Chapter 16: the pioneer makes a new and startling departure.
When Garrison hoisted the banner of immediate emancipation he was over-confident of success through the instrumentality of the church. It did not enter his heart to conceive that after he had delivered his message touching the barbarism of slavery that a church calling itself Christian, or that a ministry arrogating to itself the character of the Christ, could possibly say him nay. But he learned sadly enough the utter folly of such expectations. For from pew and pulpit the first stones were hurled against him, and the most cruel and persistent opposition and persecution issued. Then as the movement which he had started advanced, he saw how it was, why the church had played him false and the cause of freedom. It was because the poison of slavery which the evil one had injected into the nation's arteries had corrupted the springs of justice and mercy in that body. The Church was not free, it, too, was in bonds to slavery, how then could it help to free the slaves? That was the reason that pulpit and pew cried out against him and persecuted him. It was not they but the slave despotism, which ruled them, which wrought its fell purpose within them. [307]If the reformer cast his eyes about him for other help it was the same; the slime of the serpent was upon State as well as Church. Both of the two great political parties were bound hands and feet, and given over to the will of the slave tyranny. In all departments of Government, State and National, the positive, all-powerful principle was slavery. Its dread nolo me tangere had forced Congress into the denial of the right of petition, and into the imposition of a gag upon its own freedom of debate. It was the grand President-maker, and the judiciary bent without a blush to do its service. What, then, in these circumstances could the friends of freedom hope to achieve? The nation had been caught in the snare of slavery, and was in Church and State helpless in the vast spider-like web of wrong. The more the reformer pondered the problem, the more hopeless did success look under a Constitution which united right and wrong, freedom and slavery. As his reflections deepened, the conviction forced its way into his mind that the Union was the strong tower of the slave-power, which could never be destroyed until the fortress which protected it was first utterly demolished. In the spring of 1842 the pioneer was prepared to strike into this new path to effect his purpose.
“ We must dissolve all connection with those murderers of fathers,” he wrote his brother-in-law, “and murderers of mothers, and murderers of liberty, and traffickers of human flesh, and blasphemers against the Almighty at the South. What have we in common with them? What have we gained? What have we not lost by our alliance with them? Are not their principles, their pursuits, their policies, their interests, [308] their designs, their feelings, utterly diverse from ours? Why, then, be subject to their dominion? Why not have the Union dissolved in form as it is in fact, especially if the form gives ample protection to the slave system, by securing for it all the physical force of the North? It is not treason against the cause of liberty to cry,” Down with every slave-holding Union! “Therefore, I raise that cry. And O that I had a voice louder than a thousand thunders, that it might shake the land and electrify the dead-the dead in sin, I mean-those slain by the hand of slavery.”
A few weeks later the first peal of this thunder broke upon the startled ears of the country through the columns of the Liberator. The May meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society was drawing near, and the reformer, now entirely ready to enter upon an agitation looking to the dissolution of the Union, suggested “the duty of making the repeal of the Union between the North and the South the grand rallying point until it be accomplished, or slavery cease to pollute our soil. We are for throwing all the means, energies, actions, purposes, and appliances of the genuine friends of liberty and republicanism into this one channel,” he goes on to announce, “and for measuring the humanity, patriotism, and piety of every man by this one standard. This question can no longer be avoided, and a right decision of it will settle the controversy between freedom and slavery.” The stern message of Isaiah to the Jews, beginning, “Hear the word of the Lord, ye scornful men that rule this people. Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death and with hell are [309] we at agreement,” seemed to the American Isaiah to describe exactly the character of the National Constitution. “Slavery is a combination of death and hell,” he declares, with righteous wrath, “and with it the North have made a covenant, and are at agreement. As an element of the Government it is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. As a component part of the Union, it is necessarily a national interest. Divorced from Northern protection, it dies; with that protection it enlarges its boundaries, multiplies its victims, and extends its ravages.”
The announcement of this new radicalism caused a sensation. Many genuine Garrisonian Abolitionists recoiled from a policy of disunion. Lydia Maria Child and James S. Gibbon of the Executive Committee of the National Society hastened to disavow for the society all responsibility for the disunion sentiment of the editor of the Liberator. His new departure seemed to them “foreign to the purpose for which it was organized.” Like all new ideas, it was a swordbearer, and proved a decided disturber of the peace. The Union-loving portion of the free States had never taken to the Abolition movement, for the reason that it tended to disturb the stability of their idol. But now the popular hatred of Abolitionism was intensified by the avowal of a distinct purpose on the part of its leader to labor for the separation of the sections. The press of the North made the most of this design to render altogether odious the small band of moral reformers, to reduce to a nullity their influence upon public opinion.
Notwithstanding its rejection by James Gibbons and Lydia Maria Child the new idea of the dissolution [310] of the Union, as an anti-slavery object, found instant favor with many of the leading Abolitionists, like Wendell Phillips, Edmund Quincy, Parker Pillsbury, Stephen S. Foster and Abby Kelley. At the anniversary meeting of the American Society in 1842, the subject was mooted, and, although there was no official action taken, yet it was apparent that a majority of the delegates were favorable to its adoption as the sentiment of the society.
The ultimate object of Garrison was the abolition of slavery. Disunion led directly to this goal, therefore he planted his feet in that way. But while he shot the agitation at a distant mark, he did not mean to miss less remote results. There was remarkable method in his madness. He agitated the question of the dissolution of the Union “in order that the people of the North might be induced to reflect upon their debasement, guilt, and danger in continuing in partnership with heaven-daring oppressors, and thus be led to repentance.”
The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at its annual meeting in January, 1843 “dissolved the Union,” wrote Quincy to R. D. Webb, “by a handsome vote, after a warm debate. The question was afterward reconsidered and passed in another shape, being wrapped up by Garrison in some of his favorite Old Testament Hebraisms by way of vehicle, as the apothecaries say.” This is the final shape which Garrison's “favorite Old Testament Hebraisms” gave to the action of the society:
“ Resolved, That the compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell-involving both parties [311] in atrocious criminality-and should be immediately annulled.”
At its tenth anniversary, in 1844, the American Society resolved likewise that there should be no Union with slaveholders; and in May of the same year the New England Society voted by a large majority to dissolve the “covenant with death, and the agreement with hell.” Almost the whole number of the Garrisonian Abolitionists had by this time placed upon their banner of immediate emancipation the revolutionary legend “No Union with slaveholders.” Cathago est delenda were now ever on the lips of the pioneer. “The Union it must and shall be destroyed” became the beginning, the middle, and the end of all his utterances on the slavery question.
The attitude of the anti-slavery disunionists to the Government which they were seeking to overthrow was clearly stated by Francis Jackson in a letter returning to the Governor of Massachusetts his commission as a justice of the peace. Says he, “To me it appears that the vices of slavery, introduced into the constitution of our body politic by a few slight punctures, has now so pervaded and poisoned the whole system of our National Government that literally there is no health in it. The only remedy that I can see for the disease is to be found in the dissolution of the patient. . . . Henceforth it (the Constitution) is dead to me, and I to it. I withdraw all profession of allegiance to it, and all my voluntary efforts to sustain it. The burdens that it lays upon me, while it is held up by others, I shall endeavor to bear patiently, yet acting with reference to a higher law, and distinctly declaring that, while I retain my [312] own liberty, I will be a party to no compact which helps to rob any other man of his.”
The Abolition agitation for the dissolution of the Union was assisted not a little by sundry occurrences of national importance. The increasing arrogance and violence of the South in Congress on all matters relating to the subject of slavery was one of these occurrences. Freedom of debate and the right of petition, Southern intolerance had rendered well nigh worthless in the National Legislature. In this way the North, during several months in every year, was forced to look at the reverse and the obverse faces of the Union. These object-lessons taught many minds, no doubt, to count the cost which the preservation of the Union entailed upon the free States-“to reflect upon their debasement, guilt, and danger” in their partnership with slaveholders. Another circumstance which induced to this kind of reflection was the case of George Latimer, who was seized as a fugitive slave in Boston in the autumn of 1842. From beginning to end the Latimer case revealed how completely had Massachusetts tied her own hands as a party to the original compact with slavery whose will was the supreme law of the land. In obedience to this supreme law Chief-Justice Shaw refused to the captive the writ of habeas corpus, and Judge Story granted the owner possession of the fugitive, and time to procure evidence of his ownership. But worse still Massachusetts officials and one of her jails were employed to aid in the return of a man to slavery. This degradation aroused the greatest indignation in the State and led to the enactment of a law prohibiting its officials from taking part in [313] the return of fugitive slaves, and the use of its jails and prisons for their detention. The passage of this personal liberty measure served to increase the activity of the anti-Union working forces in the South
Then, again, the serious difficulty between Massachusetts and two of the slave States in regard to their treatment of her colored seamen aided Garrison in his agitation for the dissolution of the Union by the keen sense of insult and injury which the trouble begat and left upon the popular mind. Colored men in Massachusetts enjoyed a fair degree of equality before her laws, were endowed with the right to vote, and were, barring the prejudice against color, treated by the commonwealth as citizens. They were employed in the merchant service of her interstate trade. But at two of the Southern ports where her vessels entered, the colored seamen were seized by the local police and confined in houses of detention until the vessels to which they belonged were ready to depart, when they were released and allowed to join the vessels. This was a most outrageous proceeding, outrageous to the colored men who were thus deprived of their liberty, outrageous also to the owners of the vessels who were deprived of the service of their employs. Of what avail was the constitutional guaranty that “the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States,” many men began to question? The South was evidently disposed to support only that portion of the national compact which sustained the slave system, all the rest upon occasion it trampled on and nullified. This lesson was enforced anew upon [314] Massachusetts by the affair of her colored seamen. Unable to obtain redress of the wrong done her citizens, the State appointed agents to go to Charleston and New Orleans and test the constitutionality of the State laws under which the local authorities had acted. But South Carolina and Louisiana, especially the former, to whom Samuel Hoar was accredited, evinced themselves quite equal to the exigency to which the presence of the Massachusetts agents gave rise. To cut a long story short, these gentlemen, honored citizens of a sister State, and covered with the aegis of the Constitution, found that they could make no success of the business which they had in hand, found indeed that as soon as that business was made public that they stood in imminent peril of their lives. Whereupon, wisely conceiving discretion to be the better part of valor, they beat a hasty retreat back to their native air. The Massachusetts agents were driven out of Charleston and New Orleans. Where was the sacred and glorious union between Massachusetts and South Carolina and Louisiana that such things were possible — were constantly occurring? The circumstance made a strong impression on the State whose rights were thus grossly violated. It helped to convert Massachusetts to its later opposition to slavery, and to make its public sentiment more tolerant of the Garrisonian opposition to the covenant with death and the agreement with hell.
To the agitation growing out of the scheme for the annexation of Texas must, however, be ascribed the premium among all the anti-Union working facts and forces of the first few years after Garrison and his coadjutors had raised the cry of “No union with [315] slaveholders.” This agitation renewed the intensity and sectionalism of the then almost forgotten struggle over the admission of Missouri nearly a quarter of a century before, and which was concluded by the Missouri compromise. This settlement was at the time considered quite satisfactory to the South. But Calhoun took an altogether different view of the matter twenty years later. The arrangement by which the South was excluded from the upper portion of the Louisiana Territory he came to regard as a cardinal blunder on the part of his section. The fact is that within those two decades the slave-holding had been completely outstripped by the non-slave-holding States in wealth, population, and social growth. The latter had obtained over the former States an indisputable supremacy in those respects. Would not the political balance settle also in the natural order of things in the Northern half of the Union unless it could be kept where it then was to the south of Mason and Dixon's line by an artificial political make-weight. This artificial political make-weight was nothing less than the acquisition of new slave territory to supply the demand for new slave States. Texas, with the territorial dimensions of an empire, answered the agrarian needs of the slave system. And the South, under the leadership of Calhoun, determined to make good their fancied loss in the settlement of the Missouri controversy by annexing Texas.
But all the smouldering dread of slave domination, all the passionate opposition to the extension of slavery, to the acquisition of new slave territory and the admission of new slave States, awoke hotly in the heart of the North. “No more slave territory.” [316] “No more slave States,” resounded during this crisis, through the free States. “Texas or disunion,” was the counter cry which reverberated through the slave States. Even Dr. Channing, who had no love for Garrison or his anti-slavery ultraism, was so wrought upon by the scheme for the annexation of Texas as to profess his preference for the dissolution of the Union, “rather than receive Texas into the Confederacy.” “This measure, besides entailing on us evils of all sorts,” the doctor boldly pointed out, “would have for its chief end to bring the whole country under the slave-power, to make the general Government the agent of slavery; and this we are bound to resist at all hazards. The free States should declare that the very act of admitting Texas will be construed as a dissolution of the Union.”
The Northern blood was at fever heat, and an unwonted defiance of consequences, a fierce contempt of ancient political bugaboos marked the utterances of men erstwhile timid of speech upon all questions relating to slavery. In the anti-Texas convention held in Faneuil Hall January 29, 1845, all this timidity disappeared in the presence of the new peril. It was not a convention of Abolitionists, although Garrison was a member, but of politicians, mostly of the Whig party. “The anti-slavery spirit of the convention,” wrote Edmund Quincy to R. D. Webb, “was surprising. The address and the speeches of the gentlemen, not Abolitionists, were such as caused Garrison to be mobbed ten years ago, and such as we thought thorough three or four years ago. There were no qualifications, or excuses, or twaddle.”
Garrison flung himself into the anti-Texas movement [317] with all his customary force and fire. Elected a delegate to the Faneuil Hall Convention by the influence of Francis Jackson, he took a leading part in its proceedings, “created the most stir in the whole matter,” Wendell Phillips thought. Charles Sumner, who heard him speak for the first time, was struck with his “natural eloquence,” and described his words as falling “in fiery rain.” Again at a mass meeting for Middlesex County, held at Concord, to consider the aggressions of the slave-power, did the words of the pioneer fall “in fiery rain.” Apprehensive that the performance of Massachusetts, when the emergency arose, would fall far short of her protestations, he exclaimed,
I have nothing to say, sir, nothing. I am tired of words, tired of hearing strong things said, where there is no heart to carry them out. When we are prepared to state the whole truth, and die for it, if necessary-when, like our fathers, we are prepared to take our ground, and not shrink from it, counting not our lives dear unto us-when we are prepared to let all earthly hopes go back to the board-then let us say so; till then, the less we say the better, in such an emergency as this. “But who are we,” will men ask, “ that talk of such things?” “Are we enough to make a revolution?” No, sir; but we are enough to begin one, and, once begun, it never can be turned back. I am for revolution were I utterly alone. I am there because I must be there. I must cleave to the right. I cannot choose but obey the voice of God.
.. . Do not tell me of our past Union, and for how many years we have been one. We were only one while we were ready to hunt, shoot down, and [318] deliver up the slave, and allow the slave-power to form an oligarchy on the floor of Congress! The moment we say no to this, the Union ceases-the Government falls.
The Texan struggle terminated in the usual way, in the triumph of the slave-power. Texas was annexed and admitted into the sisterhood of States, giving to the Southern section increased slave representation in both branches of Congress, and thereby aiding to fasten, what at the moment appeared to be its permanent domination in national affairs. As Garrison had apprehended, the performance of the North fell far short of its protestations when the crisis came. It swallowed all its brave words, and collapsed into feeble and disheartened submission to its jubilant and hitherto invincible antagonist. The whole North except the small and irrepressible band of Garrisonian Abolitionists were cast down by the revulsive wave of this disastrous event. Writing to his friend Webb, Garrison discourses thus upon the great defeat: “Apparently the slave-holding power has never been so strong, has never seemed to be so invincible, has never held such complete mastery over the whole, has never so sucessfully hurled defiance at the Eternal and Just One, as at the present time; and yet never has it in reality been so weak, never has it had so many uncompromising assailants, never has it been so filled with doubt and consternation, never has it been so near its downfall, as at this moment. Upon the face of it, this statement looks absurdly paradoxical; but it is true, nevertheless. We are groping in thick darkness; but it is that darkest hour which is said to precede the dawn of day.”
