BIRNEY, CHANNING, AND WEBSTER
Of the moderate wing of the anti-slavery men, a good representative was
James G. Birney. With the fine physical presence and genial manhood of
the typical Kentuckian, he had a well-balanced mind and a thorough
loyalty to the sense of duty, which broadened as he grew. Removing to
Alabama, he became anti-slavery in his sentiments, and he was a friend
not only of the negro, but of all who were oppressed. As the legal
representative of the Cherokee nation he stood for years between the
Indians and those who would wrong them. He identified himself for a time
with the colonization cause; and, finding himself growing powerless in
Southern communities, he removed to Ohio, where there was a strong and
vigorous anti-slavery propaganda. One incident of his life in Cincinnati
illustrates the concrete form which slavery sometimes took. A Missourian
owned a slave girl who was his own daughter, a cultivated and refined
woman. He took her to the East for a visit, treated her habitually as
one of his own family, but refused her prayers for freedom. Dreading the
possibilities of her lot, she made her escape in Cincinnati; and,
concealing her identity and history, she got a situation as a servant in
Mr. Birney's family. One day when he was absent from the city she came
home in terror; she had been recognized on the street by two
professional slave-catchers; now she told her story and implored
protection. In vain,--the officers of the law dragged her from the
house; a judge gave speedy sentence that she was a slave; she was taken
sobbing to jail; and the next day she was carried down the river to New
Orleans, where she was sold on the auction block,--and never heard of
again.
Birney took part in the work of the new anti-slavery societies, but he
did not follow Garrison's no-government theories. He favored for a while
the policy of throwing the anti-slavery strength for such congressional
nominees of the regular parties as favored their views, and several
candidates were chosen in this way. But when Clay became pronounced
against the Abolitionists, and even John Quincy Adams, after championing
the right of petition, voted against the abolition of slavery in the
District of Columbia, Birney and his sympathizers gave up hope of help
from existing parties, and organized their own party for the election of
1840. Its principles were resistance to slavery extension, and
opposition to slavery so far as was practicable under the
Constitution,--the principles later of the Republican party. Birney was
nominated for President, and this handful of voters was the seed of the
harvest twenty years later. He was again the candidate in 1844, with an
increased support, and the party now was named "The Liberty Party."
A leader and type of the moderate anti-slavery sentiment was William
Ellery Channing. In Channing was a blending of high moral ideals,
intelligent views of human nature and society, an apostle's earnestness
wedded with "sweet reasonableness," and a personal character of rare
symmetry and beauty. He was an evolutionist and not a revolutionist.
Foremost among the group of New England ministers who broadened and
ripened out of the orthodoxy of their day, and were ostracized by their
former brethren, he was forced into the position of leader of a new
sect, but his utterances and spirit were always those of a minister of
the church universal. He was the early advocate of most of the
religious and social reforms which have since come to the front. By
preference, he always used the methods of peace and persuasion. He had
made early acquaintance with slavery in a two-years' residence in
Richmond while a young man. He was always opposed to it, but his
attention was long absorbed by the immediate needs of his own people. He
spent half a year in Santa Cruz, for his health, in 1830-1,--just when
Garrison was starting the _Liberator_,--and slavery came home to him
with new force. The plantation on which he lived was one of the best in
the West Indies. The proprietor had taken a pride in the character and
condition of his slaves. But he had fallen into bankruptcy, his estate
had been sold, and the new proprietor left it in charge of an overseer
who was a passionate and licentious man, under whom the slaves suffered
a very different treatment. Most pathetic incidents came under Dr.
Channing's notice. But from all he saw about him he concluded that the
physical sufferings of the slaves had been exaggerated by report; that,
with occasional cruelties, they were better off as to physical comfort
than most of the European peasantry. He writes to an English
correspondent, "I suspect that a gang of negroes receive fewer stripes
than a company of soldiers of the same number in your army"; that they
are under a less iron discipline and suffer incomparably less than
soldiers in a campaign. But he adds, and always insists, that their
condition degrades them intellectually and morally, lowers them toward
the brutes, and in this respect the misery of slavery cannot be
expressed too strongly. Marriage is almost unknown; family life, with
its mutual dependence and the resulting tenderness, scarcely exists; and
thus "the poor negro is excluded from Nature's primary school for the
affections and the whole character." "The like causes are fatal to
energy, foresight, self-control."
The inspiration of Channing's creed, the soul of the new movement in
religion, was the potential nobility of human nature--a nobility to be
made real by utmost effort of the individual, and by all wisest
appliances of society. It was from this standpoint that he judged
slavery, and in this spirit that while still in Santa Cruz he began to
write his treatise upon it.
Returning to Boston, he spoke with clearness and weight to his
congregation: "I think no power of conception can do justice to the
evils of slavery. They are chiefly moral, they act on the mind, and
through the mind bring intense suffering to the body. As far as the
human soul can be destroyed, slavery is that destroyer." Having borne
his testimony, he devoted himself to the general work of his ministry.
The violence of the men who had come to the front in Abolitionism was
not only against his taste and feeling, but against his deep
convictions; as he had written years before to Webster, he saw in these
denunciations of the slave-holder seeds of a harvest of sectional hate
and national disaster.
A characteristic conversation with him is recorded by Rev. Samuel J.
May, himself in full alliance with the Abolitionists, but a man of great
sweetness and sanity, never diverted from his religious ministry or
losing his mental balance. Dr. Channing dwelt on the excesses of the
Abolitionists until Mr. May was aroused, and broke out: "Dr. Channing, I
am tired of these complaints! The cause of suffering humanity, the cause
of our oppressed, crushed, colored countrymen, has called as loudly upon
others as upon us, who are known as the Abolitionists. But the others
have done nothing. The wise and prudent saw the wrong, but did nothing
to remove it. The priest and Levite passed by on the other side; the
children of Abraham held their peace, until 'the very stones have cried
out' against this tremendous wickedness. The people who have taken up
the cause may lack the calmness and discretion of scholars, clergy, and
statesmen,--but the scholars, clergy, and statesmen, have done nothing.
We Abolitionists are just what we are,--babes and sucklings, obscure
men, silly women, publicans, sinners; and we shall manage the matter we
have taken in hand just as might be expected of such persons as we are.
It is unbecoming in able men, who stood by and would do nothing, to
complain of us because we manage this matter no better."
And so the torrent of words dashed upon the silent listener, until the
speaker suddenly bethought himself and stopped in abashment,--this man
he was rebuking had been to him as a father in God, his kind friend from
childhood, and first among the great and good. Almost overwhelmed by his
own temerity, he watched the agitated face of his hearer and waited in
painful suspense for the reply. At last, in a very subdued manner and in
his kindest tones of voice, he said, "Brother May, I acknowledge the
justice of your reproof; I have been silent too long."
May's appeal had only quickened a little the sure work of Channing's
conscience. A few months later, in December, 1835, he published his
short treatise on _Slavery_. No weightier word on the subject was ever
spoken. If mankind were moved by their higher reason the North would not
have waited twenty years to be converted to anti-slavery by _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_. And if the South had been wise in her day, she would have
listened to this noble and persuasive utterance. No passion sullied its
temper; slave and slave-holder were held in equal regard; the case was
pleaded on irresistible grounds--of facts beyond question and rooted in
the very constitution of human nature. The needed, the righteous, the
inevitable reform, was shown as part of the upward movement of humanity,
and as appealing to every consideration of practical wisdom and of
justice. The little book of 150 pages deserves to be held as a classic
in American history.
Channing never lost the sense of proportion in his own work. He went on
giving inspiration and leadership to religious thought and to social
advance. It was neither necessary nor possible for him to be in close
sympathy or habitual alliance with the extreme Abolitionists. But he
vindicated the right of free speech when it was denied them, and he was
recognized by the best of their number as a friend of the cause. Mrs.
Lydia Maria Child,--like Mr. May, one of the finest spirits among the
Abolitionists--wrote: "He constantly grew upon my respect, until I came
to regard him as the wisest as well as the gentlest apostle of humanity.
I owe him thanks for preserving me from the one-sidedness to which
zealous reformers are so apt to run. He never sought to undervalue the
importance of anti-slavery, but he said many things to prevent me from
looking upon it as the only question interesting to humanity."
Side by side with the anti-slavery sentiment was growing another
sentiment--distinct from it, at first often in practical hostility to
it, but at last blending with it for a common triumph. It was the
sentiment of American nationality--the love of the Union. The separate
colonies were brought together in the Revolution by a common peril and a
common struggle. Then their tendency to fall apart was counteracted by
the strong bond of the Constitution and the Federal government. Diverse
interests and mutual distrust still tended to draw them asunder. With
the continuance of the Union, the strengthening of the tie by use, the
hallowing of old associations under the glamour of memory, and the
growth of the new bonds of commerce and travel, the sense of a common
country and destiny began to take root in the hearts of men, and on
occasion disclosed itself with the strength and nobility of a heroic
passion. True, a new rift was appearing, in the doctrine of
nullification and the question of slavery, but this evoked at times a
more militant and again a more appealing aspect in the sentiment of
union. Jackson seemed to rise from the rough frontiersman to the
guardian of the nation when he gave the word, "The Federal Union--it
must be preserved!" Clay found the noblest exercise of his eloquence and
his diplomacy in evoking the national spirit and in harmonizing the
differences which threatened it. But the most stirring voice and
effective leadership was that of Daniel Webster.
As Webster is judged in the retrospect, we see that he was not so much a
statesman, still less a moral idealist, as an advocate. His lucidity of
statement and emotional power were not matched by constructive ability.
His name is associated with no great measure of administration, no large
and definite policy. He was luminous in statement rather than sagacious
in judgment, an advocate rather than a judge. On the platform or in the
Senate he was still pre-eminently the lawyer, in that, like a lawyer, he
was the representative and exponent of established interests,--not the
projector of new social adjustments. Civil law represents a vast
accumulated experience and tradition of mankind; it has been slowly
wrought out, as a regulation and adjustment of existing interests; with
an effort toward equity, as understood by the best intelligence of each
period, but always with immense regard for precedent and previous usage.
It was in this spirit, highly conservative of what has already been
secured, and extremely cautious toward radical change, that Webster
habitually dealt with political institutions. It was characteristic of
him that in the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1820 he
pleaded strongly for the retention of the property qualification of
voters for State senators. But when the tide moved irresistibly toward
manhood suffrage, he acquiesced.
But conservative as he was by nature, he was in profound sympathy with a
sentiment which while rooted in the past was yet in the '20s and '30s a
young, plastic, growing idea,--the idea of American Union, indissoluble,
perpetual. No voice was so powerful as Webster's to fill the minds and
hearts of man with this lofty passion. His orations at Plymouth Rock, at
Bunker Hill, and upon the simultaneous deaths of Adams and Jefferson,
his vindication of the national idea against the localism of Hayne and
Calhoun,--were organ-voices of patriotism. They thrilled the souls of
those who listened; they went over the country and printed themselves on
the minds of men; school-boys declaimed passages from them; they became
part of the gospel of the American people.
We may quote a single passage from the address inspired by that dramatic
circumstance, the death at once of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, on
the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence: "It cannot
be denied, but by those who would dispute against the sun, that with
America and in America a new era commences in human affairs. This era is
distinguished by free representative governments, by entire religious
liberty, by improved systems of national intercourse, by a newly
awakened and an unconquerable spirit of free inquiry, and by a diffusion
of knowledge through the community, such as has been before
altogether unknown and unheard of. America, America, our country,
fellow-countrymen, our own dear and native land, is inseparably
connected, fast bound up, in fortune and by fate, with these great
interests. If they fall, we fall with them; if they stand, it will be
because we have maintained them.... If we cherish the virtues and the
principles of our fathers, heaven will assist us to carry on the work
of human liberty and human happiness. Auspicious omens cheer us. Great
examples are before us. Our own firmament now shines brightly upon our
paths. Washington is in the upper sky. These other stars have now joined
the American constellation; they circle round their center, and the
heavens beam with new light. Beneath this illumination let us walk the
course of life, and at its close devoutly commend our beloved country,
the common parent of us all, to the Divine Benignity."