THE WIDENING RIFT
For the next twelve years, slavery was in the background of the national
stage. But during this period, various influences were converging to a
common result, until in 1832-3 the issue was defined with new clearness
and thenceforth grew as the central feature in the public life of
America.
From the time of the Missouri debate, the slavery interest was
consolidated and alert, even while other subjects seemed to fill the
public mind. To the North, slavery was habitually a remote matter, but
it was perpetually brought home to the business and bosoms of the South.
The whole industrial system, a social aristocracy, and political
ambition, blended their forces. An instance of the subtle power of the
institution was given in a little-marked incident of Adams's generally
creditable administration. By three men as high-minded as President
Adams, Secretary Clay, and Minister Gallatin, overtures were made to
England for a treaty by which the surrender of deserters from her army
and navy should be her compensation for surrendering our fugitive
slaves! The British government would not listen to the proposal.
The national politics of this period, 1820-32, centred in a group of
strong and picturesque personalities,--Clay, Adams, Calhoun, Jackson,
and Webster. John Quincy Adams was a sort of exaggeration of the typical
New Englander,--upright, austere, highly educated, devoted to the public
service, ambitious, yet not to the sacrifice of conscience, but cold,
angular, repellant. Says Carl Schurz in his _Henry Clay_--a book which
gives an admirable resumé of a half-century of politics: "He possessed
in the highest degree that uprightness which leans backward. He had a
horror of demagogy, and lest he should render himself guilty of anything
akin to it, he would but rarely condescend to those innocent amenities
by which the good-will of others may be conciliated. His virtue was
freezing cold of touch, and forbidding in its look." When the
Presidential election went into the House in 1824, the influence of
Clay--himself a defeated candidate--was decisively thrown for Adams
against Jackson, and Clay served as President Adams's Secretary of
State. The two men supplemented each other well; Clay less austerely
virtuous, but far more lovable; his personal ideals less exacting, but
his sympathies wider. The co-operation between them was honorable to
both and serviceable to the country; but partisan bitterness stigmatized
it as a corrupt alliance; the air was full of suspicion and jealousy
toward the cultivated and prosperous class that had hitherto supplied
the chiefs of the government, and the rising democratic sentiment found
a most congenial hero in Andrew Jackson.
He was a rough backwoodsman; a fighter by nature and a passable soldier;
a staunch friend and a patriot at heart; ignorant, wholly unversed in
statesmanship, arbitrary in temper, and inclined to judge all subjects
from a personal standpoint. He easily defeated Adams for the Presidency
in 1828. His election marked the ascendancy, long to continue, of a more
ignoble element in the nation's political life. His administration began
the employment of the spoils system; and it "handled intricate financial
problems as a monkey might handle the works of a watch." Jackson had
small regard for the rights of those who got in the way of himself, his
party, or his country; he had trampled recklessly on the Indian; and his
triumph fell as a heavy discouragement on the quiet but widespread
movement to elevate the negro. He treated all questions in a personal
way; and the first great battle of his administration was to compel
social recognition in Washington for the wife of one of his cabinet
members whose reputation scandal had breathed upon, unjustly as Jackson
believed. In the revolt against her recognition a leader was the
Vice-President, John C. Calhoun, himself a man of blameless morals and
an advocate of the highest social standards. He thereby lost at once the
favor of Jackson, which was transferred to Martin Van Buren, a wily New
York politician, quite ready to call on any lady or support any policy
that his chief might approve. The breach between Jackson and Calhoun was
widened by the disclosure of an old political secret, probably by
Crawford of Georgia, a disappointed Presidential aspirant. Jackson's
administration naturally fell more and more into the hands of mediocre
men.
Calhoun had already had a long term of distinguished public service; he
had been one of the group of young men who came to the front in urging
on the war of 1812; he had served with success in the cabinet and twice
been chosen to the Vice-Presidency. He was of high personal character; a
keen logician and debater; a leader who impressed himself by the
strength of his character and depth of his convictions. Adams wrote of
him in 1821: "He is above all sectional and factious prejudices, more
than any other statesman of this Union with whom I have ever acted." He
was ambitious of the Presidency, an ambition which saw itself defeated
when Van Buren became the heir-apparent of the Jackson dynasty. A true
lover of his country, his predominant devotion came to be given to his
own section, and that temper fell in with events to make him the
foremost champion of the South.
The prominence of the personal element in public affairs was connected
with the absence of any clear and deep division upon large questions of
policy. There emerged a group of ideas constituting what was called the
"American system," of which Clay was the foremost advocate, and which
became the basis of the Whig party, as it was organized in the early
'30's. Its general principle was the free use of the Federal
government's resources for the industrial and commercial betterment of
the people; and its prominent applications were a national bank, a
system of national highroads and waterways, and a liberal use of the
protective principle in tariff laws. "Protection to American industry"
was the great cry by which Clay now rallied his followers. The special
direction of this protection was in favor of American manufacturers. By
very high taxes levied on imported goods, the price of those was
necessarily raised to the consumer, and the American maker of clothes,
cutlery, and so on, was enabled to raise his own prices correspondingly.
Naturally, this result was most gratifying to the manufacturer and his
dependents and allies. No less naturally, it was highly objectionable to
the consumer. But to the consumer it was pointed out that by thus
fostering the "infant industries" of his country they would be
strengthened to the point where they could and would supply him with his
goods far more cheaply than would otherwise be possible. But this
pleasing promise, held out now for some seventy-five years, somehow
failed to quite satisfy the consumer; and where whole classes and
sections were consumers only, from the tariff standpoint, and saw
themselves mulcted for the benefit of classes and sections already
richer than they, they grumbled loudly, and did not always stop with
grumbling. So when in 1828 a tariff was enacted imposing very high
duties on most manufactured articles, and which delighted the hearts of
New England and Middle States manufacturers, it was so obnoxious to
others that the name was fastened to it of "the tariff of abominations,"
and history has never changed that name.
There were hopes of relief under Jackson, but in the confusion of party
issues, and with the tariff supported by the consolidated strength of
the manufacturers--a consolidation powerful enough to make Webster its
spokesman in Congress; a consolidation as definite and resolute as that
of the slave-holders, and destined to be far longer-lived,--no change in
legislation came till 1832, and then the change was immaterial; the
"tariff of abominations" was substantially re-enacted. The South had
been chafing bitterly, and now South Carolina broke into open revolt.
The whole South felt itself aggrieved by the tariff. Its industrial
system was not suited to develop manufactures; it lacked the material
for skilled labor; it lacked the artisan class who create a demand. Its
staple industry was agriculture, the growth of tobacco, rice, sugar, and
above all, cotton, and it went to the North and to Europe for its
manufactured goods. A system of taxation which doubled the price of its
imports without helping its exports, was resented as unjust, and as
hostile to the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution.
South Carolina took the lead, and indeed stood alone, in applying a
remedy more drastic than the disease--nullification. Calhoun's logic
welded and sharpened the weapon which had behind it almost the entire
weight of the State. The precise relation of the States to the Union,
left indeterminate in the Constitution, and debated in every crisis
which had strained the bonds, was now asserted by Calhoun to involve the
right of any State to declare null and void any action of the Federal
Congress which impaired its rights. South Carolina now put the theory
into action. She held near the close of 1832 a convention, which
declared the tariff law unconstitutional and void; asserted that the
State would no longer pay duties under it, and if coercion was attempted
would secede outright.
Congress discussed the matter; and in the most memorable and classic of
Senate debates, Hayne of South Carolina vindicated the State's position
with logic, passion, and eloquence; while Webster replied with an equal
logic, a broader and higher ideal of nationality, a vindication of New
England which thrilled all hearts, and a patriotism which gave the
keynote to the ultimate triumph of the Union. Hitherto, Massachusetts
and South Carolina had each stood stiffly at times for her own way, even
at peril of the national bond; but in that hour the individuality of
South Carolina was merged in the slave-holding States, and that of
Massachusetts in a Union, one and indivisible.
The challenge of South Carolina was promptly answered by Jackson, just
re-elected President. He issued a proclamation, proclaiming
nullification as political heresy, and threatening to treat its
practical exercise as treason. But the situation was not destined to
settlement by the high hand. Webster favored such a settlement; he was
for no concession. As well make the issue now as ever, he said. The
President's friends introduced a bill giving him authority, if
nullification were insisted on, to close ports of entry, collect duties
by military force, and the like; "the force bill," it was called. But
the "tariff of abominations" was not the most satisfactory or promising
ground on which to assert the national sovereignty. And Jackson was
hardly a desirable man to intrust with indefinite military power. So
urged the timid or the moderate, and Clay was again the spokesman of
compromise. He brought in a tariff bill, by which all duties above 20
per cent. were to be gradually reduced until in 10 years they reached
that figure, at which they were to remain. This bill and the force bill
were passed together, and signed the same day. Confronted by the
government with the sword in one hand and the olive branch in the other,
South Carolina retracted--it was not a capitulation--and repealed the
ordinance. Nullification as a theory passed out of sight. But the
willingness of the extreme South to push to all lengths its resistance
to a hostile policy remained, and was felt in all that followed.
It was a distinct tradition among Calhoun's followers after his
death--and they followed him till Appomattox--that he privately gave as
a reason for making the first battle on the tariff question rather than
on slavery, that on the first the world's sympathies would be with them,
and on slavery against them. The same tradition ascribed to Calhoun the
prediction that the Northern influence would become predominant in the
Union about 1860. Whether or not Calhoun said these things, the tariff
issue certainly was brought on by the North; and the "compromise" on it
was a substantial victory gained by South Carolina for the South. The
final verdict of history may be that it was a just victory, won by
unjust means. Calhoun now stood forth the recognized leader of his
section, while it soon became apparent that of that section slavery was
the special bond, and was to be its avowed creed.
Almost unobserved for a time amid these exciting events, the debate over
slavery had been going on, transferred mainly from the political field
to the minds and consciences of individuals. Once in State politics it
came to an issue. Illinois, a free State without question at its
admission in 1818, had a majority of its early immigrants from the
South, and a determined effort was made to introduce slavery by law. It
met a still more vigorous resistance, in which the Methodist and Baptist
clergy, mainly Southern men, took a leading part. The opposition was
led by a Southerner, Gov. Edward Coles, one of the forgotten heroes.
Inheriting in Virginia some hundreds of slaves, and hindered by the
State laws from emancipating them, he took them all to Illinois, gave
them their freedom, supplied them with land, cabins, stock, and tools,
and watched and befriended them till they became self-supporting. In
each deed of emancipation he gave his testimony: "Whereas, I do not
believe a man can have a right of property in his fellow men ... I do
therefore ... restore to the said ---- that inalienable liberty of which
they have been deprived." He led the fight against the introduction of
slavery into Illinois to a decisive victory in 1824. A few more such men
throughout the South, and history would have been different.
A quiet advocacy of anti-slavery went on throughout the country, except
the extreme South. It was in sympathy with the general revival of
religious activity which began about 1815--a form of the new national
life, disentangled from European complications, and free for home
conquests and widening achievements. Three great evils aroused the
spirit of reform--intemperance, slavery, and war. The general assembly
of the Presbyterian church, representing the whole country, in 1818, by
a unanimous vote, condemned slavery as "a gross violation of the most
sacred and precious rights of human nature, and utterly inconsistent
with the law of God, which requires us to love our neighbor as
ourselves." In 1824-7 the Legislatures of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New
Jersey passed resolutions calling on Congress to provide for compensated
emancipation, and expressing willingness that their States should pay
their share of the burden. This last sentiment was a rare one; the
self-sacrifice it demanded from the non-slave-holding States was very
little in evidence during the long contest that followed; men would
speak and vote for freedom; when angry enough they would fight--to
defeat the master and incidentally to free the slave--but to pay, in
cold blood, and in heavy measure, for the ransom of the slaves, was a
different matter; and few were they who, like Lincoln, favored that way
out. The action of those three Legislatures marked the height of the
early anti-slavery tide, and prompted a hope which was never fulfilled.
In the decade 1820-30, more than 100 anti-slavery societies were
established in slave States (see _James G. Birney and His Times_, an
admirable exposition of the conservative anti-slavery movement). The
Manumission Society of North Carolina in 1825 took a kind of census of
the State, and concluded that of its people 60 in 100 favored
emancipation in some form. In the same year a pamphlet published in
Charleston, S. C., on "The Critical Situation and Future Prospects of
the Slave-Holding States," bitterly declared that the whole book and
newspaper press of the North and East teemed with articles on slavery.
In Maryland, an anti-slavery party in 1826 elected two members to the
House of Delegates; but this movement disappeared on the election of
Jackson two years later. In Alabama, Birney, a man of a fine type, and
growing toward leadership, secured in 1827 the passage of a law
forbidding the importation of slaves as merchandise; but this was
repealed two years later. So the wave flowed and ebbed, but on the whole
it seemed to advance.
Among local societies in the Northern States, one may be instanced in
New Haven, Ct., in which, in 1825, five young men associated themselves;
among them were Edward Beecher, Leonard Bacon, and Theodore D. Woolsey.
They were highly practical; their immediate aims were: First to elevate
the black population of New Haven; secondly, to influence public
sentiment in the city and State; and thirdly, to influence the
theological students in Yale college. So faithful were their labors in
their own city for its black population--described as in most wretched
condition, which seems to have been the case with most of the blacks at
the North in this period--that six years later Garrison pronounced them
more comfortable and less injured by prejudice than in any other place
in the Union. The young men of the New Haven and Andover seminaries
united in a project of a college for the blacks; strong support was
obtained; but the fierce wave of reaction following Nat Turner's revolt
swept it away. Lane seminary at Cincinnati, a Presbyterian stronghold,
became a center of enthusiastic anti-slavery effort, with the brilliant
young Theodore D. Weld as its foremost apostle; he was welcomed and
heard in the border slave States. The authorities of the college,
alarmed by the audacity of their pupils, tried to restrain the movement,
and the result was a great secession of students.
The seceders proposed to form a theological department at Oberlin
College (established two years before) if they could have Charles G.
Finney, the famous revivalist, as their teacher. But Finney declined to
take the place until the conservative trustees consented to admit
colored youths to the College; and thus Oberlin became an anti-slavery
stronghold.
As the anti-slavery movement developed, the call for immediate
liberation became more insistent and imperative. The colonization method
lost credit. Slavery was coming to be regarded by its opponents not
merely as a social evil to be eradicated, but as a personal sin of the
slave-holder, to be renounced as promptly as any other sin. John Wesleys
words were a keynote: "Instantly, at any price, were it the half of your
goods, deliver thyself from blood-guiltiness!" A Virginia minister, Rev.
George Bourne, published in 1816 _Slavery and the Book Irreconcilable_,
in which he said: "The system is so entirely corrupt that it admits of
no cure but by a total and immediate abolition." Two other Southern
ministers, James Duncan and John Rankin, wrote to the same effect. In
England, the abolition of slavery in the West India colonies was being
persistently urged; the impulse was a part of the philanthropic movement
that went along with the evangelical revival, and Wilberforce was its
leader. These English abolitionists were coming to "immediatism" from
1824, and their influence told in America.
Among the most unselfish and devoted laborers for the slave was Benjamin
Lundy. He was a Quaker by birth and training; he overtaxed his strength
and permanently impaired his hearing by prematurely trying to do a man's
work on his father's farm in New Jersey, and settled at the saddler's
trade in Wheeling, Va., in 1808. With the outlawing of the African slave
trade, there was beginning the sale of slaves from Virginia to the
Southern cotton-fields, and the sight of the sorrowful exiles moved
Lundy's heart to a lifelong devotion of himself to pleading the cause of
the slave. Infirm, deaf, unimpressive in speech and bearing, trudging on
long journeys, and accepting a decent poverty, he gave all the resources
of a strong and sweet nature to the service of the friendless and
unhappy. He supported himself by his trade, while he lectured and wrote.
He established in 1821 a weekly _Genius of Universal Emancipation_, at
Mt. Pleasant, O., starting without a dollar of capital and only six
subscribers; and at first walking twenty miles every week to the
printing press, and returning with his edition on his back. Four years
later he moved his paper to Baltimore. Anti-slavery agitation was still
tolerated in the border States, though once Lundy was attacked by a
bully who almost murdered him. When the impending election of Jackson
in 1828 came as a chill to the anti-slavery cause, the waning fortunes
of his paper sent Lundy to Boston to seek aid. There he found sympathy
in a number of the clergy, though fear of arousing the hostility of the
South kept them cautious. Dr. Channing wrote to Daniel Webster,
expressing the fullest sympathy with Lundy's devotion to freedom, but
also the gravest apprehension that unless the slaveholders were
approached in a spirit of friendliness rather than denunciation, there
would result a sectional strife fraught with the greatest danger. We
should say to the South, wrote Channing, "Slavery is your calamity and
not your crime"; and the whole nation should assume the burden of
emancipation, meeting the expense by the revenue from the sale of public
lands. In this brief letter of Channing's there is more of true
statesmanship than in all the utterances of the politicians of his day.
But Lundy (himself not given to denunciation) made one convert of a very
different temper from Channing's or his own--William Lloyd Garrison, a
young man educated in a printing-office, fearless, enthusiastic, and
energetic in the highest degree. Quickly won to the emancipation idea,
and passing soon to full belief in immediate and uncompensated
liberation, he allied himself with Lundy as the active editor of the
_Genius_, while the older man devoted himself to traveling and
lecturing. The _Genius_ at once became militant and aggressive. The
incidents which constantly fell under Garrison's eye--slave auctions and
whippings--fanned the fire within him. One day, for example, a slave
came into the office, told his story, and showed the proofs. His master
had lately died, leaving him his freedom, which was to be legally
effected in a few weeks; but in the meantime the overseer under whom he
worked, displeased at his way of loading a wagon, flogged him with a
cowhide so severely that his back showed twenty-seven terrible gashes.
Garrison appealed to the master's heirs for redress, but was repelled
with contumely. Presently he assailed an old fellow-townsman in
Newburyport, Mass., because a ship he owned had been employed to
transport a cargo of slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans. The
denunciation was unmeasured; the ship-owner brought suit, and as some
points in the article were not sustained by the evidence, Garrison was
fined $100. Unable to pay he went to jail, bearing his captivity with
courage and high cheer, till Arthur Tappan, a New York merchant and a
leader in the anti-slavery cause, paid his fine and released him. The
_Genius_ being ruined, Garrison transferred his field of labor to
Boston, where, at the beginning of 1831, he started the weekly
_Liberator_. He and his partner, Isaac Knapp, did all the work of every
kind, living principally on bread and water, and with only six hours a
week, and those at midnight, for Garrison to write his articles. The
paper's motto was: "Our country is the world, our countrymen are all
mankind." In his salutatory Garrison wrote: "I will be as harsh as truth
and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think
or speak or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on
fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife
from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate
her babe from the fire into which it has fallen,--but urge me not to use
moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest--I will not
equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retract a single inch--and I
will be heard!"
While Garrison's language was constantly such as to arouse passion to
the boiling point, he was always in theory a supporter of peace, opposed
to war under any conditions, and even to resistance of force by force.
But in 1829 there appeared a pamphlet of a different tenor; an
_Appeal_, by Walker, a Boston negro, addressed directly to the slaves.
It was a fiery recital of their wrongs and an incitement to forcible
redress. Its appearance in the South caused great excitement. The
Governors of Virginia and Georgia sent special messages to their
Legislatures about it. Garrison wrote of it, in the _Genius_: "It
breathes the most impassioned and determined spirit. We deprecate its
publication, though we cannot but wonder at the bravery and intelligence
of its author." Garrison's biographers--his sons--speak of Walker as "a
sort of John the Baptist to the new anti-slavery dispensation." It was
well for the Baptist that his head was out of Herod's reach. The Georgia
Legislature passed in a single day a bill forbidding the entry of free
negroes into the State, and making "the circulation of pamphlets of evil
tendency among our domestics" a capital offense.
Large as these events loom in the retrospect, they were comparatively
little noticed in their time. Virginia held in 1830 a convention for the
revision of her constitution; among its members were Madison, Monroe,
and Randolph; and emancipation was not even mentioned. Jefferson was
dead, and the spirit of Jefferson seemed dead. Then the unexpected
happened. There was a negro preacher, a slave named Nat Turner. He was a
man of slight figure, reputed among his people a sort of prophet,
addicted to visions and rhapsodies. He planned in 1831 an uprising of
the slaves. He circulated among them a document written in blood, with
cabalistic figures, and pictures of the sun and a crucifix. One night he
and a group of companions set out on their revolt. Others joined them
voluntarily or by impressment till they numbered forty. They began by
killing Turner's master and his family; then they killed a lady and her
ten children; they attacked a girls' boarding-school and killed all the
inmates. Houses stood open and unguarded, and most of the white men were
away at a camp-meeting. From Sunday night till Monday noon the band went
on its way unchecked, and killed sixty persons. Then the neighborhood
rallied and overcame them; slew several on the spot; but held the rest
for trial, which was held regularly and fairly, and thirteen were
executed. The origin of the outbreak remained mysterious. Turner said on
his trial that he had not been unkindly treated, and there was no
evidence of provocation by special abuse. There was no trace of any
instigation from the North in any form. It seemed not a stroke for
freedom by men worthy to be free; not even a desperate revolt against
intolerable wrong; but more like an outbreak of savagery, the uprising
of the brute in man, thirsty for blood. The fear at first prevailed that
there existed a widespread conspiracy, and various legislation for
protection and repression was enacted or discussed.
But the larger mind of Virginia was moved toward a radical treatment of
the disease itself, instead of its symptoms. In the next session of the
Legislature, 1831-2, proposals for a general emancipation were brought
forward, and the whole subject was canvassed in a long and earnest
debate. For slavery on its merits hardly a word of defense was spoken.
The moral condemnation was not frequent or strong, but the economic
mischief was conceded by almost all. It was recognized that labor was
debased; manufactures and immigration were discouraged; the yeomanry
were leaving the State. One bold speaker declared that the masters were
not entitled to compensation, since property condemned by the State as a
nuisance brings no award of damages to the owner. But the general
agreement was that emancipation should be compensated and gradual, and
that the blacks must be removed from the State. One plan was that they
should be deported in a body to Africa; another, that the
increase--about 6000 a year--should be so deported; while Thomas
Jefferson Randolph urged a plan which recalled that framed by his uncle,
Thomas Jefferson, half a century before. He proposed that the owner
should maintain the slave-child till the age of eighteen or twenty-one,
his labor for the last six or eight years being regarded as compensation
for the expense of infancy; and that the slave should then be hired out
till he had earned his passage to Africa. But, whatever the method, let
decisive action be taken, and taken now! The Legislature, it is said,
was largely made up of young and inexperienced men. Would not the
courage and hopefulness of Virginia youth essay this great deliverance?
Older voices bade them to the task. Said the Richmond _Enquirer_ (edited
by the elder Ritchie), January 7, 1832: "Means, sure but gradual,
systematic but discreet, ought to be adopted for reducing the mass of
evil which is pressing upon the South, and will still more press upon
her the longer it is put off. We say, now, in the utmost sincerity of
our hearts, that our wisest men cannot give too much of their attention
to this subject, nor can they give it too soon." It was one of the
decisive hours of history:
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.
But the task was too great, or the life-long habit of the slave-owner
had been too enervating. The apparent expense, the collision of
different plans, the difficulty in revolutionizing the whole industrial
system, the hold of an aristocracy affording to its upper class a
fascinating leisure and luxury--these, and the absence of any high moral
inspiration in the movement, brought it to naught. Instead of decreeing
emancipation, the Legislature fell back on the policy of stricter
repression. It enacted that the advocacy of rebellion by writing or
printing should be a penitentiary offense, and to express the opinion
that masters had no rights to their slaves was made punishable by a fine
of $500 and one year in jail. To advise conspiracy was treason and its
punishment death. It had been enacted a year before that no white man be
allowed to assemble slaves to instruct them in reading and writing; and
to this it was now added that neither slaves nor free negroes be allowed
to preach.
And so Virginia abdicated her old-time leadership in the cause of human
rights, and the primacy of the South passed to South Carolina and to
Calhoun, the champion of slavery.
In the meantime the organization of the radical anti-slavery force went
on at the North. In 1832 Garrison, Oliver Johnson and ten others
constituted themselves the New England Anti-slavery Society. Almost its
first attack was directed against the Colonization Society, Garrison
being always as fierce against half-way friends as against pronounced
foes. In 1833 a little group of more moderate but resolute men organized
a local association in New York city, and under their call the American
Anti-slavery Society held its first meeting in Philadelphia, in
December. Among the New York leaders were Arthur and Lewis Tappan,
merchants of high standing and men of well-balanced and admirable
character; with them were associated Joshua Leavitt and Elizur Wright.
Among the Massachusetts recruits was Whittier. The sixty-four members
were largely made up of merchants, preachers, and theological students.
Almost all were church members; twenty-one Presbyterians or
Congregationalists, nineteen Quakers, and one Unitarian,--Samuel J. May.
There was a noticeable absence of men versed in public affairs. The
constitution was carefully drawn to safeguard the society against the
imputation of unconstitutional or anarchic tendencies. It declared that
the right to legislate for the abolition of slavery existed only in the
Legislature of each State; that the society would appeal to Congress to
prohibit the interstate slave trade, to abolish slavery in the District
of Columbia and the territories, and to admit no more slave States; and
that the society would not countenance the insurrection of slaves.
Garrison, who had been visiting the Abolitionists in England, was not
among the signers of the call to the convention, and the constitution
was hardly in the line of his views; but he wrote a declaration of
principles which after some debate was adopted. It was impassioned and
unsparing; pictured the woes of the slaves and the essential wickedness
of the system; denounced compensation and colonization; declared that
"all laws admitting the right of slavery are before God utterly null and
void" and "ought instantly to be abrogated"; and called for a universal
and unresting agitation.