As representative of a later generation and voicing sentiments of one
more removed from the period of controversy, the views of Theodore
Roosevelt are of value. Writing in 1898, he says:
"In 1833 the abolition societies of the North came into prominence;
they had been started a couple of years previously. Black slavery
was such a grossly anachronistic and un-American form of evil that
it is difficult to discuss calmly the efforts to abolish it and to
remember that many of these efforts were calculated to do and
actually did more harm than good.... The cause of the Abolitionists
has had such a halo shed around it by the course of events, which
they themselves in reality did very little to shape, that it has
been usual to speak of them with absurdly exaggerated praise. Their
courage and, for the most part, their sincerity, cannot be too
highly spoken of, but their share in abolishing slavery was far less
than has commonly been represented; any single, non-abolitionist
politician, like Lincoln or Seward, did more than all the
professional Abolitionists combined really to bring about its
destruction."[77]
Writing still later, Mr. William Henry Smith, of Ohio, in his book, _A
Political History of Slavery_, alluding to the work of the
Abolitionists, says:
"What befell is what has always been the experience, which must
needs be ever the experience of society when men 'encounter with
such bitter tongues,' when full play is given to passion, prejudice
and all uncharitableness.... After fifteen years of this commotion,
the testimony of the judicious was 'that the tendency to general
emancipation in the Border States had been checked, and that the
Abolitionists had done more to rivet the chains of the slave and to
fasten the curse of slavery upon the country than all the
pro-slavery men in the world had done or could do in half a
century.'"[78]