THE PIONEER MAKES A NEW AND STARTLING DEPARTURE.
When Garrison hoisted the banner of immediate emancipation he was
over-confident of success through the instrumentality of the church. It
did not enter his heart to conceive that after he had delivered his
message touching the barbarism of slavery that a church calling itself
Christian, or that a ministry arrogating to itself the character of the
Christ, could possibly say him nay. But he learned sadly enough the
utter folly of such expectations. For from pew and pulpit the first
stones were hurled against him, and the most cruel and persistent
opposition and persecution issued. Then as the movement which he had
started advanced, he saw how it was, why the church had played him false
and the cause of freedom. It was because the poison of slavery which the
evil one had injected into the nation's arteries had corrupted the
springs of justice and mercy in that body. The Church was not free, it,
too, was in bonds to slavery, how then could it help to free the slaves?
That was the reason that pulpit and pew cried out against him and
persecuted him. It was not they but the slave despotism, which ruled
them, which wrought its fell purpose within them.
If the reformer cast his eyes about him for other help it was the same;
the slime of the serpent was upon State as well as Church. Both of the
two great political parties were bound hands and feet, and given over to
the will of the slave tyranny. In all departments of Government, State
and National, the positive, all-powerful principle was slavery. Its
dread _nolo me tangere_ had forced Congress into the denial of the right
of petition, and into the imposition of a gag upon its own freedom of
debate. It was the grand President-maker, and the judiciary bent without
a blush to do its service. What, then, in these circumstances could the
friends of freedom hope to achieve? The nation had been caught in the
snare of slavery, and was in Church and State helpless in the vast
spider-like web of wrong. The more the reformer pondered the problem,
the more hopeless did success look under a Constitution which united
right and wrong, freedom and slavery. As his reflections deepened, the
conviction forced its way into his mind that the Union was the strong
tower of the slave-power, which could never be destroyed until the
fortress which protected it was first utterly demolished. In the spring
of 1842 the pioneer was prepared to strike into this new path to effect
his purpose.
"We must dissolve all connection with those murderers of fathers," he
wrote his brother-in-law, "and murderers of mothers, and murderers of
liberty, and traffickers of human flesh, and blasphemers against the
Almighty at the South. What have we in common with them? What have we
gained? What have we not lost by our alliance with them? Are not their
principles, their pursuits, their policies, their interests, their
designs, their feelings, utterly diverse from ours? Why, then, be
subject to their dominion? Why not have the Union dissolved in form as
it is in fact, especially if the form gives ample protection to the
slave system, by securing for it all the physical force of the North? It
is not treason against the cause of liberty to cry, "Down with every
slave-holding Union!" Therefore, I raise that cry. And O that I had a
voice louder than a thousand thunders, that it might shake the land and
electrify the dead--the dead in sin, I mean--those slain by the hand of
slavery."
A few weeks later the first peal of this thunder broke upon the startled
ears of the country through the columns of the _Liberator_. The May
meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society was drawing near, and the
reformer, now entirely ready to enter upon an agitation looking to the
dissolution of the Union, suggested "the duty of making the REPEAL OF
THE UNION between the North and the South the grand rallying point until
it be accomplished, or slavery cease to pollute our soil. We are for
throwing all the means, energies, actions, purposes, and appliances of
the genuine friends of liberty and republicanism into this one channel,"
he goes on to announce, "and for measuring the humanity, patriotism, and
piety of every man by this one standard. This question can no longer be
avoided, and a right decision of it will settle the controversy between
freedom and slavery." The stern message of Isaiah to the Jews,
beginning, "Hear the word of the Lord, ye scornful men that rule this
people. Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with DEATH and
with HELL are we at agreement," seemed to the American Isaiah to
describe exactly the character of the National Constitution. "Slavery is
a combination of DEATH and HELL," he declares, with righteous wrath,
"and with it the North have made a covenant, and are at agreement. As an
element of the Government it is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. As
a component part of the Union, it is necessarily a national interest.
Divorced from Northern protection, it dies; with that protection it
enlarges its boundaries, multiplies its victims, and extends its
ravages."
The announcement of this new radicalism caused a sensation. Many genuine
Garrisonian Abolitionists recoiled from a policy of disunion. Lydia
Maria Child and James S. Gibbon of the Executive Committee of the
National Society hastened to disavow for the society all responsibility
for the disunion sentiment of the editor of the _Liberator_. His new
departure seemed to them "foreign to the purpose for which it was
organized." Like all new ideas, it was a sword-bearer, and proved a
decided disturber of the peace. The Union-loving portion of the free
States had never taken to the Abolition movement, for the reason that it
tended to disturb the stability of their idol. But now the popular
hatred of Abolitionism was intensified by the avowal of a distinct
purpose on the part of its leader to labor for the separation of the
sections. The press of the North made the most of this design to render
altogether odious the small band of moral reformers, to reduce to a
nullity their influence upon public opinion.
Notwithstanding its rejection by James Gibbons and Lydia Maria Child the
new idea of the dissolution of the Union, as an anti-slavery object,
found instant favor with many of the leading Abolitionists, like Wendell
Phillips, Edmund Quincy, Parker Pillsbury, Stephen S. Foster and Abby
Kelley. At the anniversary meeting of the American Society in 1842, the
subject was mooted, and, although there was no official action taken,
yet it was apparent that a majority of the delegates were favorable to
its adoption as the sentiment of the society.
The ultimate object of Garrison was the abolition of slavery. Disunion
led directly to this goal, therefore he planted his feet in that way.
But while he shot the agitation at a distant mark, he did not mean to
miss less remote results. There was remarkable method in his madness. He
agitated the question of the dissolution of the Union "in order that the
people of the North might be induced to reflect upon their debasement,
guilt, and danger in continuing in partnership with heaven-daring
oppressors, and thus be led to repentance."
The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at its annual meeting in January,
1843 "dissolved the Union," wrote Quincy to R.D. Webb, "by a handsome
vote, after a warm debate. The question was afterward reconsidered and
passed in another shape, being wrapped up by Garrison in some of his
favorite Old Testament Hebraisms by way of vehicle, as the apothecaries
say." This is the final shape which Garrison's "favorite Old Testament
Hebraisms" gave to the action of the society:
"_Resolved_, That the compact which exists between the North and the
South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell--involving
both parties in atrocious criminality--and should be immediately
annulled."
At its tenth anniversary, in 1844, the American Society resolved
likewise that there should be no Union with slaveholders; and in May of
the same year the New England Society voted by a large majority to
dissolve the 'covenant with death, and the agreement with hell.' Almost
the whole number of the Garrisonian Abolitionists had by this time
placed upon their banner of immediate emancipation the revolutionary
legend "No Union with slaveholders." _Cathago est delenda_ were now ever
on the lips of the pioneer. 'The Union it must and shall be destroyed'
became the beginning, the middle, and the end of all his utterances on
the slavery question.
The attitude of the anti-slavery disunionists to the Government which
they were seeking to overthrow was clearly stated by Francis Jackson in
a letter returning to the Governor of Massachusetts his commission as a
justice of the peace. Says he, "To me it appears that the vices of
slavery, introduced into the constitution of our body politic by a few
slight punctures, has now so pervaded and poisoned the whole system of
our National Government that literally there is no health in it. The
only remedy that I can see for the disease is to be found in the
_dissolution of the patient_.... Henceforth it (the Constitution) is
dead to me, and I to it. I withdraw all profession of allegiance to it,
and all my voluntary efforts to sustain it. The burdens that it lays
upon me, while it is held up by others, I shall endeavor to bear
patiently, yet acting with reference to a higher law, and distinctly
declaring that, while I retain my own liberty, I will be a party to no
compact which helps to rob any other man of his."
The Abolition agitation for the dissolution of the Union was assisted
not a little by sundry occurrences of national importance. The
increasing arrogance and violence of the South in Congress on all
matters relating to the subject of slavery was one of these occurrences.
Freedom of debate and the right of petition, Southern intolerance had
rendered well nigh worthless in the National Legislature. In this way
the North, during several months in every year, was forced to look at
the reverse and the obverse faces, of the Union. These object-lessons
taught many minds, no doubt, to count the cost which the preservation of
the Union entailed upon the free States--"to reflect upon their
debasement, guilt, and danger" in their partnership with slaveholders.
Another circumstance which induced to this kind of reflection was the
case of George Latimer, who was seized as a fugitive slave in Boston in
the autumn of 1842. From beginning to end the Latimer case revealed how
completely had Massachusetts tied her own hands as a party to the
original compact with slavery whose will was the supreme law of the
land. In obedience to this supreme law Chief-Justice Shaw refused to the
captive the writ of _habeas corpus_, and Judge Story granted the owner
possession of the fugitive, and time to procure evidence of his
ownership. But worse still Massachusetts officials and one of her jails
were employed to aid in the return of a man to slavery. This degradation
aroused the greatest indignation in the State and led to the enactment
of a law prohibiting its officials from taking part in the return of
fugitive slaves, and the use of its jails and prisons for their
detention. The passage of this personal liberty measure served to
increase the activity of the anti-Union working forces in the South.
Then, again, the serious difficulty between Massachusetts and two of the
slave States in regard to their treatment of her colored seamen aided
Garrison in his agitation for the dissolution of the Union by the keen
sense of insult and injury which the trouble begat and left upon the
popular mind. Colored men in Massachusetts enjoyed a fair degree of
equality before her laws, were endowed with the right to vote, and were,
barring the prejudice against color, treated by the commonwealth as
citizens. They were employed in the merchant service of her interstate
trade. But at two of the Southern ports where her vessels entered, the
colored seamen were seized by the local police and confined in houses of
detention until the vessels to which they belonged were ready to depart,
when they were released and allowed to join the vessels. This was a most
outrageous proceeding, outrageous to the colored men who were thus
deprived of their liberty, outrageous also to the owners of the vessels
who were deprived of the service of their employés. Of what avail was
the constitutional guaranty that "the citizens of each State shall be
entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several
States", many men began to question? The South was evidently disposed to
support only that portion of the national compact which sustained the
slave system, all the rest upon occasion it trampled on and nullified.
This lesson was enforced anew upon Massachusetts by the affair of her
colored seamen. Unable to obtain redress of the wrong done her citizens,
the State appointed agents to go to Charleston and New Orleans and test
the constitutionality of the State laws under which the local
authorities had acted. But South Carolina and Louisiana, especially the
former, to whom Samuel Hoar was accredited, evinced themselves quite
equal to the exigency to which the presence of the Massachusetts agents
gave rise. To cut a long story short, these gentlemen, honored citizens
of a sister State, and covered with the ægis of the Constitution, found
that they could make no success of the business which they had in hand,
found indeed that as soon as that business was made public that they
stood in imminent peril of their lives. Whereupon, wisely conceiving
discretion to be the better part of valor, they beat a hasty retreat
back to their native air. The Massachusetts agents were driven out of
Charleston and New Orleans. Where was the sacred and glorious union
between Massachusetts and South Carolina and Louisiana that such things
were possible--were constantly occurring? The circumstance made a strong
impression on the State whose rights were thus grossly violated. It
helped to convert Massachusetts to its later opposition to slavery, and
to make its public sentiment more tolerant of the Garrisonian opposition
to the covenant with death and the agreement with hell. To the agitation
growing out of the scheme for the annexation of Texas must, however, be
ascribed the premium among all the anti-Union working facts and forces
of the first few years after Garrison and his coadjutors had raised the
cry of "No union with slaveholders." This agitation renewed the
intensity and sectionalism of the then almost forgotten struggle over
the admission of Missouri nearly a quarter of a century before, and
which was concluded by the Missouri compromise. This settlement was at
the time considered quite satisfactory to the South. But Calhoun took an
altogether different view of the matter twenty years later. The
arrangement by which the South was excluded from the upper portion of
the Louisiana Territory he came to regard as a cardinal blunder on the
part of his section. The fact is that within those two decades the
slave-holding had been completely outstripped by the non-slave-holding
States in wealth, population, and social growth. The latter had obtained
over the former States an indisputable supremacy in those respects.
Would not the political balance settle also in the natural order of
things in the Northern half of the Union unless it could be kept where
it then was to the south of Mason and Dixon's line by an artificial
political make-weight. This artificial political make-weight was nothing
less than the acquisition of new slave territory to supply the demand
for new slave States. Texas, with the territorial dimensions of an
empire, answered the agrarian needs of the slave system. And the South,
under the leadership of Calhoun, determined to make good their fancied
loss in the settlement of the Missouri controversy by annexing Texas.
But all the smouldering dread of slave domination, all the passionate
opposition to the extension of slavery, to the acquisition of new slave
territory and the admission of new slave States, awoke hotly in the
heart of the North. "No more slave territory." "No more slave States,"
resounded during this crisis, through the free States. "Texas or
disunion," was the counter cry which reverberated through the slave
States. Even Dr. Channing, who had no love for Garrison or his
anti-slavery ultraism, was so wrought upon by the scheme for the
annexation of Texas as to profess his preference for the dissolution of
the Union, "rather than receive Texas into the Confederacy." "This
measure, besides entailing on us evils of all sorts," the doctor boldly
pointed out, "would have for its chief end to bring the whole country
under the slave-power, to make the general Government the agent of
slavery; and this we are bound to resist at all hazards. The free States
should declare that the very act of admitting Texas will be construed as
a dissolution of the Union."
The Northern blood was at fever heat, and an unwonted defiance of
consequences, a fierce contempt of ancient political bugaboos marked the
utterances of men erstwhile timid of speech upon all questions relating
to slavery. In the anti-Texas convention held in Faneuil Hall January
29, 1845, all this timidity disappeared in the presence of the new
peril. It was not a convention of Abolitionists, although Garrison was a
member, but of politicians, mostly of the Whig party. "The anti-slavery
spirit of the convention," wrote Edmund Quincy to R.D. Webb, "was
surprising. The address and the speeches of the gentlemen, not
Abolitionists, were such as caused Garrison to be mobbed ten years ago,
and such as we thought thorough three or four years ago. There were no
qualifications, or excuses, or _twaddle_."
Garrison flung himself into the anti-Texas movement with all his
customary force and fire. Elected a delegate to the Faneuil Hall
Convention by the influence of Francis Jackson, he took a leading part
in its proceedings, "created the most stir in the whole matter," Wendell
Phillips thought. Charles Sumner, who heard him speak for the first
time, was struck with his "natural eloquence," and described his words
as falling "in fiery rain." Again at a mass meeting for Middlesex
County, held at Concord, to consider the aggressions of the slave-power,
did the words of the pioneer fall "in fiery rain." Apprehensive that the
performance of Massachusetts, when the emergency arose, would fall far
short of her protestations, he exclaimed, "I have nothing to say, sir,
nothing. I am tired of words, tired of hearing strong things said, where
there is no heart to carry them out. When we are prepared to state the
whole truth, and die for it, if necessary--when, like our fathers, we
are prepared to take our ground, and not shrink from it, counting not
our lives dear unto us--when we are prepared to let all earthly hopes go
back to the board--_then_ let us say so; _till_ then, the less we say
the better, in such an emergency as this. 'But who are we, will men
ask.' that talk of such things? 'Are we enough to make a revolution?'
No, sir; but we are enough to _begin_ one, and, once begun, it never can
be turned back. I am for revolution were I utterly alone. I am there
because I _must_ be there. I _must_ cleave to the right. I cannot choose
but obey the voice of God.
" ... Do not tell me of our past Union, and for how many years we have
been one. We were only one while we were ready to hunt, shoot down, and
deliver up the slave, and allow the slave-power to form an oligarchy on
the floor of Congress! The moment we say no to this, the Union
ceases--the Government falls."
The Texan struggle terminated in the usual way, in the triumph of the
slave-power. Texas was annexed and admitted into the sisterhood of
States, giving to the Southern section increased slave representation in
both branches of Congress, and thereby aiding to fasten, what at the
moment appeared to be its permanent domination in national affairs. As
Garrison had apprehended, the performance of the North fell far short of
its protestations when the crisis came. It swallowed all its brave
words, and collapsed into feeble and disheartened submission to its
jubilant and hitherto invincible antagonist. The whole North except the
small and irrepressible band of Garrisonian Abolitionists were cast down
by the revulsive wave of this disastrous event. Writing to his friend
Webb, Garrison discourses thus upon the great defeat: "Apparently the
slave-holding power has never been so strong, has never seemed to be so
invincible, has never held such complete mastery over the whole, has
never so successfully hurled defiance at the Eternal and Just One, as at
the present time; and yet never has it in reality been so weak, never
has it had so many uncompromising assailants, never has it been so
filled with doubt and consternation, never has it been so near its
downfall, as at this moment. Upon the face of it, this statement looks
absurdly paradoxical; but it is true, nevertheless. We are groping in
thick darkness; but it is that darkest hour which is said to precede the
dawn of day."