CALHOUN AND GARRISON
Thus, with the beginning of the second third of the nineteenth century,
the issue as to American slavery was distinctly drawn, and the leading
parties to it had taken their positions. Let us try to understand the
motive and spirit of each.
In the new phase of affairs, the chief feature was the changed attitude
of the South. In the sentiment of its leading and representative men,
there had been three stages: first, "slavery is an evil, and we will
soon get rid of it"; next, "slavery is an evil, but we do not know how
to get rid of it"; now it became "slavery is good and right, and we will
maintain it." To this ground the South came with surprising suddenness
in the years immediately following 1833. What caused the change? The
favorite Southern explanation has been that the violence of the
Abolitionists exasperated the South, checked its drift toward
emancipation, and provoked it in self-defense to justify and extend its
system. This may be effective as a criticism of the extreme
Abolitionists, but as regards the South it is rather a confession than a
defense. On a subject involving its whole prosperity, its essential
character, its relation to the world's civilization, did it reverse its
course at the bitter words of a few critics? If that were true, it would
bespeak passionate irritability, an incapacity for the healthy
give-and-take of practical life, in keeping with the worst that could be
said of the effect of slavery on the master. In truth the violence of
Garrison and his few followers was but a minor element in the case.
Slavery had become immensely profitable; it was the corner-stone of a
social fabric in which the upper class had an extremely comfortable
place; it was involved with the whole social and political life of the
section. It was too important to be dealt with half-heartedly: it must
be accepted, justified, believed in,--or it must be abandoned. John
Randolph of Roanoke had said of slavery: "We are holding a wolf by the
ears; it is perilous alike to hold on or to let go." But one or the
other must be done, and the South elected to keep on holding the wolf.
The better to understand the developments of the following years, it
will be well to consider a group of representative men,--Calhoun,
Garrison, Birney, Channing, and Webster.
Calhoun had many of the elements of high statesmanship--clear views,
strong convictions, forcible speech. He was ambitious, but in no ignoble
fashion; he often served his country well, as in his efficient
administration of the war department under Munroe, his protest against
the spoils system and the personal government of Jackson, and his
influence in averting war with England over the Oregon boundary in
1845-46. After the Presidency was clearly out of his reach--from
1832--he was growingly identified with and devoted to the interests of
his own section, yet always with a patriotic regard for the Union as a
whole. He had that fondness for theories and abstractions which was
characteristic of the Southern statesmen, fostered perhaps by the
isolated life of the plantation. With this went a kind of provincialism
of thought, bred from the wide difference which slavery made from the
life of the world at large. When Calhoun, in one of his Senate orations
was magnifying the advantage of slave over free labor, Wade of Ohio, who
sat listening intently, turned to a neighbor and exclaimed: "That man
lives off of all traveled roads!" He had neither the arts nor the
magnetism of the popular politician; he won no such personal following
as Clay and Jackson; but the South more and more accepted him as the
most logical and far-seeing champion of its peculiar interests.
His personality had much in common with Jonathan Edwards. There was in
both the same inflexible logic and devotion to ideas, the same personal
purity and austerity. The place of the mystic's fire which burned in
Edwards was taken in Calhoun by a passionate devotion to the
commonwealth. In both there was a certain moral callousness which made
the one view with complacence a universe including a perpetual hell of
unspeakable torments; while the other accepted as the ideal society a
system in which the lowest class was permanently debased. Each was the
champion of a cause destined to defeat because condemned by the moral
sentiment of the world,--Edwards the advocate of Calvinism, and Calhoun
of slavery.
Calhoun is to be regarded as a typical slave-holder of the better class.
He owned and cultivated a plantation with several hundred slaves; spent
much time upon it; made it profitable, and dispensed a generous
hospitality. Such a plantation was a little community, organized and
administered with no small labor and skill; with house servants, often
holding a friendly and intimate relation with the family; with a few
trained mechanics and a multitude of field hands. As to physical comfort
the slaves were probably as well or better provided than the bulk of
European peasantry,--this on the testimony of witnesses as unfriendly to
slavery as Fanny Kemble and Dr. Channing. Order and some degree of
morality were enforced, and religion, largely of the emotional type,
prevailed widely. So much may be said, perhaps, for the average
plantation, certainly for the better class, and a very large class.
Joseph Le Conte, the eminent scientist, a writer of the highest credit,
in his pleasing autobiography describes his boyhood on a Georgia
plantation, and characterizes his father as a man of rare excellence to
whom he owed the best of his mental inheritance. He writes of him: "The
best qualities of character were constantly exercised in the just, wise,
and kindly management of his 200 slaves. The negroes were strongly
attached to him, and proud of calling him master.... There never was a
more orderly, nor apparently a happier working class than the negroes of
Liberty county as I knew them in my boyhood."
Against this description are to be set such statements as this made by
Frederick Law Olmsted, after many months of travel in the South: "The
field hand negro is on an average a very poor and a very bad creature,
much worse than I had supposed before I had seen him and grown familiar
with his stupidity, indolence, duplicity, and sensuality. He seems to be
but an imperfect man, incapable of taking care of himself in a civilized
manner, and his presence in large numbers must be considered a dangerous
circumstance to a civilized people." Olmsted saw no resource but gradual
emancipation with suitable training. A resident of this same Liberty
county, Rev. C. C. Jones, himself a staunch supporter of slavery, but
urgent for giving better religious instruction to the slaves, wrote in
1842; "That the negroes are in a degraded state is a fact, so far as my
knowledge extends, universally conceded.... Negro marriages are neither
recognized nor protected by law. Uncleanness--this sin may be considered
as universal.... They are proverbial thieves." But how could "religious
instruction" produce chastity in those for whom the law did not
recognize marriage, or honesty in those who themselves were stolen?
But the bright side of the medal, which had so dark an obverse, was the
interpretation on which Calhoun and the slave-holding class took their
stand. They resolutely ignored the frequent abuses and the essential
degradation of manhood. They fashioned the theory--it was the old
familiar theory of past ages, but had fallen out of sight in the
enthusiasm of the revolutionary period--that society rightly and
properly is constituted with a servile class as its base. Calhoun
declared: "I hold that there never has yet existed a wealthy and
civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in
point of fact, live on the labor of the other." And generally, he adds,
the condition of the laborer has been worse than it now is in the South.
In advance of civilization, he declares, there always comes a conflict
between capital and labor; and this conflict the South avoids by
unflinchingly holding the laborer in his subject condition.
Calhoun is dead, and slavery is dead, but the ideas he then avowed are
still powerfully, if more latently, asserting themselves in our social
order.
For these theories the slave-holders now found justification from the
ministers of religion. The South held more tenaciously than any other
section to the old-fashioned type of Christianity. In earlier days,
religious teachers--as in the unanimous vote of the Presbyterian General
Assembly in 1818--had held slavery to be "utterly inconsistent with the
law of God, which requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves." But
now the Southern ministers of all denominations appealed for ample
justification to slavery as it was permitted under the Jewish law, and
as it existed in the time of Christ and the Apostles, and was unrebuked
by them. They went further back, and in the curse pronounced by Noah
upon the unfilial Ham and his posterity, they found warrant for holding
the African in perpetual bondage. So the South closed up its ranks, in
Church and State, and answered its critics with self-justification, and
with counterattack on what it declared to be their unconstitutional,
anarchic, and infidel teachings.
The agitation against slavery took on a new phase with the appearance of
Garrison and his founding of the _Liberator_ and the New England
Anti-slavery Society in 1831. Garrison was filled and possessed with one
idea--the wrongs of the slave, and the instant, pressing, universal duty
of giving him freedom. It was in him an unselfish and heroic passion.
For it he cheerfully accepted hardship, obloquy, peril. He saw no
difficulties except in the sin of wrongdoers and their allies; the only
course he admitted was immediate emancipation by the master of his human
property, and the instant coöperation and urgency of all others to this
end. His words were charged with passion; they kindled sympathetic souls
with their own flame; they roused to a like heat those whom they
assailed; and they sent thrills of alarm, wonder, and wrath, through the
community. Wherever the _Liberator_ went, or the lecturers of the new
anti-slavery societies were heard, there could be no indifference or
forgetfulness as to slavery. Hitherto, to the immense mass of people
throughout the North, it had been a far-away and unimportant matter. Now
it was sent home to the business and bosoms of all men.
The anti-slavery movement changed its character. Garrison entered on a
very active campaign, lecturing and establishing local societies.
Prominent among his assistants was George Thompson, one of the English
Abolitionists, who, after the emancipation of the West India slaves by
the British government at a cost of £20,000,000, came to this country
and acted as Garrison's ally, winning some converts by his eloquence,
but heightening the unpopularity of the movement through the general
hostility to foreign interference. The early societies had been largely
in the border States, and their efforts had an immediate object in the
political action of their own communities. Now, the resentment and fear
of the slave-holding interest soon drove them out of those communities.
They spread faster than ever,--in a few years it was said that they were
1300,--but were confined to the free States. What immediate and
practical aim could they pursue? It was the question of practical action
that brought Garrison's views to a sharp test, and soon divided him from
the great body of anti-slavery people.
In Garrison's mind there was room for only one idea at a time. Slavery
was a crime, a sin, an abomination,--that to him was the first, the
last, the whole truth of the matter. He had little education, and he had
not in the least a judicial or an open mind. It was to him clear and
certain that the blacks were in every way the equal of the whites. Of
the complexity of human society; of the vital necessity of a political
bond uniting communities, and of the inevitable imperfections and
compromises which are the price of an established social order; of the
process of evolution by which humanity slowly grows from one stage into
another; of the fact that the negro was in some ways better as a slave
in America than as a savage in Africa, and that there must be other
intermediate stages in his development; of the consideration due to
honest differences of opinion and to deeply-rooted habits--of all this
Garrison was as ignorant as a six-years-old child. When facts came in
his way, he denied them; when institutions stood across his path, he
denounced them; when men differed from him, he assailed them.
As to a practical course of action by Northern people, he was absolutely
without resource. How were they to free the slaves? Not by force--force
was to Garrison as wicked as slavery itself. By their votes? That was
only possible under the government as ordained by the Constitution; and
the Constitution allowed no action against slavery except by each State
for itself. The worse then for the Constitution! Ere many years Garrison
declared, and put as a standing heading to the _Liberator_: "The United
States Constitution Is a Covenant with Death and an Agreement with
Hell." He went further; for a time at least he held that all human
governments, as resting on force, were sinful, and to be ignored, or
passively submitted to, without taking active part. He declared the
Union, as a compact with slave-holders, was worthy only to be dissolved.
But how even dissolve it, since he counselled his followers not to vote?
And if it were dissolved, how would the slaves be any nearer freedom?
Was there any possible good outcome to non-voting and dissolution of the
Union, except that there would then be no complicity with slave-holders?
And would such escape from complicity be any help to the slave, any
service to humanity, anything more than an egotistic separation from
political society, a mere refined selfishness?
Such questions never troubled Garrison. Instead of answering them, he
found something else to denounce. The churches he thought were derelict,
in that they did not bear testimony against slavery. True, most of the
great religious bodies of the country were soon rent asunder on the
question: Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, were divided between
North and South, because neither side could tolerate the other's
position on slavery. But nothing satisfied Mr. Garrison. To him the
churches were "cages of unclean birds and synagogues of Satan."
But if the gun was ill-aimed, at least the recoil was prodigious. It is
unreasonable to attribute principally to the violence of the _Liberator_
the new and determined rally of the South in defense of
slavery,--Calhoun and his followers had far wider grounds for their
action than that,--but undoubtedly that violence helped to consolidate
and intensify the Southern resistance. The Abolitionist papers were at
first sent all over the South. The Southerners saw little difference
between such papers as the _Liberator_ and such direct incitements to
insurrection as Walker's _Appeal_; and the horrors of Nat Turner's
rising were fresh in mind. They put all Abolitionist teaching under a
common ban. At the North, the anti-slavery cause became associated in
the popular mind with hostility to the government, to the churches, to
the established usages of society. It was Charles Sumner who said: "An
omnibus load of Boston Abolitionists had done more harm to the
anti-slavery cause than all its enemies."
Garrison's own following was soon divided, and a large part drew away
from him. The most important division came on the question of political
action, when, in the Presidential election of 1840, the practical wing
entered into the political field, as the inevitable and only arena for
effective action; nominated a candidate, and laid the foundation for the
election of Lincoln twenty years later. In the American Anti-slavery
Society there came a contest; Garrison triumphed by a narrow vote, but a
secession followed. Of his immediate and permanent allies the most
important was Wendell Phillips. He threw himself heart and soul into the
cause; he gave to it an educated and brilliant mind, and a fascinating
oratory; he was as uncompromising and censorious as Garrison.
Garrison always held a place of honor and friendship among the
Abolitionists, even those who refused to follow his leadership. In
private life his genial and winning traits were as marked as was his
fierceness on the platform. The term "Abolitionist" is somewhat
indefinite, but it may best be defined as denoting a person to whom the
supreme interest in public affairs was the extinction of slavery. It
included not only those who shared Garrison's ideas of non-voting and
peaceable disunion, but those, too, like Birney and Whittier, who
respected the Constitution and worked for their cause through a
political party. The term also applied to the few who, like John Brown,
would attack slavery by force of arms. On the other hand, the name
Abolitionist did not properly belong to those who were opposed to
slavery, but held that opposition along with other political tenets and
not as a supreme article of faith. These were best included under the
general term of "anti-slavery men," a designation accepted by many of
the Free Soil, Whig and Democratic parties, and later by the Republican
party. The classification cannot be made exact, but the word
"Abolitionists" generally designated the men and women to whom the
extinction of slavery was a primary interest, and who gave to it their
habitual and earnest attention, through the anti-slavery societies and
otherwise. In this broader sense, the Abolitionists were a notable
company. They were bound together by a disinterested and noble
sentiment, and by sacrifices to the cause. The hostility aroused by
Garrison, Phillips, Pilsbury, and a few like-minded associates, extended
to many who went to no such extremes. The anti-slavery speakers were
sometimes mobbed: once in Boston a rope was round Garrison's neck and
his life was in peril; meetings were broken up; and the respectable part
of the community sometimes encouraged or tolerated these assaults.
Actual physical injury was very rare, but a hostile social atmosphere
was the frequent price of fidelity to conscience.
Among the most notable of the leaders was Gerritt Smith. He took active
part in politics, and was for a time in Congress. He is finely
characterized by Andrew D. White:
"Of all tribunes of the people I have ever known he dwells in my memory
as possessing the greatest variety of gifts. He had the prestige given
by great wealth, by lavish generosity, by transparent honesty, by
earnestness of purpose, by advocacy of every good cause, by a superb
presence, and by natural eloquence of a very high order. He was very
tall and large, with a noble head, an earnest yet kindly face, and of
all human voices I have ever heard his was the most remarkable for its
richness, depth, and strength."
Women took a prominent and honorable part; the venerable and beautiful
Lucretia Mott gave her benign presence to the gatherings; Lydia Maria
Child made heavy sacrifices in the good cause. In the common ardor, and
with a Quaker precedent, women took part as speakers. Women's rights was
closely united with anti-slavery; and hence came a fresh odium from
conservative quarters, while the admirable bearing of the leading women
won growing favor for both lines of emancipation. The makers of the new
American literature were friends of the anti-slavery cause. Emerson gave
to it his words of serene inspiration. Whittier was among its ardent
apostles, shared in its political activity, and sang lyrics of freedom.
Bryant was its strong advocate in journalism. Lowell, drawn by his noble
wife, came as a strong ally, and the Biglow Papers gave what had been
greatly lacking,--the salt of humor.
The Abolitionists might be compared to a comet,--a body with a bright
head and a nebulous tail. Like all radicals and reformers they had a
fringe of unbalanced and crotchety folk. It must be said, too, that
absorption in a topic remote from the concerns of one's daily life is
apt to be somewhat distracting and demoralizing. Dr. Joseph Henry
Allen--an admirable and too little known writer--has in an eloquent and
beautiful passage described the Abolitionists (though he was not one of
them) as the devotees of a genuine and heroic religion. But any
adequate religion must find its main application in the duties and
services of the immediate present; and the men and women who were
possessed day and night by the wrongs of those to whom they could render
little service, were apt to be thrown out of touch with near and homely
relations, and become what are now called "cranks."
But to appreciate the service of the Abolitionists we must remember that
up to the birth of the Republican party in 1854 almost all of the
political leaders and men of public affairs, as well as most of the
churches, colleges, and professional educators, held aloof from the
anti-slavery cause. With a few exceptions, they left the work of
educating public sentiment, and shaping some policy on the supreme
question, to be done by this little company,--of lecturers, ministers,
literary men and women. These did loyally and bravely according to their
lights; and they had their reward, outwardly in unpopularity and
sometimes persecution, but inwardly in a social atmosphere within their
own body, warm, joyful, and religious; and the sense of alliance with
the Divine Force in the universe. Said Wendell Phillips: "One man with
God is a majority."