1831

by Louis P. Masur

  The attention turned out to be a boon for the fledging Liberator, and Garrison used it to promote the paper and the cause. Those who had never heard of him now wondered about this Boston abolitionist. “A price set upon the head of a citizen of Massachusetts,” he cried. “Where is the liberty of the press and of speech? Where the spirit of our fathers? … Are we the slaves of Southern taskmasters? Is it treason to maintain the principles of the Declaration of Independence?” Subscriptions to The Liberator, limited largely in its first months to free blacks in Boston, now extended to New York and Philadelphia. Garrison used the momentum created by his success at the business of reform to call a meeting in November that consolidated the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts under his leadership. The constitution of the New-England Anti-Slavery Society (1832), a predecessor to the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833), declared its objective “to effect the abolition of slavery in the United States, to improve the character and conditions of the free people of color … and obtain for them equal civil and political rights and privileges with the whites.” Had Southerners ignored the Boston weekly, it might have folded or limped along. But the attention it garnered in the form of accusation boosted circulation, brought in revenue, and provided Garrison with the platform he desperately sought. “The tread of the youthful Liberator,” he thundered in October, “already shakes the nation.”26

  As to the charge of inciting the slaves to murder, Garrison proclaimed that The Liberator “courts the light, and not darkness.” He reminded readers that he was a pacifist whose creed held that violence of any kind for whatever reason was contrary to Christian precepts. With typical sarcasm, he retorted that if Southerners wanted to prohibit incendiary publications they should ban their own statute books and issue a warrant for Thomas Gray, whose pamphlet on Nat Turner “will only serve to rouse up other leaders and cause other insurrections.” The blow for freedom, he explained, originated in experiences, not words on the page: “The slaves need no incentives at our hands. They will find them in their stripes—in their emaciated bodies—in their ceaseless toil—in their ignorant minds—in every field, in every valley, on every hill-top and mountain, wherever you and your father have fought for liberty.” Garrison likened Turner to other revolutionary leaders: “Although he deserves a portion of the applause which has been so prodigally heaped upon Washington, Bolivar, and other heroes, for the same rebellious though more successful conduct, yet he will be torn to pieces and his memory cursed.”27

  Garrison was not alone in viewing Turner’s revolt as part of a transatlantic revolutionary movement. “The whole firmament,” he believed, “is tremulous with an excess of light.” In 1830 and 1831, across the Western world, blows for freedom were being struck. The Belgians obtained independence. In France, the king fled. The British Parliament debated the Reform Bill. In Poland, the Diet declared independence. David Child, the editor of the Massachusetts Journal, proclaimed “that the oppressed and enslaved of every country, Hayti and Virginia as well as France and Poland, have a right to assert their ‘natural and unalienable rights’ whenever and wherever they can.” “These are the days of revolutions, insurrections, and rebellions, throughout the world,” declared a New York editor. And yet “do we hear any portion of the American press rejoice at the success of the efforts of the enslaved AMERICAN to obtain their liberty—mourn over their defeats—or shed a solitary tear of sympathy and pity for their misery, unhappiness, and misfortune?” The writer denounced the hypocrisy of those who “rejoice at the success of liberty, equality, justice, and freedom, or mourn and sympathize at its defeat abroad,” yet say nothing of its course at “home.” By their actions, “some of the enslaved population of free America … have declared their independence.” Had the writer known that Turner originally planned to strike on the Fourth of July, he would have had even more evidence for his analysis.28

  The Free Enquirer, published in New York by Robert Dale Owen, the son of the famous utopian planner Robert Owen, also warned the slaveholders of the fate that awaited them in trying to resist the spirit of the times. Southerners might “suppress partial insurrections; by shooting and hanging, they may for a time intimidate and check that reforming and revolutionizing spirit which has always been extolled when successful; but a knowledge of the world’s history, and man’s nature should teach them that there is a point beyond which oppression cannot be endured, and they ought to anticipate the horrors of the oppressor when that day shall come.” 29

  Southerners could not tolerate such talk. “Has it come at last to this,” lamented Thomas Dew of the College of William and Mary, “that the hellish plots and massacres of Dessalines, Gabriel, and Nat Turner, are to be compared to the noble deeds and devoted patriotism of Lafayette, Kosciusko, and Schrynecki?” Dew and others placed the blame for the Southampton County tragedy on the mischievous effects of Garrison’s Liberator and Walker’s Appeal, not on a transatlantic revolutionary ideology of rights and liberties. Southerners sought a simple explanation for a tragedy they could not comprehend in any other way, because to do so would challenge the basis of Southern society. If slavery was wrong, if slaves were human, if liberty belonged to all and at some level every enslaved person knew it, then widespread rebellion and death would mark the future of the slaveholding states.30

  The publication of incendiary publications raised another issue as well: the relationship of North and South under the federal government. Garrison often noted that “the bond of our Union is becoming more and more brittle” and thought “a separation between the free and slaves States” to be “unavoidable” unless slavery was speedily abolished. Governor John Floyd of Virginia reached similar conclusions for different reasons. In his diary on September 27, he wondered how it was possible that no law could punish the editor of The Liberator and other “Northern conspirators” who displayed “the express intention of inciting the slaves and free negroes in this and the other States to rebellion and to murder the men, women and children of those states.” “A man in our States,” he concluded, “may plot treason in one state against another without fear of punishment, whilst the suffering state has no right to resist by the provisions of the Federal Constitution. If this is not checked it must lead to the separation of these states.”31

  TRAVELERS IN AMERICA

  Travelers to America in 1831 offered their own thoughts on the future of the United States and the dilemma of slavery in a republic that espoused freedom. James Boardman, an Englishman who left Liverpool in 1829 and returned in the summer of 1831, called America “the El Dorado of the age,” a country “in which the great problem, can man be free, has been triumphantly solved.” Boardman, for one, was reticent on the subject of slavery. While noting that he never hesitated to denounce the institution whenever “opportunities presented themselves,” he expressed satisfaction that slave owners seemed reluctant to use the word “slave,” substituting instead the word “servant” so as to avoid opprobrium. Another Englishman, the barrister Godfrey Vigne, sailed from Liverpool for New York on March 24, “alone, unbewifed, and unbevehicled … with the determination … of seeing all I could of the United States in the space of about six months.” His brief comments on slavery are contradictory, a mirror of the tensions in the air. The slaves, he states, “are a very happy race,” yet “they do as little as they can for their masters” and, if educated, would not “remain long in a state of bondage.” Commenting on the aftermath of Turner’s insurrection, Vigne noted that the Southern threat to secede would be checked by “the danger they would incur from their inability to defend themselves against their black population.” “There can be no doubt,” he predicted, “that the slaves, with an offer of liberty, would prove a most formidable weapon in the hands of an enemy.”32

  Other travelers offered more pointed denunciations of American slavery. In a letter written the day before Christmas, Henry Tudor, also an English barrister, described the horrors of the New Orleans slave market, where he witnessed “about thirty of my fellow-cr
eatures—men, women, children, and even infants at the breast—put up indiscriminately to auction, and knocked down to the highest bidder, just like pigs or oxen in a market.” “It was perfectly disgusting,” he decried, “to observe the different purchasers … feeling their joints and examining their bodies, to ascertain if they were sound and in good wind. Several of them, in no delicate manner, as you may suppose, actually opened the mouths of some of these wretched victims of the white man’s inhumanity, to satisfy themselves as to the soundness of their teeth, and possibly as to their age, as if they had been so many horses in a fair.”

  Sold for fourteen hundred dollars were a young man, wife, and infant, “a picture that would have softened a heart of stone”; sold for seven hundred was an attractive eighteen-year-old girl; sold for a thousand was a handsome man of twenty, “almost as white as myself.” “Such a display as this, in a country declaring itself the freest in the world,” Tudor asserted, “presents an anomaly of the most startling character; and as long as so foul a stain shall tarnish the brightness of American freedom, this otherwise prosperous, powerful, and highly civilised country, must be content to forego its proud claims to superior advantages over the rest of mankind.”

  For all his indignation, Tudor could not bring himself to advocate immediate abolition. Calling slavery “a subject surrounded by great and numerous difficulties,” he concluded that “an indiscriminate course of emancipation would become a curse to the slaves themselves.” He thought that slaves had to be prepared for freedom, educated in duties and obligations, and that only an act of gradual emancipation, completed with “the present generation of parents passing away,” would protect the republic from convulsion.33

  Of all the English travelers, Thomas Hamilton, who sailed from England in the fall of 1830 and returned the following summer, offered the most biting condemnation of American slavery. Hamilton also witnessed a slave auction in New Orleans, and he recounted the sale of an emaciated woman evidently dying of consumption:

  “Now, gentlemen, here is Mary!”, said the auctioneer, “a clever house servant and an excellent cook. Bid me something for this valuable lot. She has only one fault, gentlemen, and that is shamming sick. She pretends to be ill, but there is nothing more the matter with her than there is with me … .”

  Men began feeling the woman’s ribs and asking her questions.

  “Are you well?” asked one man.

  “Oh, no I am very ill.”

  “What is the matter with you?”

  “I have a bad cough and pain in my side.”

  “How long have you had it?”

  “Three months and more.”

  The auctioneer interrupted: “Damn her humbug. Give her a touch or two of the cow-hide, and I’ll warrant she’ll do your work.”

  Mary sold for seventy dollars. Buyers joked that the woman would soon be food for land crabs, and “amid such atrocious merriment the poor dying creature was led off.”

  Scenes such as this one passed daily throughout the nation. Slavery, Hamilton noted, extended across “the larger portion of the territory of the Union.” Especially galling was its perpetuation in Washington, where slaves served as waiters, coachmen, servants, and artisans. “While the orators in Congress are rounding periods about liberty in one part of the city, proclaiming, alto voce, that all men are equal, and that ‘resistance to tyrants is obedience to God,’ the auctioneer is exposing human flesh to sale in another.” “That slavery should exist in the District of Columbia,” thundered Hamilton, “that even the foot-print of a slave should be suffered to contaminate the soil peculiarly consecrated to Freedom, that the very shrine of the Goddess should be polluted by the presence of chains and fetters, is perhaps the most extraordinary and monstrous anomaly to which human inconsistency—a prolific mother—has given birth.”

  For those who excused the evil by stating that Americans had inherited the institution from the British, Hamilton had a piercing response: “Now when the United States have enjoyed upwards of half a century of almost unbroken prosperity, when their people, as they themselves declare, are the most moral, the most benevolent, the most enlightened in the world, we are surely entitled to demand, what have this people done for the mitigation of slavery? What have they done to elevate the slave in the scale of moral and intellectual being, and to prepare him for the enjoyment of those privileges to which, sooner or later, the coloured population must be admitted? The answer to these questions unfortunately may be comprised in one word—NOTHING.”

  As for the abolition of slavery in the Northern states, Hamilton expressed disdain. “Slavery has only ceased in those portions of the Union, in which it was practically found to be a burden on the industry and resources of the country,” he argued. “wherever it was found profitable, there it has remained, there it is to be found at the present day, in all its pristine and unmitigated ferocity.” Because Northern abolition came gradually, slave owners had time to sell their most valuable property to the South. As a result, when the “day of liberation came, those who actually profited by it, were something like the patients who visited the pool of Bethesda,—the blind, the halt, the maimed, the decrepit, whom it really required no great exercise of generosity to turn about their own business, with an injunction to provide thereafter for their own maintenance.”

  Freedom, proclaimed Hamilton, entailed more than liberation from the power of compulsory labor: “If the word means anything, it must mean the enjoyment of equal rights, and the unfettered exercise in each individual of such powers and faculties as God has given him.” Free people of color, he observed, “are subjected to the most grinding and humiliating of all slaveries, that of universal and unconquerable prejudice. The whip, indeed, has been removed from the back of the Negro, but the chains are still on his limbs, and he bears the brand of degradation on his forehead. What is it but the mere abuse of language to call him free … . The law, in truth, has left him in that most pitiable of all conditions, a masterless slave.”

  The condition of free blacks served to highlight further the disingenuousness of slaveholders who pretended to acknowledge the evils of slavery but did not care at all about the fate of the black race. Southerners tried to disarm critics by inviting them to suggest a plan of abolition, to offer a “glimmering of light through the darkness by which this awful subject is surrounded.” But if the slaveholders favored abolition, observed Hamilton, it was “abolition of a peculiar kind, which must be at once cheap and profitable; which shall peril no interest, and offend no prejudice; and which, in liberating the slave shall enrich his master.” Hamilton concluded by wondering how long the slave owners “can hold out against nature, religion, and the common sympathies of mankind … . My own conviction is, that slavery in this country can only be eradicated by some great and terrible convulsion. The sword is evidently suspended; it will fall at last.”34

  Some travelers who admired the South (one writer called New Orleans “one of the most wonderful places in the world”) decried state laws that prohibited anyone from teaching slaves to read. In his Guide for Emigrants, J. M. Peck declared that “to keep slaves entirely ignorant of the rights of man, in this spirit-stirring age, is utterly impossible. Seek out the remotest and darkest corner of Louisiana, and plant every guard that is possible around the negro quarters and the light of truth will penetrate. Slaves will find out, for they already know, that they possess rights as men.” The slaves, Peck predicted, were “prepared to enter into the first insurrectionary movement proposed by some artful and talented leader.”35

  Rumors of widespread insurrections flowing from Turner’s revolt seemed to substantiate these travelers’ observations. Reports of a rebellion in Raleigh, North Carolina, led authorities to arrest every free black in the city. In Fayetteville, Tennessee, citizens believed they discovered a plot by a group of slaves to set fire to several buildings and, during the confusion, “seize as many guns and implements of destruction as they could rescue and commence a general massacre.” James Alexand
er, another of the British travelers who toured America in 1831, noted in his Transatlantic Sketches that in New Orleans “there was an alarm of a slave insurrection … . Hand-bills of an inflammatory nature were found, telling the slaves to rise and massacre the whites; that Hannibal was a Negro, and why should not they also get great leaders among their number to lead them on to revenge? That in the eye of God all men were equal; that they ought instantly to rouse themselves, break their chains, and not leave one white slave proprieter alive; and, in short, that they ought to retaliate by murder for the bondage in which they were held.”36

  A German immigrant, twenty-five-year-old Johann Roebling (who would go on to build the Brooklyn Bridge), also heard rumors that in New Orleans “the blacks … had made a plan to massacre the whites, and thus attain their freedom by force.” Roebling restated in his own words what seemed to him the common wisdom of the day: “All reasonable Americans agree … that slavery is the greatest cancerous affliction from which the United States are suffering.” He arrived in Philadelphia on August 6 and immediately began contemplating where to settle. Of one thing he became certain: “We have made our decision to settle in a free state.” “We have been frightened away from the South,” he confided, “by the universally prevailing system of slavery, which has too great an influence on all human relationships and militates against civilization and industry.” Fearing that in time “we should see ourselves compelled to hold slaves,” Roebling headed west from Philadelphia and settled outside of Pittsburgh, where, from a distance, he could “wish the blacks all good fortune in their endeavors to be free.”37