the book was written.
In 1844, appeared, "The Brotherhood of Thieves; or a True Picture of the American Church and Clergy," taking up the argument where Mr. Birney had left off, besides greatly strengthening his, by multiplied proofs from the same sources.
In 1847, "The Church as It Is; the Forlorn Hope of Slavery," appeared, bringing the action of the churches and clergy on the slavery question down to that time.
A peculiarity [characteristic] of all these books was, the churches and ministers furnished the testimony, so that they were judged by their own words and works.
A division occurred in the general conference of the Methodist church. But the south, not the north, separated. And there still remained seven or eight annual conferences in the northern division, the boundaries distinctly discribed in the Book of Discipline.
And on slavery the books of north and south read exactly alike, and it was shown clearly by Methodist testimony that there were still thousands of slave-holders and many thousand slaves in the northern general conference.
The one unquestionable fact was, that though there were exceptions to the fearful charge, the system of slavery was supported by the government and sanctified by the religion of the nation, till the Infinite Patience could bear it no longer. The
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trump of the avenging angel first sounded at Fort Sumter, summoning north and south to their judgment day.
Nor could the dread call be resisted. At the memorable field of Bull Run the two armies met face to face. It was on a beautiful summer Sunday morning. The northern and the southern states, regiments of Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, from Maine to Michigan; regiments of the same denominations were up to meet them from the shores of the Mexican gulf to Mason and Dixon's line. Many of both armies must have sometime sat together at the sacramental supper-tables of the same denominational faith. But now their hour had come.
Now the warnings, entreaties and expostulations of the faithful abolitionists were ended, and their terrible predictions were to be fulfilled. On that bright Sunday the two armies met in battle array. Avenging Justice beheld them, and seizing the one in His right hand the other in His left, dashed them together, dashed them in pieces, and gave frightful multitudes of them their last sacrament; not any more in the blood of slaves sold for wine of communion, but in the steaming battle blood of each other!
For days both sides claimed a victory. The rebel commander-in-chief sent to his congress at Richmond forthwith dispatches dated Sunday night, and commencing thus:
| "The night has closed upon a hard fought field.
"The enemy were routed, and precipitately fled, abandoning a large amount of arms, knapsacks and baggage.
"The ground was strewn for miles with those killed, and the farm-houses and grounds around were filled with the wounded.
"Pursuit was continued along several routes till darkness covered the fugitives." |
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Let readers mark those words, "the fugitives." New England, Boston even, had many noble sons in that fight; and only a little while before New England, and even Boston, was returning fugitive slaws to their masters. Who was He who once said,"With what measure ye meet, it shall be measured to you again?" [Matt. 7:2; Mk. 4:24; Lk. 6:38]
And what the Boston pulpit, what Andover Theological Seminary said, what nearly every evangelical doctor of divinity taught on the duty of returning fugitive slaves, shall be shown in some future chapter of these fearful chronicles.
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CHAPTER VII.
ACTS CONTINUED, WITH PERSONAL SKETCH
OF STEPHEN SYMONDS FOSTER.
The last chapter contained an account of a sally into the lecturing field in which Mr. Foster and myself were accompanied by our inestimable coadjutor, Mr. Rogers, of the Herald of Freedom.
My next campaign was with Foster alone, and as some account of Mr. Garrison and Mr. Rogers has been given, it may be proper to advert briefly to some of the more general incidents in the early life of Stephen S. Foster.
It has been already intimated that in this work only the acts of a small number of the anti-slavery apostles can be even named. There were many, both men and women, whose separate faithful labors, patient endurance of privations, perils, sacrifices and sufferings, earned for each one a volume larger and abler than this can possibly be. Men and women whose very names should only be spoken by those of cleanest lips and purest hearts.
Mr. Foster was born in Canterbury, New Hampshire, in November, 1809, son of Colonel Asa Foster, of revolutionary days. He was the ninth child of a family of thirteen.
The old Foster homestead is in the north part of Canterbury, on a beautiful hillside, overlooking a long stretch of the Merrimack river valley, including Concord, and a wide view east and west, as well as south. It includes several hundred acres, and is still owned by one of the Foster brothers.
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Stephen left it early and learned the trade of a carpenter and builder. In that, however, he did not come to his life occupation. His parents were most devout and exemplary members of the Congregational church, to which he also was joined in youthful years.
At that time the call for ministers and missionaries, especially to occupy the new opening field at the west, called then "the great valley of the Mississippi," was loud and earnest. At twenty-two [c. 1831] he heard and heeded it, and immediately entered on a course of collegiate study to that end, and it is only just to say that a more consistent, conscientious, divinely consecrated spirit never set itself to prepare for that then counted holiest of callings.
Though assenting to the creed and covenant of his denomination, his whole rule of practical life and work was the "Sermon on the Mount
[Matt. 5:3-7:27]," as interpreted and illustrated in the life and death of its author.
With him "Love your enemies" [Matt. 5:44] was more than words, and "Resist not evil" [Matt. 5:39]was not returning evil, nor inflicting penalties under human enactments. And he went early to prison for non-appearance at military parade, armed with weapons of death.
In Dartmouth College he was called to perform military service. On christian principles he declined, and was arrested and dragged away to jail. So bad were the roads that a part of the way the sheriff was compelled to ask him to leave the carriage and walk. He would cheerfully have walked all the way, as once did George Fox [1624-1691], good naturedly telling the officer, "Thee need not go thyself; send thy boy, I know the way;" for Foster feared no prison cells. He had earnest work in hand which led through many of them in subsequent years.
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Eternal Goodness might have had objects in view in sending him to Haverhill, for he found the jail in a condition to demand the hand of a Hercules, as in the "Augæan" stables for its cleansing. His companions there were poor debtors, as well as thieves, murderers, and lesser felons. One man so gained his confidence as to whisper in his ear that on his hands was the blood of murder, though none knew it but himself. Another poor wretch had been so long confined by illness to his miserable bed, that it literally swarmed with vermin crawling from his putrid sores.
Foster wrote and sent to the world such a letter as few but he could write, awakening general horror and indignation wherever it was read, and a cleansing operation was forthwith instituted. The filth on the floor was found so deep and so hard trodden, that strong men had to come with pick-axes and dig it up. And that jail was not only revolutionized, but the whole prison system of the state from that time began to be reformed; and imprisonment for debt was soon heard of here no more.
His college studies closed, he entered, for a theological course, the Union Seminary in New York. Soon aftenward there was threatened war between our country and Great Britain, over a short stretch of the northeastern boundary line, about which the two nations had disputed for half a century. Wholly opposed to war as was he, for any cause, he and a few of his friends proposed a meeting for prayer and conference, in relation to it as then menaced. Foster asked for the use of a lecture room for their purpose, but was surprised as much as grieved to find the seminary faculty not only opposed to granting the use of the room, but sternly against the holding of any such meeting.
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That refusal, probably more than any other one event, determined his whole future course. For while in college he had had many serious doubts and misgivings as to the claim of the great body of the American church and clergy to the Christian name and character; not only because of their supporting war and approval of his incarceration for peace principles, but also for their persistent countenance of slave-holding and fellowship of even slave-breeders and slave-holders, as Christians and Christian ministers.
In 1839, Mr. Foster abandoned all hope of the Congregational ministry, and entered the anti-slavery service, side by side with Garrison, of the Boston Liberator, and Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, of the New Hampshire Herald of Freedom. And from that time onward till slavery was abolished, and indeed to the day of his death, the cause of freedom and humanity, justice and truth, had no more faithful, few if any more able champions.
In the autumn of 1845, he married Miss Abby Kelley, of Worcester, Massachusetts, then a well and widely-known lecturer on anti-slavery, temperance, peace, and other subjects pertaining to the rights and the welfare of man and womankind. She and a daughter, their only child, survive him. The daughter graduated first at Vassar College, then entered Cornell University, which she left at the end of the year, with the degree of Master of Arts.
I first saw Stephen Foster in the autumn of 1834. We were commencing teaching schools in adjoining districts of a small country town. A "revival of religion" soon appeared in the town, and was eminently powerful in his school, if, indeed, it did not commence there. His school was much larger than mine, and many of the parents were members, and
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some of them officers, of the Congregational church. They found in Mr. Foster a teacher, or at any rate a leader in religion, as well as in the literature of their school. And though most satisfactory progress was made in all the branches, and the discipline of the school was deemed throughout of the very best, nearly every scholar of or above fifteen years old was converted and joined the Congregational church; and then their teacher and some of themselves came over as missionaries into my more remote and benighted district, and quite a work was accomplished there.
The venerable minister of the town thought, and from the standpoint, and in the light of that day, thought truly, that, "with young Mr. Foster, evidently, was 'the secret of the Lord!'" And that same characteristic faithfulness he brought with him into the anti-slavery cause. And soon learning where was the great, deep, tap-root of the deadly upas, he laid the axe at the root of the tree.
His encounters with the church and ministry, the frequency with which his meetings had been and were still broken up by brutal mobs, not unfrequently justified by the pulpit and religious press, had made him a disciple to the Birney doctrine, "The American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery," long before this startling tract had come before the public.
Mr. Birney's experiences with the same power suggested his title; but a few years later, another pamphlet appeared from Foster's own pen, entitled, "The Brotherhood of Thieves; or a True Picture of the American Church and Clergy." Mr. Birney had already proved the pertinence and propriety of such a title in his little work; but in a ringing book, of more than seventy pages, Foster showed, by super-abundant testimony, and every single witness furnished by the
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church itself, that if slavery were man stealing, as the Presbyterian church had declared it forty years before, and "the highest kind of theft," then surely the whole southern church was indeed a vast "Brotherhood of Thieves!" with their northern baptized brethren, who fellowshiped them as Christians, their not less guilty accomplices!
 Mr. Foster therefore made the popular, prevailing religions his main point of attack. What could he have done otherwise? The churches of the north were opened to southern slave-breeders, slave-traders, slave-hunters, and slave-holders, if members of the same, and often even of widely different denominations, both for preaching, baptizing and sacramental supper occasions and purposes.
There were a few exceptions; but not enough to affect the general charge. Northern academies, colleges, universities, and theological seminaries, toned down their whole curriculum of moral and religious training and teaching to suit the depraved demand and taste of the whole brotherhood of southern slave-holders. And with most rare exceptions, the northern press attuned itself to the same key.
The religious public soon learned to dread Mr. Foster's presence or approach. Convicted of the most malignant pro-slaveryism, and by its own public records and reports of proceedings of ecclesiastical bodies and associations, from general assemblies, general conferences, and American Bible, missionary and tract societies, to state and county conferences and consociations, they had good reason to fear such a judgment-day before the time.
So there was a conspiracy among all classes of the people to conquer the abolitionists, "by letting them severely alone." And in some states the clergy went
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so far as to issue pastoral letters to the churches, declaring that anti-slavery lecturers had no right to invade a people who had chosen a pastor and regularly inducted him into office; nor had such a people any right to permit it. A Massachusetts clerical mandate, duly published in the religious papers, signed by two congregational ministers, contained this paragraph:
| "When a people have chosen a pastor, and he has been regularly inducted into office, they have so far surrendered up to him the right to discharge the appropriate duties of his office in the parish over which he is settled, that they themselves can not send another to discharge those duties, all or any part of them, against his wishes, without an evident invasion of his territory. Whoever comes before a parish under these circumstances is an intruder.
"And equally so is he who, after being admitted by the pastor, sets up his judgment in matter that falls properly under the pastor's control. These are both acts of trespass, and the perpetrators of them are or should be liable to ecclesiastical censure. The unfaithfulness or incapacity of the pastor is no apology for the offence." |
Nor was this law a dead letter in any place where it could possibly be enforced, whether in Massachusetts or anywhere in the north or west.
But the brave faithfulness of Mr. Foster to the enslaved and to his own solemn convictions, soon triumphed over such religious despotism. He conceived the idea of entering the meeting houses on Sunday, and at the hour of sermon, respectfully rising and claiming the right to be heard then and there, on the duties and obligations of the church to those who were in bonds at the south.
This measure he first adopted in the old North church, at Concord, in September, 1841. He was immediately seized by "three young gentlemen, one a southerner from Alabama, and the other two, guards
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(pp 130-141)
better that they had been all given in the same manner and continued, in this extract. Almost all the parties, official and unofficial, are now dead; many of them died long ago, even those who led the mob outrages at the church door where Foster received his bodily injuries. The court room during the trial, which lasted through the most of an afternoon, was crowded with an audience whose sympathies at the beginning were doubtless quite evenly divided, for Concord was at that time by no means an anti-slavery town.
But when the complaint was read, solemnly charging the accused, who was a well-known, consistent peace man and non-resistant, with "force and arms," and "rude and indecent behavior," the whole scene assumed a ludicrous aspect only. As the trial proceeded, however, it soon became manifest that malice and spite instigated the arrest, and that summary vengeance was to be inflicted, however unjust.
Then when Foster so serenely corrected the court in its knowledge of law, telling just when the law was repealed, and where, and at whose desire, and exactly for what purpose the law then existing to protect public religious meetings was enacted, all of which he showed to the full satisfaction of the court, the burst of admiring applause was as general and hearty as it was long continued. Nor was there any attempt to suppress it. That was the verdict of humanity and justice, instinctively rendered, with voice and power irresistible.
And when Judge Badger remitted the fine, which doubtless gave him great pleasure, though he transcended his authority in doing so, there was another demonstration of delight, at which Sheriff Pettingill stepped forward and told him he would remit his fees with the fine, and take nothing for his services. To
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which the judge good naturedly responded that he would not be outdone in magnanimity, and would throw in his charges with the rest, and Mr. Foster might be discharged. The demonstration which succeeded needs no description, no report.
But there was yet one more incident worthy of mention. Judge Badger beholding the generous pile of silver which had been tossed on his table, asked, "What shall be done with all this money?" "Give it to Foster, give it to Foster," was shouted out from all over the yet crowded room. Carried by acclamation. It was done. Sheriff Pettingill then gave Foster his hand and said, "Now if you will step into my carriage I will be very happy to take you back to your lodgings." The offer was cordially and gratefully accepted by our weary and suffering friend, and thus ended the day with its strange and wondrous disclosures and deeds.
But perhaps narration should not close without a brief mention of two or three meetings held immediately, to consider the right and propriety of so liberal construction of the rights of speech and worship, as were attempted by Mr. Foster and countenanced by Mr. Wood. Both being members of the state anti-slavery executive committee, that committee united with them in a formal call for such expression.
And a committee was appointed to extend a special invitation to the clergy of the town to attend and participate in the deliberations. But the clergy did not come, though the people did, in number and quality, too, much to their surprise. Mr. Foster vindicated himself in the course he pursued, by the example of Jesus Christ and his apostles, who were both dragged out of the synagogues by the church and clergy of their time. He showed that Christ enjoined on his
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(pp 144-153)
rough, so that when we arrived it was time to commence, and a good audience had assembled, some from several miles away.
The days were at the shortest, and we were to hold an evening meeting, so that there was not much time to be lost. It was quite sunset when we closed.
A Mr. Sanborn came and said we had better go home with him to supper, as probably no other family would invite us, and there was no tavern in the town. He told us he and his family were anti-slavery, and kept to the old organization, and would be extremely glad to entertain us, though he lived two miles away, and up the mountain besides.
And he also said, and much to my joy, that we need not take our horse out in the evening, as we could be brought back in the family wagon.
"Catamount hill," as it was and is called, proved to us the "Delectable mountains" of Bunyan's pilgrims.
We had two interesting meetings, but New Organisation had preceded us and captured the church and minister, so that those who aided us there, as elsewhere, with hospitality, with sympathy, or otherwise, were outside of the sectarian folds.
The experiences of Monday and Tuesday were a fair average of the experiences of the week, for we reached Concord on Monday, having been absent eight days; and we had held one or two meetings every day. A snow storm came in the time, and we were compelled to have our Tunbridge winter shod in consequence.
We had had some success in disposing of our shares to the debt, but beyond that our financial operations would not to-day be pronounced a success.
On reckoning up we had exactly thirty-seven cents more than when we set out, and that was in my hands. I did not smile if Foster did, when he said: "Well, Parker, I have no wife and you have; so this time we will not divide." Nor prob-
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ably did my wife smile heartily when I reached home and disclosed to her the situation. We made our supper of plain coarse bread and butter.
But next morning, to my wonderment, we had just the same for breakfast. In a joking way I complained of her fare, and said something about a new boarding house unless she set a better table. The wit was a little too cool and deposited a dew drop or two in her eye and down her cheek, as she told me her money was out, and she did not like to break our resolution, never to be in debt.
It would have been in order then for my eye to reflect back her's, but a rainbow in her sky seemed to me just then the needed return.
It was true we determined in our little forty dollars a year rent never to be in debt; but her health then was not as robust as mine. Such a breakfast was soon dispatched, and nearly as soon I was on the street to break our good resolution, if there was strength in my credit to do it.
Mr. Franklin Evans then (as I believe ever since) kept an excellent general country store, and readily consented to trust me for whatever was needed.
When I asked for my first and costliest article, which was fourteen pounds of good flour, he advised my taking a half barrel, as more economical. But I declined his generous proposal, and kept my bill within three dollars, though some nice butter and sugar were in my purchase. Before bed-time three dollars came from some unexpected source, with which the debt was paid as promised, and wife and I slept that night as before from our marriage, "owing no man anything, but to love one another."
And it is only truth and justice to say that from that night, the handful of meal and cruse of oil never wholly failed our humble home.
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CHAPTER VIII.
ACTS OF THE APOSTLES CONTINUED—LETTER OF
CONCORD WOMEN—CLERICAL USURPATION—MORE
REVELATIONS OF NEW ORGANIZATION—RIOTOUS
PROCEEDINGS AT DOVER—BY THE
EDITOR OF THE HERALD OF FREEDOM.
As we are now back in Concord, we will once more recur briefly to the South church. Readers doubtless have seen, if not deplored, some repetition in previous chapters—only necessary till they become acquainted with the persons and the principles mostly presented in these pages for their consideration.
It is now proposed to present a new phase of anti-slavery action and effort, in which all could bear active part who chose. Concord South Congregational church had several excellent men and women, who had made themselves quite offensive to the minister and some prominent members by their fidelity to the anti-slavery cause. Some had even withdrawn, both from communion supper service and Sunday worship. Some were women who were denied all speech or prayer, in private as well as public assemblies. They addressed a formal communication to the church, expressive of their views and determinations, and then withdrew wholly from such fellowship..
And in presenting that letter here it should be said that the same course became common, if not general, among genuine abolitionists all over the country, until the sect known as Come-outers grew to be numerous, and odious, too, to all who lacked courage or honesty to imitate that entirely scriptural course. Great numbers of these church withdrawal letters are before
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me in the bound volumes of anti-slavery papers, some of them of diamond points; those of Mr. and Mrs. Rogers among them.
New organized and third political party abolitionists displayed most fiery zeal at the ballot box once or twice a year; would vote for no whig nor democrat to fill the meanest office.
At the baptismal and sacramental altar whig and democrat shrunk into "gnats," and were swallowed in the communion wine, who, on Monday at the polls, swelled into larger "camels" than ever were exhibited at Barnum's menagerie.
Not so the women, nor some of the husbands of the women who addressed the subjoined
Letter to the South Congregational church in Concord,
under the pastoral care of Daniel J. Noyes:
DEAR BRETHREN AND SISTERS:—We, the undersigned, members of the South Congregational church in this town, feel bound in duty to God and man to address to you the following communication:
Three millions of our fellow beings are living in our midst under the following circumstances:
- The family institution is abolished among them—husbands and wives, parents and children, are torn asunder to gratify the cupidity of their oppressors;
- they are punished as felons for any attempt to learn to read the Holy Gospel;
- parents are liable to be scourged and punished with death for teaching their children the way of life and salvation by Jesus Christ.
- Eight thousand children are annually stolen, labeled as property and converted into merchandize.
- One sixth of the population of this nation are driven to incessant and unrequited toil from the dawn of life to its close.
- Three millions of God's immortal children, our brethren and sisters, are held and used among us as chattels personal, and bought and sold as brute beasts.
- [White] Parents not unfrequently sell their own children [by slave women].
- Thus a cloud of frightful, perpetual night is drawn over millions of souls in this land of Bibles and professed Christian ministers and churches
.
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(pp 158-179)
Root. Nor was his church as a body, far behind him. Nor was he by any means among the first, nor most active in the clerical conspiracy which led or drove to the division and new organisation.
Had northern clerical cooperation and church participation in all the crimes, cruelties and damning guilt of slavery never been arraigned, Dover had never had a mob in defence of such partnership in the sin.
Had Mr. Root remained the minister of that church, it is hardly probable that scenes so disgraceful would have been witnessed.
But Mr. Root had left Dover and New Hampshire, and the Rev. Mr. Young was in his stead straight from the sombre shades of Andover Theological Seminary. It was a large, rich church and society that had settled and ordained him, and they worshipped in one of the largest and finest meeting houses then in the state.
Some of us who were with Mr. Young at Andover rather wondered at their selection to succeed such a man as David Root. But so it was, though his stay in Dover was short, and he early abandoned thé ministry altogether.
The mob of that dark December night was precipitated by the arraignment of Rev. Edwin Holt, of Portsmouth, as a slaveholder. And yet Mr. Young knew the charge was true. He admitted it to Mr. Rogers at the very steps of the altar, before the tumult had wholly ceased. His church must have known it was true.
And Mr. Holt knew that Mr. Young knew it was true, because Mr. Young told us that Mr. Holt knew what his opinion of the business was, and he gave us to understand, doubtless intended that we should understand, that he had dealt very faithfully with him, as an offending brother. Why, then, did he cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war on our meeting for free and friendly discussion? A
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meeting, as were all the meetings we ever held, free alike to our foes and friends.
A meeting in which Mr. Young or Mr. Cogswell, or Mr. Pierce, could have had half of every hour, and more, had he desired, to contradict or disprove any statement of ours, about Mr. Holt, or anybody, or anything else.
But the truth was, there was nothing to contradict. We knew whereof we affirmed. That was no new scene to us.
On that very night, Foster had on a coat, (a dress coat of the style of that time), one skirt of which was torn square off in a violent mob at Portland, only the week before, and which coat he wore for weeks afterward, as a testimony against Portland christianity, though his friends very soon furnished him another.
No, it is not very likely we could be convicted of false statements in the face of two or three mobs in a week. For we were not courting persecution. We were not ambitions for martyr honors, nor confessors' crowns. But we spoke the truth, and if not the whole truth, certainly nothing but the truth in the love of God and man. And we could not often be successfully contradicted, as most who heard us knew full well.
Mr. Young was not countenanced by all his congregation in his strange and unwarrantable course on that occasion. Indeed, he was quite sharply, though good-naturedly rebuked by one parishioner as we groped our way out in the total darkness. He happened, unfortunately, to tell us what we could not mistake, that it was very dark. Then responded his parishioner, who could hear but not see him,
| "True, Brother Young, but it is about as light as you ever make it for us." |
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CHAPTER IX.
MEETINGS IN WEST CHESTER—-RIOTOUS AND SHAMEFUL
CONDUCT—RIDE TO DERRY, AND WHAT CAME OF IT—
FRANKL1N MOB DESCRIBED IN LETTER BY MR. FOSTER.
That the churches were indeed the bulwarks of slavery grew every day more and more apparent. And as Dover, and several other of the larger towns have testified, it may be proper to report briefly on a few of the smaller places we visited, such as Auburn, Chester, and Derry. Auburn was at that time known as West Chester. Its church was Presbyterian, its minister, Rev. Benjamin Sargent, already introduced in these pages, venerable in years and rich in the graces of the true Christian minister and man of that period.
The Methodists had a strong hold in West Chester, but at the center of the town, Congregationalism held undisputed sway and ruled with rigor not often surpassed. No town ever more sternly or successfully resisted the anti-slavery, or other unpopular reforms.
In conversation with a venerable deacon of the church on the Indian question, so prominent at the time of the Scminole war, he declared to me that it was the duty of the first settlers of the country to exterminate the Indian tribes as completely as did the Israelites the inhabitants of Canaan and of Midian; "killing everything that breathed." He said all our Indian wars ever since were God's judgments, sent as penalty for neglecting that duty! And, moreover, that they would be inflicted till that duty was done.
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He seemed exactly of the spirit of some Connecticut colonists, who, it was told, seized the territory under two resolutions, unanimously adopted:
"I. Resolved—That the earth is to be given to the saints as an inheritance forever. And
II. Resolved—That we, being saints, do hereby take possession of that portion of it bounded as follows, etc., etc."
I never heard that the Chester Congregational church, or its deacons, or minister, held ever afterwards any more humane sentiment towards the Indians, or even the slaves, while slavery lasted.
Our first anti-slavery meeting at West Chester was held in the Methodist meeting-house—adjourned there from the school-house, which was too small for half who came, the evening being Sunday.
Most of the time was occupied by Mr. Foster, who paid the Methodists, who were present in large numbers, the compliment of presuming that they wished to know the exact truth as to their connection with slavery, that they might be governed accordingly. So he opened Judge Birney's tract and proceeded to read exactly the record the denomination had furnished for itself in the past as far back as 1780; when it was
"Resolved, That the conference acknowledges slavery contrary to the laws of God, man and nature; and hurtful to society; contrary to the dictates of conscience and true religion."
In 1784, when the Methodist church had been fully organized, rules were adopted fixing the time when members who were already slaveholders should emancipate all their slaves, and then followed this solemn injunction:
"Every person concerned, who will not comply with these rules, shall have liberty quietly to withdraw"
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from our society within the twelve months following the notice being given him as aforesaid. Otherwise, the assistants shall exclude him from the society. No person holding slaves shall be admitted into our society or to the Lord's supper till he comply with these rules concerning slavery. And those who buy, sell or give away slaves, unless on purpose to free them, shall be immediately expelled."
And then, again, in 1801, the conference declared:
"We declare that we are more than ever convinced of the great evils of African slavery, which still exists in these United States. * * * * * Every member of the society who sells a slave shall, immediately after full proof, be excluded. * * * * * Proper committees shall be appointed by the annual conferences out of the most respectable of our friends, for the conducting of the business. And the presiding elders, deacons, and traveling preachers shall procure as many proper signatures as possible to the addresses: and give all the assistance in their power in every respect to aid the committees and to further the blessed undertaking. Let this be continued from year to year, till the desired end be accomplished."
So much, and more of the same character, Mr. Foster had in hand to read to the Methodists who on that evening composed a large proportion of our numerous audience. And so much he read to the credit of early Methodism. But then he had to unfold and expose the terrible degeneracy and apostacy in a single generation. And this was his offence, though his testimony was still as before only what the denomination itself furnished him.
In the year 1836 the general conference was held in Cincinnati, Ohio, and adopted with only fourteen dissenting voices this resolution:
"Resolved, By the delegates of the annual conferences in general conference assembled, that we are decidedly opposed to modern abolitionism; and wholly
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disclaim any right, wish, or intention to interfere in the civil and political relation between master and slave as it exists in the slave holding states of this Union."
And this resolution, though ample to the purpose of Foster, was a small part of the stunning testimony he presented to show that the northern Methodists were fully as guilty as their southern brethren of all the abominations of slave holding. For instance, he cited the declarations of the most eminent northern ministers and doctors of Methodist divinity. Rev. Dr. [Wilbur] Fisk, president of the Wesleyan university of Connecticut, said and published to this effect:
"The relation of master and slave may, and does, exist in many cases, under such circumstances as free the master from the just charge and guilt of immorality. The text, 1 Cor., 7th chap., 20 to 23d verse, seems mainly to enjoin and sanction the fitting continuance of their present social relations. The free man was to remain free, and the slave, unless emancipation should offer, was to remain a slave. The general rule of Christianity, not only permits, but ini supposable cases, enjoins a continuance of the master's authority. The New Testament enjoins obedience upon the slave, as an obligation due to rightful authority."
[Ed. Note: H. B. Stowe showed that there are no masters, only kidnappers.]
Only so much from a great deal by Dr. Fisk, in like vein and tone. And this one baptismal seal by Bishop [Elijah] Hedding, then living in Lynn, Massachusetts, as read in the Christian Advocate and Journal:
"The right to hold a slave is founded on this rule: 'Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them, for this is the law and the prophets.'"
The argument of Mr. Foster enraged, as much as surprised, the Methodist portion of the audience. He showed slavery to be wholesale adultery and concubinage, and that all, who upheld it by fellowshipping it
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as Christians, or fit to be regarded with anything less than abhorrence and execration, were partakers in those sins and shames [contrary to Ephesians 5:7, 1 Timothy 5:22, John 17:15, 2 Corinthians 6:14-18, and Revelation 18:4]. He proved, that Methodist church members and ministers had held, or still held hundreds of thousands of slaves, while pretending to detest slavery and to be seeking its overthrow; holding them as "goods and chattels," robbing them of marriage, and dooming them to perpetual prostitution, till the southern Methodist church had made itself a great house of ill-fame, a vast brothel, into which the Son of God himself, in the person of his forlorn brethren and sisters, was continually and hopelessly cast!
He declared no house of ill-fame in New York was guilty of such fearful impiety, such frightful abomination. For there the victim or the guilty could flee out and escape, while in the churches they were held, were compelled by both religion and government, to stay and endure, even though their soul and spirit were pure as the angels of God!
Mr. Foster was heard an hour or more with comparative order and attention. Suddenly a man rose in great agitation, much as a drunken man or lunatic some times did in our meetings, and demanded proof of what had been said. Nothing needed proving, as the church and clergy supplied all the argument, and the inferences were as self-evident as heat from fire, or light from the heavens. But instead of drunkard or lunatic, the man proved to be one of the leading members of that very church, and it required the aid of some of his brethren to quiet him and restore the order of the meeting. Foster then opened the Bible and read the eighteenth chapter of Revelation down to the thirteenth verse, and sat down, leaving the remaining time to me.
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The verse [Revelation 18:4] containing the injunction: "Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues," read in Mr. Foster's deep, earnest, solemn tones, produced a deep impression; and a man rose with much apparent sincerity and asked: "Would it not be better to remain in the churches and reform them?" He, too, was a Methodist brother and, we were told, was a reformed inebriate. Had I known that at the time, I should have asked him whether dram-shops and brothels were fit haunts for those who had abandoned them, even to save the still lost ones, when everything and more could be done, and better done, from the outside? and especially if remaining within, or going within, involved eating of the same loaf and drinking the same cup with the guilty.
[Ed. Note: See also Rev. John G. Fee's 1849 book saying likewise.]
But as it was, I asked why Wesley did not remain in the old Episcopal church? Why not so preach his doctrine as not to create schism and separation? I asked if Unitarians or Universalists were ever exhorted to remain in their communion and work reform there, instead of coming out and uniting with the more evangelical churches into whose faith they had been converted.
On the question of changing their religious preferences or beliefs, by leaving their pro-slavery communions to become abolitionists, I remarked that no such change would be required. I said, do you wish or prefer to be a Methodist? Then be a Methodist with all your heart; be such a Methodist as was Wesley who declared slavery "the sum of all villanies," which must brand a slave-holder as the sum of all villains; such a Methodist as was Dr. Adam Clarke [1762-1832], your own great Bible Commentator, who said and wrote:
"If one place in hell is hotter than any other, that place should be appropriated to slave-holders." To
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(pp 188-201)
| But the mob were not yet satisfied. They had not fully vindicated their character nor that of the church and ministry from the slanderous accusations of the anti-alavery agents.
After the lapse of about three-quarters of an hour, most of the rioters retired from the hall. Joined, as we supposed, by a new recruit from the bar-room, they soon came back and commenced a hideous noise in the entry, which entirely overpowered the speaker's voice, and gave signs of another brutal assault.
Several persons, not abolitionists, attempted to hush the noise, but to little purpose.
One of them called upon the constable to take the leaders into custody, but he declined on the ground that he had no precept.
I took occasion to remind this scrupulously conscientious political "minister of God" that when I entered your meeting-house for the purpose of preaching the gospel in an orderly manner, it was not thought necessary to obtain a precept in order to dispose of me; but that any member of the congregation who chose, the minister himself not excepted, turned constable and thrust me from the house.
Finding it impossible to proceed with our exercises, brother Pillsbury and myself felt it our duty to shake off the dust of our feet and leave the place. This we did by a short, though solemn testimony, against all those through whose agency the meeting had been broken up.
While recording that testimony, a death-like silence pervaded the room. Even the infuriated ranks of the besotted rioters that were momentarily threatening to break forth upon us, were overpowered by its fearful import, and they silently retired in dismay at the terrors of the coming judgment, leaving us to return in safety and unmolested to our lodgings.
Such are the prominent facts connected with this disgraceful outrage. It only remains for me to submit the question whether, in view of them, I am not fully justified in the opinion that you were the guilty author.
What possible interest had Mr. Hilton and his associates in the breaking up of our meeting? The anti slavery enterprise does not and cannot molest them. They have nothing to fear from the prevalence of free principles. The mob was on your be- |
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| half. Its avowed object was to defend your character, and that of the church and ministry generally, against what it professed to regard as the slanderous accusations of the abolitionists.
How is it, sir, that the bar-room has disgorged itself to furnish a body-guard for the pulpit? Why are the most vicious of your citizens so jealous of your reputation?
Can we suppose that they acted contrary to your wishes in this matter? Men may oppose, but will rarely defend us by means which we do not sanction and approve.
You declared you "would sooner co-operate with fiends from perdition than with Rogers and his coadjutors!"
Is not this mob alarming proof that you are co-operating with fiends from perdition in the perpetuity of slavery, and not with Rogers and his coadjutors in its overthrow?
Respectfully yours,
STEPHEN S. FOSTER.
Andover, Mass. Nov. 7, 1841. |
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CHAPTER X.
DARTMOUTH COLLEEGE—RIOTOUS BEHAVIOR OF THE
STUDENTS—STRAFFORD COUNTY ANNIVERSARY—
EASTERN RAILROAD AND ITS JIM CROW CARS—
OUTRAGES ON COLORED PASSENGERS.
Franklin was but a specimen of New Hampshire, and Mr. Knight was in immense majority, and Dartmouth college was helping to keep the number of his kind good, if not increase it. At Franklin, the rioters were mostly boys, set on or led on by some old enough to be their fathers and grandfathers, drunk on rum or rage, spleen and spite, but doing the will and pleasure of church and minister. Their ribaldry was as offensive as their blasphemy.
What we most feared, had most reason to fear, was that some indiscreet friend of ours might be impelled to resist their outrages of word and deed by force. True, the provocation was very great. But had such resistance been made, even to a single blow, however slight, it would have filled the hordes surrounding us with fiendish delight, and bloody scenes must inevitably have followed. Since the war of the rebellion, almost every ruffian appears to be armed with dirk, pistol, or both, ready for use at any moment. It was not so then and there, but I long kept in my cabinet stones and other missiles, including heavy bullets, which had been hurled at me and my brave companion, through windows, or as we walked or rode along the streets to or from our meetings.
We read in New Testament times of a Stephen [Acts 7:58-59] stoned to death by a mob. I traveled and worked
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with another Stephen who would have cheerfully suffered similar fate. And who shall say it would not have been in an equally holy cause? And in deep humility and sincerity I can say we together passed through many scenes where it would have been our joy, and true honor, too, to fall as did the ancient Stephen, could our cause have been best subserved thereby. But it was only in extreme peril that my constitutional cowardice was so far overcome. Mob violence was ever my aversion and dread, till deep in the midst of it. Brave old military heroes have often told me that they trembled at the outset, and till after the first few shots had been exchanged. Then there was no more fear. I could well understand them. But not so my friend Foster. He seemed ever cool and serene, before and through the fiercest encounters. Nor did any one ever see him exultant, in his most brilliant successes. But to return to our narrative.
The next experiences and their results to be described occurred, soon after at Dartmouth college, which introduced me to society and scenes unknown before.
The question has often been asked me, sometimes in letters from distant states, at what college I received my education. It always sounded strangely in my ears, when remembering that at seven and twenty there was not a harder worked, nor working man, young nor old, in my native state of Massachusetts, nor my involuntarily adopted state of New Hampshire, at four years old. At twenty-four, I joined the Congregational church, in Henniker. To me, it was the most sacred, solemn step of my whole life. There had been none of those dark, despairing convictions, so frequently felt and described, and still less had
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there been any of the raptures, the "joy unspeakable and full of glory," that so many experienced, and even loudly boasted. I waited for such, long, earnestly, expectantly, and confidently.
A doubt that such were necessary had not entered my mind, though many around me gave sad evidence in their lives and conversation after their experience, that even the most intense anguish of conviction and exttaic joy in the hour of conversion, were no assurance of regeneration or change of heart.
The reasonableness, wisdom and righteousness of the divine requirements were made so plain to my understanding, and the observance of them, according to my enlightenment, so necessary to the highest happiness and welfare of the human race, that in the very love of them, I accepted them, irrespective of all questions of perdition as penalty or paradise as reward.
Educated almost from infancy in the Congregational Sunday-school, and corresponding religious teaching with scrupulous care and faithfulness at home, it was easy to assume as true all the doctrines of our denomination, trinity atonement, total depravity and election, as well as everlasting rewards and retributions.
If away beyond my comprehension, I remembered how many great and holy men had embraced and defended them; how many godly men and women had died martyrs for them on torturing racks and in burning flames, and who in my situation could doubt their truth without violence to every pulsation of soul and spirit?
And so I entered the church tremblingly, but resolved to the best of all I was, or could become, to adorn my profession. And whatever duties were taught me as a Christian professer, I endeavored to perform.
Temperance and anti-slavery were among my first espousals; the former with the approval of
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and encouragement of our pastor, but the latter rather in spite of him.
Our first anti-slavery lecture was delivered in the Methodist meeting-house, by Moses A. Cartland, then a most excellent Quaker school-teacher and principal, if not founder, of the once well-known Clinton Grove school, in the adjoining town of Weare. It was in the spring of 1835, while I was yet with my father and family on the farm.
The lecture was a calm, serene, but truthful and faithful presentation of the wrongs of the slave, the crimes and cruelties, the outrages and abominations inseparable from the slave system; but all delivered with the gentleness and spirit of Lydia Maria Child, from whose writings he frequently and liberally quoted, and several older members of the church than myself were deeply impressed by the important truths we heard.
Not so, however, the minister and most of the leading church members and officers. A general town meeting was called at the town house, and speeches were made and resolutions adopted denouncing and condemning the anti-slavery agitation and all who abetted or encouraged it. And similar meetings were held in many towns all over the state, and their proceedings were published in the newspapers.
At this time, and for three or four years afterward, the agitation had not jarred the foundations of church or pulpit to such a degree as to produce the winnowings, the separations and rendings that were to ensue in 1839 and 1840, when in very deed judgment had to begin, and did "begin at the house of God!" [I Peter 4:17].
Till then, there were many in the churches, ministers as well as others, who hated slavery and were willing it should be abolished if the peace and sleep of their organizations be not thereby disturbed. But so it could not be.
In our church at
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Henniker, temperance was held and preached as a cardinal Christian virtue. The church covenant required of every member "total abstinence from ardent spirits as a drink," as early as 1835, if not before.
Had the ministers espoused and proclaimed the doctrines and duties of anti-slavery as earnestly, most of the church would as cordially have embraced them.
My anti-slavery gave some offence, especially when once a slaveholder came and preached in our pulpit, and I absented myself from meeting solely in consequence.
But only few held with me, and none had gone so far as to refuse sermon and sacrament from a slaveholder, though several men and women approved my course in such refusal.
It was to the question however, at what college my education was obtained, that I proposed to answer a few words, and directly in continuation of the matter in hand. In prosecuting our mission, Mr. Foster and myself found ourselves at Hanover, and the gates of Dartmouth college, from whence Foster had graduated only three years before, and with more than ordinary college honors.
I had never before seen the interior of that, nor of any other college, in my life; and to academies and high-schools I was scarcely less a stranger.
The annual meeting of the Grafton county society had been already held, but in the south part of the county, a full day's drive from Hanover, and a similar convening seemed desirable in the northern section, and Hanover was the selected place.
It was a full week, however, before any house could be found in which to assemble, and the committee were at length, after that delay, compelled to call our meeting at the dancing hall of the principal hotel. Neither church
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nor college would open to us a door, nor condescend to give us any reason why we were so summarily denied.
At the time appointed, however, the convention assembled in encouraging numbers, was duly organized, opened with prayer, and we proceeded to business. Henry C. Wright, of Philadelphia, formerly a Congregational minister, Mr. Foster, and myself were present as principal speakers, though all persons present were cordially invited, as was our invariable custom, to participate in the discussions.
The first resolution presented was to the effect that in any moral conflict, strength and success depended, not so much upon numbers, as on inflexible adherence to principle. An interesting debate ensued, which occupied the remainder of the morning session, when the resolution passed unanimously, and we adjourned till afternoon.
At two o'clock we again assembled, when after prayer the following resolution was offered:
| Resolved, That every person in the nation, north or south, who is not an open abolitionist, is by his influence, sustaining and perpetuating [aiding, abetting,
partaking in] slavery, and should be regarded by every friend of humanity as a virtual slave-holder. |
This resolution was the order for afternoon. A clerical agent of the new organisation came also among us. He moved an amendment diluting thc resolution to his taste and temper. And as church, college and village made a large part of the audience after closing all their doors against us, the original resolution was rejected, by small majority. In the evening, our resolution read as below:
| Resolved, That American slavery is a complication of the foulest crimes; robbery, adultery, man-stealing, and murder [as per analyses by Wesley and Foster]; and should therefore be immediately and unconditionally abolished. |
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The college students crowded themselves together and were very disorderly, both before and after the exercises began, clapping, hissing, and hooting, in most indecent and vulgar manner.
Mr. Foster opened the discussion in an address of wondrous eloquence and power of argument, showing how slavery was all the resolution charged and a great deal more, and that logically, morally, every way, the slave-holder must be robber, adulterer, man-stealer and murderer.
Then he illustrated what these crimes meant in slavery; how a man-Stealer must be as much greater than a horse or sheep-stealer, as a man is better and greater than sheep or horse. Then he asked: "How much greater is a man than a sheep?" [Matthew 12:12]. "Who in Dartmouth college can solve that problem? Who?"
And yet, he declared,
| "those monsters are hourly stealing the very Christ who died for them, in the person of his little ones. For inasmuch as they do it to the poorest, blackest of his children, they do it unto God! And to Christ his Son. [Matthew 25:40].
All this, not to speak of the other capital crimes mentioned in the resolution.
And who perpetrates these outrages? They are ministers, bishops, elders, doctors of divinity, deacons, and church members, presidents and professors of collèges and theological seminaries." |
And he declared,
| "those at the north who fellowshiped such as christians and Christian ministers [i.e., accessories, partakers], are bad as they. They voluntarily make themselves man-stealers and robbers, adulterers and murderers, in position, all of them; and many of them in heart.
"We do not see them do the deeds, and so we hold them innocent.
"But what would you say if President Lord, of your own college, should be seen carrying home at night, a stolen sheep? or buying one he knew had just been stolen?" |
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From that time, the order and quiet of the convention were no more. But the disturbance did not begin then, it was only mightily increased. It commenced before the opening prayer, and did not wholly cease during the evening.
There were those, not all boys, who, during some of Mr. Foster's most thrilling appeals, and blood curdling descriptions, would keep up their scraping, whistling, and snickering, as though they were in some cheap circus or minstrel show.
Possibly on some battle-field in the Rebellion [1861-1865], they learned their mistake [via casualties].
For a time we were completely silenced by the uproar. The editor of the Hanover Amulet, who happened to enter at that moment, said in his next paper:
| "Judge of our surprise when we entered the hall where we supposed every heart beat in unison with sympathy for the oppressed, to find general tumult and confusion," |
which tumult continued through the evening with greater or less atrocity to the very last; and the clerical new organization agent added greatly, and seemed to enjoy greatly, the outrage.
But no explanation which Mr. Foster could make availed anything. For a long time, he had no hearing at all. When he obtained the ear for a few moments, he abjured utterly, any disrespect to President Lord or to the college.
He only wished to impress on the minds and hearts of his hearers, the awful wickedness of slavery, and not less of the north, especially the northern church and clergy, in fellowshiping as christians, thèse monsters of iniquity—that for Dr. Lord he had only profound respect; and with good reason, he said, for he had ever been as a father to him, both while he was at college and since he graduated; and that sooner should his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth than be guilty of uttering one word
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(pp 212-239)
culture, fresh from his travels and the hospitalities of the best families of England, rudely and roughly treated on his arrival in his native state.
And Senator Wilson could have named others besides Dr. Mann, who suffered similar indignities and for the same reasons. James N. Buffum had traveled extensively in Britain with Douglass, addressing immense anti-slavery meetings; but in his own town of Lynn, with him was dragged out of railway cars, making no resistance except to cling to the backs of the seats, which, as they were athletic men, they generally brought out with them, "one in each hand." The railroad authorities at length became so indignant that they refused to allow the trains to stop in Lynn at all. And for several days the rule was enforced. At one time they sent a police-officer with the trains to see that their atrocious mandates on the subject of negro hate were obeyed.
One day Mr. Buffum saw a white man riding in the cars with a pet monkey in his lap. He good-naturedly asked the conductor:"How is this, that you drag out 'the connecting link,' as you call the colored man, and permit the two extremes, the white man and the monkey, the opposite link on the brute side, to ride unmolested as any white gentlemen?" The conductor did not reply. He had his orders and must obey them. And the shameful "Jim Crow" car continued, with occasional outrages, till public opinion rose indignantly on legislation, and compelled enactments sweeping them out of existence. "The negro pew" in churches can still be found, north, east and west as well as south.
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CHAPTER XI.
DISCUSSION ON CHURCH ORGANIZATIONS BY REV. MR.
PUTNAM AND REV. MR. SARGENT—HILLSBOROUGH
COUNTY CONVENTION AT HANCOCK—AND MEETING
AT NASHUA, BY MR. FOSTER, AND WHAT CAME OF IT.
The Strafford-county anniversary has occupied much space, but discloses the genius and spirit, philosophy and methods, of the anti-slavery enterprise; and could the addresses and speeches have been reported and published with the proceedings, the wondrous ability of at least some of its advocates, would have been no less apparent. The editor of the Herald earned unpayable thanks for his glowing descriptions which are as just and truthful as they are brilliant and beautiful.
New organizantion was now asserting itself, and gave us some inconvenience, chiefly through clerical influence and action, as the following incident will reveal:
In the winter of 1841, Rev. Rufus A. Putnam, Congregational minister, of Chichester, proposed an evening discussion with our faithful friend, Rev. Mr. Sargent, of West Chester, on the question: "Are our church organizations Christian?" Happening that week to be at home in Concord, and the moon and sleighing favoring, I proposed to Mr. Rogers that we attend and hear the arguments. Knowing that our new organized clergy, of most of the sects, were then in arms to defend them, he readily consented, and just as the sun was setting and the moon rising, we
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set out on our ride of seven or eight miles. A mile short of Mr. Putnam's meeting-house, where the meeting was held, lived Mr. Benjamin Emery, a true anti-slavery man, and there we left our horse and sleigh, and with him walked the remainder of the distance. We arrived in time for the preliminary exercises, which were quite as many and lengthy as at the ordinary Sunday services of that day, now over forty years ago. Mr. Putnam read a hymn, which was sung by the choir. Then the Methodist minister offered (performed, Rogers called it), a long, miscellaneous prayer. The people were not impressed, nor interested; and it seemed a waste of valuable time. Some had come long distances to attend what it was presumed would be an interesting, instructive and profitable discussion, and were impatient, evidently, to get at the business of the occasion.
It might be uncharitable to presume that the unexpected arrival from Concord had something to do with the prolonged devotional exercises. But the editor of the Herald had voice as well as pen, and it would have been uncourteous not to have invited him to a part in the proceedings of the meeting. But undoubtedly the less time allotted to him, the better it might be for the affirmative side of the question in hand. And so some were not surprised that prayer and praise were thus prolonged, even though inopportune, for still another hymn had to be solemnly read and then sung.
There was a good country audience, some, like Mr. Rogers and myself, having come several miles. Preliminaries being settled at last, Mr. Putnam appeared behind a huge pile of notes, newspapers, and other signs of most elaborate preparation, and commenced a tiresome apology, for ill health, many duties, including attending a funeral, and general want of suitable
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preparation and arrangement. He feared he should not be able to speak to acceptance, on account of bodily infirmity, but would do the best he could, and there were others present who would take part in the meeting, which was to be free to all. He continued in this strain till we felt constrained to believe that he had made all possible preparation, and, besides, was not over-desirous that his opponents should have more time than was their right. And so it turned out. He had a manuscript discourse of, apparently, about his usual length, besides piles of newspapers, which he read at intervals, with dry and desultory comments and needless explanations, consuming quite two hours, in spite of "bodily ailments," which, had they been as described, should have kept him at home.
His main subject, instead of being as was expected, the Christianity of the churches, was the infidelity and Jacobinism of the old organization. And he tried to prove it by showing that Garrison and others in Massachusetts had betrayed the anti-slavery cause, by sifting into The Liberator other subjects than anti-slavery, such as non-resistence and woman's rights, no Sabbath, no ministry, no church of Christ. He did not pretend that these subjects were brought openly into the anti-slavery society, but we were secretly promoting them. He read a part of the phrenological character of Garrison, as given by O. S. Fowler, to prove his secretiveness, and that he did not tell everybody all he thought. And Rogers and Pillsbury and Foster had introduced these subjects into New Hampshire, and Garrison and Rogers had even carried them to England. He read with all the emphasis at his command, something from a print he had brought, advocating the right and propriety of unlimited intercourse of the sexes, and placed it with his other documents, which he had given
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(pp 244-251)
from there to Concord. I don't know of a single habitation in all that distance that would have given us a human reception, had they known us as we were, the mortal enemies of slavery, and of its patrons, the priesthood. We left the river road, on the margin of the Contoocook, and wound our way among the hills to the southward of the beautiful village of Henniker. It brought us at length into a valley behind the high ridge that overlooks the village. We ascended to the summit, where stand the pleasant and comfortable dwellings of our two friends. Brother dwellings they are, near by each other as are the families, twin in affection as in kindred. I could hardly image to myself a more desirable location. Remote, but not lonely, the two families, alone, affording each other abundant society. A glorious prospect stretches around them. Off to the south, beyond the deep, narrow valley, rose high, wooded hills, their heavy hard-wood growth touched gorgeously with the frost-pencil of October. North, the Village, shining at their feet, with its painted dwellings and green fields, deformed only by a sectarian steeple or two and a kindred rum tavern, a wide upland country swelling beyond, rising in the distance and terminating with old Kearsarge, its bare head among the drifting clouds.
After a most pleasant refreshment, bodily and mental, with our affectionate friends, (who have not yet cast off from their association their pro-slavery church corporation) we resumed our ride for Hancock, among some of the boldest inhabited scenery I have ever seen in New Hampshire. Bold and free as his own intrepid spirit, we passed the farm on which grew up, from four years old, our noble coadjutor and veteran fellow-laborer, Parker Pillsbury. The rugged mountain homestead where he was bred from early childhood—bred to toil; where he worked through all his young life, hard and faithfully as his manhood is laboring for the slave, with almost as little acknowledgement or thanks as the world then awarded him, where he developed obscurely among the rocks. We passed the solitary school housed where he was allowed the few weeks schooling of his childhood. But thanks
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they were so few. He was educating all the better for humanity's service on that rugged farm. He there taught himself to be a MAN. A great lesson he had effectually learned before he came in contact with seminaries and a priesthood. These proved unequal on that account, to over-match and cower down his homespun nobility of soul. They tied their fetters round his manly limbs, but he snapped them as Samson did the withes, and went out an abolitionist, carrying off the very theological gates with him upon his manly shoulders. He is away from home now; gone on a campaign into Rhode Island, and I will have a word about him. It is due from me, and has long been.
The abolitionists of the country ought to know Parker Pillsbury better than they do. I know him for all that is noble in soul, and powerful in talent and eloquence. The remote district school houses in New Hampshire and in the granite old county of Essex, Massachusetts, where he was born, would bear me witness to all I could say. He is one of the strong men of our age. I wish he oftener felt his own strength, if he ever feels it and would oftener put it forth, when he happens among the multitude audiences of the lowlands, where he is too apt to keep himself in the back ground. And the abolitionists, I fear, have regarded him too much as he regards himself. He has overlooked himself, and they have overlooked him. He has undervalued his inestimable services, and the abolitionists have imitated him in it. He has gone unpaid—not that, it is not the word he would allow. Paid or unpaid are not the words for him, but unsustained, unsupported. He has broken down in two or three years by giant labor, a constitution of adamant, matured and hardened into iron 'in the school of his early toil. He has broken it down and what has he received in requital? The curses of the priesthood and their vassal followers, and the forgetfulness of the abolitionists. He has been abroad in the fields, and they snugly at their homes; he has performed the incessant labor of the galley slave, with little better than slaves' fare, often times, and hardly better than slaves' wages. He never complains, but
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(pp 254-263)
And not only there, but in hundreds of towns besides. And the mob spirit there manifested was mildness itself compared with many other places east and west.
When the clerical or political party leaders saw that we were determined the cause of the slave should be presented to the people, they felt safe in setting the [white trash] mob on us at any time, knowing that we were non-resistants in every encounter.
At Hancock, when the volley of stones came crashing in at the windows among the people, the women kept quiet, but a man cried out, "Let's adjourn; let's adjourn." Happening to be speaking at the moment, I raised my voice so as to be heard in the confusion and asked;
| Did your fathers adjourn at Bunker Hill when fired upon by the enemies of freedom? |
The effect was as sudden as satisfactory, and the silence and order continued to the close of the session. The poor fellow with the shilalah in the pulpit had been drinking, but he rose and made a few very sensible remarks, rebuking severely the disturbers, which we applauded, and that rather won him to our side.
I had often by strategy captured the champion of rioters [mob leader] whom they had crazed with liquor and put forward to annoy me so as to break up the meeting if possible.
Sometimes I would invite him to a friendly discussion and take him to the platform and propose that I would speak half an hour and he take notes and reply as he saw might be needed. I would furnish paper and pencil and proceed. The plan would not always succeed; neither did it always fail of the desired result.
I well recollect such an occurrence one terrible night in Vermont. The moon was bright as silver, but the mercury was much below zero. I should have held my man and the audience [attention] had not the rioters began pelting their [own] champion at the table with paper pellets, tobacco quids and similar
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arguments, doubtless the best they had to offer. He soon kindled into rage against them, and I think would have died then in my defense had it been necessary.
I was able to continue speaking in the confusion till the disturbing element was shamed into comparative silence, and then closed the meeting. This was unexpected, and some of the most violent begged me to proceed, promising the best of order and behavior to the end.
But I declined, telling them I had captured their champion [leader] and proved him the most decent man of them all, and now they might have the responsibility of breaking up a free meeting where they would have been welcome to half the time.
The Hancock convention had no presiding nor other officers, and so was a gathering after Mr. Rogers's own heart, as his graphic but eminently just and truthful description shows.
While on Hillsborough county it may be opportune to report one more meeting held or attempted by Mr. Foster alone. It was in the town of Nashua, where anti-slavery never had rapid nor healthy growth. The people not coming to Mr. Foster he felt called on to go to them.
It need not be told again that he differed at that time from most of his fellow christians in modes of worship. He believed devoutly that in all Christian assemblies there should be freedom of utterance, whether by prayer, speaking, or song, as was both preached and practiced by Christ and the early apostles.
But into whatever religious assembly he entered, his manner was always decent and respectful, and whether he spoke or prayed, his tones of voice were remarkably solemn and impressive. But I am sure he never once interrupted any religious services, except in places where political leaders and religious
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teachers had used all their influence and authority to keep the people from attending his meetings, which were always supereminently free [open to participation].
Mr. Foster's own account of the [Nashua] affair will best describe it, and as it was written in a prison into which his faithfulness brought him, it will be all the more interesting. A part only of his letter will here be given. It was dated,
|
This site is one in a series on the abolitionists from before the 1861-1865 Civil War.
This site presents a book by one of them, Rev. Parker Pillsbury (1809-1898).