THE HEAVY WORLD IS MOVED.
Archimedes with his lever desired a place to stand that he might move
the world of matter. Garrison with his paper, having found a place for
his feet, demonstrated speedily his ability to push from its solid base
the world of mind. His plan was very simple, viz., to reveal slavery as
it then existed in its naked enormity, to the conscience of the North,
to be "as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice." And so, week
after week, he packed in the columns of the _Liberator_ facts, the most
damning facts, against slaveholders, their cruelty and tyranny. He
painted the woes of the slaves as if he, too, had been a slave. For the
first time the masters found a man who rebuked them as not before had
they been rebuked. Others may have equivocated, but this man called
things by their proper names, a spade, a spade, and sin, sin. Others may
have contented themselves with denunciations of the sins and with
excuses for the sinner, as a creature of circumstances, the victim of
ancestral transgressions, but this man offered no excuses for the
slave-holding sinner. Him and his sin he denounced in language, which
the Eternal puts only into the mouths of His prophets. It was, as he had
said, "On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with
moderation." The strength and resources of his mother-tongue seemed to
him wholly inadequate for his needs, to express the transcendent
wickedness of slave-holding. All the harsh, the stern, the terrible and
tremendous energies of the English speech he drew upon, and launched at
slaveholders. Amid all of this excess of the enthusiast there was the
method of a calculating mind. He aimed to kindle a conflagration because
he had icebergs to melt. "The public shall not be imposed upon," he
replied to one of his critics, "and men and things shall be called by
their right names. I retract nothing, I blot out nothing. My language is
exactly such as suits me; it will displease many, I know; to displease
them is my intention." He was philosopher enough to see that he could
reach the national conscience only by exciting the national anger. It
was not popular rage, which he feared but popular apathy. If he could
goad the people to anger on the subject of slavery he would soon be rid
of their apathy. And so week after week he piled every sort of
combustible material, which he was able to collect on board the
_Liberator_ and lighting it all, sent the fiery messenger blazing among
the icebergs of the Union. Slaveholders were robbers, murderers,
oppressors; they were guilty of all the sins of the decalogue, were in a
word the chief of sinners. At the same moment that the reformer denied
their right of property in the slave, he attacked their character also,
held them up in their relation of masters to the reprobation of the
nation and of mankind as monsters of injustice and inhumanity. The tone
which he held toward them, steadily, without shadow of change, was the
tone of a righteous man toward the workers of iniquity. The
indifference, the apathy, the pro-slavery sympathy and prejudice of the
free States rendered the people of the North hardly less culpable. They
were working iniquity with the people of the South. This was the long,
sharp goad, which the young editor thrust in between the bars of the
Union and stirred the guilty sections to quick and savage outbursts of
temper against him and the bitter truths which he preached. Almost
directly the proofs came to him that he was HEARD at the South and at
the North alike. Angry growls reached his ears in the first month of the
publication of the _Liberator_ from some heartless New England editors
in denunciation of his "violent and intemperate attacks on
slaveholders." The _Journal_, published at Louisville, Kentucky, and
edited by George D. Prentice, declared that, "some of his opinions with
regard to slavery in the United States are no better than lunacy." The
_American Spectator_ published at the seat of the National Government,
had hoped that the good sense of the "late talented and persecuted
junior editor" of the _Genius_, "would erelong withdraw him even from
the side of the Abolitionists." And from farther South the growl which
the reformer heard was unmistakably ferocious. It was from the State of
South Carolina and the Camden _Journal_, which pronounced the
_Liberator_ "a scandalous and incendiary budget of sedition." These were
the beginning of the chorus of curses, which soon were to sing their
serpent songs about his head. Profane and abusive letters from irate
slaveholders and their Northern sympathisers began to pour into the
sanctum of the editor. Within a few months after the first issue of the
_Liberator_ the whole aspect of the world without had changed toward
him. "Foes are on my right hand, and on my left," he reported to some
friends. "The tongue of detraction is busy against me. I have no
communion with the world--the world none with me. The timid, the
lukewarm, the base, affect to believe that my brains are disordered, and
my words the ravings of a maniac. Even many of my friends--they who have
grown up with me from my childhood--are transformed into scoffers and
enemies." The apathy of the press, and the apathy of the people were
putting forth signs that the long winter of the land was passing away.
To a colored man belongs the high honor of having been the _courier
avant_ of the slavery agitation. This man was David Walker, who lived in
Boston, and who published in 1829 a religio-political discussion of the
status of the negroes of the United States in four articles. The
wretchedness of the blacks in consequence of slavery he depicted in dark
and bitter language. Theodore Parker, many years afterward, said that
the negro was deficient in vengeance, the lowest form of justice.
"Walker's Appeal" evinced no deficiency in this respect in its author.
The pamphlet found its way South, and was the cause of no little
commotion among the master-class. It was looked upon as an instigation
to servile insurrection. The "Appeal" was proscribed, and a price put
upon the head of the author. Garrison deprecated the sanguinary
character of the book. For he himself was the very reverse of Walker.
Garrison was a full believer in the literal doctrine of non-resistance
as enunciated by Jesus. He abhorred all war, and physical collisions of
every description, as wicked and inhuman. He sang to the slave:
"Not by the sword shall your deliverance be;
Not by the shedding of your master's blood,
Not by rebellion--or foul treachery,
Upspringing suddenly, like swelling flood;
Revenge and rapine ne'er did bring forth good.
God's _time is best_!--nor will it long delay;
Even now your barren cause begins to bud,
And glorious shall the fruit be!--watch and pray,
For lo! the kindling dawn that ushers in the day."
He considered "Walker's Appeal" "a most injudicious publication, yet
warranted by the creed of an independent people." He saw in our
Fourth-of-July demonstrations, in our glorification of force as an
instrument for achieving liberty, a constant incentive to the slaves to
go and do likewise. If it was right for the men of 1776 to rise in
rebellion against their mother-country, it surely could not be wrong
were the slaves to revolt against their oppressors, and strike for their
freedom. It certainly did not lie in the mouth of a people, who
apotheosized force, to condemn them. What was sauce for the white man's
goose was sauce for the black man's gander.
The South could not distinguish between this sort of reasoning, and an
express and positive appeal to the slaves to cut the throats of their
masters. The contents of the _Liberator_ were quite as likely to produce
a slave insurrection as was "Walker's Appeal," if the paper was allowed
to circulate freely among the slave population. It was, in fact, more
dangerous to the lives and interests of slaveholders by virtue of the
pictorial representation of the barbarism and abomination of the
peculiar institution, introduced as a feature of the _Liberator_ in its
seventeenth number, in the shape of a slave auction, where the slaves
are chattels, and classed with "horses and other cattle," and where the
tortures of the whipping-post are in vigorous operation. Here was a
message, which every slave, however ignorant and illiterate could read.
His instinct would tell him, wherever he saw the pictured horror, that a
friend, not an enemy, had drawn it, but for what purpose? What was the
secret meaning, which he was to extract from a portrayal of his woes at
once so real and terrible. Was it to be a man, to seize the knife, the
torch, to slay and burn his way to the rights and estate of a man?
Garrison had put no such bloody import into the cut. It was designed not
to appeal to the passions of the slaves, but to the conscience of the
North. But the South did not so read it, was incapable, in fact, of so
reading it. What it saw was a shockingly realistic representation of the
wrongs of the slaves, the immediate and inevitable effect of which upon
the slaves would be to incite them to sedition, to acts of revenge.
Living as the slaveholders were over mines of powder and dynamite, it is
not to be marveled at that the first flash of danger filled them with
apprehension and terror. The awful memories of San Domingo flamed red
and dreadful against the dark background of every Southern plantation
and slave community. In the "belly" of the _Liberator's_ picture were
many San Domingos. Extreme fear is the beginning of madness; it is,
indeed, a kind of madness. The South was suddenly plunged into a state
of extreme fear toward which the _Liberator_ and "Walker's Appeal" were
hurrying it, by one of those strange accidents or coincidences of
history.
This extraordinary circumstance was the slave insurrection in
Southampton, Virginia, in the month of August, 1831. The leader of the
uprising was the now famous Nat Turner. Brooding over the wrongs of his
race for several years, he conceived that he was the divinely appointed
agent to redress them. He was cast in the mould of those rude heroes,
who spring out of the sides of oppression as isolated trees will
sometimes grow out of clefts in a mountain. With his yearning to deliver
his people, there mingled not a little religious frenzy and
superstition. Getting his command from Heaven to arise against the
masters, he awaited the sign from this same source of the moment for
beginning the work of destruction. It came at last and on the night of
August 21st; he and his confederates made a beginning by massacring
first his own master, Mr. Joseph Travis, and his entire family. Turner's
policy was remorseless enough. It was to spare no member of the white
race, whether man, woman, or child, the very infant at the mother's
breast was doomed to the knife, until he was able to collect such an
assured force as would secure the success of the enterprise. This
purpose was executed with terrible severity and exactness. All that
night the work of extermination went on as the slave leader and his
followers passed like fate from house to house, and plantation to
plantation, leaving a wide swathe of death in their track. Terror filled
the night, terror filled the State, the most abject terror clutched the
bravest hearts. The panic was pitiable, horrible. James McDowell, one of
the leaders of the Old Dominion, gave voice to the awful memories and
sensations of that night, in the great anti-slavery debate, which broke
out in the Virginia Legislature, during the winter afterward. One of the
legislators, joined to his idol, and who now, that the peril had passed,
laughed at the uprising as a "petty affair." McDowell retorted--"Was
that a 'petty affair,' which erected a peaceful and confiding portion of
the State into a military camp, which outlawed from pity the unfortunate
beings whose brothers had offended; which barred every door, penetrated
every bosom with fear or suspicion, which so banished every sense of
security from every man's dwelling, that let but a hoof or horn break
upon the silence of the night, and an aching throb would be driven to
the heart? The husband would look to his weapon, and the mother would
shudder and weep upon her cradle. Was it the fear of Nat Turner and his
deluded, drunken handful of followers which produced such effects? Was
it this that induced distant counties, where the very name of
Southampton was strange, to arm and equip for a struggle? No, sir, it
was the _suspicion eternally attached to the slave himself,_--a
suspicion that a Nat Turner might be in every family, that the same
bloody deed might be acted over at any time and in any place, that the
materials for it were spread through the land, and were always ready for
a like explosion."
Sixty one whites and more than a hundred blacks perished in this
catastrophe. The news produced a profound sensation in the Union.
Garrison himself, as he records, was horror-struck at the tidings. Eight
months before he had in a strain of prophecy penetrated the future and
caught a glimpse of just such an appalling tragedy:
"Wo, if it come with storm, and blood, and fire,
When midnight darkness veils the earth and sky!
Wo to the innocent babe--the guilty sire--
Mother and daughter--friends of kindred tie!
_Stranger and citizen alike shall die!_
Red-handed slaughter his revenge shall feed,
And havoc yell his ominous death-cry,
And wild despair in vain for mercy plead--
While hell itself shall shrink and sicken at the deed!"
After the Southampton insurrection the slavery agitation increased
apace, and the _Liberator_ and its editor became instantly objects of
dangerous notoriety in it. The eyes of the country were irresistibly
drawn to them. They were at the bottom of the uprising, they were
instigating the slaves to similar outbreaks. The savage growlings of a
storm came thrilling on every breeze from the South, and wrathful
mutterings against the agitator and his paper grew thenceforth more
distinct and threatening throughout the free States. October 15, 1831,
Garrison records in the _Liberator_ that he "is constantly receiving
from the slave States letters filled with the most diabolical threats
and indecent language." In the same month Georgetown, S.C., in a panic
made it unlawful for a free colored person to take the _Liberator_ from
the post-office. In the same month the Charleston _Mercury_ announced
that "gentlemen of the first respectability" at Columbia had offered a
reward of fifteen hundred dollars for the arrest and conviction of any
white person circulating the _Liberator_, Walker's pamphlet, "or any
other publication of seditious tendency." In Georgia the same symptoms
of fright were exhibited. In the same month the grand jury at Raleigh,
N.C., indicted William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp for circulating
the _Liberator_ in that county. It was even confidently expected that a
requisition would be made by the Executive of the State upon the
Governor of Massachusetts for their arrest, when they would be tried
under a law, which made their action felony. "Whipping and imprisonment
for the first offence, and death, without benefit of clergy, for the
second." Governor Floyd said in his message to the Virginia Legislature
in December that there was good cause to suspect that the plans of the
Southampton massacre were "designed and matured by unrestrained fanatics
in some of the neighboring States." Governor Hamilton sent to the South
Carolina Legislature in the same month an excited message on the
situation. He was in entire accord with the Virginia Executive as to the
primary and potent agencies which led to the slave uprising in Virginia.
They were "incendiary newspapers and other publications put forth in the
non-slave-holding States, and freely circulated within the limits of
Virginia." As specimens of "incendiary newspapers and other
publications, put forth in the non-slave-holding States," the South
Carolina official sent along with his message, copies of the _Liberator_
and of Mr. Garrison's address to the "Free People of Color," for the
enlightenment of the members of the Legislature. But it remained for
Georgia to cap the climax of madness when her Legislature resolved:
"That the sum of five thousand dollars be, and the same is
hereby appropriated, to be paid to any person or persons who
shall arrest, bring to trial and prosecute to conviction, under
the laws of this State, the editor or publisher of a certain
paper called the _Liberator_, published in the town of Boston
and State of Massachusetts; or who shall arrest and bring to
trial and prosecute to conviction, under the laws of this State,
any other person or persons who shall utter, publish, or
circulate within the limits of this State said paper called the
_Liberator_, or any other paper, circular, pamphlet, letter, or
address of a seditious character."
This extraordinary resolve was signed Dec. 26, 1831, by "Wilson Lumpkin,
Governor." The whole South was in a state of terror. In its insane
fright it would have made short shrift of the editor of the _Liberator,_
had he by accident, force, or fraud have fallen into the clutches of its
laws. The Georgia reward of five thousand dollars was as Mr. Garrison
put it, "a bribe to kidnappers." The Southern method of dealing with the
agitation within the slave States was violent and effective. There could
be no agitation after the agitators were abolished. And the Southern
method was to abolish the agitators.
The suppression of Abolitionism within the slave States was no difficult
matter, but its suppression at the North was a problem of a wholly
different nature, as the South was not long in finding out. It would not
understand why its violent treatment of the disease within its
jurisdiction could not be prescribed as a remedy by the
non-slave-holding half of the Union within its borders. And so the South
began to call loudly and fiercely for the suppression of a movement
calculated to incite the slaves to insubordination and rebellion. This
demand of the South had its influence at the North. Such newspapers as
the _National Intelligencer,_ and the Boston _Courier_ suggested
amendments to the laws whereby the publication of incendiary writings in
the free States might be prohibited. The latter journal allowed that
under the criminal code of Massachusetts "every man has a right to
advocate Abolition, or conspiracy, or murder; for he may do all these
without breaking our laws, although in any Southern State public justice
and public safety would require his punishment." "But," the editor goes
on to remark, "if we have no laws upon the subject, it is because the
exigency was not anticipated.... Penal statutes against treasonable and
seditious publications are necessary in all communities. We have them
for our own protection; if they should include provisions for the
protection of our neighbors it would be no additional encroachment upon
the liberty of the press." The Governors of Virginia and Georgia
remonstrated with Harrison Gray Otis, who was Mayor of Boston in the
memorable year of 1831, "against an incendiary newspaper published in
Boston, and, as they alleged, thrown broadcast among their plantations,
inciting to insurrection and its horrid results." As a lawyer Mayor
Otis, however, "perceived the intrinsic, if not insuperable obstacles to
legislative enactments made to prevent crimes from being consummated
beyond the local jurisdiction." But the South was not seeking a legal
opinion as to what it could or could not do. It demanded, legal or
illegal, that Garrison and the _Liberator_ be suppressed. To the Boston
mayor the excitement over the editor and his paper seemed like much ado
about nothing. The cause appeared to his supercilious mind altogether
inadequate to the effect. And so he set to work to reduce the panic by
exposing the vulgarity and insignificance of the object, which produced
it. That he might give the Southern bugaboo its _quietus_, he directed
one of his deputies to inquire into a publication, of which "no member
of the city government, nor any person," of his honor's acquaintance,
"had ever heard." The result of this inquiry Mayor Otis reported to the
Southern functionaries.
"Some time afterward," he wrote, "it was reported to me by the city
officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor; that his
office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and
his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colors."
With this bare bodkin Harrison Gray Otis thought to puncture the
Southern panic. But the slaveholders had correcter notions of the nature
and tendency of the Abolition enterprise than had the Boston mayor. They
had a strange, an obstinate presentiment of disaster from the first
instant that the _Liberator_ loomed upon their horizon. It was a battery
whose guns, unless silenced, would play havoc with Southern interests
and the slave system; _ergo_, the paper must be suppressed; _ergo_, its
editor must be silenced or destroyed. And so when Otis, from his serene
height, assured them of his "belief that the new fanaticism had not
made, nor was likely to make, proselytes among the respectable classes
of our people," they continued to listen to their fears, and to cry the
louder for the suppression of the "incendiary newspaper published in
Boston."
The editor of that paper never flinched before the storm of malignity
which was gathering about his head. He pursued the even tenor of his
way, laboring at the case more than fourteen hours every day, except
Sundays, upon the paper, renewing, week after week, his assaults upon
the citadel of the great iniquity, giving no quarter to slave-holding
sinners, but carrying aloft the banner of IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL
EMANCIPATION. Otis had looked to numbers and respectability as his
political barometer and cue; but when, after diligent search with
official microscopes, he failed to observe the presence of either in
connection with this "new fanaticism," wise man that he was, he turned
over and renewed his slumbers on the edge of a volcano whose ominous
rumbling the Southern heart had heard and interpreted aright. He was too
near to catch the true import of the detonations of those subterranean
forces which were sounding, week after week, in the columns of the
_Liberator_. They seemed trivial, harmless, contemptible, like the toy
artillery of children bombarding Fort Independence. Garrison's moral
earnestness and enthusiasm seemed to the Boston mayor like the impotent
rage of a man nursing memories of personal injuries suffered at the
South.
If there was panic in the South, there was none in the office of the
_Liberator_. Unterrified by the commotion which his composing-stick was
producing near and far, he laughed to scorn the abuse and threats of his
enemies. When the news of the reward of the State of Georgia "for the
abduction of his person" reached him, he did not quail, great as was his
peril, but boldly replied:
"Of one thing we are sure: all Southern threats and rewards will be
insufficient to deter us from pursuing the work of emancipation. As
citizens of the United States we know our rights and dare maintain them.
We have committed no crime, but are expending our health, comfort, and
means for the salvation of our country, and for the interests and
security of infatuated slaveholders, as well as for the relief of the
poor slaves."
Archimedes with his lever had moved the world. Archimedes "in a small
chamber, unfurnitured and mean," had set a world of pro-slavery passions
and prejudices spinning away into space:
"Such earnest natures are the fiery pith,
The compact nucleus, 'round which systems grow;
Mass after mass becomes inspired therewith,
And whirls impregnate with the central glow."