On a pleasant day and evening during the autumn a few venerable
graybeards and bald-heads met in a church in the city, and sang and
spoke, and told old tales of former meetings, and rejoiced that they had
not died before their eyes had seen the glory. The meeting produced no
ripple upon the surface of the city life. The newspapers printed brief
reports of it among the other city news. But the return of the
Philadelphia baseball players, and the "mill" between Sullivan and other
bruisers, challenged very much more space and a very much more public
attention.
Yet fifty years before, when those gray beards were brown, and those
bald heads were shaggy as Samson's, their meeting convulsed the city,
and occasioned a riot which was the precursor of similar desperate
disturbances, and the forerunner of one of the greatest of civil wars.
The meeting was then denounced in advance in double-leaded editorials,
which were the direct, and doubtless the intentional incitements to
bloodshed and the subversion of popular rights; for the popular right
which is the foundation of all other rights is that of free speech. The
mere announcement of the meeting drew a vast and excited throng to
prevent it. Men of standing in the community made themselves leaders of
the mob, and occupied in advance the entrance to the hall where it was
to take place. The proprietors of the hall, appalled by the evidences of
furious hostility to the meeting and its purposes, refused to open it to
those who had engaged it, and they went elsewhere.
But the obstructing mob did not relax their purpose. They hastened to
another hall where men of respected and even noted names harangued them
violently, introducing resolutions decrying the purpose of the original
meeting; and suddenly hearing that the projectors were assembled
elsewhere, the crowd rushed wildly to the place, which was a small
chapel, and, swarming in eager for crime, found the chapel deserted. The
holders of the meeting had accomplished their object and retired from
the rear of the building as the mob burst in through the front doors.
The press of the city, with one or two notable exceptions, the next
morning celebrated the intended suppression of a peaceful meeting by an
angry mob as if it had been a national victory over piratical invaders.
It denounced the leaders of the meeting with a malignant bitterness with
which the familiars of the Inquisition might have anathematized Luther
and his friends, and the few voices in the papers which protested
against treating the holders of the meeting with violence, yet spoke of
them in a strain of abhorrence which virtually branded them as public
enemies.
Who were these dangerous and desperate men whose mere proposal to meet
and organize themselves for a purpose which was plainly declared, and
which was to be sought by legal methods only, had so profoundly
disturbed the city and startled the press into sounding a furious alarm?
They were a few persons who asserted the principles of the Declaration
of Independence, and demanded that all Americans should enjoy the rights
which the Declaration affirmed to belong to all men. The object of the
meeting was the formation of a city antislavery society, and those who
assembled in October of this year were the survivors of that meeting.
Their object has been accomplished, and the views whose announcement
fifty years ago convulsed the city are now common-places of universal
acceptance. It would be incredible that the sentiment of the city within
easy memory of men living was so hostile to the American principle and
its fundamental guarantees if a still later experience had not
illustrated the same hostility.
It seems almost cruel to recall the names of those who spoke of the
purposes of men who proposed to appeal to public opinion against a
monstrous public wrong, and of the men themselves, as "the folly,
madness, and mischief of these bold and dangerous men," and as "persons
who owe what notoriety they have to their love of meddling with
agitating subjects." This was the way in which those who thought
themselves to be in the van of freedom and of civilization spoke of the
beginning of one of the great historic movements in the progress of the
race, and of men who took up the work of the fathers of the country only
to carry it further and logically forward. It was with this stupid and
insolent contempt that the press, which prided itself upon its liberty,
and in a country which guaranteed the right of free peaceful assembly
and free speech, struck at both of them as fatal to the common welfare.
Had Philip II. and the sanguinary Alva controlled a press in the
Netherlands three centuries ago, they would have denounced the beginning
of the great contest with the black despotism of the Inquisition in the
same tone of vindictive hatred and disdain with which that little
meeting at the Chatham Street chapel was assailed by the press of New
York in 1833.
It is no wonder that the pioneers of that famous evening wished to come
together upon its fiftieth anniversary to rejoice that they had entered
into the promised land. The fact that their meeting excited no general
interest, and was almost unobserved, was the evidence of the
completeness of their triumph. Their "folly, madness, and mischief" have
become patriotic wisdom. The "bold and dangerous men" have grown into a
mighty nation. And for the brethren of the press that anniversary has
some very significant suggestions. First and chief is the consideration
that the spirit of the newspapers, and not of the meeting in Chatham
Street chapel, was the dangerous spirit. There is no blacker traitor to
popular institutions than the man who incites an angry mob against
peaceful meetings and free speech. Free speech is precious not for
popular but for unpopular opinions. It is to secure in the land of the
Inquisition a voice against the inquisition; in the land of slavery, a
voice for liberty. That freedom has overthrown those two tyrants by
developing a public opinion which has made them impossible. The first
duty of a free press is to defend the right of the free assertion of
unpopular opinions, however dangerous they may seem to government or to
society; and it is but just to record that the only paper in New York
which, "when this old coat was new," stated clearly and conclusively the
true principle upon this subject was the _Journal of Commerce_.
If, among the exulting crowd that welcomed King William of glorious and
happy memory to England, a spectator had seen the flowing white locks of
some old soldier of Cromwell's Ironsides, as the men of Hadley were
fabled to have seen the venerable head of Goffe, the regicide, suddenly
appearing as their deliverer, he would have felt his heart throbbing
with gratitude at the vision of one of the heroes who founded the
liberty which William came to complete. So some musing observer in the
church where the reverend graybeards met to renew their friendship and
to tell their story might well have gazed with gratitude, amid the peace
and prosperity of the country, upon the thinned and thinning remnant of
that old guard whose constancy and devotion made that peace and
prosperity possible.