He who knew so well what is in man said: “The children of this world
are wiser towards their generation than the children of light.” And
certainly the slaveholders of our country and their partisans have
been incomparably more vigilant in watching for whatever might affect
the stability of their “peculiar institution,” and far more adroit in
devising measures, and resolute in pressing them to the maintenance and
extension of _Slavery_, than their opponents have been in behalf of
_Liberty_.
Slave labor has ever been found wasteful and exhaustive of the soil
from which it has taken the crops. Therefore, it used to be a common
saying, “the Southern planter needs all the lands that join his
estate.” Ample as was the territory of that portion of the United
States in which slavery was established, the “barons of the South”
early looked beyond their borders for new acquisitions of land. Partly
to gratify their cupidity, the immense tract of land between the
Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, with the valley of the Columbia
River, was purchased by our Federal Government in 1803. Sixteen years
afterwards Florida was given them. And then they began to turn their
desiring eyes upon the rich and fertile plains of Texas. They gained
admission to these by an artifice worthy of men who were accustomed to
set at naught all the rights of humanity. In 1819 a man named Austin,
then living in Missouri, went to Spain, represented to the King that
the Roman Catholics in the United States were subjected to grievous
persecutions, and supplicated for them an asylum in Mexico. His pious
Majesty, deeply moved by this appeal, made a very large and gratuitous
grant of land of the finest quality to Austin and his associates on
this one condition, that they should introduce within a limited time a
certain number of Roman Catholic settlers “of good moral character.”
This condition was complied with, and thus our Southern slaveholders
gained a foothold in Texas. They were diligent to confirm and extend
their possession by the sale of immense quantities of land to intended
settlers and to land jobbers throughout the Southern States. Thus
commenced what erelong became “one of the most stupendous systems of
bribery and corruption ever devised by man.”
In 1821 Mexico became independent of the Spanish crown, and soon after
confirmed the royal grant to the settlers in her province of Texas. In
1824 the Mexican Government adopted some measures preparatory to the
manumission of slaves, and in 1829 decreed the complete and immediate
emancipation of all in bonds throughout their borders.
The vigilant Southerners were of course alarmed. A nation of freemen
adjoining them on the Southwest! A door thrown wide open for the
easy escape of fugitives from their tyrannous grasp!! Something
must be done to avert the threatened evil. Mr. Benton, of Missouri,
in 1829, broached the scheme of the annexation of Texas, and the
re-establishment of slavery there. He urged this as obviously
necessary: first, in order to prevent the easy and continual escape of
their slaves into an adjoining free country, the government of which
had persistently refused to return the fugitives; second, to open a
new field for slave labor, which was rapidly exhausting the soil of
the old States, and a new market for the slaves of those States which,
no longer capable of producing large crops, might still be sustained
in population and political power by becoming the nurseries of slaves
for the immense territory, to be obtained from Mexico by purchase or
force; third, by adding to the number of slave States, to provide new
securities for the continued ascendency of the slaveholders’ influence
in the government of the nation.
This last reason was probably the most momentous in the estimation of
Southern statesmen. For the Texas, which they aimed to annex to our
country, they foresaw might from time to time be divided and subdivided
into seven States as large as New York, or into forty-three States
as large as Massachusetts. Thus might the majority of the United
States Senate be kept always ready to support any measure favorable
to the interests of the slaveholding aristocracy, which had assumed
the government of our Republic. Mr. Calhoun openly declared that
“the measure of annexation is calculated and designed to uphold the
institution of slavery, extend its influence, and secure its permanent
duration.”
The devoted, indefatigable, self-sacrificing, Benjamin Lundy, was
living in Missouri at the time when Mr. Benton first proposed the
Texas scheme, and at once gave him battle, so far as he was permitted
to do it, in the newspapers of that State. Afterwards on removing to
Maryland and establishing there his own paper, _The Genius of Universal
Emancipation_, he did all in his power to alarm the country. He went
to Texas and, at great personal hazard, traversed that country and
gathered a large amount of most important information, revealing the
spirit of the settlers there and the designs of the projectors and
managers of the scheme.
He did not labor in vain. The leading National Republican papers in
the free States seconded his efforts. Especially my good friend and
classmate David Lee Child, Esq., as early as 1829, when editor of _The
Massachusetts Journal_, emphatically denounced the dismemberment and
robbery of Mexico for the protection and perpetuation of slavery in
the United States. And he manfully contended against that nefarious,
execrable plot until further opposition was made useless, as we shall
see, by the perpetration of the great iniquity in 1845. In 1835 Mr.
Child addressed a number of carefully prepared letters to Mr. Edward
S. Abdy, a philanthropic English gentleman, hoping thereby to awaken
the attention of British Abolitionists. In 1836 he wrote nine or
ten able articles on the impending evil, that were published in a
Philadelphia paper. The next year he went to France and England. In
Paris he addressed an elaborate memoir to the “Société pour l’Abolition
d’Esclavage,” and in London he published in the _Eclectic Review_ a
full exposition of the interest which the British nation ought to
take in utterly extinguishing the slave-trade, and preventing the
re-establishment of slavery in Texas, and the aggrandizement of the
unprincipled slaveholding power in that country, larger than the whole
of France. No two persons did so much to prevent the annexation of
Texas as did Benjamin Lundy and David L. Child. They undoubtedly
furnished the Hon. John Q. Adams with much of the information and
some of the weapons that he plied with so much vigor on the floor
of Congress; but, alas! as the event proved, with so little effect
to prevent the great transgression which the Southern statesmen
led our nation to commit. At first the indignation of the people
in many of the free States at the proposed extension of the domain
of slaveholders, and the confirmation of their ascendency in the
government of our nation, seemed to be general, deep, and fervent. In
1838 the legislatures of Massachusetts, Ohio, and Rhode Island, with
great unanimity, passed resolutions, earnestly and solemnly protesting
against the annexation of Texas to our Union, and declaring that no act
done, or compact made for that purpose, by the government of the United
States would be binding on the States or the people.
For a while it seemed as if the villany was averted; but it was started
again in 1843, and from that time until its consummation the protests
of the above-named States were renewed with frequent repetition and,
if possible, in still more emphatic language. No party within their
borders ventured to take the side of the slaveholders. Connecticut and
New Jersey at that time joined in the protest. Massachusetts of course
took the lead. Meetings of the people, to declare their opposition to
the proposed outrage upon the Union, were held in many of the principal
towns of the State. At length, when the resolutions providing for the
annexation were pending in both Houses of Congress, a great convention
of her citizens met in Faneuil Hall, to make known their displeasure
in a still more impressive tone and manner. The call to the meeting
was signed by prominent men of all parties. It invited the cities and
towns of the Commonwealth to send as many delegates to the Convention
as they could legally send representatives to the General Court. This
took place in January, 1845, only three months before my removal to
Syracuse. I was then living in Lexington. A town-meeting was held there
to respond to the call to Faneuil Hall, by the choice of two delegates.
To my great surprise I was chosen one of the two, and General Chandler,
high sheriff of the county, was the other. But unutterable was my
astonishment when, on coming into the Convention, I found William Lloyd
Garrison seated among the members, sent thither with other delegates
by the votes of a large majority of the Tenth Ward of the city of
Boston, where he resided. This did, indeed, betoken a marvellous
change in the sentiments and feelings of the community. He, who a
few years before had been dragged through the streets with a halter,
by a mob of “gentlemen of property and standing,” clamoring for his
immediate execution, was there in the “Cradle of Liberty,” member of a
Convention that comprised the men of Massachusetts who were accustomed
to represent, on important occasions, the intelligence, the patriotism,
and weight of character of the Commonwealth.
Mr. Garrison addressed the Convention, and was listened to with
respectful attention. I need not say that he spoke in a manner worthy
of the place and the occasion, and in perfect consistency with his
avowed principles. The chief business done by the Convention was the
issuing of an elaborate, carefully prepared Address to the people of
the United States, setting forth the reasons why Texas should not be
annexed to our Republic, and why we ought not to submit to such a
violation of the Constitution of our Union, and such an outrage upon
the territory and institutions of an adjoining nation. Mr. Garrison
published the document in his _Liberator_ of the next week and said,
“The Address of the Convention was, as a whole, a most forcible and
eloquent document, worthy to be read of all men, and to be preserved to
the latest posterity. It was adopted unanimously, after a disclaimer by
Samuel J. May and myself of that portion of it which seeks to vindicate
the United States Constitution from the charge of guaranteeing
protection to slavery.” I was irresistibly impelled to ask that that
part of the otherwise admirable Address might be omitted, because it
would obliterate the most momentous lesson taught in the history of
our nation,--namely, that the reluctant, indirect, inferential consent
given by the framers of our Republic to the continuance of slavery in
the land--not any deliberate explicit guaranty--had countenanced and
sustained the friends of that “System of Iniquity,” from generation
to generation, in violating the inalienable rights of millions of our
fellow-beings, and had brought upon us, who are opposed to that system,
the evils of political discord, national disgrace, and the fear of
national disruption and ruin.
I urged the Convention to acknowledge distinctly that, “under the
commonly received interpretation of the Constitution, we have hitherto
been giving our countenance and support to the slaveholders in their
outrages upon humanity, the fundamental rights of man,--an iniquity
of which we will no longer be guilty. We have been roused from our
insensibility to the wrongs we have wickedly consented should be
inflicted upon others--”the least of the brethren“--by the discovery
of the evils we have thereby brought upon ourselves, and the ruin
that awaits our nation if we do not stay the iniquity where it is,
and commence at once the work “meet for the repentance” that alone
can save us,--the extermination of slavery from our borders.” “Let
this Convention declare, that we certainly will not consent to the
extension of slavery,--no, not an inch. And if they urge to its
consummation the annexation of Texas, in the way they propose, they
will, by so doing, trample the Constitution under foot, set at naught
some of its most important provisions, grossly violate the compact of
our United States, and therefore absolve us from all obligations to
respect it or live under it any longer.”
Mr. Garrison urged that the Address should be further amended by adding
that, if our protest and remonstrance shall be disregarded, and Texas
be annexed, then shall the Committee of the Convention call another at
the same place; that then and there Massachusetts shall declare the
union of these States dissolved, and invite all the States, that may be
disposed, to reunite with her as a Republic based truly upon the grand
principles of the Declaration of Independence. Although his motion was
not carried by the Convention, it was received with great favor by a
large portion of the members and other auditors; and he sat down amidst
the most hearty bursts of applause.
It seemed as if the opposition of Massachusetts and other States to
annexation was too strong, and the reasons urged against it were too
weighty, to be disregarded by the legislators, the guardians of the
nation. The contest waxed and waned throughout the whole of the year
1845. A petition signed by fifty thousand persons was sent to Congress
at its opening in December of that year. But several prominent Whig
members of Congress from the Southern States were found, in the end, to
care more for the perpetuation of slavery than for their party or their
principles. And certain members from the free States (one even from
Massachusetts) were plied by considerations and alarmed by threats,
which the Southern statesmen knew so well how to wield, until they gave
way, and suffered the nefarious, the abominable, unconstitutional,
disastrous deed to be done,--_Texas to be annexed_.
Late in the year 1845, when some of the hitherto opposers were
evidently about to yield, Mr. D. L. Child, as a final effort against
the consummation of the great iniquity, prepared an admirable article
for the _New York Tribune_, under the title,--“Taking Naboth’s
Vineyard.” But alas! “considerations” had affected Mr. Greeley’s mind
also, and he refused to publish it. Mr. Child then hired him to publish
the article in a supplement to his paper, and paid him sixty dollars
for the service. But instead of treating it as a supplement is wont to
be treated, instead of distributing it coextensively with the principal
issue, my friend tells me that Mr. Greeley, having supplied the members
of the two Houses of Congress each with a copy, sent the residue
of the edition to him. So strangely have political considerations,
particularly those suggested by slaveholding statesmen, influenced the
politicians of the North.
Other besides political considerations were no doubt plied to affect
the votes of the representatives of the free States. It was reported at
the time that no less than forty of them had their pockets stuffed with
Texas scrip, which would become very valuable if annexation should be
effected.