1831

by Louis P. Masur

  Randolph’s proposal, however, was not the thing to be done. Calling it “nauseous to the palate,” Brodnax denounced it for violating the three axioms that had to be met in considering any plan for abolition: “That no emancipation of slaves should ever be tolerated, unaccompanied by their immediate removal from among us; that no system should be introduced which is calculated to interfere with, or weaken the security of private property, or affect its value;—and, that not a single slave or any other property he possesses, should be taken from its owner, without his own consent, or an ample compensation for its value.”

  Brodnax, an ardent colonizationist, was willing to support emancipation provided that the state expelled all the slaves and that the slaveholders did not suffer financially. In reality, there was not much difference between Gholson, a slaveholder who defended the institution, and Brodnax, one who questioned it. It was easy to call slavery an evil and then refuse to pay a price to eliminate that evil. Brodnax suggested that legislators forget about the enslaved until they first demonstrated they could do something about the free black population. Before the state could deal with over 450,000 slaves, it must first show it could remove nearly fifty thousand free blacks. Brodnax argued that free blacks had an injurious influence on the slave population and played an indirect role in “fomenting conspiracies and insurrections.” He recommended targeting six thousand per year for colonization in Liberia. Acquiring Texas and making it an independent black state (“a sable nation”) had been discussed, but such a plan would prove unpalatable to the bordering slaveholding states to the east. Rather, Brodnax thought it imperative to restore “these people to the region in which nature had planted them, and to whose climates she had fitted their constitution.” The colonization of all the free blacks would be accomplished in less than a decade, paid for by state taxation and by monies rightfully received from the federal government “without the slightest violation of those strict State Right principles which distinguish our Virginia political school.”56

  Thomas Jefferson Randolph knew all about that school. In 1798, his grandfather authored the resolutions adopted by the Kentucky legislature in protest against the Alien and Sedition Acts. Those resolutions declared, “The several States composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government.” Randolph was close to his grandfather. He lived nearby, managed Monticello for the last ten years of Jefferson’s life, and served as executor of his estate. It was Randolph who sold Jefferson’s slaves in order to pay off debts of forty thousand dollars.

  Thomas Jefferson never figured out what to do about slavery. In 1787, he proposed a plan of gradual emancipation in which the children of slaves would be raised and educated at public expense until a certain age and then declared “a free and independent people.” Throughout his life, he thought this a sound and practicable solution. Any abolition scheme, he believed, had to be accompanied by colonization. To the question “Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state?” he answered: “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real differences which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”57

  In retirement, Jefferson watched and at times worried as slavery became an increasingly divisive national issue. In 1814, he received a letter from Edward Coles, James Madison’s private secretary. Coles implored Jefferson to use his influence to promote a plan of gradual emancipation. He told the statesman that, given his lifelong “professed and practiced” principles of liberty and independence, the “duty … devolves particularly on you.” Coles confessed that slavery was so repugnant to him that he had decided to abandon his native soil and emancipate his slaves.

  Jefferson wrote back that he believed that the “hour of emancipation is advancing” and that the most expedient plan would provide for the “education and expatriation” of blacks born after a certain date. The work of emancipation, however, was not for his generation: “This enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up and bear it through to its consummation.” Thinking it preferable to be a benevolent slave owner, he advised Coles not to leave Virginia but to reconcile himself “to your country and its unfortunate condition” and through “the medium of writing and conversation” labor to change public opinion.

  “I can not agree with you that [prayers] are the only weapons of one of your age,” retorted Coles. “The difficult work of cleansing the escutcheon of Virginia of the foul stain of Slavery” required not only the energy of the young but the experience and influence of the “revered Fathers” of the nation. He reminded Jefferson that at the end of life another luminary, Ben Franklin, was “actively and usefully employed” in opposing slavery. 58

  Coles had the last word. In 1819, he left Virginia for Illinois and emancipated his slaves as he crossed the Ohio River. Elected governor of Illinois in 1822, he defeated proslavery forces within the state. As for Jefferson, he continued to worry, but felt unable to act. In the aftermath of the Missouri Crisis of 1819—20, when Missouri entered the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and Congress prohibited slavery north of a geographic line located at 36°30’, Jefferson confessed that the division of the union into slave and free states was an issue that, “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.” Yet he saw no “practicable” way out except for some plan of gradual emancipation and expatriation. Aged and tired, the statesman feared that the sacrifice of the Founding Fathers to “acquire self government and happiness … is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons,” the very generation Jefferson had told Coles would have to lead the way.59

  Jefferson’s relations tried to take action. In 1820, his son-in-law, Governor Thomas Mann Randolph of Virginia, suggested using tax monies to remove slaves to Santo Domingo. The legislature did not pursue the recommendation. And in 1831, thirty-nine-year-old Thomas Jefferson Randolph was elected for the first time to the House of Delegates. Without question, he burned with beliefs and ambitions fueled by bloodlines as well as book lines. He internalized his beloved grandfather’s attitude toward the younger generation and felt the need to demonstrate his worthiness by proving himself in the public arena. As the House began to discuss the various petitions submitted in the aftermath of Turner’s insurrection, Randolph received a message from a former neighbor who in August had been defeated in his bid for a seat in Congress.

  Edward Coles was still writing letters. He informed Randolph, “Now is the time to bring forward & press on the consideration of the people & their representatives, not only the propriety but absolute necessity of commencing a course of measures for the riddance of … the colored population of Va.” Appealing to the grandson’s place in history, Coles told Randolph that he had “inherited the feelings & principles” of his “illustrious Grand Father” and that “no one of the young generation could be more suitable to lead or could bring more moral and political weight of character to aid the good work than his grandson.”

  Coles suggested a plan that would commence in 1840 and free children at the age of twenty-one. If they then had to work for two years to pay costs of transportation to Africa, “it would bring the year 1863 before the first Negro under this act would be sent out of the country.” Coles lived through the Civil War, and if he stayed true to his conscience, on January 1, 1863, the day the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, he squirmed to remember what he had proposed three decades earlier.60

  On that frigid day in January 1832 when Thomas Jefferson Randolph rose in the Virginia House of Delegates to move for a plan of gradual emancipation, he did so because Turner’s insurrection horrified his wife, because he was a Jefferson and a Randolph, and because a letter had arrived that he, unlike his grandfather, took to heart. But as he rose to speak,
his words evaporated. The thoughts that had flowed so easily when conceived in his closet vanished “as mist before the sun” when presented in public. His lineage summoned the oracle of Virginia’s past, dead not even five years. The “weight” of his grandfather’s name, Randolph complained, “was thrown into the scale to press me down farther.” Randolph did not want to debate whether Thomas Jefferson would have supported this specific proposal, but he quoted from Jefferson’s letter to Coles to show that throughout his life the sage of Monticello thought it “expedient” to do something about slavery.

  Expedient. That was the word over which so many words issued forth in the Virginia debate on slavery. Randolph proclaimed that he had never intended his resolution to be debated so vociferously. It was not a bill, only a resolution of inquiry designed to probe the possibility of some future plan. Brodnax’s committee reported that it “is inexpedient for the present legislature to make any legislative enactment for the abolition of slavery.” A trans-Allegheny representative, William Preston, moved to strike the word “inexpedient” and substitute “expedient.” Randolph was one of only six Piedmont representatives to vote for it; the motion lost seventy-three to fifty-eight. Ultimately, “inexpedience” won. A preamble to the report of the special committee, moved by Archibald Bryce, a slave owner from Piedmont, offered that “further action for the removal of the slaves should await a more definite development of public opinion.” No one knew what that meant. Bryce said he only wanted to submit the question to the people. Preston said he would vote for it if it was intended as a declaration that the House would one day act. Another delegate offered that “slavery was not an evil in Virginia.” One representative observed that if he voted for the preamble and afterward was asked what he had voted for he would be unable to answer.61

  Bryce’s preamble to the special committee’s report passed by a vote of sixty-seven to sixty, and the Virginia debate came to an end. Unable to act against slavery, the legislature acted against what it believed to be the sources of insurrectionary spirit. Within weeks, a colonization bill to provide for the removal of free blacks moved swiftly through the legislature. A “police bill” further eroded the rights of free blacks, denying them trial by jury and allowing for their sale and transportation if convicted of a crime. The legislature also revised the black codes, barring slaves and free blacks from preaching or attending religious meetings unaccompanied by whites. In the aftermath of Nat Turner, Virginians sought to reassure themselves that in the future “successful insurrection would be impossible.”

  Thomas Jefferson Randolph was not so certain. Perhaps, in the event of a full-scale revolt, if Virginia’s resources proved inadequate, the federal government would send troops and “reclaim a country smoking with the blood of its population.” Far more likely, he thought, “there is one circumstance to which we are to look as inevitable in the fullness of time; a dissolution of the Union. God grant it may not happen in our time, or that of our children; but … it must come, sooner or later; and when it does come, border war follows it, as certain as the night follows the day.” Randolph imagined an invasion by Virginia’s enemy “in part with black troops, speaking the same language, of the same nation, burning with enthusiasm for the liberation of their race; if they are not crushed the moment they put foot upon your soil, they roll forward, an hourly swelling mass; your energies are paralyzed, your power is gone; the morass of the lowlands, the vastness of the mountains, cannot save your wives and your children from destruction.” 62

  With the eclipse of the sun, Nat Turner’s prophecy came to pass. In time, Randolph’s would as well.

  RELIGION AND POLITICS

  RELIGION AND REFORM

  A man in a daydream drifts toward the precipice of Niagara Falls unaware of the danger. On the opposite side, someone watches. Just as the man is about to plunge, the observer cries out “STOP!” The shout awakens the man from his reverie, and at the critical moment he is saved. A crowd gathers.

  “That man has saved my life.”

  “But how?”

  “O he called to me at the very moment I was stepping off, and that word, STOP, snatched me from destruction. O, if I had not turned that instant, I should have been dashed to pieces. O, it was the mercy of God that kept me from a horrible death.”

  Charles Grandison Finney introduced this Niagara Falls parable in a sermon delivered at Boston’s Park Street Church in late October 1831, and he often repeated it to answer the question “What must I do to be saved?” The wandering sinner, Finney suggested, must act immediately in response to the voice of the preacher who shouts the word that originates with God. The sinner must choose salvation. A conversion experience occurs because the preacher is an effective instrument, the word awakens, and the spirit is present. When all works in unison, the unbeliever is “brought out of darkness into marvelous light.” 1

  Finney arrived in Boston at the peak of a revivalist surge that he helped to create and define. In 1831, he later recalled, began “the greatest revival of religion throughout the land that this country had then ever witnessed.” Finney’s rival, Lyman Beecher, who questioned his colleague’s methods and tried to dissuade him from coming to Boston, went further when he declared, “This is the greatest revival of religion that has been since the world began.” The “extraordinary excitement” of evangelical enthusiasm engulfed numerous cities and towns across the United States. In August, the secretary of the American Education Society reported that as many as a “thousand congregations in the United States have been visited within six months … with revivals of religion; and the whole number of conversions is probably not less than fifty thousand.” In New England and the Mid-Atlantic regions particularly, the fires of revivalism burned intensely. Evangelical Protestantism had swept through the southwestern frontier in the first decades of the century, leading to a proliferation of Baptist and Methodist churches. Now Presbyterians and Congregationalists, employing frontier techniques such as prolonged camp meetings and extemporaneous preaching, entered into the competition for souls. Whereas the newer denominations in the South appealed to the poor and dispossessed, those in the North attracted evangelical converts from the middle and upper classes. “The Lord,” Finney proclaimed, “was aiming at the conversion of the highest classes of society.”2

  6. “Camp-Meeting,” C. 1829 (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)

  Finney himself was becoming a member of those classes when his conversion came. He was born in 1792 and reared in Oneida County in western New York, an area that would come to be known as the “burned-over district” because the flames of revivalism roared most intensely there. Finney taught for a while in New Jersey and then decided to study for the law. He later claimed that at the time he had had no interest in religion and that he had begun reading the Bible only because his law books contained so many references to the Mosaic Code. One day in the fall of 1821, he took a walk in the woods and suddenly began contemplating the issue of his own salvation. Then and there, in an open space surrounded by fallen trees, he decided to give his heart to God. The struggle with his excessive pride and sinfulness took all day, and he returned to his office to pray. Though the room was dark, it appeared to him as “perfectly light.” At that moment, his religious conversion was completed, and he decided to preach the Gospel. Due in court at 10 A.M., he told his client that he could not handle his case because “I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause.”3

  Finney studied theology, and the Oneida Presbytery ordained him in 1824. For the next few years, he led revivals across western New York and Pennsylvania and in New York City. In the fall of 1830, he accepted Rochester as his client. As recently as 1821, Rochester had been a small village of fifteen hundred settlers. The opening of the Erie Canal, which provided access to market for the goods of western New York, transformed the town. Farmers bought land and devoted their energies to wheat production. Merchants and laborers flooded the city. By 1830, the boomtown had become a bustling entrep�
�t of ten thousand residents. The boundaries between civilization and the wilderness were so distinct that one visitor commented, “The transition from a crowded street to the ruins of the forest, or to the forest itself, is so sudden, that a stranger, by turning a wrong corner in the dark, might be in danger of breaking his neck over the enormous stumps of trees.”4

  But with growth came discord. The middle class divided on political and religious issues and united against the laboring classes on moral questions such as the consumption of alcohol. The story repeated itself in scores of other towns and cities. With expansion and wealth came dissension and strife. Only a revival of religion, many believed, could preserve the nation “from our vast extent of territory, our numerous and increasing population, from diversity of local interests, the power of selfishness, and the fury of sectional jealousy and hate.”5

  When the Third Church invited Finney to preach, they were without a minister and embroiled in a controversy with the First Church. “Religion was in a low state,” Finney recalled. His friends advised against going to Rochester: too “uninviting a field,” they warned. He agreed, and prepared to head east from Utica for New York City, a far richer field for someone trying not only to win souls but also to make a career. Upon further reflection, however, he concluded that the reasons “against my going to Rochester, were the most cogent reasons for my going.” With his change of heart, he boarded the canal packet boat with his family and headed west to Rochester, where he filled the pulpit of the Third Church from September 10, 1830, through March 6, 1831.