A Disease in the Public Mind

by Thomas Fleming

  Weld led a revolt that virtually emptied the seminary of students. Many of them became Weld’s collaborators in a campaign to awaken antislavery fervor in Ohio. Another large group transferred to Oberlin College, which was run by outspoken abolitionists and was already admitting blacks. Others flung themselves into educating and uplifting Cincinnati’s free blacks, who lived in a segregated “Little Africa” community.3

  From town to town Weld and his followers travelled, preaching their message of slavery’s sinfulness and the guilt that every American man and woman shared for this ongoing defiance of God’s will. They used the techniques of the revival meeting to stir emotions; they challenged their listeners to put themselves in the slave’s place, to imagine how he felt when he saw his wife lashed or raped by a sadistic owner, or his children sold to a slave trader who took them, shackled and forlorn, to Memphis or New Orleans. Garrison said similar things in The Liberator, but words on paper were pale lifeless things compared to the impact an impassioned Weld and his disciples achieved in person.

  Weld was the most indefatigable of these crusaders by far. He would arrive in a town, introduce himself to the local minister, and sometimes board with him and his family. Meanwhile he would rent a hall and preach day and night, as many as eighteen times in one place. He was not always welcome. More than once, he found himself the target of flung stones and pods of manure and mud. In Circleview, Ohio, a rock struck him in the head while he was preaching. Dazed but unfazed, he got up and finished the sermon. Most of the time, audiences succumbed to his call for action; when he departed a town, he usually left behind an antislavery society.

  The pace at which the Weld wing of the abolitionist movement grew under his leadership was phenomenal. In four years of campaigning, often to the point of physical and emotional collapse, he and his followers created 1,346 local antislavery societies, and they raised enough money to hire seventy full-time paid agents to continue the crusade. To appreciate this achievement, a comparison to the British antislavery campaign is instructive. At the climax of their forty-year struggle, they had only six paid agents.

  Energized by Weld, the American Anti-slavery Society also began distributing over a million publications—pamphlets, sermons, petitions to Congress and state legislatures—each year. These became the paper avalanche that deluged and infuriated Virginia.4

  One of the keys to Weld’s success was his almost mystical appeal to women. They sent him stories of dreams he had inspired, in which his stentorian voice and charismatic figure is mingled with the power of God. One woman told him he had moved her “like the quivering throb of a lacerated limb, the convulsive throb of a crushed bosom.” Women became the prime distributors of antislavery publications. They jammed Weld’s meetings, wept and cried out at his oratorical flights, and soon gave Weld the illusion that he was invincible. He told one man that he now thought slavery would be vanquished in five years.5

  “God’s terrors begin to blaze upon the guilty nation,” he told one fellow campaigner. “If repentance, speedy and deep and national, does not forestall Jehovah’s judgment . . . the voice of a brother’s blood crying from the ground will peal against the wrathful heavens and shake down ruin like a fig tree casteth her untimely fruit.”

  These apocalyptic words terrified and uplifted most of Weld’s listeners. But some people began asking tough questions. Most of Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and northern New York were in an abolitionist turmoil. But had all this excitement freed a single slave in the South?

  It began to dawn on many abolitionists that America was not and never would be England. No matter how many people they converted and how many antislavery petitions they generated, they had little or no impact on the politicians in the state and federal governments. Even more daunting was the realization that they were changing almost no minds in the South, where the power to free or not to free the slaves resided. For Weld, such doubts were troubling and his experience in northern New York further darkened these questions in his mind and heart.

  Weld was not welcomed in this turbulent section of the Empire State. He swiftly became “the most mobbed man in the United States.” Usually he demanded and got police protection. But at Troy, Weld collided with a hostile community—and public officials—not unlike those he would encounter if he ventured into the South. A mob shut down the church where he and an associate were planning to preach. The mayor of the city said things that encouraged the demonstrators. When Weld found another church that gave him its pulpit, the mob stormed into the place and tried to drag him into the street. It soon became apparent that if he so much as ventured outside his boarding house, he was going to be assaulted by rocks and epithets. His body became “one general painful bruise.”6

  In a letter to a Rhode Island believer who was urging him to quit Troy, Weld declared that every abolitionist had to find out if he were willing to “lie upon the rack” for the cause. But the mayor of Troy did not give him an opportunity to make this sacrifice. He told Weld to leave the city or he would use force to deport him.7

  This defeat inflicted a serious psychological wound on Weld. For a while, he continued to play a leadership role at the American Anti-Slavery Society. To energize their paid agents, they held a convention in New York and asked Weld to preside over it. For seventeen days in November and December of 1836, he did so with his usual vigor, meeting with these eager crusaders for eight hours every day and often toiling until three a.m. preparing his remarks for the following day. By the last session, his mighty voice had been reduced to a croak. No one realized that they would not hear Theodore Dwight Weld speak again for another decade.8

  • • •

  During the next years, Weld turned to a new role in the crusade. He became a writer and editor for the American Anti-Slavery Society and a resident of New York, where he fell in love with a remarkable woman, Angelina Grimké. She and her older sister, Sarah, were the daughters of a wealthy Charleston slave owner. They had decided slavery was evil, broken with their family and friends, and moved north. Angelina and her sister were also passionate advocates of women’s rights. When Angelina married Theodore in 1838, instead of the usual ceremonial words about love and obedience, she required a promise that he would always treat her as an equal.

  The Grimkés’ firsthand stories of the cruelties inflicted on slaves in South Carolina mesmerized Weld. For the first time he realized that he and other abolitionists had been contending with a general idea of slavery as wrong in principle. They devoted most of their speeches to what freedom could accomplish in a slave’s soul. They had little or no acquaintance with slavery as a day-to-day reality. Weld decided they needed a book that would prove slavery was wrong in practice. Day after day for the next six months, he and the Grimkés went through twenty thousand copies of southern newspapers, clipping stories that proved slavery’s almost daily cruelty.

  The Grimkés added to this collection their personal memories. Angelina told of talking to the female slave of a wealthy Charleston woman, who had been sent to the “treadmill” where disobedient or defiant slaves were flogged. The slave revealed gashes on her back so deep, Angelina said, “I might have laid my whole finger in them.” Another victim, a disobedient boy, had been whipped so ferociously he could barely walk. These were typical of the examples that filled the pages of Weld’s book, Slavery As It Is.

  In Weld’s introduction to the book, he urged each reader to sit as a juror and bring in “an honest verdict” on slavery and slave owners. When a reader finished the book, Weld was sure, he or she would no longer believe slave owners who claimed to treat their slaves as human beings. Here was proof that slaves’ “ears are often cut off, their eyes knocked out, their bones broken, their flesh branded with red hot irons; that they are maimed, mutilated and burned to death over slow fires; All these things and more, and worse, we shall prove.”

  Slavery As It Is was an instant publishing success. It sold a hundred thousand copies in its first year and continued to sell for another decade. B
ut it did not solve the personal problems that were troubling Theodore Weld—or the future of the stalled abolition movement. Not a few of Weld’s friends objected to the harsh tone of his book. Others accused him of worsening the threat of a civil war. The Grimkés’ relations in South Carolina considered the book a personal insult. One of Angelina’s sisters accused her of hastening their mother’s death.9

  Weld followed this book with a report on the impact of abolition in the British West Indies. He claimed that contrary to the dread inspired by Santo Domingo, emancipation had gone smoothly there. Subsequent developments would prove this was anything but the case. But it was undoubtedly true that the freed slaves had not turned on their ex-masters with machetes and muskets.

  • • •

  Over the next few years, Theodore Weld became dubious about abolitionism as a way of life. He was enormously disturbed by two scandals in the movement. One was the discovery that a leader in the Midwest had pilfered funds from Oberlin College. The evildoer had also seduced and impregnated a woman acquaintance, forced her to abort the child, and married another woman. Even more shocking was the revelation that the minister of an abolitionist church in Brooklyn had sexually abused at least ten young girls.

  Weld began to wonder whether abolitionism was the path to personal holiness and true contact with God. Compounding these doubts were angry clashes with abolitionists and their critics in many parts of the nation. A series of visits to Washington, DC, where Weld worked with antislavery members of the new Whig Party, added to his disillusionment. He saw firsthand the rage that abolitionism stirred in Southerners, who accused its proponents of being indifferent to—or even eager for—a slave insurrection and a race war in which thousands of women and children would be slaughtered. Was this the way to achieve God’s heaven on earth? Weld wondered.

  His doubts exploded in a speech Weld gave in 1844, “God’s Hinderances.” He asked his audience—and himself—a question: Could any person or group of persons hope to reform the American world in any fundamental way by calling slave owners vicious names? Were Christian charity and any hope of mutual respect being destroyed by abolitionism? Weld’s reply was a mournful yes, and he withdrew from the abolitionist crusade.10

  CHAPTER 12

  Abolitionism Divides and Conquers Itself

  While abolitionism lost its strongest voice with Theodore Weld’s withdrawal, the William Lloyd Garrison wing of the movement was undergoing its own upheavals. Much of the trouble was caused by the founder’s tendency to attack established churches for their lukewarm approach to antislavery and their continuing fondness for colonization. He also viewed with disapproval any antislavery society that was not pledged to his demand for immediate emancipation. When his followers won a vote in the 1840 annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, a large part of the membership seceded to form a separate society, opposed to this all-or-nothing approach.1

  New causes and beliefs further divided potential recruits. Many people became convinced that they did not need a church or a minister to discover God’s truth. Prayer and an intense reading of the Bible would guide them. This led to a bewildering variety of Christian faiths preached at camp meetings. Upstate New York was the home for many of these new beliefs. It soon acquired the nickname “The Burned Over District,” suggesting that many souls had caught fire so often, they no longer had the energy to deal with any cause in a systematic way.

  One of the most explosive ideas came from a lay preacher named William Miller. He grew convinced that Christ would return to earth and the world would end in the next few years, making abolitionism and other crusades irrelevant. Millerism swept New York and New England and even found roots in distant Britain. Various dates for Christ’s return were proposed by a veritable babble of Bible readers. Miller himself remained reluctant to specify a single day. Gradually, however, a consensus emerged that October 21, 1844, would be the day of the “Great Hope.”

  Some people sold their farms and gave away their money, convinced that only the poor in fact as well as in spirit would achieve salvation. On the appointed day, hundreds gathered on mountaintops in northern New York to welcome the Savior. When Jesus failed to appear, not a few people were unable to deal with the “Great Disappointment” and began wailing and babbling hysterically. In some towns angry mobs stormed the churches where the true believers had met, smashing and burning them. Occasionally the disenchanted wielded clubs and knives. In Toronto, Canada, the punishment was tar and feathers.2

  • • •

  Further confusing the abolitionist movement were the extreme doctrines Garrison began to embrace. He wondered aloud if people needed a government, which only seemed to corrupt them into passive tolerance of evils like slavery. One of his followers, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, began preaching not only no government, but also no organizations of any kind—a forerunner of the ideology of anarchism that would agitate the closing years of the nineteenth century. This was too much even for Garrison, and he silenced Rogers by seizing control of the newspaper he was publishing, Herald of Freedom.

  In the mid-1830s, the opposition to abolitionism both in the North and South became stronger when a mass of antislavery pamphlets mailed from Boston was discovered in the Charleston post office. Indignation swept the South, and Harrison Gray Otis was one of several prominent Bostonians who convened a mass meeting to “vindicate the fair name” of their city. The seventy-year-old Otis gave one of the most vehement speeches of his career, calling on respectable people to unite against the abolitionists, who were creating so much turmoil in the nation. Speaking as a man who knew many Southerners well, he predicted that if Garrison and his friends were not checked, they were going to start a devastating civil war, in which the South would fight to protect the safety of their women and children.3

  • • •

  Boston responded to Otis’s plea by coming very close to lynching William Lloyd Garrison. When the newspapers announced that Garrison had invited the English abolitionist George Thompson to the city, a mob poured into the streets to tell the Englishman to go home. Thompson fled, but the mob found Garrison and paraded him through the city with a rope around his neck. For a while it looked as if they were going to do him serious harm. But some friends joined local policemen who rescued the almost-victim and whisked him to the safety of the city jail.4

  Watching from the sidelines was a young Boston aristocrat named Wendell Phillips. Harvard educated, he had shared the low opinion most of the Boston establishment had toward Garrison. A combination of sympathy for the menaced reformer and disdain for the mostly lower class mob that attacked him worked a transformation in Phillips. From that day in 1835, he became an abolitionist with a taste for violent solutions. In a few years he was urging slaves to “at least try to cut your master’s throat.”5

  • • •

  In Alton, Illinois, a Presbyterian minister from Maine, Elijah Lovejoy, was daring to do something that Garrison and most abolitionist leaders had hitherto avoided: telling slave owners and proslavery Southerners to their faces that they were committing a terrible wrong by keeping blacks in bondage. This was dangerous work. Lovejoy had tried to publish his newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri. Angry mobs attacked his office and threw his press into the nearby Mississippi River not once but three times.

  Lovejoy moved across the river to Alton. Why he thought this transfer would improve his reception remains mysterious. Alton and the counties in its vicinity had been settled by Southerners. The atmosphere there was not much friendlier to abolitionism than in St. Louis. Alton’s city officials claimed they lacked the resources to protect Lovejoy. Instead they deputized the minister and his handful of supporters, authorizing them to defend their crusade with gunfire.

  Lovejoy bought a fourth printing press and again opened for business. It did not take long for a mob to gather. Lovejoy and his friends opened fire on them, the rioters fired back, and Lovejoy died with a half dozen bullets in his body.6

  William Lloyd Garrison d
ecided to make Lovejoy a martyr, although he severely disapproved of Lovejoy’s reliance on violence. He called on Boston to express its disapproval of the minister’s murder. On December 8, 1837, over five thousand Bostonians jammed Faneuil Hall. Some came to protest Lovejoy’s death, others to condemn abolitionism. The meeting was run by William Ellery Channing, a leading Boston churchman and outspoken foe of Garrison.

  The stated goal was a protest against the violation of Lovejoy’s civil rights—above all freedom of speech. The attorney general of Massachusetts, James T. Austin, set the tone when he condemned Lovejoy and his fellow abolitionists for trying to turn slaves loose on unoffending Southerners. Austin declared that the protestors were patriots, defending the American Union from the ruinous rupture that the abolitionists were hoping to achieve.

  Up sprang Wendell Phillips to tell Austin that he did not know what he was talking about. He insisted that Lovejoy was a martyr to America’s ideals, no different from the men who died in the Boston Massacre. A burst of applause made this a pivotal moment in the abolitionist crusade. A delighted Garrison pronounced the meeting “a signal triumph for our side.”

  Garrison still insisted that Lovejoy’s death with a gun in his hand disqualified him as a “Christian abolitionist.” With Theodore Weld on the sidelines, there is little doubt that if the abolitionist crusade had been left in Garrison’s hands, it would have remained a minority movement, out of touch with the mainstream of American politics. That probability was about to change, thanks to a most unlikely recruit.7

  CHAPTER 13

  Enter Old Man Eloquent

  Defeated for reelection in 1828, President John Quincy Adams was dismayed at the thought of going home to Massachusetts and turning into a replica of his embittered father, John Adams, whose defeat by Thomas Jefferson had stripped New England of its original dream of leading the American nation. In 1831 John Quincy decided to run for Congress and was easily elected. He soon found himself embroiled in the quarrel over slavery, an issue that he had done his best to avoid during his previous political career.