The nearly simultaneous uprising of the proslavery hosts in 1835, and
the almost universal outbreak of violence upon our antislavery heads
in all parts of the country, from Louisiana to Maine, showed plainly
enough that Mr. Garrison’s demand for the immediate emancipation of the
enslaved had entered into the ear of the whole nation. All the people
had heard it, or heard of it. It had received a heartfelt response from
not a few of the purest and best men and women in the land. This was
manifest at the Convention in Philadelphia, in December, 1833, where
were delegates from ten of the States of our Union, all of whom seemed
ready to do, to dare, and to suffer whatever the cause of the oppressed
millions might require. It waked at once the lyre of our Whittier,
which has never slumbered since, and inspired him to utter those
thrilling strains which all but tyrants and their minions love to hear.
It drew from Elizur Wright, Jr., Professor in Western Reserve College,
Ohio, in 1833, a thorough searching pamphlet on “the sin of slavery.”
It called out from Hon. Judge William Jay, of New York, that “Inquiry,”
which brought so many to the conclusion that the Colonization plan
tended, if it were not _intended_, to perpetuate slavery, and
satisfied them that “the class of Americans called Africans” (to use
the pregnant title of Mrs. Child’s impressive Appeal) had as much
right to live in this country and enjoy liberty here as any other
Americans. Mr. Garrison’s word gave rise to that memorable discussion
in Lane Seminary, of which I have heretofore given some account, and
which resulted in the departure, from that narrow enclosure, of eighty
preachers of the doctrine of “immediate emancipation,” to repeat and
urge their deep convictions upon the willing and the unwilling in
almost every part of the land, which sent out Theodore D. Weld and
Henry B. Stanton and James A. Thome, sons of thunder, whose voices
reverberated throughout our Middle, Western, and Southern States.
Mr. Garrison’s word came to the ears, and at once found its way
to the hearts, of those admirable ladies in South Carolina, Sarah
and Angelina Grimké, who erelong came to the North, and bore their
emphatic, eloquent, thrilling testimony to the intrinsic, all-pervading
sinfulness of that system of domestic servitude to which they had been
accustomed from their birth. And, more than all, his word had reached
that high-souled, brave, courteous civilian, philanthropist, and
Christian in Alabama, Hon. James G. Birney, who, as I shall hereafter
relate, having for several years devoted his time, his personal
influence, and persuasive eloquence to the Colonization cause, when he
came to see its essential injustice and proslavery tendency, earnestly
renounced his error. He forthwith emancipated his slaves, paid them
fairly for their services, did all he could for their improvement,
and thenceforward consecrated himself, through much evil report and
bitter persecution, to the dissemination of the sentiments and the
accomplishment of the great object of the American Antislavery Society.
Immediately after his conversion he wrote and published two letters
addressed to the American Presbyterians, of whose body he had been a
highly esteemed member. In those letters he set forth most clearly the
sinfulness of slaveholding, and implored his brethren to turn from it,
and rid themselves wholly of the awful guilt of holding, or allowing
others to hold, human beings as their chattels personal, and treating
them as domesticated brutes.
These and other instances might be adduced to show how far and widely
the antislavery doctrines had been made known at the time of which
I am writing. But, alas! there were a great many different and very
disagreeable evidences that _the truth_, which alone could make our
nation _free_, had been heard, or heard of, everywhere.