Читать книгу The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences - Hilary A. Herbert - Страница 9

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In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, English, and American vessels brought many thousands of negroes from Africa, and sold them as slaves in the British West Indies and in the British-American colonies. William Goodell, a distinguished Abolitionist writer, tells us[7] that "in the importation of slaves for the Southern colonies the merchants of New England competed with those of New York and the South" (which never had much shipping). "They appear indeed to have outstripped them, and to have almost monopolized at one time the profits of this detestable trade. Boston, Salem, and Newburyport in Massachusetts, and Newport and Bristol in Rhode Island, amassed, in the persons of a few of their citizens, vast sums of this rapidly acquired and ill-gotten wealth."[7]

The slaves coming to America went chiefly to the Southern colonies, because there only was slave labor profitable. The laws and conditions under which these negroes were sold in the American colonies were precisely the same as in the West Indies, except that the whites in the islands, so far as is known, never objected, whereas the records show that earnest protests came from Virginia[8] and also from Georgia[9] and North Carolina.[10] The King of England was interested in the profits of the iniquitous trade and all protests were in vain.

Of the rightfulness, however, of slavery itself there was but little question in the minds of Christian peoples until the closing years of the eighteenth century. Then the cruelties practised by ship-masters in the Middle Passage attracted attention, and then came gradually a revolution in public opinion. This revolution, in which the churches took a prominent part, originated in England, but it soon swept over America also, both North and South.

England abolished the slave trade in 1807. The United States followed in 1808; the Netherlands in 1814; France in 1818; Spain in 1820; Portugal in 1830. The great Wilberforce, Buxton, and others, who had brought about the abolition of the slave trade in England, continued their exertions in favor of the slave until finally, in 1833, Parliament abolished slavery in the British West Indies, appropriating twenty millions sterling ($100,000,000) as compensation to owners—this because investments in slave property had been made under the sanction of existing law.

"Great Britain, loaded with an unprecedented debt and with a grinding taxation, contracted a new debt of a hundred millions of dollars to give freedom, not to Englishmen, but to the degraded African. This was not an act of policy, but the work of statesmen. Parliament but registered the edict of the people. The English nation, with one heart and one voice, under a strong Christian impulse and without distinction of rank, sex, party, or religious names, decreed freedom to the slave. I know not that history records a national act so disinterested, so sublime."

So wrote Dr. Channing, the great New England pulpit orator, in his celebrated letter on Texas annexation, to Henry Clay, in 1837.

While the rightfulness of slavery was being discussed in England, the American conscience had also been aroused, and emancipation was making progress on this side of the water.

Emancipation was an easy task in the Northern States, where slaves were few, their labor never having been profitable, and by 1804 the last of these States had provided for the ultimate abolition of slavery within its borders. But the problem was more difficult in the Southern States, where the climate was adapted to slave labor. There slaves were numerous, and slavery was interwoven, economically and socially, with the very fabric of existence. Naturally, it occurred to thoughtful men that there ought to be some such solution as that which was subsequently adopted in England, and which, as we have seen, was so highly extolled by Dr. Channing—emancipation of the slaves with compensation to the owners by the general government. The difficulty in our country was that the Federal Constitution conferred upon the Federal Government no power over slavery in the States—no power to emancipate slaves or compensate owners; and that for the individual States where the negroes were numerous the problem seemed too big. Free negroes and whites in great numbers, it was thought, could not live together. To get rid of the negroes, if they should be freed, was for the States a very serious, if not an unsurmountable task.

On the seventeenth of January, 1824, the following resolutions, proposed as a solution of the problem, were passed by the legislature of Ohio:[11]

Resolved, That the consideration of a system providing for the gradual emancipation of the people of color, held in servitude in the United States, be recommended to the legislatures of the several States of the American Union, and to the Congress of the United States.

Resolved, That, in the opinion of the general assembly, a system of foreign colonization, with correspondent measures, might be adopted that would in due time effect the entire emancipation of the slaves of our country without any violation of the national compact, or infringement of the rights of individuals; by the passage of a law by the general government (with the consent of the slave-holding States) which would provide that all children of persons now held in slavery, born after the passage of the law, should be free at the age of twenty-one years (being supported during their minority by the persons claiming the service of their parents), provided they then consent to be transported to the intended place of colonization. Also:

Resolved, That it is expedient that such a system should be predicated upon the principle that the evil of slavery is a national one, and that the people and the States of the Union ought mutually to participate in the duties and burthens of removing it.

Resolved, That His Excellency the Governor be requested to forward a copy of the foregoing resolutions to His Excellency the Governor of each of the United States, requesting him to lay the same before the legislature thereof; and that His Excellency will also forward a like copy to each of our senators and representatives in Congress, requesting their co-operation in all national measures having a tendency to effect the grave object embraced therein.

By June of 1825 eight other Northern States had endorsed the proposition, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, Massachusetts. Six of the slave-holding States emphatically disapproved of the suggestion, viz., Georgia, South Carolina, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama.[12]

Reasons which in great part influenced all the Southern States thus rejecting the proposition may be gathered from the following words of Governor Wilson, of South Carolina, in submitting the resolutions: "A firm determination to resist, at the threshold, every invasion of our domestic tranquillity, and to preserve our sovereignty and independence as a State, is earnestly recommended."[13]

The resolutions required of the Southern States a complete surrender in this regard of their reserved rights; they feared what Governor Wilson called "the overwhelming powers of the general government," and were unwilling to make the admission required, that the slavery in the South was a question for the nation.

Another reason was that, although there was a quite common desire in the Southern States to get rid of slavery, the majority sentiment doubtless was not yet ready for the step.

Basing this plan on the "consent of the slave-holding States," as the Ohio legislature did, was an acknowledgment that the North had no power over the matter; while the proposition to share in the expense of transporting the negroes, after they were manumitted, seems to be a recognition of the joint responsibility of both sections for the existence of slavery in the South. However that may be, the generous concurrence of nine of the thirteen Northern States indicates how kindly the temper of the North toward the South was before the rise of the "New Abolitionism" in 1831. Had emancipation been, under the Federal Constitution, a national and not a local question, it is possible that slavery might have been abolished in America, as it was in the mother country, peacefully and with compensation to owners.

The Ohio idea of freeing and at the same time colonizing the slaves, was no doubt suggested by the scheme of the African Colonization Society. This Colonization Society grew out of a resolution passed by the General Assembly of Virginia, December 23, 1816. Its purpose was to rid the country of such free negroes and subsequently manumitted slaves as should be willing to go to Liberia, where a home was secured for them, and a government set up that was to be eventually controlled by the negro from America. The plan was endorsed by Georgia in 1817, Maryland in 1818, Tennessee in 1818, and Vermont in 1819.[14]

The Colonization Society was composed of Southern and Northern philanthropists and statesmen of the most exalted character. Among its presidents were, at times, President Monroe and ex-President Madison. Chief Justice Marshall was one of its presidents. Colonization, while relieving America, was also to give the negro an opportunity for self-government and self-development in his native country, aided at the outset by experienced white men, and Abraham Lincoln, when he was eulogizing the dead Henry Clay, one of the eloquent advocates of the scheme, seemed to be in love with the idea of restoring the poor African to that land from which he had been rudely snatched by the rapacious white man. The society, with much aid from philanthropists and some from the Federal Government, was making progress when, from 1831 to 1835, the Abolitionists halted it.[15] They got the ears of the negro and persuaded him not to go to Liberia. Its friends thought the enterprise would stimulate emancipation by furnishing a home for such negroes as their owners were willing to manumit; but the new friends of the negro told him it was a trick of the slave-holder, and intended to perpetuate slavery—it was banishment. And Dr. Hart now, in his "Abolition and Slavery," calls it a move for the "expatriation of the negro."

All together only a few thousand negroes went to Liberia. The enterprise lagged, and finally failed, partly because of opposition, but chiefly because the negroes were slothful and incapable of self-government. The word came back that they were not prospering. For a time, while white men were helping them in their government, the outlook for Liberia had more or less promise in it. When the whites, to give the negroes their opportunity for self-development withdrew their case was hopeless.[16]

In 1828, while emancipation was still being freely canvassed North and South, Benjamin Lundy, an Abolition editor in charge of The Genius of Emancipation, then being published at Baltimore, in a slave State, went to Boston to "stir up" the Northern people "to the work of abolishing slavery in the South." Dr. Channing, who has been previously quoted, wrote a letter to Daniel Webster on the 28th of May, 1828, in which, after reciting the purpose of Lundy, and saying that he was "aware how cautiously exertions are to be made for it in this part of the country," it being a local question, he said: "It seems to me that, before moving in this matter, we ought to say to them (our Southern brethren) distinctly, 'We consider slavery as your calamity, not your crime, and we will share with you the burden of putting an end to it. We will consent that the public lands shall be appropriated to this object; or that the general government shall be clothed with the power to apply a portion of revenue to it.'

"I throw out these suggestions merely to illustrate my views. We must first let the Southern States see that we are their friends in this affair; that we sympathize with them and, from principles of patriotism and philanthropy, are willing to share the toil and expense of abolishing slavery, or, I fear, our interference will avail nothing."[17] Mr. Webster never gave out this letter until February 15, 1851.[18]

In less than three years after that letter was written, Lundy's friend, William Lloyd Garrison, started in Boston a crusade against slavery in the South, on the ground that instead of being the "calamity," as Dr. Channing deemed it to be, it was the "crime" of the South. Had no such exasperating sectional cry as this ever been raised, the story told in this little book would have been very different from that which is to follow. Even Spain, the laggard of nations, since that day has abolished slavery in her colonies. Brazil long ago fell into line, and it is impossible for one not blinded by the sectional strife of the past, now to conceive that the Southern States of this Union, whose people in 1830 were among the foremost of the world in all the elements of Christian civilization, would not long, long ago, if left to themselves, have found some means by which to rid themselves of an institution condemned by the public sentiment of the world and even then deplored by the Southerners themselves.

The crime, if crime it was, of slavery in the South in 1830 was one for which the two sections of the Union were equally to blame. Abraham Lincoln said in his debate with Douglas at Peoria, Illinois, October 15, 1858: "When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely do not blame them for not doing what I would not know how to do myself."[19]

Prior to the rise of the Abolitionists in 1831, emancipationists in the South had been free to grapple with conditions as they found them. What they and what the people of the North had accomplished we may gather from the United States census reports. The tables following are taken from "Larned's History of Ready Reference," vol. V. The classifications are his. We have numbered three of his tables, for the sake of reference, and have added columns 4 and 5, calculated from Larned's figures, to show "excess of free blacks" and "increase of free blacks, South."

Let the reader assume as a fact, which will perhaps not be questioned, that "free blacks" in the census means freedmen and their increase, and these tables tell their own story, a story to which must be added the statement that slaves in the South had been freed only by voluntary sacrifices of owners.

It will be noted that in 1790 the total "blacks" in the North was 67,479, and, although emancipation in these States had begun some years before, the excess of "free blacks" in the South was over 5,000. Also that at every succeeding census, down to and including that of 1830, the "excess of free blacks" increased with considerable regularity until 1830, when that excess is 44,547.