A Social History of the American Negro Part 15

The Abolitionists, however, did not stop with a mere attack on slavery. Not satisfied with the mere enumeration of examples of Negro achievement, they made even higher claims in behalf of the people now oppressed. Said Alexander H. Everett:[1] "We are sometimes told that all these efforts will be unavailing--that the African is a degraded member of the human family--that a man with a dark skin and curled hair is necessarily, as such, incapable of improvement and civilization, and condemned by the vice of his physical conformation to vegetate forever in a state of hopeless barbarism. I reject with contempt and indignation this miserable heresy. In replying to it the friends of truth and humanity have not hitherto done justice to the argument. In order to prove that the blacks were capable of intellectual efforts, they have painfully collected a few specimens of what some of them have done in this way, even in the degraded condition which they occupy at present in Christendom. This is not the way to treat the subject. Go back to an earlier period in the history of our race. See what the blacks were and what they did three thousand years ago, in the period of their greatness and glory, when they occupied the forefront in the march of civilization--when they const.i.tuted in fact the whole civilized world of their time. Trace this very civilization, of which we are so proud, to its origin, and see where you will find it. We received it from our European ancestors: they had it from the Greeks and Romans, and the Jews. But, sir, where did the Greeks and the Romans and the Jews get it?

They derived it from Ethiopia and Egypt--in one word, from Africa.[2]

... The ruins of the Egyptian temples laugh to scorn the architectural monuments of any other part of the world. They will be what they are now, the delight and admiration of travelers from all quarters, when the gra.s.s is growing on the sites of St. Peter's and St. Paul's, the present pride of Rome and London.... It seems, therefore, that for this very civilization of which we are so proud, and which is the only ground of our present claim of superiority, we are indebted to the ancestors of these very blacks, whom we are pleased to consider as naturally incapable of civilization."

[Footnote 1: See "The Anti-Slavery Picknick: a collection of Speeches, Poems, Dialogues, and Songs, intended for use in schools and anti-slavery meetings. By John A. Collins, Boston, 1842," 10-12.]

[Footnote 2: It is worthy of note that this argument, which was long thought to be fallacious, is more and more coming to be substantiated by the researches of scholars, and that not only as affecting Northern but also Negro Africa. Note Lady Lugard (Flora L. Shaw): _A Tropical Dependency_, London, 1906, pp. 16-18.]

In adherence to their convictions the Abolitionists were now to give a demonstration of faith in humanity such as has never been surpa.s.sed except by Jesus Christ himself. They believed in the Negro even before the Negro had learned to believe in himself. Acting on their doctrine of equal rights, they traveled with their Negro friends, "sat upon the same platforms with them, ate with them, and one enthusiastic abolitionist white couple adopted a Negro child."[1]

[Footnote 1: Hart: _Slavery and Abolition_, 245-6.]

Garrison appealed to posterity. He has most certainly been justified by time. Compared with his high stand for the right, the opportunism of such a man as Clay shrivels into nothingness. Within recent years a distinguished American scholar,[1] writing of the principles for which he and his co-workers stood, has said: "The race question transcends any academic inquiry as to what ought to have been done in 1866. It affects the North as well as the South; it touches the daily life of all of our citizens, individually, politically, humanly. It molds the child's conception of democracy. It tests the faith of the adult. It is by no means an American problem only. What is going on in our states, North and South, is only a local phase of a world-problem.... Now, Whittier's opinions upon that world-problem are unmistakable. He believed, quite literally, that all men are brothers; that oppression of one man or one race degrades the whole human family; and that there should be the fullest equality of opportunity. That a mere difference in color should close the door of civil, industrial, and political hope upon any individual was a hateful thing to the Quaker poet. The whole body of his verse is a protest against the a.s.sertion of race pride, against the emphasis upon racial differences. To Whittier there was no such thing as a 'white man's civilization.' The only distinction was between civilization and barbarism. He had faith in education, in equality before the law, in freedom of opportunity, and in the ultimate triumph of brotherhood.

'They are rising,-- All are rising, The black and white together.'

This faith is at once too sentimental and too dogmatic to suit those persons who have exalted economic efficiency into a fetish and who have talked loudly at times--though rather less loudly since the Russo-j.a.panese War--about the white man's task of governing the backward races. _But whatever progress has been made by the American Negro since the Civil War, in self-respect, in moral and intellectual development, and--for that matter--in economic efficiency, has been due to fidelity to those principles which Whittier and other like-minded men and women long ago enunciated_.[2] The immense tasks which still remain, alike for 'higher' as for 'lower' races, can be worked out by following Whittier's program, if they can be worked out at all."

[Footnote 1: Bliss Perry: "Whittier for To-Day," _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. 100, 851-859 (December, 1907).]

[Footnote 2: The italics are our own.]

3. The Contest

Even before the Abolitionists became aggressive a test law had been pa.s.sed, the discussion of which did much to prepare for their coming.

Immediately after the Denmark Vesey insurrection the South Carolina legislature voted that the moment that a vessel entered a port in the state with a free Negro or person of color on board he should be seized, even if he was the cook, the steward, or a mariner, or if he was a citizen of another state or country.[1] The sheriff was to board the vessel, take the Negro to jail and detain him there until the vessel was actually ready to leave. The master of the s.h.i.+p was then to pay for the detention of the Negro and take him away, or pay a fine of $1,000 and see the Negro sold as a slave. Within a short time after this enactment was pa.s.sed, as many as forty-one vessels were deprived of one or more hands, from one British trading vessel almost the entire crew being taken. The captains appealed to the judge of the United States District Court, who with alacrity turned the matter over to the state courts. Now followed much legal proceeding, with an appeal to higher authorities, in the course of which both Canning and Adams were forced to consider the question, and it was generally recognized that the act violated both the treaty with Great Britain and the power of Congress to regulate trade.

To all of this South Carolina replied that as a sovereign state she had the right to interdict the entry of foreigners, that in fact she had been a sovereign state at the time of her entrance into the Union and that she never had surrendered the right to exclude free Negroes.

Finally she a.s.serted that if a dissolution of the Union must be the alternative she was quite prepared to abide by the result. Unusual excitement arose soon afterwards when four free Negroes on a British s.h.i.+p were seized by the sheriff and dragged from the deck. The captain had to go to heavy expense to have these men released, and on reaching Liverpool he appealed to the Board of Trade. The British minister now sent a more vigorous protest, Adams referred the same to Wirt, the Attorney General, and Wirt was forced to declare South Carolina's act unconst.i.tutional and void. His opinion with a copy of the British protest Adams sent to the Governor of the state, who immediately transmitted the same to the legislature. Each branch of the legislature pa.s.sed resolutions which the other would not accept, but neither voted to repeal the law. In fact, it remained technically in force until the Civil War. In 1844 Ma.s.sachusetts sent Samuel h.o.a.r as a commissioner to Charleston to make a test case of a Negro who had been deprived of his rights. h.o.a.r cited Article II, Section 2, of the National Const.i.tution ("The citizens of each state shall be ent.i.tled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states"), intending ultimately to bring a case before the United States Supreme Court. When he appeared, however, the South Carolina legislature voted that "this agent comes here not as a citizen of the United States, but as an emissary of a foreign Government hostile to our domestic inst.i.tutions and with the sole purpose of subverting our internal police." h.o.a.r was at length notified that his life was in danger and he was forced to leave the state. Meanwhile Southern sentiment against the American Colonization Society had crystallized, and the excitement raised by David Walker's _Appeal_ was exceeded only by that occasioned by Nat Turner's insurrection.

[Footnote 1: Note McMaster, V, 200-204.]

When, then, the Abolitionists began their campaign the country was already ripe for a struggle, and in the North as well as the South there was plenty of sentiment unfavorable to the Negro. In July, 1831, when an attempt was made to start a manual training school for Negro youth in New Haven, the citizens at a public meeting declared that "the founding of colleges for educating colored people is an unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other states, and ought to be discouraged"; and they ultimately forced the project to be abandoned. At Canterbury in the same state Prudence Crandall, a young Quaker woman twenty-nine years of age, was brought face to face with the problem when she admitted a Negro girl, Sarah Harris, to her school.[1]

When she was boycotted she announced that she would receive Negro girls only if no others would attend, and she advertised accordingly in the Liberator. She was subjected to various indignities and efforts were made to arrest her pupils as vagrants. As she was still undaunted, her opponents, on May 24, 1833, procured a special act of the legislature forbidding, under severe penalties, the instruction of any Negro from outside the state without the consent of the town authorities. Under this act Miss Crandall was arrested and imprisoned, being confined to a cell which had just been vacated by a murderer. The Abolitionists came to her defense, but she was convicted, and though the higher courts quashed the proceedings on technicalities, the village shopkeepers refused to sell her food, manure was thrown into her well, her house was pelted with rotten eggs and at last demolished, and even the meeting-house in the town was closed to her. The attempt to continue the school was then abandoned. In 1834 an academy was built by subscription in Canaan, N.H.; it was granted a charter by the legislature, and the proprietors determined to admit all applicants having "suitable moral and intellectual recommendations, without other distinctions." The town-meeting "viewed with abhorrence" the attempt to establish the school, but when it was opened twenty-eight white and fourteen Negro scholars attended. The town-meeting then ordered that the academy be forcibly removed and appointed a committee to execute the mandate.

Accordingly on August 10 three hundred men with two hundred oxen a.s.sembled, took the edifice from its place, dragged it for some distance and left it a ruin. From 1834 to 1836, in fact, throughout the country, from east to west, swept a wave of violence. Not less than twenty-five attempts were made to break up anti-slavery meetings. In New York in October, 1833, there was a riot in Clinton Hall, and from July 7 to 11 of the next year a succession of riots led to the sacking of the house of Lewis Tappan and the destruction of other houses and churches. When George Thompson arrived from England in September, 1834, his meetings were constantly disturbed, and Garrison himself was mobbed in Boston in 1835, being dragged through the streets with a rope around his body.

[Footnote 1: Note especially "Connecticut's Canterbury Tale; its Heroine, Prudence Crandall, and its Moral for To-Day, by John C.

Kimball," Hartford (1886).]

In general the Abolitionists were charged by the South with promoting both insurrection and the amalgamation of the races. There was no clear proof of these charges; nevertheless, May said, "If we do not emanc.i.p.ate our slaves by our own moral energy, they will emanc.i.p.ate themselves and that by a process too horrible to contemplate";[1] and Channing said, "Allowing that amalgamation is to be antic.i.p.ated, then, I maintain, we have no right to resist it. Then it is not unnatural."[2] While the South grew hysterical at the thought, it was, as Hart remarks, a fair inquiry, which the Abolitionists did not hesitate to put--Who was responsible for the only amalgamation that had so far taken place? After a few years there was a cleavage among the Abolitionists. Some of the more practical men, like Birney, Gerrit Smith, and the Tappans, who believed in fighting through governmental machinery, in 1838 broke away from the others and prepared to take a part in Federal politics. This was the beginning of the Liberty party, which nominated Birney for the presidency in 1840 and again in 1844. In 1848 it became merged in the Free Soil party and ultimately in the Republican party.

[Footnote 1: Hart, 221, citing _Liberator_, V, 59.]

[Footnote 2: Hart, 216, citing Channing, _Works_, V. 57.]

With the forties came division in the Church--a sort of prelude to the great events that were to thunder through the country within the next two decades. Could the Church really countenance slavery? Could a bishop hold a slave? These were to become burning questions. In 1844-5 the Baptists of the North and East refused to approve the sending out of missionaries who owned slaves, and the Southern Baptist Convention resulted. In 1844, when James O. Andrew came into the possession of slaves by his marriage to a widow who had these as a legacy from her former husband, the Northern Methodists refused to grant that one of their bishops might hold a slave, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was formally organized in Louisville the following year. The Presbyterians and the Episcopalians, more aristocratic in tone, did not divide.

The great events of the annexation of Texas, with the Mexican War that resulted, the Compromise of 1850, with the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, and the Dred Scott decision of 1857 were all regarded in the North as successive steps in the campaign of slavery, though now in the perspective they appear as vain efforts to beat back a resistless tide. In the Mexican War it was freely urged by the Mexicans that, should the American line break, their host would soon find itself among the rich cities of the South, where perhaps it could not only exact money, but free two million slaves as well, call to its a.s.sistance the Indians, and even draw aid from the Abolitionists in the North.[1] Nothing of all this was to be. Out of the academic shades of Harvard, however, at last came a tongue of flame. In "The Present Crisis" James Russell Lowell produced lines whose tremendous beat was like a stern call of the whole country to duty:

[Footnote 1: Justin H. Smith: _The War with Mexico_, I, 107.]

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, G.o.d's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Then to side with Truth is n.o.ble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit and 'tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified, And the mult.i.tude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our _Mayflower_, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key.

As "The Present Crisis" came after the Mexican War, so after the new Fugitive Slave Law appeared _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ (1852). "When despairing Hungarian fugitives make their way, against all the search-warrants and authorities of their lawful governments, to America, press and political cabinet ring with applause and welcome. When despairing African fugitives do the same thing--it is--what _is_ it?" asked Harriet Beecher Stowe; and in her remarkable book she proceeded to show the injustice of the national position. _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ has frequently been termed a piece of propaganda that gave an overdrawn picture of Southern conditions. The author, however, had abundant proof for her incidents, and she was quite aware of the fact that the problem of the Negro, North as well as South, transcended the question of slavery. Said St. Clair to Ophelia: "If we emanc.i.p.ate, are you willing to educate? How many families of your town would take in a Negro man or woman, teach them, bear with them, and seek to make them Christians? How many merchants would take Adolph, if I wanted to make him a clerk; or mechanics, if I wanted to teach him a trade? If I wanted to put Jane and Rosa to school, how many schools are there in the Northern states that would take them in?... We are in a bad position. We are the more _obvious_ oppressors of the Negro; but the unchristian prejudice of the North is an oppressor almost equally severe."

Meanwhile the thrilling work of the Underground Railroad was answered by a practical reopening of the slave-trade. From 1820 to 1840, as the result of the repressive measure of 1819, the traffic had declined; between 1850 and 1860, however, it was greatly revived, and Southern conventions resolved that all laws, state or Federal, prohibiting the slave-trade, should be repealed. The traffic became more and more open and defiant until, as Stephen A. Douglas computed, as many as 15,000 slaves were brought into the country in 1859. It was not until the Lincoln government in 1862 hanged the first trader who ever suffered the extreme penalty of the law, and made with Great Britain a treaty embodying the principle of international right of search, that the trade was effectually checked. By the end of the war it was entirely suppressed, though as late as 1866 a squadron of s.h.i.+ps patrolled the slave coast.

The Kansas-Nebraska Bill, repealing the Missouri Compromise and providing for "squatter sovereignty" in the territories in question, outraged the North and led immediately to the forming of the Republican party. It was not long before public sentiment began to make itself felt, and the first demonstration took place in Boston. Anthony Burns was a slave who escaped from Virginia and made his way to Boston, where he was at work in the winter of 1853-4. He was discovered by a United States marshal who presented a writ for his arrest just at the time of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in May, 1854. Public feeling became greatly aroused. Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker delivered strong addresses at a meeting in Faneuil Hall while an unsuccessful attempt to rescue Burns from the Court House was made under the leaders.h.i.+p of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who with others of the attacking party was wounded. It was finally decided in court that Burns must be returned to his master. The law was obeyed; but Boston had been made very angry, and generally her feeling had counted for something in the history of the country. The people draped their houses in mourning, hissed the procession that took Burns to his s.h.i.+p and at the wharf a riot was averted only by a minister's call to prayer. This incident did more to crystallize Northern sentiment against slavery than any other except the exploit of John Brown, and this was the last time that a fugitive slave was taken out of Boston. Burns himself was afterwards bought by popular subscription, and ultimately became a Baptist minister in Canada.

In 1834 Dr. Emerson, an army officer stationed in Missouri, removed to Illinois, taking with him his slave, Dred Scott. Two years later, again accompanied by Scott, he went to Minnesota. In Illinois slavery was prohibited by state law and Minnesota was a free territory. In 1838 Emerson returned with Scott to Missouri. After a while the slave raised the important question: Had not his residence outside of a slave state made him a free man? Beaten by his master in 1848, with the aid of anti-slavery lawyers Scott brought a suit against him for a.s.sault and battery, the circuit court of St. Louis rendering a decision in his favor. Emerson appealed and in 1852 the Supreme Court of the state reversed the decision of the lower court. Not long after this Emerson sold Scott to a citizen of New York named Sandford. Scott now brought suit against Sandford, on the ground that they were citizens of different states. The case finally reached the Supreme Court of the United States, which in 1857 handed down the decision that Scott was not a citizen of Missouri and had no standing in the Federal courts, that a slave was only a piece of property, and that a master might take his property with impunity to any place within the jurisdiction of the United States. The owners.h.i.+p of Scott and his family soon pa.s.sed to a Ma.s.sachusetts family by whom they were liberated; but the important decision that the case had called forth aroused the most intense excitement throughout the country, and somehow out of it all people remembered more than anything else the amazing declaration of Chief Justice Taney that "the Negroes were so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The extra-legal character and the general fallacy of his position were exposed by Justice Curtis in a masterly dissenting opinion.

No one incident of the period showed more clearly the tension under which the country was laboring than the a.s.sault on Charles Sumner by Preston S. Brooks, a congressional representative from South Carolina.

As a result of this regrettable occurrence splendid canes with such inscriptions as "Hit him again" and "Use knock-down arguments" were sent to Brooks from different parts of the South and he was triumphantly reelected by his const.i.tuency, while on the other hand resolutions denouncing him were pa.s.sed all over the North, in Canada, and even in Europe. More than ever the South was thrown on the defensive, and in impa.s.sioned speeches Robert Toombs now glorified his state and his section. Speaking at Emory College in 1853 he had already made an extended apology for slavery;[1] speaking in the Georgia legislature on the eve of secession he contended that the South had been driven to bay by the Abolitionists and must now "expand or perish." A writer in the _Southern Literary Messenger_,[2] in an article "The Black Race in North America," made the astonis.h.i.+ng statement that "the slavery of the black race on this continent is the price America has paid for her liberty, civil and religious, and, humanly speaking, these blessings would have been unattainable without their aid." Benjamin M. Palmer, a distinguished minister of New Orleans, in a widely quoted sermon in 1860 spoke of the peculiar trust that had been given to the South--to be the guardians of the slaves, the conservers of the world's industry, and the defenders of the cause of religion.[3] "The blooms upon Southern fields gathered by black hands have fed the spindles and looms of Manchester and Birmingham not less than of Lawrence and Lowell. Strike now a blow at this system of labor and the world itself totters at the stroke.

Shall we permit that blow to fall? Do we not owe it to civilized man to stand in the breach and stay the uplifted arm?... This trust we will discharge in the face of the worst possible peril. Though war be the aggregation of all evils, yet, should the madness of the hour appeal to the arbitration of the sword, we will not shrink even from the baptism of fire.... The position of the South is at this moment sublime. If she has grace given her to know her hour, she will save herself, the country, and the world."

[Footnote 1: See "An Oration delivered before the Few and Phi Gamma Societies of Emory College: Slavery in the United States; its consistency with republican inst.i.tutions, and its effects upon the slave and society. Augusta, Ga., 1853."]

[Footnote 2: November, 1855.]

[Footnote 3: "The Rights of the South defended in the Pulpits, by B.M.

Palmer, D.D., and W.T. Leac.o.c.k, D.D., Mobile, 1860."]

All of this was very earnest and very eloquent, but also very mistaken, and the general fallacy of the South's position was shown by no less a man than he who afterwards became vice-president of the Confederacy.

Speaking in the Georgia legislature in opposition to the motion for secession, Stephens said that the South had no reason to feel aggrieved, for all along she had received more than her share of the nation's privileges, and had almost always won in the main that which was demanded. She had had sixty years of presidents to the North's twenty-four; two-thirds of the clerks.h.i.+ps and other appointments although the white population in the section was only one-third that of the country; fourteen attorneys general to the North's five; and eighteen Supreme Court judges to the North's eleven, although four-fifths of the business of the court originated in the free states.

"This," said Stephens in an astonis.h.i.+ng declaration, "we have required so as to guard against any interpretation of the Const.i.tution unfavorable to us."

Still another voice from the South, in a slightly different key, attacked the tendencies in the section. _The Impending Crisis_ (1857), by Hinton Rowan Helper, of North Carolina, was surpa.s.sed in sensational interest by no other book of the period except _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. The author did not place himself upon the broadest principles of humanity and statesmans.h.i.+p; he had no concern for the Negro, and the great planters of the South were to him simply the "whelps" and "curs" of slavery. He spoke merely as the voice of the non-slaveholding white men in the South. He set forth such unpleasant truths as that the personal and real property, including slaves, of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, taken all together, was less than the real and personal estate in the single state of New York; that representation in Southern legislatures was unfair; that in Congress a Southern planter was twice as powerful as a Northern man; that slavery was to blame for the migration from the South to the West; and that in short the system was in every way harmful to the man of limited means. All of this was decidedly unpleasant to the ears of the property owners of the South; Helper's book was proscribed, and the author himself found it more advisable to live in New York than in his native state. _The Impending Crisis_ was eagerly read, however, and it succeeded as a book because it attempted to attack with some degree of honesty a great economic problem.

The time for speeches and books, however, was over, and the time for action had come. For years the slave had chanted, "I've been listenin'

all the night long"; and his prayer had reached the throne. On October 16, 1859, John Brown made his raid on Harper's Ferry and took his place with the immortals. In the long and bitter contest on American slavery the Abolitionists had won.

CHAPTER XI

SOCIAL PROGRESS, 1820-1860[1]

[Footnote 1: This chapter follows closely upon Chapter III, Section 5, and is largely complementary to Chapter VIII.]