Chapter V: Part 5

And here I must tell you a family secret. The lady who afterwards became his wife, whose position in society was much higher than his own (a circumstance of far greater importance in England than in our country), was present at these debates. She was fired with such admiration of his powers, and of his consecration of them to the cause of suffering humanity, that it lighted a kindred flame in his bosom; or, to speak in plain American English, they there fell in love with each other, and were soon after married.

About this time the London Antislavery Society was formed. The directors, or executive committee thereof, advertised for a suitable man, who was willing to become their lecturing agent. This opened the door to what has since been the business of his life. He hesitated several weeks, distrusting his ability. But, encouraged and urged by his young wife, he at length consented that the Secretary, Mr. Thomas Pringle, should be informed of his wish to receive an appointment. By that gentleman he was invited to an interview with Sir George Stevens and Rev. Zachary Macaulay, who, after satisfying themselves of his qualifications, commended him to Lord Brougham, Lord Denham, and Sir George Bunting, the committee that was to decide the question of appointment. These gentlemen, after an extended conversation with him, gave him a commission for three months, and sent him forth to agitate the community on the question of West India emancipation.

Could you but turn to the English papers of that day, you would see for yourself how rapidly, and to what an unexampled height, rose his reputation as a lecturer. At the end of three months, the demands that came from all parts of the kingdom for the services of Mr. Thompson settled the question with the committee. They gave him an appointment until “the warfare should be accomplished.” And for three or four years he was the principal, if not the only, agent of that Society, performing an amount of labor which seems almost superhuman. In all parts of the United Kingdom his voice was heard, either in speeches to the crowds that everywhere thronged to listen to him, or in debates with Mr. Bostwick and other agents hired by the West India slaveholders to oppose him. And when, in 1833, the victory was achieved; when, overpowered by the outward pressure, both Houses of Parliament were compelled to make a virtue of necessity, and to magnify the glory of England by that Act which gave liberty to eight hundred thousand slaves, Lord Brougham rose in the House of Lords and said: “I rise to take the crown of this most glorious victory from every other head, and place it upon George Thompson’s. He has done more than any other man to achieve it.” This tribute was most justly deserved.

Yet for all his labors, his inestimable services, Mr. Thompson received only pecuniary compensation enough to pay his expenses and support his small family. He asked no more. He had consecrated himself to the cause of suffering humanity for its own sake, not expecting to be enriched thereby. But the friends of that cause which he had served so well, so nobly, could not be indifferent to his future career. Lord Brougham, Lord Denham, and others, confident that he would become an ornament and an honor to the legal profession, offered him all the assistance he could need to defray his own and his family’s expenses for five years, while he should be pursuing his preparatory studies, and getting established as a member of the English bar. The prospect thus opened was most inviting to him; the proposed profession was congenial to his taste. Indeed, if I have been correctly informed, the preliminary arrangements were made, when the claims of the most oppressed of all men,--the enslaved in the United States,--were forcibly urged upon him.

Mr. Garrison had been in England several weeks, laboring successfully to undeceive the philanthropists and people of Great Britain as to the real design and tendency of the American Colonization Society. Their kindred spirits had met and mingled. He had heard Mr. Garrison’s exposition, and had become, with Clarkson, Wilberforce, Buxton, and others, fully satisfied that the expatriation of the free colored people, their removal from this country, if practicable, would only perpetuate the bondage of the enslaved, and aggravate their wrongs. Mr. Garrison, on the other hand, had repeatedly witnessed the surpassing power of Mr. Thompson’s eloquence on the audiences he addressed, had heard the tributes everywhere paid to the importance of his services, and was present at the consummation of his unsparing labors,--the passage by the British Parliament of the bill for the abolition of West India slavery. It was manifest to him that the man, who had done so much for the overthrow of British slavery, could help mightily to accomplish the far greater work needed to be done in this country; and his heart was set on enlisting Mr. Thompson in the service of the American Antislavery Society. He pressed his wish, his demand, upon him just as Mr. Thompson was about to agree to the above-named arrangement for the study of the law. Mr. Garrison’s invitation was not to be accepted hastily, nor could he reject it without consideration. He revolved it anxiously in his mind, as he went from city to city with his now beloved brother, hearing him portray the peculiarities of the American system of slavery, the far greater difficulties against which Abolitionists here had to contend, the need we felt of a living voice, potent enough to wake up thousands who were _dead_ in this iniquity.

On the eve of Mr. Garrison’s departure from England in the fall of 1833 Mr. Thompson, with deep emotion, said to him: “I have thought much of the bright professional prospects opened to me here. I have thought yet more of the dark, dismal, desperate condition of millions of my fellow-beings in your country. They are no farther from me than are the eight hundred thousand whom I have been laboring to emancipate, and their claims upon me for the help God may enable me to give them are just as strong. I cannot withhold myself from their service. If, on your return to Boston, you shall still think I can render you much assistance, and your fellow-laborers concur with you in that opinion, command me, and I will hasten to you.”

Mr. Thompson, however, remained in England almost a year after Mr. Garrison left him, that he might reorganize the antislavery hosts who had triumphed so gloriously in the conflict for British West India emancipation, and induce them to engage as heartily in the enterprise for the emancipation of the millions held in the most abject bondage in these United States, and for the abolition of slavery throughout the world.

GEORGE THOMPSON’S FIRST YEAR IN AMERICA.

When, on his return from England in October, 1833, Mr. Garrison informed us that he had obtained from George Thompson--the champion of the triumphant conflict for West India emancipation--the promise to “come over and help us,” if we concurred in the invitation Mr. Garrison had given him, our hearts were encouraged, our hands strengthened, our purpose confirmed. Our own great antislavery orators, male and female, who since then have done so much to convict and convert the nation, had not yet appeared. Theodore D. Weld and Henry B. Stanton were studying theology in Lane Seminary; Parker Pillsbury, Stephen S. Foster, and John A. Collins were doing likewise somewhere in Vermont; Henry C. Wright had not plucked up quite courage enough to justify Mr. Garrison’s terrible denunciations of slaveholders and their abettors; James G. Birney was the Secretary of the Kentucky Colonization Society; Gerrit Smith had not got wholly out of the toils of that fraudulent scheme which had deceived “the very elect”; Charles C. Burleigh was an unknown youth in Plainfield Academy; Wendell Phillips, our Apollo, was just preparing to leap into his place at the head of the Massachusetts bar; and Angelina Grimké, Lucy Stone, Abby Kelly Foster, Susan B. Anthony, Antoinette L. Brown, Sallie Holley, and other excellent women, who have since rendered such signal services, had not then left “the appropriate sphere of women.”

That George Thompson would come to our aid, the orator to whose relentless logic and surpassing eloquence, more than to any other instrumentality, Lord Brougham had just attributed the triumph of the antislavery cause in England,--that he was about coming to help us did seem at that time a godsend indeed. But, as was stated in my last, his coming was deferred a year, that the Abolitionists of Great Britain and Ireland might not lay aside their well-used weapons, nor cease from their warfare, while so many millions of human beings remained in the most abject slavery, especially in the United States, where the horrid institution was established by the authority of England. Having re-enlisted his fellow-laborers throughout the United Kingdom to co-operate with us, he came to Boston in the fall of 1834.

At that time I was devoting a few weeks of permitted absence from my church in Connecticut to a lecturing tour in the antislavery cause, and came to Mr. Garrison’s house in Roxbury an hour after the arrival of Mr. Thompson. He readily consented to go with us the next day to Groton, there to attend a county convention. We gladly spent the remainder of that day together, in earnest and prayerful communion over the great work in which we had engaged; and at night repaired to lodge at the Earl Hotel in Hanover Street, that we might not fail to be off for Groton the next morning at four o’clock, in the first stage-coach, no conveyance thither by railroad being extant then.

At the appointed hour, the house being well filled, the meeting was called to order, and business commenced. As all were eager to see and hear the great English orator, preliminary matters were disposed of as soon as practicable. Then Mr. Thompson was called up by a resolution enthusiastically passed, declaring our appreciation of the inestimable value of his antislavery labors in England, our joy that he had come to aid us to deliver our country from the dominion of slaveholders, and our wish that he would occupy as much of the time of the convention as his inclination might prompt and his strength would enable him to do. He rose, and soon enchained the attention of all present. He set forth the essential, immitigable sin of holding human beings as slaves in a light, if possible, more vivid, more intense, than even Mr. Garrison had thrown upon that “sum of all villanies.” He illustrated and sustained his assertions by the most pertinent facts in the history of West India slavery. He inculcated the spirit in which we ought to prosecute our endeavor to emancipate the bondmen,--a spirit of compassion for the masters as well as their slaves,--a compassion too considerate of the harm which the slaveholder suffers, as well as inflicts, to consent to any continuance of the iniquity. He most solemnly enjoined the use of only moral and political means and instrumentalities to effect the subversion and extermination of the gigantic system of iniquity, although it seemed to tower above and overshadow the civil and religious institutions of our country. He showed us that he justly appreciated the greater difficulties of the work to be done in our land, than of that which had just been so gloriously accomplished in England, but exhorted us to trust undoubtingly in “the might of the right,”--the mercy, the justice, the power of God,--and to go forward in the full assurance that He, who had crowned the labors of the British Abolitionists with such a triumph, would enable us in like manner to accomplish the greater work he had given us to do.

Mr. Thompson then went on to give us a graphic, glowing account of the long and fierce conflict they had had in England for the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. His eloquence rose to a still higher order. His narrative became _a continuous metaphor_, admirably sustained. He represented the antislavery enterprise in which he had been so long engaged as a stout, well-built ship, manned by a noble-hearted crew, launched upon a stormy ocean, bound to carry inestimable relief to 800,000 sufferers in a far-distant land. He clothed all the kinds of opposition they had met, all the difficulties they had contended with, in imagery suggested by the observation and experience of the voyager across the Atlantic in the most tempestuous season of the year. In the height of his descriptions, my attention was withdrawn from the emotions enkindled in my own bosom sufficiently to observe the effect of his eloquence upon half a dozen boys, of twelve or fourteen years of age, sitting together not far from the platform. They were completely possessed by it. When the ship reeled or plunged or staggered in the storms, they unconsciously went through the same motions. When the enemy attacked her, the boys took the liveliest part in battle,--manning the guns, or handing shot and shell, or pressing forward to repulse the boarders. When the ship struck upon an iceberg, the boys almost fell from their seats in the recoil. When the sails and topmasts were wellnigh carried away by the gale, they seemed to be straining themselves to prevent the damage; and when at length the ship triumphantly sailed into her destined port with colors flying and signals of glad tidings floating from her topmast, and the shout of welcome rose from thousands of expectant freedmen on the shore, the boys gave three loud cheers, “Hurrah! Hurrah!! Hurrah!!!” This irrepressible explosion of their feelings brought them at once to themselves. They blushed, covered their faces, sank down on their seats, one of them upon the floor. It was an ingenuous, thrilling tribute to the surpassing power of the orator, and only added to the zest and heartiness with which the whole audience applauded (to use the words of another at the time) “the persuasive reasonings, the earnest appeals, the melting pathos, the delightful but caustic irony and enrapturing eloquence of Mr. Thompson.”

Thus commenced his brilliant career in this country. The Groton Convention lasted two days, the 1st and 2d of October. Mr. Thompson went thence immediately to Lowell, where he spoke to a delighted crowd on the 5th. Four days after, on the 9th of October, he gave his first address in Boston. It was at an adjourned meeting of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society. All the prominent Abolitionists, who could be, were there to see and hear “the almost inspired apostle of negro emancipation,” who had “come over to help us.” Every one that heard him then felt that his signal gifts had not been overrated, and joined in thanksgiving to the God of the oppressed, whose Holy Spirit, we believed, had moved him to consecrate those gifts to the abolition of slavery.

Reports of Mr. Thompson’s eloquence spread rapidly, and invitations came to him from all quarters. The day after the meeting in Boston he went into the State of Maine, and lectured on the 12th in Portland, on the 13th in Brunswick, on the 15th in Augusta. Everywhere he was heard with delight, and made many converts. At Augusta, it is true, he received an angry letter from five “gentlemen of property and standing,” informing him that his “coming to their city had given great offence,” and admonishing him not to presume to address the public there again. But his engagements elsewhere, rather than their threats, obliged him to leave immediately. The next evening he lectured in the neighboring city of Hallowell, where the people heard him gladly. On the 17th he delivered an address in Waterville, which was listened to by most of the students and several of the faculty of the College, and made deep impressions upon a large number. On the 20th he spoke again to a crowded audience in Brunswick, with like effect upon the students and faculty of Bowdoin College. Returning, he lectured at Portland in six different churches, to large and delighted audiences, before the close of the month; and then came into New Hampshire and gave lectures in Plymouth, Concord, and other places, on his way back to Boston. After a few days’ repose, he went forth again, in answer to many urgent invitations, and lifted up his voice for the enslaved in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Whoever will turn over the leaves of the _Liberator_ for 1834 and 1835 will find on almost every page some admiring mention of Mr. Thompson’s lectures or speeches, and grateful acknowledgments of the deep impressions his words had made.

It is true that in the same paper will be found, under the appropriate head “_Refuge of Oppression_,” extracts from newspapers and letters from all parts of the country, denouncing, execrating him, and calling upon the patriotic to put a stop to his incendiary career. He was a foreign intruder, who had come here to “meddle with a delicate matter about which he could know nothing.” He was “a British emissary, sent to embroil the Northern with the Southern States, and break up our glorious Union.” He was “the paid agent of the enemies of republican institutions, supported in our midst, that he might do all in his power to prevent the success of the grandest experiment in national government ever tried on earth.” The changes were rung on these and similar charges until those, who could be deceived thereby, were maddened in their fear and hatred of Mr. Thompson. He was threatened with all kinds of ill-treatment; yet he went fearlessly wherever he was invited to speak, and not unfrequently disarmed and converted some who had come to the meetings intending to do him harm.

In several of his lecturing tours I was his companion; and I wondered how any persons who heard him speak, in public or in private, could suspect or be persuaded that he was an enemy of our country. I was continually surprised, as well as delighted, by the evidences he gave of his just appreciation of the principles of our government, and the admiration of them that he always cordially expressed. Having hitherto contemplated our Republic from a distance, he seemed to have taken a more comprehensive view of it than too many of our own citizens, even statesmen, had done, whose regard for the whole nation had been warped by their concern for the supposed interests of a section or a State. Mr. Thompson’s detestation of slavery was intensified by his clear perception of the corruption it had diffused throughout our body politic and body ecclesiastic; and, if not abolished, the ruin it would inevitably bring upon our country, called, in the providence of God, to be “the land of the free and the asylum of the oppressed.” No American patriot ever felt, for no human heart could feel, a deeper, more sincere, or more intelligent concern for the honor, glory, perpetuity of our Republic than Mr. Thompson felt and evinced in his every word and act. Few home-born lovers of our country have done a tithe as much as he did to save her from the ruin she was bringing upon herself by her recreancy to the fundamental principles, upon which she professed to stand. Not a dozen names, of those who have lived within the last forty years, deserve to stand higher on the list of our public benefactors than the name of George Thompson.

Yet was he maligned, hated, hunted, driven from our shores. The story of the treatment he received is too shameful to be told. During the last six months of his stay here the persecution of him was continuous. The newspapers, from Maine to Georgia, with a few most honorable exceptions, denounced him daily, and called for his punishment as an enemy, or his expulsion from the country. Those few who dared to tell the truth testified, not only to his enrapturing eloquence and his friendliness to our nation, but to his eminently Christian deportment and spirit. But the tide of persecution could not be stayed. He was often insulted in the streets. Meetings to which he spoke, or at which he was expected to speak, were broken up by mobs. Rewards were offered for his person or his life. Twice I assisted to help his escape from the hands of hired ruffians.

All this he bore, for the most part, with fortitude and sweet serenity. He seemed less apprehensive of his danger than his friends were. Sometimes he overawed the men who were sent to take him by his dignified, heroic bearing, and at other times dispelled their evil intentions by his pertinent wit. I will give a single instance. At one of the last meetings he addressed in Boston, some Southerners cried out:--

“We wish we had you at the South. We would cut your ears off, if not your head.”

Mr. Thompson promptly replied: “Would you? Then should I cry out all the louder, ‘He that _hath_ ears to hear let him hear.’” It was irresistible. I believe the Southerners themselves joined in the rapturous applause.

On the 27th of September, 1835, we left Boston together in a private conveyance,--he to lecture at Abington, one of the most antislavery towns in the State, and I at Halifax, a few miles beyond. On my return the next morning I learnt that there had been a fearful onslaught upon Mr. Thompson; and, when I called to take him back to the city, I found him more subdued than I had ever seen him. He had not expected ill-usage there. As we passed the meeting-house, from which he and his audience had been routed the night before, he was overcome by his emotions. There lay strewn upon the ground fragments of windows, blinds, and doors, and some of the heavy missiles with which they had been broken down. He fell back in the chaise, and for several minutes gave way to his feelings. When able to command himself he said:--

“What does it mean? Am I indeed an enemy of your country? Do I deserve this at your hands? Testify against me if you can, Mr. May. You know, if any one does, what sentiments I have uttered, what spirit I have evinced. You have been with me in private and in public. Have you ever suspected me? Have you ever heard a word from my lips unfriendly to your country,--your magnificent, your might-be-glorious, but your awfully guilty country? What have I said, what have I done, that I should be treated as an enemy? Have not all my words and all my acts tended to the removal of an evil which is your nation’s disgrace, and, if permitted to continue, must be your ruin?”

We rode on in silence, for he knew my answers without hearing them from my lips. But the outrage at Abington assured us that the spirit of persecution was rife in the land, and might manifest itself anywhere.

Nevertheless, Mr. Thompson accepted an invitation to lecture a few days afterwards in the afternoon, by daylight, at East Abington. Accordingly, on the 15th of October, I went with him to the appointed place. We had been credibly informed that a number of men were going thither to take him, if they could do so without harm to themselves. But the good men and women of the town and neighborhood were up to the occasion. The meeting-house was crowded, so that, though the evil intenders were there in force, they soon saw that the capture could not be made there. And then the wit, the wisdom, the pathos, the eloquence of the speaker disarmed them, took them captive, and, for the hour, at least, made them delighted hearers.

This was Mr. Thompson’s last public appearance during his first year in America. All his friends insisted that he must keep out of sight, and as soon as practicable return to England. It was well known that his life was in danger. That we had not attributed too great malignity to our countrymen--even to the citizens of Boston--was soon made apparent by their own acts.

It was announced in the _Liberator_, and so became publicly known, that a regular meeting of the “Boston Female Antislavery Society” would be held in the Hall, 46 Washington Street, on the 21st of October, 1835. Without authority, it was reported by other papers that Mr. Thompson was to address them; and it was more than intimated that then and there would be the time and place to seize him. On the morning of that day the following placard was posted in all parts of the city:--

“THOMPSON THE ABOLITIONIST.

“That infamous foreign scoundrel, Thompson, will hold forth
this afternoon at 46 Washington Street. The present is a fair
opportunity for the friends of the Union to _snake_ Thompson out!
It will be a contest between the Abolitionists and the friends of
the Union. A purse of _one hundred dollars_ has been raised by a
number of patriotic citizens, to reward the individual who shall
first lay violent hands on Thompson, so that he may be brought to
the Tar Kettle before dark. Friends of the Union, be vigilant!”

The sequel of the infamous proceedings thus inaugurated will be given hereafter. Mr. Thompson was not there, and so the mob vented itself upon another. Mr. Thompson was, and had been for several days, secreted by his friends in Boston, and afterwards in Brookline, Lynn, Salem, Phillips Beach, and elsewhere, until his enemies were baffled in their pursuit of him, and arrangements were made to take him safely out of the country.

On or about the 20th of November he was conveyed in a small boat, rowed by two of his friends, from one of the Boston wharves to a small English brig, that had fortunately been consigned to Henry G. Chapman, one of our earliest and best antislavery brothers; and in that vessel he was carried to St. Johns. From that port he sailed for England on the 28th of the same month. Would that all my countrymen could read the letter that he wrote to Mr. Garrison on the eve of his departure. If words can truly express a man’s thoughts and feelings, the words of that letter were written by a lover of our country, a true philanthropist, a Christian hero.

ANTISLAVERY CONFLICT.

There were many noble confessors of the antislavery gospel, and many self-sacrificing sufferers in the cause, in various parts of our country, to whom I should be doing great injustice not to speak particularly of their services, if I were writing a complete history of our protracted conflict for impartial liberty. But I must confine myself, for the most part, to my personal recollections of prominent events and the individuals who were most conspicuous within my own limited view.

It is to be hoped that a complete history of this second American Revolution will, erelong, be written by Mr. Garrison, the man of all others best qualified to write it,--except that he will not give that prominence to himself in his narrative which he took in the beginning and occupied until emancipation was proclaimed for all in bondage throughout our borders. He has been the coryphæus of our antislavery band. He uttered the first note that thrilled the heart of the nation. He, more than any one, has corrected the national discord. And he has led the grand symphony in which so many millions of our countrymen at last have gladly, exultingly joined.

But so many have, at different periods and in various ways, contributed to the glorious result that it will not be possible even for Mr. Garrison to do ample justice to all his fellow-laborers. Indeed, many of them cannot be known to him, or to any one but the Omniscient. As in every other war, the fate of many a battle was decided by the indomitable will and heroic self-sacrifice of some nameless private soldier, who happened to be at the point of imminent peril, so, no doubt, has a favorable turn sometimes been given to our great enterprise by the undaunted moral courage and persistent fidelity of one and another, who are unknown but to Him who seeth in secret.

In my last article I gave an account of the bitter persecution of Mr. Thompson. The fact that he was a foreigner was used with great effect to exasperate the mobocratic spirit against him; but the real gist of his offence was the same that every one was guilty of, who insisted upon the abolition of slavery.

At the annual meeting of the American Antislavery Society in May, 1835, I was sitting upon the platform of the Houston Street Presbyterian Church in New York, when I was surprised to see a gentleman enter and take his seat who, I knew, was a partner in one of the most prominent mercantile houses in the city. He had not been seated long before he beckoned me to meet him at the door. I did so. “Please walk out with me, sir,” said he; “I have something of great importance to communicate.” When we had reached the sidewalk he said, with considerable emotion and emphasis, “Mr. May, we are not such fools as not to know that slavery is a great evil, a great wrong. But it was consented to by the founders of our Republic. It was provided for in the Constitution of our Union. A great portion of the property of the Southerners is invested under its sanction; and the business of the North, as well as the South, has become adjusted to it. There are millions upon millions of dollars due from Southerners to the merchants and mechanics of this city alone, the payment of which would be jeopardized by any rupture between the North and the South. We cannot afford, sir, to let you and your associates succeed in your endeavor to overthrow slavery. It is not a matter of principle with us. It is a matter of business necessity. We cannot afford to let you succeed. And I have called you out to let you know, and to let your fellow-laborers know, that we do not mean to allow you to succeed. We mean, sir,” said he, with increased emphasis,--“we mean, sir, to put you Abolitionists down,--by fair means if we can, by foul means if we must.”

After a minute’s pause I replied: “Then, sir, the gain of gold must be better than that of godliness. Error must be mightier than truth; wrong stronger than right. The Devil must preside over the affairs of the universe, and not God. Now, sir, I believe neither of these propositions. If holding men in slavery be wrong, it will be abolished. We shall succeed, your pecuniary interests to the contrary notwithstanding.” He turned hastily away; but he has lived long enough to find that he was mistaken, and to rejoice in the abolition of slavery.

We were soon made to realize that the words of the New York merchant were not an unmeaning threat. He had not spoken for himself, or any number of the moving spirits of that commercial metropolis alone. He was warranted in saying what he did by the pretty general intention of the “gentlemen of property and standing” throughout the country to put a stop to the antislavery reform. The storm-clouds of persecution had gathered heavily upon our Southern horizon. Fiery flashes of wrath had often darted thence towards us. But we were slow to believe that our Northern sky would ever become so surcharged with hatred for those, who were only contending for “the inalienable rights of man,” as to break upon us in any serious harm. The summer and fall of 1835 dispelled our misplaced confidence. We found, to our shame and dismay, that even New England had leagued with the slaveholding oligarchy to quench the spirit of impartial liberty, and uphold in our country the most cruel system of domestic servitude the world has ever known. The denunciations of the South were reverberated throughout the North. The public ear was filled with most wanton, cruel misrepresentations of our sentiments and purposes, and closed, as far as possible, against all our replies in contradiction, explanation, or defence. The political newspapers, with scarcely an exception, teemed with false accusations, the grossest abuse, and the most alarming predictions of the ultimate effects of our measures. The religious papers and periodicals were no better. The churches in Boston, not less than elsewhere, were closed against us. Not a minister[B]--excepting Dr. Channing, and the one in Pine Street Church--would even venture to read a notice of an antislavery meeting. Dr. Henry Ware, Jr., was denounced and vilified for having done so from Dr. Channing’s pulpit. All the public halls, too, of any tolerable size, were one after the other refused us. Even Faneuil Hall, the so-called cradle of American liberty, was denied to our use, though asked for in a respectful petition signed by the names of a hundred and twenty-five gentlemen of Boston, whose characters were as irreproachable as any in the city. But a few weeks afterwards, on the 21st of August, at the request of fifteen hundred of the “gentlemen of property and standing,” that hall, in which had been cradled the independence of the United States, was turned into the Refuge of Slavery. There as large a multitude as could crowd within its spacious walls, with feelings of alarm for the safety of our country, and of indignation at the Abolitionists as disturbers of the peace, already excited by the grossest misrepresentations of our sentiments, purposes, and acts, industriously disseminated by newspapers and in reports of public speeches throughout the Southern States,--there, in Faneuil Hall, thousands of our fellow-citizens were infuriated yet more against us by harangues from no less distinguished civilians than the Hon. Harrison Gray Otis, Peleg Sprague, and Richard Fletcher. These gentlemen reiterated all the common unproved charges against us, and solemnly, eloquently, passionately argued and urged that the enslavement of millions of the people in our country was a matter with which we of the Northern States had no right to meddle. It was a concern, they insisted, of the Southern States alone, found there when these portions of our Republic were about to emerge from their colonial dependence upon Great Britain, and left there by the framers of the Constitution, which was meant to be the fundamental law of our glorious Union. They harped upon the guaranties given to the slaveholders, that they should be sustained and undisturbed in _enforcing_ their claim of _property_ in the persons and services of their laborers. And those gentlemen insisted that the endeavors of Abolitionists to convince their fellow-citizens of the heinous wickedness of holding human beings in slavery gave just offence to those who were guilty of the sin; violated the compact by which these United States were held together, and, if they were permitted to be prosecuted, would cause the dissolution of the Union.

Meetings of a similar character, in the same or a more violent spirit of denunciation, were held in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and most of the cities of the nation. What were the immediate effects of this general outcry against us I shall narrate as briefly as I may.

REIGN OF TERROR.

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.

WALKER’S APPEAL.

It should be stated, however, that the excitement which had become so general and so furious against the Abolitionists throughout the slaveholding States was owing in no small measure to an individual with whom Mr. Garrison and his associates had had no connection. David Walker, a very intelligent colored man of Boston, having travelled pretty extensively over the United States, and informed himself thoroughly of the condition of the colored population, bond and free, had become so exasperated that he set himself to the work of rousing his fellow-sufferers to a due sense of “their degraded, wretched, abject condition,” and preparing them for a general and organized insurrection. In the course of the year 1828 Mr. Walker gathered about him, in Boston and elsewhere, audiences of colored men, into whom he strove to infuse his spirit of determined, self-sacrificing rebellion against their too-long endured and unparalleled oppression. Little was known of these meetings, excepting by those who had been specially called to them. But in September, 1829, he published his “_Appeal to the colored citizens of the world, in particular and very expressly to those of the United States_.”

It was a pamphlet of more than eighty octavo pages, ably written, very impassioned and well adapted to its purpose. The second and third editions of it were published in less than twelve months. And Mr. Walker devoted himself until his death, which happened soon after, to the distribution of copies of this Appeal to colored men who were able to read it in every State of the Union.

Just as I had written the above sentence, Dr. W. H. Irwin, of Louisiana, came in with an introduction to me. He is one of many Union men who have been stripped of their property and driven out of the State by President Johnson’s and Mayor Monroe’s partisans. Learning that he had been a resident many years in the Southern States, I inquired if he saw or heard of Walker’s Appeal in the time of it. He replied that he was living in Georgia in 1834, was acquainted with the Rev. Messrs. Worcester and Butler, missionaries to the Cherokees, and knew that they were maltreated and imprisoned in 1829 or 1830 for having one of Walker’s pamphlets, as well as for admitting some colored children into their Indian school.

So soon as this attempt to excite the slaves to insurrection came to the knowledge of Mr. Garrison, he earnestly deprecated it in his lectures, especially those addressed to colored people. And in his first number of the _Liberator_ he repudiated the resort to violence, as wrong in principle and disastrous in policy. His opinions on this point were generally embraced by his followers, and explicitly declared by the American Antislavery Society in 1833.

But as we wished that our fellow-citizens South as well as North should be assured of our pacific principles, and as we hoped to abolish the institution of slavery by convincing slaveholders and their abettors of the exceeding wickedness of the system, we did send our reports, tracts, and papers to all white persons in the Southern States with whom we were any of us acquainted, and to distinguished individuals whom we knew by common fame, to ministers of religion, legislators, civilians, and editors. _But in no case did we send our publications to slaves._ This we forbore to do, because we knew that few of them could read; because our arguments and appeals were not addressed to them; and especially because we thought it probable that, if our publications should be found in their possession, they would be subjected to some harsher treatment.

Notwithstanding our precaution, the Southern “gentlemen of property and standing” denounced us as incendiaries, enemies, accused us of intending to excite their bondmen to insurrection, and to dissolve the Union. They would not themselves give any heed to our _exposé_ of the sin and danger of slavery, nor would they suffer others so to do who seemed inclined to hear and consider. They assaulted, lynched, imprisoned any one in whose possession they found antislavery publications. They waylaid the mails, or broke into post-offices, and tore to pieces or burnt up all papers and pamphlets from the North that contained aught against their “peculiar institution,” and significantly admonished, if they did not summarily punish, those to whom such publications were addressed. Meetings were called in most, if not all, of the principal cities of the South, at which Abolitionists were denounced in unmeasured terms, and the friends of the Union, North and South, and East and West, were peremptorily summoned to suppress them. By the votes of such meetings, and still more by the acts of the Legislatures of several States, large rewards--$5,000, $10,000, $20,000--were offered for the abduction or assassination of Arthur Tappan, William Lloyd Garrison, Amos A. Phelps, and other prominent antislavery men. Moreover, letters of the most abusive character were sent to us individually, threatening us with all sorts of violence, arson, and murder.

Sad to relate, the corrupting, demoralizing influence of slavery was not confined to those who were directly enforcing the great wrong upon their fellow-beings. Those who had consented to such desecration of humanity were found to be almost as much contaminated as the slaveholders themselves. “The whole head of the nation was sick, and the whole heart was faint.” The “gentlemen of property and standing” at the North, yes, even in Massachusetts, espoused the cause of the slaveholders. The editors of most of the newspapers, religious as well as secular, and of some of the graver periodicals, nearly all of the popular orators, and very many of the ministers of religion, spoke and wrote against the doctrine of the Abolitionists. They extenuated the crime of denying to fellow-men the God-given, inalienable rights of humanity, apologized for those who had been born to an inheritance of slaves, and insisted that “slavery was an ordination of Providence, sanctioned by our sacred Scriptures, even the Christian Scriptures.” This last was the chief weapon with which the religionists throughout the Northern as well as Southern States combated the Abolitionists. Not a few sermons were preached in various parts of New England, as well as New York and other Middle States, in justification of slaveholding. The professors of Princeton Theological School published a pamphlet in defence of slavery, and Professor Stuart, of Andover, the great leader of New England orthodoxy, gave the abomination his sanction. The record of our Cambridge Divinity School is much more honorable. Dr. Henry Ware, Jr., evinced a deep interest in our enterprise, and incurred some censure for manifesting his interest. Dr. Follen identified himself with us at an early day, and, as I shall tell hereafter, was one of the sufferers in the cause; and Dr. Palfrey, though at the time of which I am writing rather privately, expressed an appreciation of our principles, which a few years afterwards impelled him to pecuniary sacrifice and a course of conduct in Congress which deservedly placed him high on the list of the antislavery worthies.[C] All the large, influential ecclesiastical bodies in our country--the Presbyterian, the Episcopal, the Methodist, the Baptist--threw over the churches of their sects throughout the Southern States the shield of their consent to, if not their approval of, slaveholding; and, I grieve to add, the American Unitarian Association could not be induced to pronounce its condemnation of the tremendous sin, the sum of all iniquities.

Most religionists of every name, our own not excepted, insisted that slavery was a political institution, with which, as Christians, it would be inexpedient for us to meddle; and the politicians and merchants did all in their power to disseminate this view of the matter, and close the doors of the churches and the lips of the ministers against this “exciting subject.” I need not add they were too successful.

Most of the prominent statesmen, and all the political demagogues of both parties, took the ground that the great question as to the enslavement of the colored population of the South was _settled_ by the framers of the Constitution; that it was a matter to be left exclusively to the States in which slavery existed; that to meddle with it was to violate the provisions of the fundamental law of the land and loosen the bands of the Union. Therefore the Abolitionists were to be regarded as disturbers of the public peace, incendiaries, enemies of their country, traitors. And it was proclaimed by many in high authority, and shouted everywhere by the baser sort, “that the Abolitionists ought to be abolished,” by any means that should be found necessary. Thus outlawed, given up to the fury of the populace, we were subjected to abuses and outrages, of which I can give only a brief account.

We were slow to believe that our fellow-citizens of the New England States could be so besotted by the influence of the institution of slavery, that they would _outrage our persons_ in its defence. We had had proofs enough that “the gentlemen of property and standing,” “the wise and prudent,” with their dependants, had shut their ears against the truth, and turned away their eyes from the grievous wrongs we were imploring our country to redress. This treatment we had experienced, with increasing frequency, ever since the formation of the American Antislavery Society, in December, 1833. But we were unwilling to apprehend anything worse, certainly in Massachusetts. We trusted that our persons would be sacred, though we had learned that the liberty of speech and of the press was not.

Late in the fall of 1833 I delivered, in Boylston Hall, at the request of the New England Antislavery Society, a discourse “On the Principles and Purposes of the Abolitionists, and the Means by which they intended to subvert the Institution of Slavery.” The audience was large, and among my hearers I was delighted to see my good friend (afterwards Dr.) F. W. P. Greenwood, then one of the editors of the _Christian Examiner_. He remained after the meeting was over, and to my great joy said to me, “I have liked your discourse much. I wish everybody who is opposed to the antislavery reform could hear or read it. If you will prepare it as an article for the _Examiner_, I will publish it there.” Glad of this avenue to the minds and hearts of so many who I especially wished should understand and appreciate the work to which I had wholly committed myself, I set about converting my discourse into a review of our best antislavery publications, and making it, as a literary production, more worthy of a place in the chief periodical of our denomination. It was too late for the January number, 1834, so I aimed to have it in readiness for the March number. In due time I called at the office and inquired how soon my manuscript would be wanted. The publisher asked what was the subject of my article; and on learning that it was to be an explanation of the sentiments and purposes of the Abolitionists, he said, to my astonishment, with much emphasis, “We do not want it; it cannot be published.” “Why,” I said, “is not Mr. Greenwood one of the editors, and do not he and his colleague decide what shall be put into the _Examiner_?” “Generally they do,” he replied; “indeed, I never interfered before. But in this case I must and shall. The _Examiner_ is my property. It would be seriously damaged if an article favoring Abolition should appear in it. I should lose most of my subscribers in the slave, and many in the free States. And I cannot afford to make such a sacrifice.” But I rejoined, “Mr. Greenwood has heard all the essential parts of the article. He approved of it, thought it would do good, and requested me to prepare it for publication.” Mr. B. replied, with more earnestness than before, “Mr. May, it shall not be published. If I should find it all printed on the pages of the _Examiner_, just ready to be issued, I would suppress the number and publish another, with some other article in the place of yours.”

I hastened to Mr. Greenwood for redress. With evident mortification and sorrow he confessed his inability to do me justice. Nevertheless, in the July number, 1834, there was allowed to be published, on the 397th page, a paragraph, written by one of the Boston ministers, “for the special instruction of such ardent, but mistaken philanthropists among us as think they are justified, from their abhorrence of slavery, and their zeal for universal emancipation, to interfere with the constitutions of civil governments, or the personal rights of individuals.”

Having permitted such an assault to be made upon us in their pages, I could not doubt that the editors of the _Examiner_ would suffer me to be heard in defence. I therefore prepared carefully a respectful “letter” to them, trusting it would appear in their next number. But, to my surprise and serious displeasure, it was excluded. The letter was accordingly published in the _Liberator_, which, here let me say to its distinctive honor, always allowed the foes as well as the friends of freedom and humanity a place in its columns. And the editors of the _Examiner_, unsolicited, did me the favor, in their November number, 1834, page 282, to refer to my letter, commending its “eloquence and its good spirit, although circumstances obliged them to decline publishing it, and advising their readers to procure it and read it, and the documents to which it refers.” This evinced the willingness of those gentlemen to deal fairly, but showed that they were _in bondage_.