Over three thousand Philadelphia blacks convened a protest meeting against the ACS. Speakers condemned Henry Clay’s view that free people of color were “a dangerous and useless part of the community.” Even stronger was their declaration that they would “never . . . separate ourselves voluntarily from the slave population of this country; they are our brethren by the ties of consanguinity, of suffering and of wrongs.” The meeting convinced James Forten that colonization was a bad idea.
At one point, hoping to change his mind, the ACS offered to make Forten president of the proposed nation of Liberia. Forten replied that he would rather remain “a sail maker in Philadelphia than enjoy the highest offices” of Liberia. Once and for all, the United States had to understand that blacks were Americans too. “Here we were born, here we will live, here we will die.”14
This opposition of the free blacks inflicted a serious wound on the ACS, but it would struggle on for decades, eventually founding Liberia and helping it become an independent nation. Native Africans did not welcome the Americans, and several times warfare broke out between the two groups. By 1830, fewer than 1,500 American blacks had chosen Liberia. Shocking numbers of the immigrants died of tropical diseases. But the ACS continued to receive strong support from clergymen, Quakers, and other idealists.
• • •
In 1819, Missouri applied for admission to the Union as a state that permitted slavery. Two other states with the same policy had already joined the growing Union: Mississippi and Alabama. They had been balanced by the admission of Illinois and Indiana, states without slavery, thanks to the Northwest Ordinance. Missouri would tip the balance in a proslavery direction, but no one thought this mattered at first. There were vast stretches of the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi waiting for settlement by Northerners. Leaders of the House of Representatives began preparing a routine enabling act, as they had done for the previous new states.
On February 13, 1819, while the act was being discussed, Congressman James Tallmadge of Poughkeepsie, New York, proposed two amendments. The first would bar the entrance of any more slaves into Missouri; the second would emancipate slave children born after the state joined the Union when they reached the age of twenty-five. Tallmadge based his reasoning on the Northwest Ordinance. Most of Missouri lay north of a line that extended west from the Ohio River.
A startling number of congressmen, many from New England, backed the proposal. Henry Clay and other Southerners attacked it as unconstitutional. The Northerners added injury to insult by winning a vote that passed the enabling act with Tallmadge’s amendments. The Senate eliminated the amendments and sent the bill back to the House, which refused its approval. Congress adjourned with Missouri unadmitted, and the two sides prepared to renew their combat in the next session.
In December 1819, with the galleries packed, Congress reconvened, and it swiftly became evident that no minds had changed. A virulent debate exploded in the Senate. On the proslavery side was William Pinckney of Maryland, a quintessential southern gentleman who wore ruffled shirts and gloves, as if he wished to avoid dirtying his elegant hands with the opposition’s arguments. He decried the idea that the federal government could interfere with slavery.
The leader of the antislavery battalion was Senator Rufus King of New York, a transplanted New Englander who condemned slavery as a loathsome violation of the Declaration of Independence’s call for universal equality. “No human law, compact or compromise can establish or continue slavery,” King insisted. “Such a law was contrary to the law of nature, which is the law of God.”
The antislavery senators lost a roll call vote, but one of their group, Senator John Thomas from the new state of Illinois, submitted a resolution to bar slavery from all states north of 36 degrees 30 minutes north latitude—the line that ran west from the Ohio River. The amendment passed and the bill went to the House, where galleries were again packed and the debate made the Senate’s clashes seem decorous. John Randolph spoke for four full days, repeatedly declaring slavery exempt from any and all federal regulation.
Sessions became all-night marathons. One exhausted congressman toppled to the floor, but his colleagues returned to their orating after he was carried out. Extremists on both sides took all-or-nothing positions. Finally, House Speaker Henry Clay of Kentucky brokered a compromise, which admitted Missouri and approved the Thomas amendment, thanks to a new provision. Maine had separated from Massachusetts and was applying for admission as a free state. This restored the balance of slave and free states and mollified the antislavery Northerners.
President Monroe signed the bill, and everyone hoped sectional peace had been restored. But a few months later, Missouri presented Congress with its constitution. Obviously the work of canny lawyers, the charter forbade the Missouri legislature to interfere with slavery, apparently making bondage perpetual within the Show-Me state’s borders. It also barred free African Americans from emigrating there, and emancipated slaves were required to leave the state.
Outrage was the order of the day among the northern members of Congress, and another six weeks of virulent debate shook the walls of the capitol. Again Henry Clay brokered a compromise. A joint House-Senate committee agreed to admit Missouri if the state agreed “to respect the rights of all citizens of the United States.” The weary legislators did not give too much thought to what those words would mean in practice. Missouri was admitted and everyone went home to see if anything was left of the era of good feelings.15
• • •
Few followed this war of words with more intensity than the aging master of Monticello. From his mountaintop mansion, a distraught Thomas Jefferson saw the uproar as an impending disaster. “In the gloomiest moments of the Revolutionary War,” he wrote in 1820, “I never had any apprehensions equal to what I feel from this source.” He was especially disturbed to see New Englanders leading the antislavery forces in Congress. He accused them—including transplanted Yankees such as King and Senator Thomas of Illinois—of “taking advantage of the virtuous feelings of the people against slavery to effect a division of parties by a geographical line. They expect this will insure them . . . the majority they could never obtain on the principles of Federalism.”
Jefferson feared that the old conflict between Federalists and Republicans would be fanaticized by this sectionalism. “The coincidence of a marked principle, [both] moral and political . . . would never more be obliterated from the [public] mind . . . it would be recurring on every occasion until it would kindle such mutual and mortal hatred as to render secession preferable to eternal discord.” The triumph of the Republican Party in 1800—and the nation’s near-miraculous victory in the War of 1812—had made him “among the most sanguine in believing that our union would be of long duration. I now doubt it very much.” For Jefferson the Missouri Compromise was “like a fire bell in the night, signaling the death knell of the Union.”
Jefferson was convinced that the antislavery men were politically motivated, but he admitted that some were no doubt honestly deluded by their moral detestation of slavery. As a Southerner who had publicly condemned the institution many times, Jefferson wondered why “they are wasting jeremiads [lamentations] on the miseries of the slave as if we were advocates of it.” Personally, he would willingly surrender all his “property” in slaves “if a scheme of emancipation and expatriation could be effected. . . . But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.”
The nightmare memory of Saint-Domingue’s (now Haiti’s) race war was obviously still haunting Jefferson. “Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?” he asked one of his favorite correspondents, ex-President John Adams. If the antislavery restrictionists were right, and Congress could regulate slavery in the new states, it could also declare all slaves free in current states. “In which case,” he told another correspondent, “all the whites south of the Potomac and the Ohio must evacuate their states, and most fortunate will be those who ca
n do it first.”16
The more Jefferson thought about the Missouri debates, the more unhappy he became. Restricting the spread of slavery would not free a single human being. It was pseudo morality, a feel-good policy motivated more by hatred of southern whites than by concern for the slaves. He now thought it was far better to spread slavery over the widest possible geographical area. This would lighten the burden of future liberation “by bringing a greater number of shoulders under it.”
Here was irony: the original sponsor of the Northwest Ordinance was now repudiating the idea of barring slavery in new states. Jefferson probably changed his mind after a discussion with his right-hand man, James Madison. He was the one with the analytical mind, as he repeatedly displayed throughout his remarkable career. Madison was now convinced that “diffusion” was the best hope of future emancipation. Thus far, the states that had abolished slavery had a relative scarcity of blacks in their population.
The thinking of another Virginian, St. George Tucker, a professor of law at the College of William and Mary, strongly influenced both men. In the aftermath of the Haitian bloodbath, Tucker concluded that the “density” of a slave population was intimately connected with the likelihood of insurrections. The numerous revolts in the West Indies, where the white-black imbalance frequently approached that of Saint-Domingue, was additional evidence supporting this conclusion.
Madison saw two routes to diffusion. One was the spread of slavery into new states; the other was an “external asylum for the colored race” beyond America’s borders. For the moment, he was placing his hopes in the hands of the American Colonization Society. He recognized it was a weak reed, even though he became its president in the 1830s. At one point he asked some of his slaves whether they would consider going to Liberia, if he freed them. All expressed terror, even horror, at the idea.17
It was rapidly becoming evident that Africa was not the answer. Its unpopularity and the steady growth in the numbers of the southern slave population made it more and more obvious. That made diffusion into new states even more important. But the uproar over Missouri signaled that this would be difficult—perhaps impossible.
• • •
In 1822, South Carolina had almost as many blacks as whites in its population. A small minority of blacks were free; the vast majority were slaves. In 1799, a slave named Denmark Vesey paid six dollars for a ticket in the state lottery and won $1,500. He bought his freedom and became a carpenter. In his youth, he had served as a cabin boy aboard a ship captained by Joseph Vesey, which regularly sailed between Saint-Dominque and Charleston. The captain had sold him to a plantation owner on the island, but the buyer had demanded his money back, complaining that Denmark was subject to fits. Captain Vesey had made the young man a house servant in Charleston until Denmark won his freedom.
Vesey was an avid reader of the Bible and a member of Charleston’s African Methodist Episcopal Church. The church had links to a black church of the same faith in Philadelphia, which often called for an end to slavery. Nervous Charleston officials had closed the local church in 1818. Vesey reportedly had become very angry about this decision. His anger was further fueled by coming across a pamphlet containing the antislavery speeches that Senator Rufus King had made during the controversy over Missouri.
Next, Vesey heard from one of the many black seamen who visited Charleston that Haiti had a new president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, who wanted American blacks to settle in his country and would pay their transportation costs. About six thousand blacks, many from Philadelphia, accepted this offer—four times as many as the American Colonization Society had been able to entice to Africa. Vesey wrote a letter to President Boyer, expressing interest in his invitation.
Meanwhile, Vesey began meeting secretly with several men who responded to his proposal that they seize the Charleston arsenal, arm their fellow blacks, slave and free, and kill all the whites. They would then set the city afire, seize a ship or ships, and sail to Haiti. They found hundreds of the city’s blacks, some of them artisans, others seemingly devoted house servants, who were ready to join them. Soon messengers had enticed field hands on the plantations near Charleston into the plan. They promised to kill their masters and race into the city to guarantee that the whites were quickly overwhelmed.
The eruption was scheduled for July 14—Bastille Day, which was evidence that Vesey was well acquainted with the French Revolution and its influence in Haiti. Vesey told his followers “not to spare one white skin alive, as this was the plan they pursued in Santo Domingo.”
As the climactic day approached, two blacks who had been invited to join the insurrection informed Charleston’s mayor and other city authorities of the plot. Armed militia swiftly filled the streets and rounded up Vesey and his leading confederates. Ultimately, over 131 men were tried; 25 were sentenced to be hanged. The rest were shipped to the brutal slavery of the British West Indies sugar cane fields.
The shock waves generated by the size and murderous intent of Denmark Vesey’s revolt sent shudders through the slave owners of the South. It validated everything they thought and imagined when they heard the words “Santo Domingo.”18
CHAPTER 8
How Not to Abolish Slavery
On January 1, 1831, an unusual newspaper appeared in Boston. On the front page were four columns of dense type, topped by block capital letters that proclaimed its identity: THE LIBERATOR. Beneath it were the names of the publishers, William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp. On the next line was a motto: “OUR COUNTRY IS THE WORLD—OUR COUNTRYMEN MANKIND.”
At the top of the first column, “Wm L. Garrison” identified himself as the editor. Below his name was a poem:
To date my being from the opening year
I come, a stranger in this busy sphere
Where some I meet perchance may pause and ask,
What is my name, my purpose, or my task?
My name is “LIBERATOR”! I propose
To hurl my shafts at freedom’s deadliest foes!
My task is hard—for I am charged to save
Man from his brother—to redeem the slave!
The next ten stanzas urged the reader to feel sympathy for the suffering slave. “Art thou a parent?” How would you feel if someone sold your children? “Art thou a brother?” What would you feel if your sister were abused by a slave owner? “Art thou a sister?” How would you feel if you saw your brother shackled in chains? “Art thou a lover?” What would you do if your beloved was torn from your arms? Finally came an appeal:
Aid me, New England, ’tis my hope in you
Which gives me strength my purpose to pursue!
Do you now hear your sister States respond?
With Afric’s cries to have her sons unbound?
In the second column, Garrison made his approach to slavery very clear—along with his belief in New England’s moral superiority. He had explored publishing The Liberator in Washington, DC, but his efforts were “palsied by public indifference.” The experience convinced him that America needed “a revolution in public sentiment.” He had selected Boston for his home base because here he could “lift up the standard of emancipation in the eyes of the nation within sight of Bunker Hill and in the birth place of liberty.”
Then came words that made The Liberator explosive: “I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population.” Immediate emancipation with the right to vote. Garrison was rejecting the ideas of almost everyone who had struggled to find a peaceful solution to slavery, above all Thomas Jefferson.
Many people had already objected to “the severity of my language,” Garrison continued on The Liberator’s first page. He had been denouncing slavery in speeches and newspaper essays in Boston and other cities for more than two years. His answer to these critics was, “Is there not cause for severity?” Grimly he declared, “I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to speak, or write, with moderation.” Would you tell a man “to
moderately rescue his wife from the hands of a ravisher? . . . I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.” This comparison of slavery to rape would become one of his favorite themes.
Adding to the confrontational tone was Garrison’s warning that unless slavery was abolished peacefully, there would be a resort to “the sword.” This was all too clear in a poem he published in the first issue:
Though distant to the hour, yet come it must—
Oh hasten it, in mercy, righteous heaven!
When Afric’s sons, uprising from the dust,
Shall stand erect—their galling fetters riven. . . .
Wo, if it comes with storm, and blood, and fire
When midnight darkness veils the earth and sky!
Wo to the innocent babe—the guilty sire—
Stranger and citizen alike shall die!
Red-handed Slaughter his revenge shall feed,
And havoc yell his ominous death-cry.
This grisly portrait was followed by a declaration that the editor of The Liberator opposed all forms of violence, and sincerely hoped that slavery could be abolished peacefully. The tone, the vocabulary, the attitude that preceded this claim virtually refuted it on the page. This did not mean that William Lloyd Garrison was a hypocrite. He was convinced that immediate abolition was the right policy because God had told him it was. He was equally convinced that God had inspired him to portray slavery as rape, and slaveholders as brutal barbarians.
From the start, some readers saw the fatal flaw in Garrison’s approach. Francis Wayland, the president of Brown University, warned him that his “menacing and vindictive attitude toward slaveholders prejudiced their minds against a cool discussion of the subject.” He reminded Garrison of the importance of preserving harmony in the Union. Another critic, a newspaper editor and erstwhile Garrison friend, suggested he could and should be indicted for sedition. Garrison asked him if he would have the same opinion if he were a whipped and branded slave.
A Disease in the Public Mind Page 11