At the time when the new cotton industry was enhancing the value of
slave labor, there arose from the ranks of the people those who freely
consecrated their all to the freeing of the slave. Among these, Benjamin
Lundy, a New Jersey Quaker, holds a significant place.
Though the Society of Friends fills a large place in the anti-slavery
movement, its contribution to the growth of the conception of equality
is even more significant. This impetus to the idea arises from a
fundamental Quaker doctrine, announced at the middle of the seventeenth
century, to the erect that God reveals Himself to mankind, not through
any priesthood or specially chosen agents; not through any ordinance,
form, or ceremony; not through any church or institution; not through
any book or written record of any sort; but directly, through His
Spirit, to each person. This direct enlightening agency they deemed
coextensive with humanity; no race and no individual is left without the
ever-present illuminating Spirit. If men of old spoke as they were moved
by the Holy Spirit, what they spoke or wrote can furnish no reliable
guidance to the men of a later generation, except as their minds also
are enlightened by the same Spirit in the same way. "The letter killeth;
it is the Spirit that giveth life."
This doctrine in its purity and simplicity places all men and all races
on an equality; all are alike ignorant and imperfect; all are alike in
their need of the more perfect revelation yet to be made. Master and
slave are equal before God; there can be no such relation, therefore,
except by doing violence to a personality, to a spiritual being. In
harmony with this fundamental principle, the Society of Friends early
rid itself of all connection with slavery. The Friends' Meeting became
a refuge for those who were moved by the Spirit to testify against
slavery.
Born in 1789 in a State which was then undergoing the process of
emancipating its slaves, Benjamin Lundy moved at the age of nineteen
to Wheeling, West Virginia, which had already become the center of an
active domestic slave-trade. The pious young Quaker, now apprenticed to
a saddler, was brought into personal contact with this traffic in human
flesh. He felt keenly the national disgrace of the iniquity. So deep did
the iron enter into his soul that never again did he find peace of mind
except in efforts to relieve the oppressed. Like hundreds and thousands
of others, Lundy was led on to active opposition to the trade by an
actual knowledge of the inhumanity of the business as prosecuted before
his eyes and by his sympathy for human suffering.
His apprenticeship ended, Lundy was soon established in a prosperous
business in an Ohio village not far from Wheeling. Though he now lived
in a free State, the call of the oppressed was ever in his ears and he
could not rest. He drew together a few of his neighbors, and together
they organized the Union Humane Society, whose object was the relief
of those held in bondage. In a few months the society numbered several
hundred members, and Lundy issued an address to the philanthropists
of the whole country, urging them to unite in like manner with uniform
constitutions, and suggesting that societies so formed adopt a policy of
correspondence and cooperation. At about the same time, Lundy began to
publish anti-slavery articles in the Mount Pleasant Philanthropist and
other papers.
In 1819 he went on a business errand to St. Louis, Missouri, where he
found himself in the midst of an agitation over the question of the
extension of slavery in the States. With great zest he threw himself
into the discussion, making use of the newspapers in Missouri and
Illinois. Having lost his property, he returned poverty-stricken
to Ohio, where he founded in January, 1821, the Genius of Universal
Emancipation. A few months later he transferred his paper to the more
congenial atmosphere of Jonesborough, Tennessee, but in 1824 he went to
Baltimore, Maryland. In the meantime, Lundy had become much occupied in
traveling, lecturing, and organizing societies for the promotion of the
cause of abolition. He states that during the ten years previous to 1830
he had traveled upwards of twenty-five thousand miles, five thousand
of which were on foot. He now became interested in plans for colonizing
negroes in other countries as an aid to emancipation, though he
himself had no confidence in the colonization society and its scheme of
deportation to Africa. After leading a few negroes to Hayti in 1829, he
visited Canada, Texas, and Mexico with a similar plan in view.
During a trip through the Middle States and New England in 1828, Lundy
met William Lloyd Garrison, and the following year he walked all the
way from Baltimore to Bennington, Vermont, for the express purpose of
securing the assistance of the youthful reformer as coeditor of his
paper. Garrison had previously favored colonization, but within the few
weeks which elapsed before he joined Lundy, he repudiated all forms of
colonization and advocated immediate and unconditional emancipation. He
at once told Lundy of his change of views. "Well," said Lundy, "thee may
put thy initials to thy articles, and I will put my witness to mine,
and each will bear his own burden." The two editors were, however,
in complete accord in their opposition to the slave-trade. Lundy had
suffered a dangerous assault at the hands of a Baltimore slave-trader
before he was joined by Garrison. During the year 1830, Garrison was
convicted of libel and thrown into prison on account of his scathing
denunciation of Francis Todd of Massachusetts, the owner of a vessel
engaged in the slave-trade.
These events brought to a crisis the publication of the Genius of
Universal Emancipation. The editors now parted company. Again Lundy
moved the office of the paper, this time to Washington, D.C., but it
soon became a peripatetic monthly, printed wherever the editor chanced
to be. In 1836 Lundy began the issue of an anti-slavery paper in
Philadelphia, called the National Inquirer, and with this was merged the
Genius of Universal Emancipation. He was preparing to resume the issue
of his original paper under the old title, in La Salle County, Illinois,
when he was overtaken by death on August 22, 1839.
Here was a man without education, without wealth, of a slight frame, not
at all robust, who had undertaken, singlehanded and without the shadow
of a doubt of his ultimate success, to abolish American slavery.
He began the organization of societies which were to displace the
anti-slavery societies of the previous century. He established the first
paper devoted exclusively to the cause of emancipation. He foresaw that
the question of emancipation must be carried into politics and that it
must become an object of concern to the general Government as well as to
the separate States. In the early part of his career he found the most
congenial association and the larger measure of effective support south
of Mason and Dixon's Line, and in this section were the greater number
of the abolition societies which he organized. During the later years
of his life, as it was becoming increasingly difficult in the South
to maintain a public anti-slavery propaganda, he transferred his chief
activities to the North. Lundy serves as a connecting link between the
earlier and the later anti-slavery movements. Eleven years of his early
life belong to the century of the Revolution. Garrison recorded his
indebtedness to Lundy in the words: "If I have in any way, however
humble, done anything towards calling attention to slavery, or bringing
out the glorious prospect of a complete jubilee in our country at no
distant day, I feel that I owe everything in this matter, instrumentally
under God, to Benjamin Lundy."
Different in type, yet even more significant on account of its peculiar
relations to the cause of abolition, was the life of James Gillespie
Birney, who was born in a wealthy slaveholding family at Dansville,
Kentucky, in the year 1792. The Birneys were anti-slavery planters of
the type of Washington and Jefferson. The father had labored to make
Kentucky a free State at the time of its admission to the Union. His son
was educated first at Princeton, where he graduated in 1810, and then
in the office of a distinguished lawyer in Philadelphia. He began the
practice of law at his home at the age of twenty-two. His home training
and his residence in States which were then in the process of gradual
emancipation served to confirm him in the traditional conviction of his
family. While Benjamin Lundy, at the age of twenty-seven, was engaged in
organizing anti-slavery societies north of the Ohio River, Birney at
the age of twenty-four was influential as a member of the Kentucky
Legislature in the prevention of the passing of a joint resolution
calling upon Ohio and Indiana to make laws providing for the return
of fugitive slaves. He was also conspicuous in his efforts to secure
provisions for gradual emancipation. Two years later he became a planter
near Huntsville, Alabama. Though not a member of the Constitutional
Convention preparatory to the admission of this Territory into
the Union, Birney used his influence to secure provisions in the
constitution favorable to gradual emancipation. As a member of the first
Legislature, in 1819, he was the author of a law providing a fair trial
by jury for slaves indicted for crimes above petty larceny, and in 1826
he became a regular contributor to the American Colonization Society,
believing it to be an aid to emancipation. The following year he was
able to induce the Legislature, although he was not then a member of it,
to pass an act forbidding the importation of slaves into Alabama
either for sale or for hire. This was regarded as a step preliminary to
emancipation.
The cause of education in Alabama had in Birney a trusted leader. During
the year 1830 he spent several months in the North Atlantic States
for the selection of a president and four professors for the State
University and three teachers for the Huntsville Female Seminary. These
were all employed upon his sole recommendation. On his return he had an
important interview with Henry Clay, of whose political party he had for
several years been the acknowledged leader in Alabama. He urged Clay
to place himself at the head of the movement in Kentucky for gradual
emancipation. Upon Clay's refusal their political cooperation
terminated. Birney never again supported Clay for office and regarded
him as in a large measure responsible for the pro-slavery reaction in
Kentucky.
Birney, who had now become discouraged regarding the prospect of
emancipation, during the winter of 1831 and 1832 decided to remove his
family to Jacksonville, Illinois. He was deterred from carrying out
his plan, however, by his unexpected appointment as agent of the
colonization society in the Southwest--a mission which he undertook from
a sense of duty.
In his travels throughout the region assigned to him, Birney became
aware of the aggressive designs of the planters of the Gulf States to
secure new slave territories in the Southwest. In view of these facts
the methods of the colonization society appeared utterly futile. Birney
surrendered his commission and, in 1833, returned to Kentucky with the
intention of doing himself what Henry Clay had refused to do three years
earlier, still hoping that Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee might be
induced to abolish slavery and thus place the slave power in a hopeless
minority. His disappointment was extreme at the pro-slavery reaction
which had taken place in Kentucky. The condition called for more drastic
measures, and Birney decided to forsake entirely the colonization
society and cast in his lot with the abolitionists. He freed his slaves
in 1834, and in the following year he delivered the principal address
at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society held in New
York. His gift of leadership was at once recognized. As vice-president
of the society he began to travel on its behalf, to address public
assemblies, and especially to confer with members of state legislatures
and to address the legislative bodies. He now devoted his entire time to
the service of the society, and as early as September, 1835, issued the
prospectus of a paper devoted to the cause of emancipation. This called
forth such a display of force against the movement that he could neither
find a printer nor obtain the use of a building in Dansville, Kentucky,
for the publication. As a result he transferred his activities to
Cincinnati, where he began publication of the Philanthropist in 1836.
With the connivance of the authorities and encouragement from leading
citizens of Cincinnati, the office of the Philanthropist was three times
looted by the mob, and the proprietor's life was greatly endangered.
The paper, however, rapidly grew in favor and influence and thoroughly
vindicated the right of free discussion of the slavery question.
Another editor was installed when Birney, who became secretary of the
Anti-slavery Society in 1837, transferred his residence to New York
City.
Twenty-three years before Lincoln's famous utterance in which he
proclaimed the doctrine that a house divided against itself cannot
stand, and before Seward's declaration of an irrepressible conflict
between slavery and freedom, Birney had said: "There will be no
cessation of conflict until slavery shall be exterminated or liberty
destroyed. Liberty and slavery cannot live in juxtaposition." He spoke
out of the fullness of his own experience. A thoroughly trained lawyer
and statesman, well acquainted with the trend of public sentiment in
both North and South, he was fully persuaded that the new pro-slavery
crusade against liberty boded civil war. He knew that the white men in
North and South would not, without a struggle, consent to be permanently
deprived of their liberties at the behest of a few Southern planters.
Being himself of the slaveholding class, he was peculiarly fitted to
appreciate their position. To him the new issue meant war, unless
the belligerent leaders should be shown that war was hopeless. By his
moderation in speech, his candor in statement, his lack of rancor, his
carefully considered, thoroughly fair arguments, he had the rare faculty
of convincing opponents of the correctness of his own view.
There could be little sympathy between Birney and William Lloyd
Garrison, whose style of denunciation appeared to the former as an
incitement to war and an excuse for mob violence. As soon as Birney
became the accepted leader in the national society, there was
friction between his followers and those of Garrison. To denounce
the Constitution and repudiate political action were, from Birney's
standpoint, a surrender of the only hope of forestalling a dire
calamity. He had always fought slavery by the use of legal and
constitutional methods, and he continued so to fight. In this policy he
had the support of a large majority of abolitionists in New England and
elsewhere. Only a few personal friends accepted Garrison's injunction to
forswear politics and repudiate the Constitution.
The followers of Birney, failing to secure recognition for their views
in either of the political parties, organized the Liberty party and,
while Birney was in Europe in 1840, nominated him as their candidate
for the Presidency. The vote which he received was a little over seven
thousand, but four years later he was again the candidate of the party
and received over sixty thousand votes. He suffered an injury during the
following year which condemned him to hopeless invalidism and brought
his public career to an end.
Though Lundy and Birney were contemporaries and were engaged in the same
great cause, they were wholly independent in their work. Lundy addressed
himself almost entirely to the non-slaveholding class, while all of
Birney's early efforts were "those of a slaveholder seeking to induce
his own class to support the policy of emancipation." Though a Northern
man, Lundy found his chief support in the South until he was driven out
by persecution. Birney also resided in the South until he was forced to
leave for the same reason. The two men were in general accord in their
main lines of policy: both believed firmly in the use of political means
to effect their objects; both were at first colonizationists, though
Lundy favored colonization in adjacent territory rather than by
deportation to Africa.
Women were not a whit behind men in their devotion to the cause of
freedom. Conspicuous among them were Sarah and Angelina Grimke, born in
Charleston, South Carolina, of a slaveholding family noted for learning,
refinement, and culture. Sarah was born in the same year as James G.
Birney, 1792; Angelina was thirteen years younger. Angelina was the
typical crusader: her sympathies from the first were with the slave.
As a child she collected and concealed oil and other simple remedies so
that she might steal out by night and alleviate the sufferings of slaves
who had been cruelly whipped or abused. At the age of fourteen she
refused to be confirmed in the Episcopal Church because the ceremony
involved giving sanction to words which seemed to her untrue. Two years
later her mother offered her a present of a slave girl for a servant and
companion. This gift she refused to accept, for in her view the servant
had a right to be free, and, as for her own needs, Angelina felt quite
capable of waiting upon herself.
Of her own free will she joined the Presbyterian Church and labored
earnestly with the officers of the church to induce them to espouse the
cause of the slave. When she failed to secure cooperation, she decided
that the church was not Christian and she therefore withdrew her
membership. Her sister Sarah had gone North in 1821 and had become a
member of the Society of Friends in Philadelphia. In Charleston, South
Carolina, there was a Friends' meeting-house where two old Quakers
still met at the appointed time and sat for an hour in solemn silence.
Angelina donned the Quaker garb, joined this meeting, and for an entire
year was the third of the silent worshipers. This quiet testimony,
however, did not wholly satisfy her energetic nature, and when, in
1830, she heard of the imprisonment of Garrison in Baltimore, she was
convinced that effective labors against slavery could not be carried on
in the South. With great sorrow she determined to sever her connection
with home and family and join her sister in Philadelphia. There the
exile from the South poured out her soul in an Appeal to the Christian
Women of the South. The manuscript was handed to the officers of the
Anti-slavery Society in the city and, as they read, tears filled
their eyes. The Appeal was immediately printed in large quantities for
distribution in Southern States.
Copies of the Appeal which had been sent to Charleston were seized by a
mob and publicly burned. When it became known soon afterwards that the
author of the offensive document was intending to return to Charleston
to spend the winter with her family, there was intense excitement, and
the mayor of the city informed the mother that her daughter would not be
permitted to land in Charleston nor to communicate with any one there,
and that, if she did elude the police and come ashore, she would be
imprisoned and guarded until the departure of the next boat. On account
of the distress which she would cause to her friends, Miss Grimke
reluctantly gave up the exercise of her constitutional right to visit
her native city and in a very literal sense she became a permanent
exile.
The two sisters let their light shine among Philadelphia Quakers. In
the religious meetings negro women were consigned to a special seat. The
Grimkes, having first protested against this discrimination, took their
own places on the seat with the colored women. In Charleston, Angelina
had scrupulously adhered to the Quaker garb because it was viewed as a
protest against slavery. In Philadelphia, however, no such meaning was
attached to the costume, and she adopted clothing suited to the climate
regardless of conventions. A series of parlor talks to women which had
been organized by the sisters grew in interest until the parlors became
inadequate, and the speakers were at last addressing large audiences of
women in the public meeting-places of Philadelphia.
At this time when Angelina was making effective use of her unrivaled
power as a public speaker, she received in 1836 an invitation from the
Anti-slavery Society of New York to address the women of that city. She
informed her sister that she believed this to be a call from God and
that it was her duty to accept. Sarah decided to be her companion and
assistant in the work in the new field, which was similar to that in
Philadelphia. Its fame soon extended to Boston, whence came an urgent
invitation to visit that city. It was in Massachusetts that men began to
steal into the women's meetings and listen from the back seats. In Lynn
all barriers were broken down, and a modest, refined, and naturally
diffident young woman found herself addressing immense audiences of men
and women. In the old theater in Boston for six nights in succession,
audiences filling all the space listened entranced to the messenger of
emancipation. There is uniform testimony that, in an age distinguished
for oratory, no more effective speaker appeared than Angelina Grimke.
It was she above all others who first vindicated the right of women to
speak to men from the public platform on political topics. But it must
be remembered that scores of other women were laboring to the same end
and were fully prepared to utilize the new opportunity.
The great world movement from slavery towards freedom, from despotism
to democracy, is characterized by a tendency towards the equality of
the sexes. Women have been slaves where men were free. In barbarous ages
women have been ignored or have been treated as mere adjuncts to the
ruling sex. But wherever there has been a distinct contribution to the
cause of liberty there has been a distinct recognition of woman's share
in the work. The Society of Friends was organized on the principle that
men and women are alike moral beings, hence are equal in the sight of
God. As a matter of experience, women were quite as often moved to break
the silence of a religious meeting as were the men.
For two hundred years women had been accustomed to talk to both men
and women in Friends' meetings and, when the moral war against slavery
brought religion and politics into close relation, they were ready
speakers upon both topics. When the Grimke sisters came into the church
with a fresh baptism of the Spirit, they overcame all obstacles and,
with a passion for righteousness, moral and spiritual and political,
they carried the war against slavery into politics.
In 1833, at the organization of the American Anti-Slavery Society
in Philadelphia, a number of women were present. Lucretia Mott, a
distinguished "minister" in the Society of Friends, took part in the
proceedings. She was careful to state that she spoke as a mere visitor,
having no place in the organization, but she ventured to suggest various
modifications in the report of Garrison's committee on a declaration of
principles which rendered it more acceptable to the meeting. It had not
then been seriously considered whether women could become members of
the Anti-Slavery Society, which was at that time composed exclusively
of men, with the women maintaining their separate organizations as
auxiliaries.
The women of the West were already better organized than the men and
were doing a work which men could not do. They were, for the most part,
unconscious of any conflict between the peculiar duties of men and
those of women in their relations to common objects. The "library
associations" of Indiana, which were in fact effective anti-slavery
societies, were to a large extent composed of women. To the library
were added numerous other disguises, such as "reading circles," "sewing
societies," "women's clubs." In many communities the appearance of men
in any of these enterprises would create suspicion or even raise a mob.
But the women worked on quietly, effectively, and unnoticed.
The matron of a family would be provided with the best riding-horse
which the neighborhood could furnish. Mounted upon her steed, she would
sally forth in the morning, meet her carefully selected friends in
a town twenty miles away, gain information as to what had been
accomplished, give information as to the work in other parts of the
district, distribute new literature, confer as to the best means of
extending their labors, and return in the afternoon. The father of
such a family was quite content with the humbler task of cooperation by
supplying the sinews of war. There was complete equality between husband
and wife because their aims were identical and each rendered the service
most convenient and most needed. Women did what men could not do. In
the territory of the enemy the men were reached through the gradual and
tentative efforts of women whom the uninitiated supposed to be spending
idle hours at a sewing circle. Interest was maintained by the use of
information of the same general character as that which later took the
country by storm in Uncle Tom's Cabin. In course of time all disguise
was thrown aside. A public speaker of national reputation would appear,
a meeting would be announced, and a rousing abolition speech would be
delivered; the mere men of the neighborhood would have little conception
how the surprising change had been accomplished.
On rare occasions the public presentation of the anti-slavery view
would be undertaken prematurely, as in 1840 at Pendleton, Indiana, when
Frederick Douglass attempted to address a public meeting and was almost
slain by missiles from the mob. Pendleton, however, was not given over
to the enemy. The victim of the assault was restored to health in the
family of a leading citizen. The outrage was judiciously utilized
to convince the fair-minded that one of the evils of slavery was the
development of minds void of candor and justice. On the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the Pendleton disturbance there was another great meeting
in the town. Frederick Douglass was the hero of the occasion. The woman
who was the head of the family that restored him to health was on the
platform. Some of the men who threw the brickbats were there to make
public confession and to apologize for the brutal deed.
In the minds of a few persons of rare intellectual and logical
endowment, democracy has always implied the equality of the sexes. From
the time of the French Revolution there have been advocates of this
doctrine. As early as 1820, Frances Wright, a young woman in Scotland
having knowledge of the Western republic founded upon the professed
principles of liberty and equality, came to America for the express
purpose of pleading the cause of equal rights for women. To the
general public her doctrine seemed revolutionary, threatening the very
foundations of religion and morality. In the midst of opposition and
persecution she proclaimed views respecting the rights and duties of
women which today are generally accepted as axiomatic.
The women who attended the meetings for the organization of the American
Anti-Slavery Society were not suffragists, nor had they espoused any
special theories respecting the position of women. They did not wish to
be members of the men's organizations but were quite content with their
own separate one, which served its purpose very well under prevailing
local conditions. James G. Birney, the candidate of the Liberty party
for the Presidency in 1840, had good reasons for opposition to the
inclusion of men and women in the same organization. He knew that by
acting separately they were winning their way. The introduction of a
novel theory involving a different issue seemed to him likely to be a
source of weakness. The cause of women was, however, gaining ground
and winning converts. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were
delegates to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention at London. They
listened to the debate which ended in the refusal to recognize them
as members of the Convention because they were women. The tone of
the discussion convinced them that women were looked upon by men with
disdain and contempt. Because the laws of the land and the customs of
society consigned women to an inferior position, and because there would
be no place for effective public work on the part of women until these
laws were changed, both these women became advocates of women's rights
and conspicuous leaders in the initiation of the propaganda. The
Reverend Samuel J. May, of Syracuse, New York, preached a sermon in 1845
in which he stated his belief that women need not expect to have their
wrongs fully redressed until they themselves had a hand in the making
and in the administration of the laws. This is an early suggestion
that equal suffrage would become the ultimate goal of the efforts for
righting women's wrongs.
At the same time there were accessions to the cause from a different
source. In 1833 Oberlin College was founded in northern Ohio. Into some
of the first classes there women were admitted on equal terms with men.
In 1885 the trustees offered the presidency to Professor Asa Mahan, of
Lane Seminary. He was himself an abolitionist from a slave State, and he
refused to be President of Oberlin College unless negroes were admitted
on equal terms with other students. Oberlin thus became the first
institution in the country which extended the privileges of the higher
education to both sexes of all races. It was a distinctly religious
institution devoted to radical reforms of many kinds. Not only was the
use of all intoxicating beverages discarded by faculty and students but
the use of tobacco as well was discouraged.
Within fifteen years after the founding of Oberlin, there were women
graduates who had something to say on numerous questions of public
interest. Especially was this true of the subject of temperance.
Intemperance was a vice peculiar to men. Women and children were the
chief sufferers, while men were the chief sinners. It was important,
therefore, that men should be reached. In 1847 Lucy Stone, an Oberlin
graduate, began to address public audiences on the subject. At the same
time Susan B. Anthony appeared as a temperance lecturer. The manner of
their reception and the nature of their subject induced them to unite
heartily in the pending crusade for the equal rights of women. The three
causes thus became united in one.
Along with the crusade against slavery, intemperance, and women's
wrongs, arose a fourth, which was fundamentally connected with the
slavery question: Quakers and Southern and Western abolitionists were
ardently devoted to the interests of peace. They would abolish slavery
by peaceable means because they believed the alternative was a terrible
war. To escape an impending war they were nerved to do and dare and to
incur great risks. New England abolitionists who labored in harmony with
those of the West and South were actuated by similar motives. Sumner
first gained public notice by a distinguished oration against war.
Garrison went farther: he was a professional non-resistant, a root and
branch opponent of both war and slavery. John Brown was a fanatical
antagonist of war until he reached the conclusion that according to the
Divine Will there should be a short war of liberation in place of the
continuance of slavery, which was itself in his opinion the most cruel
form of war.
Slavery as a legally recognized institution disappeared with the Civil
War. The war against intemperance has made continuous progress and this
problem is apparently approaching a solution. The war against war as
a recognized institution has become the one all-absorbing problem of
civilization. The war against the wrongs of women is being supplanted by
efforts to harmonize the mutual privileges and duties of men and women
on the basis of complete equality. As Samuel May predicted more than
seventy years ago, in the future women are certain to take a hand both
in the making and in the administration of law.