A Social History of the American Negro Part 8

About the first of June Osceola was one day on a quiet errand of trading at Fort King. With him was his wife, the daughter of a mulatto slave woman who had run away years before and married an Indian chief. By Southern law this woman followed the condition of her mother, and when the mother's former owner appeared on the scene and claimed the daughter, Thompson, who desired to teach Occeola a lesson, readily agreed that she should be remanded into captivity.[1] Osceola was highly enraged, and this time it was his turn to upbraid the agent. Thompson now had him overpowered and put in irons, in which situation he remained for the better part of two days. In this period of captivity his soul plotted revenge and at length he too planned a "_ruse de guerre_."

Feigning a.s.sent to the treaty he told Thompson that if he was released not only would he sign himself but he would also bring his people to sign. The agent was completely deceived by Osceola's tactics. "True to his professions," wrote Thompson on June 3, "he this day appeared with seventy-nine of his people, men, women, and children, including some who had joined him since his conversion, and redeemed his promise. He told me many of his friends were out hunting, whom he could and would bring over on their return. I have now no doubt of his sincerity, and as little, that the greatest difficulty is surmounted."

[Footnote 1: This highly important incident, which was really the spark that started the war, is absolutely ignored even by such well informed writers as Drake and Sprague. Drake simply gives the impression that the quarrel between Osceola and Thompson was over the old matter of emigration, saying (413), "Remonstrance soon grew into altercation, which ended in a _ruse de guerre_, by which Osceola was made prisoner by the agent, and put in irons, in which situation he was kept one night and part of two days." The story is told by McMaster, however. Also note M.M. Cohen as quoted in _Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine_, Vol. II, p.

419 (July, 1837).]

Osceola now rapidly urged forward preparations for war, which, however, he did not wish actually started until after the crops were gathered.

By the fall he was ready, and one day in October when he and some other warriors met Charley Emathla, who had upon him the gold and silver that he had received from the sale of his cattle preparatory to migration, they killed this chief, and Osceola threw the money in every direction, saying that no one was to touch it, as it was the price of the red man's blood. The true drift of events became even more apparent to Thompson and Clinch in November, when five chiefs friendly to migration with five hundred of their people suddenly appeared at Fort Brooke to ask for protection. When in December Thompson sent final word to the Seminoles that they must bring in their horses and cattle, the Indians did not come on the appointed day; on the contrary they sent their women and children to the interior and girded themselves for battle. To Osceola late in the month a runner brought word that some troops under the command of Major Dade were to leave Fort Brooke on the 25th and on the night of the 27th were to be attacked by some Seminoles in the Wahoo Swamp. Osceola himself, with some of his men, was meanwhile lying in the woods near Fort King, waiting for an opportunity to kill Thompson. On the afternoon of the 28th the agent dined not far from the fort at the home of the sutler, a man named Rogers, and after dinner he walked with Lieutenant Smith to the crest of a neighboring hill. Here he was surprised by the Indians, and both he and Smith fell pierced by numerous bullets. The Indians then pressed on to the home of the sutler and killed Rogers, his two clerks, and a little boy. On the same day the command of Major Dade, including seven officers and one hundred and ten men, was almost completely annihilated, only three men escaping. Dade and his horse were killed at the first onset. These two attacks began the actual fighting of the Second Seminole War. That the Negroes were working shoulder to shoulder with the Indians in these encounters may be seen from the report of Captain Belton,[1] who said, "Lieut. Keays, third artillery, had both arms broken from the first shot; was unable to act, and was tomahawked the latter part of the second attack, by a Negro"; and further: "A Negro named Harry controls the Pea Band of about a hundred warriors, forty miles southeast of us, who have done most of the mischief, and keep this post constantly observed." Osceola now joined forces with those Indians who had attacked Dade, and in the early morning of the last day of the year occurred the Battle of Ouithlecoochee, a desperate encounter in which both Osceola and Clinch gave good accounts of themselves. Clinch had two hundred regulars and five or six hundred volunteers. The latter fled early in the contest and looked on from a distance; and Clinch had to work desperately to keep from duplicating the experience of Dade. Osceola himself was conspicuous in a red belt and three long feathers, but although twice wounded he seemed to bear a charmed life. He posted himself behind a tree, from which station he constantly sallied forth to kill or wound an enemy with almost infallible aim.

[Footnote 1: Accessible in Drake, 416-418.]

After these early encounters the fighting became more and more bitter and the contest more prolonged. Early in the war the disbursing agent reported that there were only three thousand Indians, including Negroes, to be considered; but this was clearly an understatement. Within the next year and a half the Indians were hard pressed, and before the end of this period the notorious Thomas S. Jessup had appeared on the scene as commanding major general. This man seems to have determined never to use honorable means of warfare if some ign.o.ble instrument could serve his purpose. In a letter sent to Colonel Harvey from Tampa Bay under date May 25, 1837, he said: "If you see Powell (Osceola), tell him I shall send out and take all the Negroes who belong to the white people.

And he must not allow the Indian Negroes to mix with them. Tell him I am sending to Cuba for bloodhounds to trail them; and I intend to hang every one of them who does not come in." And it might be remarked that for his bloodhounds Jessup spent--or said he spent--as much as $5,000, a fact which thoroughly aroused Giddings and other persons from the North, who by no means cared to see such an investment of public funds. By order No. 160, dated August 3, 1837, Jessup invited his soldiers to plunder and rapine, saying, "All Indian property captured from this date will belong to the corps or detachment making it." From St. Augustine, under date October 20, 1837, in a "confidential" communication he said to one of his lieutenants: "Should Powell and his warriors come within the fort, seize him and the whole party. It is important that he, Wild Cat, John Cowagee, and Tustenuggee, be secured. Hold them until you have my orders in relation to them."[1] Two days later he was able to write to the Secretary of War that Osceola was actually taken. Said he: "That chief came into the vicinity of Fort Peyton on the 20th, and sent a messenger to General Hernandez, desiring to see and converse with him.

The sickly season being over, and there being no further necessity to temporize, I sent a party of mounted men, and seized the entire body, and now have them securely lodged in the fort." Osceola, Wild Cat, and others thus captured were marched to St. Augustine; but Wild Cat escaped. Osceola was ultimately taken to Fort Moultrie, in the harbor of Charleston, where in January (1838) he died.

[Footnote 1: This correspondence, and much more bearing on the point, may be found in House Doc.u.ment 327 of the Second Session of the Twenty-fifth Congress.]

Important in this general connection was the fate of the deputation that the influential John Ross, chief of the Cherokees, was persuaded to send from his nation to induce the Seminoles to think more favorably of migration. Micanopy, twelve other chieftains, and a number of warriors accompanied the Cherokee deputation to the headquarters of the United States Army at Fort Mellon, where they were to discuss the matter. These warriors also Jessup seized, and Ross wrote to the Secretary of War a dignified but bitter letter protesting against this "unprecedented violation of that sacred rule which has ever been recognized by every nation, civilized and uncivilized, of treating with all due respect those who had ever presented themselves under a flag of truce before the enemy, for the purpose of proposing the termination of warfare." He had indeed been most basely used as the agent of deception.

This chapter, we trust, has shown something of the real nature of the points at issue in the Seminole Wars. In the course of these contests the rights of Indian and Negro alike were ruthlessly disregarded. There was redress for neither before the courts, and at the end in dealing with them every honorable principle of men and nations was violated. It is interesting that the three representatives of colored peoples who in the course of the nineteenth century it was most difficult to capture--Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Negro, Osceola, the Indian, and Aguinaldo, the Filipino--were all taken through treachery; and on two of the three occasions this treachery was practiced by responsible officers of the United States Army.

CHAPTER VI

EARLY APPROACH TO THE NEGRO PROBLEM

1. The Ultimate Problem and the Missouri Compromise

In a previous chapter[1] we have already indicated the rise of the Negro Problem in the last decade of the eighteenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth century. And what was the Negro Problem? It was certainly not merely a question of slavery; in the last a.n.a.lysis this inst.i.tution was hardly more than an incident. Slavery has ceased to exist, but even to-day the Problem is with us. The question was rather what was to be the final place in the American body politic of the Negro population that was so rapidly increasing in the country. In the answering of this question supreme importance attached to the Negro himself; but the problem soon transcended the race. Ultimately it was the destiny of the United States rather than of the Negro that was to be considered, and all the ideals on which the country was based came to the testing. If one studied those ideals he soon realized that they were based on Teutonic or at least English foundations. By 1820, however, the young American republic was already beginning to be the hope of all of the oppressed people of Europe, and Greeks and Italians as well as Germans and Swedes were turning their faces toward the Promised Land.

The whole background of Latin culture was different from the Teutonic, and yet the people of Southern as well as of Northern Europe somehow became a part of the life of the United States. In this life was it also possible for the children of Africa to have a permanent and an honorable place? With their special tradition and gifts, with their shortcomings, above all with their distinctive color, could they, too, become genuine American citizens? Some said No, but in taking this position they denied not only the ideals on which the country was founded but also the possibilities of human nature itself. In any case the answer to the first question at once suggested another, What shall we do with the Negro? About this there was very great difference of opinion, it not always being supposed that the Negro himself had anything whatever to say about the matter. Some said send the Negro away, get rid of him by any means whatsoever; others said if he must stay, keep him in slavery; still others said not to keep him permanently in slavery, but emanc.i.p.ate him only gradually; and already there were beginning to be persons who felt that the Negro should be emanc.i.p.ated everywhere immediately, and that after this great event had taken place he and the nation together should work out his salvation on the broadest possible plane.

[Footnote 1: IV, Section 3.]

Into the agitation was suddenly thrust the application of Missouri for entrance into the Union as a slave state. The struggle that followed for two years was primarily a political one, but in the course of the discussion the evils of slavery were fully considered. Meanwhile, in 1819, Alabama and Maine also applied for admission. Alabama was allowed to enter without much discussion, as she made equal the number of slave and free states. Maine, however, brought forth more talk. The Southern congressmen would have been perfectly willing to admit this as a free state if Missouri had been admitted as a slave state; but the North felt that this would have been to concede altogether too much, as Missouri from the first gave promise of being unusually important. At length, largely through the influence of Henry Clay, there was adopted a compromise whose main provisions were (1) that Maine was to be admitted as a free state; (2) that in Missouri there was to be no prohibition of slavery; but (3) that slavery was to be prohibited in any other states that might be formed out of the Louisiana Purchase north of the line of 36 30'.

By this agreement the strife was allayed for some years; but it is now evident that the Missouri Compromise was only a postponement of the ultimate contest and that the social questions involved were hardly touched. Certainly the significance of the first clear drawing of the line between the sections was not lost upon thoughtful men. Jefferson wrote from Monticello in 1820: "This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.... I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any _practicable_ way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle that would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emanc.i.p.ation and _expatriation_ could be effected; and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be."[1] For the time being, however, the South was concerned mainly about immediate dangers; nor was this section placed more at ease by Denmark Vesey's attempted insurrection in 1822.[2] A representative South Carolinian,[3] writing after this event, said, "We regard our Negroes as the _Jacobins_ of the country, against whom we should always be upon our guard, and who, although we fear no permanent effects from any insurrectionary movements on their part, should be watched with an eye of steady and unremitted observation." Meanwhile from a ratio of 43.72 to 56.28 in 1790 the total Negro population in South Carolina had by 1820 come to outnumber the white 52.77 to 47.23, and the tendency was increasingly in favor of the Negro. The South, the whole country in fact, was more and more being forced to consider not only slavery but the ultimate reaches of the problem.

[Footnote 1: _Writings_, XV, 249.]

[Footnote 2: See Chapter VII, Section 1.]

[Footnote 3: Holland: _A Refutation of Calumnies_, 61.]

Whatever one might think of the conclusion--and in this case the speaker was pleading for colonization--no statement of the problem as it impressed men about 1820 or 1830 was clearer than that of Rev. Dr. Nott, President of Union College, at Albany in 1829.[1] The question, said he, was by no means local. Slavery was once legalized in New England; and New England built slave-s.h.i.+ps and manned these with New England seamen.

In 1820 the slave population in the country amounted to 1,500,000. The number doubled every twenty years, and it was easy to see how it would progress from 1,500,000 to 3,000,000; to 6,000,000; to 12,000,000; to 24,000,000. "Twenty-four millions of slaves! What a drawback from our strength; what a tax on our resources; what a hindrance to our growth; what a stain on our character; and what an impediment to the fulfillment of our destiny! Could our worst enemies or the worst enemies of republics, wish us a severer judgment?" How could one know that wakeful and sagacious enemies without would not discover the vulnerable point and use it for the country's overthrow? Or was there not danger that among a people goaded from age to age there might at length arise some second Toussaint L'Ouverture, who, reckless of consequences, would array a force and cause a movement throughout the zone of bondage, leaving behind him plantations waste and mansions desolate? Who could believe that such a tremendous physical force would remain forever spell-bound and quiescent? After all, however, slavery was doomed; public opinion had already p.r.o.nounced upon it, and the moral energy of the nation would sooner or later effect its overthrow. "But," continued Nott, "the solemn question here arises--in what condition will this momentous change place us? The freed men of other countries have long since disappeared, having been amalgamated in the general ma.s.s. Here there can be no amalgamation.

Our manumitted bondmen have remained already to the third and fourth, as they will to the thousandth generation--a distinct, a degraded, and a wretched race." After this sweeping statement, which has certainly not been justified by time, Nott proceeded to argue the expediency of his organization. Gerrit Smith, who later drifted away from colonization, said frankly on the same occasion that the ultimate solution was either amalgamation or colonization, and that of the two courses he preferred to choose the latter. Others felt as he did. We shall now accordingly proceed to consider at somewhat greater length the two solutions that about 1820 had the clearest advocates--Colonization and Slavery.

[Footnote 1: See "African Colonization. Proceedings of the Formation of the New York State Colonization Society." Albany, 1829.]

2. _Colonization_

Early in 1773, Rev. Samuel Hopkins, of Newport, called on his friend, Rev. Ezra Stiles, afterwards President of Yale College, and suggested the possibility of educating Negro students, perhaps two at first, who would later go as missionaries to Africa. Stiles thought that for the plan to be worth while there should be a colony on the coast of Africa, that at least thirty or forty persons should go, and that the enterprise should not be private but should have the formal backing of a society organized for the purpose. In harmony with the original plan two young Negro men sailed from New York for Africa, November 12, 1774; but the Revolutionary War followed and nothing more was done at the time. In 1784, however, and again in 1787, Hopkins tried to induce different merchants to fit out a vessel to convey a few emigrants, and in the latter year he talked with a young man from the West Indies, Dr. William Thornton, who expressed a willingness to take charge of the company.

The enterprise failed for lack of funds, though Thornton kept up his interest and afterwards became a member of the first Board of Managers of the American Colonization Society. Hopkins in 1791 spoke before the Connecticut Emanc.i.p.ation Society, which he wished to see incorporated as a colonization society, and in a sermon before the Providence society in 1793 he reverted to his favorite theme. Meanwhile, as a result of the efforts of Wilberforce, Clarkson, and Granville Sharp in England, in May, 1787, some four hundred Negroes and sixty white persons were landed at Sierra Leone. Some of the Negroes in England had gained their freedom in consequence of Lord Mansfield's decision in 1772, others had been discharged from the British Army after the American Revolution, and all were leading in England a more or less precarious existence. The sixty white persons sent along were abandoned women, and why Sierra Leone should have had this weight placed upon it at the start history has not yet told. It is not surprising to learn that "disease and disorder were rife, and by 1791 a mere handful survived."[1] As early as in his _Notes on Virginia_, privately printed in 1781, Thomas Jefferson had suggested a colony for Negroes, perhaps in the new territory of Ohio. The suggestion was not acted upon, but it is evident that by 1800 several persons had thought of the possibility of removing the Negroes in the South to some other place either within or without the country.

[Footnote 1: McPherson, 15. (See bibliography on Liberia.)]

Gabriel's insurrection in 1800 again forced the idea concretely forward.

Virginia was visibly disturbed by this outbreak, and _in secret session_, on December 21, the House of Delegates pa.s.sed the following resolution: "That the Governor[1] be requested to correspond with the President of the United States,[2] on the subject of purchasing land without the limits of this state, whither persons obnoxious to the laws, or dangerous to the peace of society may be removed." The real purpose of this resolution was to get rid of those Negroes who had had some part in the insurrection and had not been executed; but not in 1800, or in 1802 or 1804, was the General a.s.sembly thus able to banish those whom it was afraid to hang. Monroe, however, acted in accordance with his instructions, and Jefferson replied to him under date November 24, 1801.

He was not now favorable to deportation to some place within the United States, and thought that the West Indies, probably Santo Domingo, might be better. There was little real danger that the exiles would stimulate vindictive or predatory descents on the American coasts, and in any case such a possibility was "overweighed by the humanity of the measures proposed." "Africa would offer a last and undoubted resort," thought Jefferson, "if all others more desirable should fail."[3] Six months later, on July 13, 1802, the President wrote about the matter to Rufus King, then minister in London. The course of events in the West Indies, he said, had given an impulse to the minds of Negroes in the United States; there was a disposition to insurgency, and it now seemed that if there was to be colonization, Africa was by all means the best place. An African company might also engage in commercial operations, and if there was cooperation with Sierra Leone, there was the possibility of "one strong, rather than two weak colonies." Would King accordingly enter into conference with the English officials with reference to disposing of any Negroes who might be sent? "It is material to observe," remarked Jefferson, "that they are not felons, or common malefactors, but persons guilty of what the safety of society, under actual circ.u.mstances, obliges us to treat as a crime, but which their feelings may represent in a far different shape. They are such as will be a valuable acquisition to the settlement already existing there, and well calculated to cooperate in the plan of civilization."[4] King accordingly opened correspondence with Thornton and Wedderbourne, the secretaries of the company having charge of Sierra Leone, but was informed that the colony was in a languis.h.i.+ng condition and that funds were likely to fail, and that in no event would they be willing to receive more people from the United States, as these were the very ones who had already made most trouble in the settlement.[5] On January 22, 1805, the General a.s.sembly of Virginia pa.s.sed a resolution that embodied a request to the United States Government to set aside a portion of territory in the new Louisiana Purchase "to be appropriated to the residence of such people of color as have been, or shall be, emanc.i.p.ated, or may hereafter become dangerous to the public safety."

Nothing came of this. By the close then of Jefferson's second administration the Northwest, the Southwest, the West Indies, and Sierra Leone had all been thought of as possible fields for colonization, but from the consideration nothing visible had resulted.

[Footnote 1: Monroe.]

[Footnote 2: Jefferson.]

[Footnote 3: _Writings_, X, 297.]

[Footnote 4: _Writings_, X, 327-328.]

[Footnote 5: _Ibid_., XIII, 11.]

Now followed the period of Southern expansion and of increasing materialism, and before long came the War of 1812. By 1811 a note of doubt had crept into Jefferson's dealing with the subject. Said he: "Nothing is more to be wished than that the United States would themselves undertake to make such an establishment on the coast of Africa ... But for this the national mind is not yet prepared. It may perhaps be doubted whether many of these people would voluntarily consent to such an exchange of situation, and very certain that few of those advanced to a certain age in habits of slavery, would be capable of self-government. This should not, however, discourage the experiment, nor the early trial of it; and the proposition should be made with all the prudent cautions and attentions requisite to reconcile it to the interests, the safety, and the prejudices of all parties."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Writings_, XIII, 11.]

From an entirely different source, however, and prompted not by expediency but the purest altruism, came an impulse that finally told in the founding of Liberia. The heart of a young man reached out across the sea. Samuel J. Mills, an undergraduate of Williams College, in 1808 formed among his fellow-students a missionary society whose work later told in the formation of the American Bible Society and the Board of Foreign Missions. Mills continued his theological studies at Andover and then at Princeton; and while at the latter place he established a school for Negroes at Parsippany, thirty miles away. He also interested in his work and hopes Rev. Robert Finley, of Basking Ridge, N.J., who "succeeded in a.s.sembling at Princeton the first meeting ever called to consider the project of sending Negro colonists to Africa,"[1] and who in a letter to John P. Mumford, of New York, under date February 14, 1815, expressed his interest by saying, "We should send to Africa a population partly civilized and christianized for its benefit; and our blacks themselves would be put in a better condition."

[Footnote 1: McPherson, 18.]

In this same year, 1815, the country was startled by the unselfish enterprise of a Negro who had long thought of the unfortunate situation of his people in America and who himself shouldered the obligation to do something definite in their behalf. Paul Cuffe had been born in May, 1759, on one of the Elizabeth Islands near New Bedford, Ma.s.s., the son of a father who was once a slave from Africa and of an Indian mother.[1]

Interested in navigation, he made voyages to Russia, England, Africa, the West Indies, and the South; and in time he commanded his own vessel, became generally respected, and by his wisdom rose to a fair degree of opulence. For twenty years he had thought especially about Africa, and in 1815 he took to Sierra Leone a total of nine families and thirty-eight persons at an expense to himself of nearly $4000. The people that he brought were well received at Sierra Leone, and Cuffe himself had greater and more far-reaching plans when he died September 7, 1817. He left an estate valued at $20,000.

[Footnote 1: First Annual Report of American Colonization Society.]

Dr. Finley's meeting at Princeton was not very well attended and hence not a great success. Nevertheless he felt sufficiently encouraged to go to Was.h.i.+ngton in December, 1816, to use his effort for the formation of a national colonization society. It happened that in February of this same year, 1816, General Charles Fenton Mercer, member of the House of Delegates, came upon the secret journals of the legislature for the period 1801-5 and saw the correspondence between Monroe and Jefferson.

Interested in the colonization project, on December 14 (Monroe then being President-elect) he presented in the House of Delegates resolutions embodying the previous enactments; and these pa.s.sed 132 to 14. Finley was generally helped by the effort of Mercer, and on December 21, 1816, there was held in Was.h.i.+ngton a meeting of public men and interested citizens, Henry Clay, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, presiding. A const.i.tution was adopted at an adjourned meeting on December 28; and on January 1, 1817, were formally chosen the officers of "The American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States." At this last meeting Henry Clay, again presiding, spoke in glowing terms of the possibilities of the movement; Elias B. Caldwell, a brother-in-law of Finley, made the leading argument; and John Randolph, of Roanoke, Va., and Robert Wright, of Maryland, spoke of the advantages to accrue from the removal of the free Negroes from the country (which remarks were very soon to awaken much discussion and criticism, especially on the part of the Negroes themselves). It is interesting to note that Mercer had no part at all in the meeting of January 1, not even being present; he did not feel that any but Southern men should be enrolled in the organization. However, Bushrod Was.h.i.+ngton, the president, was a Southern man; twelve of the seventeen vice-presidents were Southern men, among them being Andrew Jackson and William Crawford; and all of the twelve managers were slaveholders.

Members.h.i.+p in the American Colonization Society originally consisted, first, of such as sincerely desired to afford the free Negroes an asylum from oppression and who hoped through them to extend to Africa the blessings of civilization and Christianity; second, of such as sought to enhance the value of their own slaves by removing the free Negroes; and third, of such as desired to be relieved of any responsibility whatever for free Negroes. The movement was widely advertised as "an effort for the benefit of the blacks in which all parts of the country could unite," it being understood that it was "not to have the abolition of slavery for its immediate object," nor was it to "aim directly at the instruction of the great body of the blacks." Such points as the last were to prove in course of time hardly less than a direct challenge to the different abolitionist organizations in the North, and more and more the Society was denounced as a movement on the part of slaveholders for perpetuating their inst.i.tutions by doing away with the free people of color. It is not to be supposed, however, that the South, with its usual religious fervor, did not put much genuine feeling into the colonization scheme. One man in Georgia named Tubman freed his slaves, thirty in all, and placed them in charge of the Society with a gift of $10,000; Thomas Hunt, a young Virginian, afterwards a chaplain in the Union Army, sent to Liberia the slaves he had inherited, paying the entire cost of the journey; and others acted in a similar spirit of benevolence. It was but natural, however, for the public to be somewhat uncertain as to the tendencies of the organization when the utterances of representative men were sometimes directly contradictory. On January 20, 1827, for instance, Henry Clay, then Secretary of State, speaking in the hall of the House of Representatives at the annual meeting of the Society, said: "Of all cla.s.ses of our population, the most vicious is that of the free colored. It is the inevitable result of their moral, political, and civil degradation. Contaminated themselves, they extend their vices to all around them, to the slaves and to the whites." Just a moment later he said: "Every emigrant to Africa is a missionary carrying with him credentials in the holy cause of civilization, religion, and free inst.i.tutions." How persons contaminated and vicious could be missionaries of civilization and religion was something possible only in the logic of Henry Clay. In the course of the next month Robert Y. Hayne gave a Southern criticism in two addresses on a memorial presented in the United States Senate by the Colonization Society.[1] The first of these speeches was a clever one characterized by much wit and good-humored raillery; the second was a sober arraignment. Hayne emphasized the tremendous cost involved and the physical impossibility of the whole undertaking, estimating that at least sixty thousand persons a year would have to be transported to accomplish anything like the desired result. At the close of his brilliant attack, still making a veiled plea for the continuance of slavery, he nevertheless rose to genuine statesmans.h.i.+p in dealing with the problem of the Negro, saying, "While this process is going on the colored cla.s.ses are gradually diffusing themselves throughout the country and are making steady advances in intelligence and refinement, and if half the zeal were displayed in bettering their condition that is now wasted in the vain and fruitless effort of sending them abroad, their intellectual and moral improvement would be steady and rapid." William Lloyd Garrison was untiring and merciless in flaying the inconsistencies and selfishness of the colonization organization. In an editorial in the _Liberator_, July 9, 1831, he charged the Society, first, with persecution in compelling free people to emigrate against their will and in discouraging their education at home; second, with falsehood in saying that the Negroes were natives of Africa when they were no more so than white Americans were natives of Great Britain; third, with cowardice in a.s.serting that the continuance of the Negro population in the country involved dangers; and finally, with infidelity in denying that the Gospel has full power to reach the hatred in the hearts of men. In _Thoughts on African Colonisation_ (1832) he developed exhaustively ten points as follows: That the American Colonization Society was pledged not to oppose the system of slavery, that it apologized for slavery and slaveholders, that it recognized slaves as property, that by deporting Negroes it increased the value of slaves, that it was the enemy of immediate abolition, that it was nourished by fear and selfishness, that it aimed at the utter expulsion of the blacks, that it was the disparager of free Negroes, that it denied the possibility of elevating the black people of the country, and that it deceived and misled the nation. Other criticisms were numerous. A broadside, "The s.h.i.+elds of American Slavery" ("Broad enough to hide the wrongs of two millions of stolen men") placed side by side conflicting utterances of members of the Society; and in August, 1830, Kendall, fourth auditor, in his report to the Secretary of the Navy, wondered why the resources of the government should be used "to colonize recaptured Africans, to build homes for them, to furnish them with farming utensils, to pay instructors to teach them, to purchase s.h.i.+ps for their convenience, to build forts for their protection, to supply them with arms and munitions of war, to enlist troops to guard them, and to employ the army and navy in their defense."[2] Criticism of the American Colonization Society was prompted by a variety of motives; but the organization made itself vulnerable at many points. The movement attracted extraordinary attention, but has had practically no effect whatever on the position of the Negro in the United States. Its work in connection with the founding of Liberia, however, is of the highest importance, and must later receive detailed attention.

[Footnote 1: See Jervey: _Robert Y. Hayne and His Times_, 207-8.]

[Footnote 2: Cited by McPherson, 22.]

3. _Slavery_