flogged to prostitution, or, worse still, are degraded to believe it
honorable. The public squares of half our great cities echo to the wail
of families torn asunder at the auction-block; no one of our fair rivers
that has not closed over the negro seeking in death a refuge from a life
too wretched to bear; thousands of fugitives skulk along our highways,
afraid to tell their names, and trembling at the sight of a human being;
free men are kidnapped in our streets, to be plunged into that hell
of slavery; and now and then one, as if by miracle, after long years
returns to make men aghast with his tale. The press says, "It is all
right"; and the pulpit cries, "Amen." They print the Bible in every
tongue in which man utters his prayers; and they get the money to do so
by agreeing never to give the book, in the language our mothers taught
us, to any negro, free or bond, south of Mason and Dixon's line. The
press says, "It is all right"; and the pulpit cries, "Amen." The slave
lifts up his imploring eyes, and sees in every face but ours the face
of an enemy. Prove to me now that harsh rebuke, indignant denunciation,
scathing sarcasm, and pitiless ridicule are wholly and always
unjustifiable; else we dare not, in so desperate a case, throw away any
weapon which ever broke up the crust of an ignorant prejudice, roused a
slumbering conscience, shamed a proud sinner, or changed in any way the
conduct of a human being. Our aim is to alter public opinion. Did we
live in a market, our talk should be of dollars and cents, and we would
seek to prove only that slavery was an unprofitable investment. Were
the nation one great, pure church, we would sit down and reason of
"righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come." Had slavery fortified
itself in a college, we would load our cannons with cold facts, and
wing our arrows with arguments. But we happen to live in the world,--the
world made up of thought and impulse, of self-conceit and self-interest,
of weak men and wicked. To conquer, we must reach all. Our object is not
to make every man a Christian or a philosopher, but to induce every one
to aid in the abolition of slavery. We expect to accomplish our object
long before the nation is made over into saints or elevated into
philosophers. To change public opinion, we use the very tools by which
it was formed. That is, all such as an honest man may touch.
All this I am not only ready to allow, but I should be ashamed to think
of the slave, or to look into the face of my fellow-man, if it
were otherwise. It is the only thing which justifies us to our own
consciences, and makes us able to say we have done, or at least tried to
do, our duty.
So far, however you distrust my philosophy, you will not doubt my
statements. That we have denounced and rebuked with unsparing fidelity
will not be denied. Have we not also addressed ourselves to that other
duty, of arguing our question thoroughly?--of using due discretion and
fair sagacity in endeavoring to promote our cause? Yes, we have. Every
statement we have made has been doubted. Every principle we have laid
down has been denied by overwhelming majorities against us. No one step
has ever been gained but by the most laborious research and the most
exhausting argument. And no question has ever, since Revolutionary days,
been so thoroughly investigated or argued here, as that of slavery. Of
that research and that argument, of the whole of it, the old-fashioned,
fanatical, crazy Garrisonian antislavery movement has been the author.
From this band of men has proceeded every important argument or idea
which has been broached on the antislavery question from 1830 to the
present time. I am well aware of the extent of the claim I make. I
recognize, as fully as any one can, the ability of the new laborers, the
eloquence and genius with which they have recommended this cause to the
nation, and flashed conviction home on the conscience of the community.
I do not mean, either, to assert that they have in every instance
borrowed from our treasury their facts and arguments. Left to
themselves, they would probably have looked up the one and originated
the other. As a matter of fact, however, they have generally made use
of the materials collected to their hands. * * * When once brought fully
into the struggle, they have found it necessary to adopt the same means,
to rely on the same arguments, to hold up the same men and the same
measures to public reprobation, with the same bold rebuke and unsparing
invective that we have used. All their conciliatory bearing, their
painstaking moderation, their constant and anxious endeavor to draw a
broad line between their camp and ours, have been thrown away. Just so
far as they have been effective laborers, they have found, as we have,
their hands against every man, and every man's hand against them. The
most experienced of them are ready to acknowledge that our plan has been
wise, our course efficient, and that our unpopularity is no fault of
ours, but flows necessarily and unavoidably from our position. "I should
suspect," says old Fuller, "that his preaching had no salt in it, if no
galled horse did wince." Our friends find, after all, that men do not
so much hate us as the truth we utter and the light we bring. They find
that the community are not the honest seekers after truth which they
fancied, but selfish politicians and sectarian bigots, who shiver, like
Alexander's butler, whenever the sun shines on them. Experience has
driven these new laborers back to our method. We have no quarrel with
them--would not steal one wreath of their laurels. All we claim is,
that, if they are to be complimented as prudent, moderate, Christian,
sagacious, statesmanlike reformers, we deserve the same praise; for they
have done nothing that we, in our measure, did not attempt before.
I claim this, that the cause, in its recent aspect, has put on nothing
but timidity. It has taken to itself no new weapons of recent years; it
has become more compromising,--that is all! It has become neither more
persuasive, more earnest, more Christian, more charitable, nor more
effective than for the twenty years pre-ceding. Mr. Hale, the head of
the Free Soil movement, after a career in the Senate that would do honor
to any man,--after a six years' course which entitles him to the respect
and confidence of the antislavery public, can put his name, within
the last month, to an appeal from the city of Washington, signed by a
Houston and a Cass, for a monument to be raised to Henry Clay! If that
be the test of charity and courtesy, we cannot give it to the world.
Some of the leaders of the Free Soil party of Massachusetts, after
exhausting the whole capacity of our language to paint the treachery of
Daniel Webster to the cause of liberty, and the evil they thought he was
able and seeking to do,--after that, could feel it in their hearts to
parade themselves in the funeral procession got up to do him honor! In
this we allow we cannot follow them. The deference which every gentleman
owes to the proprieties of social life, that self-respect and regard to
consistency which is every man's duty,--these, if no deeper feelings,
will ever prevent us from giving such proofs of this newly invented
Christian courtesy. We do not play politics, antislavery is no half-jest
with us; it is a terrible earnest, with life or death, worse than life
or death, on the issue. It is no lawsuit, where it matters not to the
good feeling of opposing counsel which way the verdict goes, and where
advocates can shake hands after the decision as pleasantly as before.
When we think of such a man as Henry Clay, his long life, his mighty
influence cast always into the scale against the slave, of that
irresistible fascination with which he moulded every one to his will;
when we remember that, his conscience acknowledging the justice of our
cause, and his heart open on every other side to the gentlest impulses,
he could sacrifice so remorselessly his convictions and the welfare of
millions to his low ambition; when we think how the slave trembled at
the sound of his voice, and that, from a multitude of breaking hearts
there went up nothing but gratitude to God when it pleased him to call
that great sinner from this world, we cannot find it in our hearts, we
could not shape our lips to ask any man to do him honor. No amount of
eloquence, no sheen of official position, no loud grief of partisan
friends, would ever lead us to ask monuments or walk in fine processions
for pirates; and the sectarian zeal or selfish ambition which gives up,
deliberately and in full knowledge of the facts, three million of human
beings to hopeless ignorance, daily robbery, systematic prostitution,
and murder, which the law is neither able nor undertakes to prevent
or avenge, is more monstrous, in our eyes, than the love of gold which
takes a score of lives with merciful quickness on the high seas. Haynau
on the Danube is no more hateful to us than Haynau on the Potomac. Why
give mobs to one and monuments to the other?
If these things be necessary to courtesy, I cannot claim that we are
courteous. We seek only to be honest men, and speak the same of the dead
as of the living. If the grave that hides their bodies could swallow
also the evil they have done and the example they leave, we might enjoy
at least the luxury of forgetting them. But the evil that men do lives
after them, and example acquires tenfold authority when it speaks from
the grave. History, also, is to be written. How shall a feeble minority,
without weight or influence in the country, with no jury of millions to
appeal to--denounced, vilified, and contemned,--how shall we make way
against the overwhelming weight of some colossal reputation, if we do
not turn from the idolatrous present, and appeal to the human race?
saying to your idols of to-day: "Here we are defeated; but we will write
our judgment with the iron pen of a century to come, and it shall never
be forgotten, if we can help it, that you were false in your generation
to the claims of the slave!" * * *
We are weak here,--out-talked, out-voted. You load our names with
infamy, and shout us down. But our words bide their time. We warn the
living that we have terrible memories, and their sins are never to be
forgotten. We will gibbet the name of every apostate so black and high
that his children's children shall blush to bear it. Yet we bear no
malice,--cherish no resentment. We thank God that the love of fame,
"that last infirmity of noble minds," is shared by the ignoble. In our
necessity, we seize this weapon in the slave's behalf, and teach caution
to the living by meting out relentless justice to the dead. * * *
"These, Mr. Chairman, are the reasons why, we take care that 'the memory
of the wicked shall rot.'"
I have claimed that the antislavery cause has, from the first, been ably
and dispassionately argued, every objection candidly examined, and every
difficulty or doubt anywhere honestly entertained treated with respect.
Let me glance at the literature of the cause, and try not so much, in
a brief hour, to prove this assertion, as to point out the sources from
which any one may satisfy himself of its truth.
I will begin with certainly the ablest and perhaps the most honest
statesman who has ever touched the slave question. Any one who will
examine John Quincy Adams' speech on Texas, in 1838, will see that
he was only seconding the full and able exposure of the Texas plot,
prepared by Benjamin Lundy, to one of whose pamphlets Dr. Channing,
in his "Letter to Henry Clay," has confessed his obligation. Every one
acquainted with those years will allow that the North owes its earliest
knowledge and first awakening on that subject to Mr. Lundy, who made
long journeys and devoted years to the investigation. His labors have
this attestation, that they quickened the zeal and strengthened the
hands of such men as Adams and Channing. I have been told that Mr. Lundy
prepared a brief for Mr. Adams, and furnished him the materials for his
speech on Texas.
Look next at the right of petition. Long before any member of Congress
had opened his mouth in its defence, the Abolition presses and lecturers
had examined and defended the limits of this right with profound
historical research and eminent constitutional ability. So thoroughly
had the work been done, that all classes of the people had made up their
minds about it long before any speaker of eminence had touched it in
Congress. The politicians were little aware of this. When Mr. Adams
threw himself so gallantly into the breach, it is said he wrote
anxiously home to know whether he would be supported in Massachusetts,
little aware of the outburst of popular gratitude which the northern
breeze was even then bringing him, deep and cordial enough to wipe away
the old grudge Massachusetts had borne him so long. Mr. Adams himself
was only in favor of receiving the petitions, and advised to refuse
their prayer, which was the abolition of slavery in the District of
Columbia. He doubted the power of Congress to abolish. His doubts were
examined by Mr. William Goodell, in two letters of most acute logic,
and of masterly ability. If Mr. Adams still retained his doubts, it is
certain at least that he never expressed them afterward. When Mr. Clay
paraded the same objections, the whole question of the power of Congress
over the District was treated by Theodore D. Weld in the fullest manner,
and with the widest research,--indeed, leaving nothing to be added:
an argument which Dr. Channing characterized as "demonstration," and
pronounced the essay "one of the ablest pamphlets from the American
press." No answer was ever attempted. The best proof of its ability is
that no one since has presumed to doubt the power. Lawyers and statesmen
have tacitly settled down into its full acknowledgment.
The influence of the Colonization Society on the welfare of the colored
race was the first question our movement encountered. To the close
logic, eloquent appeals, and fully sustained charges of Mr. Garrison's
letters on that subject no answer was ever made. Judge Jay followed
with a work full and able, establishing every charge by the most patient
investigation of facts. It is not too much to say of these two volumes,
that they left the Colonization Society hopeless at the North. It dares
never show its face before the people, and only lingers in some few
nooks of sectarian pride, so secluded from the influence of present
ideas as to be almost fossil in their character.
The practical working of the slave system, the slave laws, the treatment
of slaves, their food, the duration of their lives, their ignorance and
moral condition, and the influence of Southern public opinion on their
fate, have been spread out in a detail and with a fulness of evidence
which no subject has ever received before in this country. Witness the
words of Phelps, Bourne, Rankin, Grimke, the _Anti-slavery Record_, and,
above all, that encyclopaedia of facts and storehouse of arguments, the
_Thousand Witnesses_ of Mr. Theodore D. Weld. He also prepared that full
and valuable tract for the World's Convention called _Slavery and the
Internal Slave-Trade_ in the United States, published in London in 1841.
Unique in antislavery literature is Mrs. Child's _Appeal_, one of the
ablest of our weapons, and one of the finest efforts of her rare genius.
_The Princeton Review_, I believe, first challenged the Abolitionists
to an investigation of the teachings of the Bible on slavery. That field
had been somewhat broken by our English predecessors. But in England the
pro-slavery party had been soon shamed out of the attempt to drag the
Bible into their service, and hence the discussion there had been short
and some-what superficial. The pro-slavery side of the question has been
eagerly sustained by theological reviews and doctors of divinity without
number, from the half-way and timid faltering of Wayland up to the
unblushing and melancholy recklessness of Stuart. The argument on the
other side has come wholly from the Abolitionists; for neither Dr. Hague
nor Dr. Barnes can be said to have added any thing to the wide research,
critical acumen, and comprehensive views of Theodore D. Weld, Beriah
Green, J. G. Fee, and the old work of Duncan.
On the constitutional questions which have at various times arisen,--the
citizenship of the colored man, the soundness of the "Prigg" decision,
the constitutionality of the old Fugitive Slave Law, the true
construction of the slave-surrender clause,--nothing has been added,
either in the way of fact or argument, to the works of Jay, Weld, Alvan
Stewart, E. G. Loring, S. E. Sewall, Richard Hildreth, W. I. Bowditch,
the masterly essays of the _Emancipator_ at New York and the _Liberator_
at Boston, and the various addresses of the Massachusetts and American
Societies for the last twenty years. The idea of the antislavery
character of the Constitution,--the opiate with which Free Soil quiets
its conscience for voting under a pro-slavery government,--I heard first
suggested by Mr. Garrison in 1838. It was elaborately argued that
year in all our antislavery gatherings, both here and in New York, and
sustained with great ability by Alvan Stewart, and in part by T. D.
Weld. The antislavery construction of the Constitution was ably argued
in 1836, in the _Antislavery Magazine_, by Rev. Samuel J. May, one of
the very first to seek the side of Mr. Garrison, and pledge to the slave
his life and efforts,--a pledge which thirty years of devoted labors
have redeemed. If it has either merit or truth, they are due to no
legal learning recently added to our ranks, but to some of the old
and well-known pioneers. This claim has since received the fullest
investigation from Mr. Lysander Spooner, who has urged it with all his
unrivalled ingenuity, laborious research, and close logic. He writes
as a lawyer, and has no wish, I believe, to be ranked with any class of
anti-slavery men.
The influence of slavery on our Government has received the profoundest
philosophical investigation from the pen of Richard Hildreth, in his
invaluable essay on _Despotism in America_,--a work which deserves a
place by the side of the ablest political disquisitions of any age.
Even the vigorous mind of Rantoul, the ablest man, without doubt, of
the Democratic party, and perhaps the ripest politician in New England,
added little or nothing to the store-house of antislavery argument. *
* * His speeches on our question, too short and too few, are remarkable
for their compact statement, iron logic, bold denunciation, and the
wonderful light thrown back upon our history. Yet how little do they
present which was not familiar for years in our anti-slavery
meetings! Look, too, at the last great effort of the idol of so many
thousands,--Mr. Senator Sumner,--the discussion of a great national
question, of which it has been said that we must go back to Webster's
reply to Hayne, and Fisher Ames on the Jay treaty, to find its equal in
Congress,--praise which we might perhaps qualify, if any adequate report
were left us of some of the noble orations of Adams. No one can be blind
to the skilful use he has made of his materials, the consummate ability
with which he has marshalled them, and the radiant glow which his genius
has thrown over all. Yet, with the exception of his reference to the
antislavery debate in Congress in 1817, there is hardly a train of
thought or argument, and no single fact in the whole speech, which has
not been familiar in our meetings and essays for the last ten
years. * * *
The relations of the American Church to slavery, and the duties of
private Christians, the whole casuistry of this portion of the question,
so momentous among descendants of the Puritans,--have been discussed
with great acuteness and rare common-sense by Messrs. Garrison, Goodell,
Gerrit Smith, Pillsbury, and Foster. They have never attempted to judge
the American Church by any standard except that which she has herself
laid down,--never claimed that she should be perfect, but have contented
themselves by demanding that she should be consistent. They have never
judged her except out of her own mouth, and on facts asserted by her
own presses and leaders. The sundering of the Methodist and Baptist
denominations, and the universal agitation of the religious world,
are the best proof of the sagacity with which their measures have been
chosen, the cogent arguments they have used, and the indisputable
facts on which their criticisms have been founded. In nothing have the
Abolitionists shown more sagacity or more thorough knowledge of their
countrymen than in the course they have pursued in relation to the
Church. None but a New-Englander can appreciate the power which church
organizations wield over all who share the blood of the Puritans. The
influence of each sect over its own members is overwhelming, often
shutting out, or controlling, all other influences. We have Popes here,
all the more dangerous because no triple crown puts you on your guard.
* * * In such a land, the Abolitionists early saw, that, for a moral
question like theirs, only two paths lay open: to work through the
Church; that failing, to join battle with it. Some tried long, like
Luther, to be Protestants, and yet not come out of Catholicism; but
their eyes were soon opened. Since then we have been convinced that, to
come out from the Church, to hold her up as the bulwark of slavery, and
to make her shortcomings the main burden of our appeals to the religious
sentiment of the community, was our first duty and best policy. This
course alienated many friends, and was a subject of frequent rebuke from
such men as Dr. Channing. But nothing has ever more strengthened the
cause, or won it more influence; and it has had the healthiest effect on
the Church itself. * * *
Unable to command a wide circulation for our books and journals, we have
been obliged to bring ourselves into close contact with the people, and
to rely mainly on public addresses. These have been our most efficient
instrumentality. For proof that these addresses have been full of
pertinent facts, sound sense, and able arguments, we must necessarily
point to results, and demand to be tried by our fruits. Within these
last twenty years it has been very rare that any fact stated by our
lecturers has been disproved, or any statement of theirs successfully
impeached. And for evidence of the soundness, simplicity, and pertinency
of their arguments we can only claim that our converts and co-laborers
throughout the land have at least the reputation of being specially able
"to give a reason for the faith that is in them."
I remember that when, in 1845, the present leaders of the Free Soil
party, with Daniel Webster in their company, met to draw up the
Anti-Texas Address of the Massachusetts Convention, they sent to
Abolitionists for anti-slavery facts and history, for the remarkable
testimonies of our Revolutionary great men which they wished to quote.
When, many years ago, the Legislature of Massachusetts wished to send to
Congress a resolution affirming the duty of immediate emancipation, the
committee sent to William Lloyd Garrison to draw it up, and it stands
now on our statute-book as he drafted it.
How vigilantly, how patiently, did we watch the Texas plot from its
commencement! The politic South felt that its first move had been too
bold, and thenceforward worked underground. For many a year men laughed
at us for entertaining any apprehensions. It was impossible to rouse the
North to its peril. David Lee Child was thought crazy because he would
not believe there was no danger. His elaborate "_Letters on Texas
Annexation_" are the ablest and most valuable contribution that has
been made toward a history of the whole plot. Though we foresaw and
proclaimed our conviction that annexation would be, in the end, a fatal
step for the South, we did not feel at liberty to relax our opposition,
well knowing the vast increase of strength it would give, at first, to
the slave power. I remember being one of a committee which waited
on Abbott Lawrence, a year or so only before annexation, to ask his
countenance to some general movement, without distinction of party,
against the Texas scheme. He smiled at our fears, begged us to have
no apprehensions; stating that his correspondence with leading men at
Washington enabled him to assure us annexation was impossible, and that
the South itself was determined to defeat the project. A short time
after, Senators and Representatives from Texas took their seats in
Congress!
Many of these services to the slave were done before I joined his cause.
In thus referring to them, do not suppose me merely seeking occasion of
eulogy on my predecessors and present co-laborers. I recall these things
only to rebut the contemptuous criticism which some about us make the
excuse for their past neglect of the movement, and in answer to
"Ion's" representation of our course as reckless fanaticism, childish
impatience, utter lack of good sense, and of our meetings as scenes only
of excitement, of reckless and indiscriminate denunciation. I assert
that every social, moral, economical, religious, political, and
historical aspect of the question has been ably and patiently examined.
And all this has been done with an industry and ability which have left
little for the professional skill, scholarly culture, and historical
learning of the new laborers to accomplish. If the people are still in
doubt, it is from the inherent difficulty of the subject, or a hatred of
light, not from want of it. * * *