The list of antislavery journals was then a long one. Since the day when Osborn issued the first number of the Philanthropist at Mount Pleasant, no period of three years had gone by without a new journal appearing somewhere. The Philanthropist began in 1817; the Emancipator, in Tennessee, in 1819; the Genius of Universal Emancipation in 1821; and the Abolition Intelligencer, in Kentucky, in 1822. The great struggle over slavery in Illinois called into existence the Edwardsville Spectator and the Illinois Intelligencer in 1822 and 1823; the African Observer, in Philadelphia, dates from 1826, and Freedom's Journal, in New York city, from 1827. The editor was a negro. Collier founded the National Philanthropist in Boston in 1826, and William Goodell the Investigator at Providence in 1827. One year later, the Free Press was started at Bennington, and the Liberalist at New Orleans. These were distinctively antislavery journals; but the daily and weekly newspapers whose columns were not closed to antislavery literature numbered upward of fifty.* Besides this antislavery journalism, there was also a great body of antislavery literature. Of books of this sort, there had never been a dearth for a hundred years past; but now not a twelvemonth elapsed but appeals, orations, thoughts, letters, pictures, brief views, treatises, remarks, sketches, reports, tracts, and pamphlets, all bearing on some phase of the question, came teeming from the press. The works of Clarkson, Wilberforce, Cooper, Stephen, and Elizabeth Heyrick, and a host of other British agitators, were not merely republished in our country, they were widely read. It was at this time. that Rankin wrote his "Letters on Slavery in America"; Duncan his "Treatise on Slavery"; Lundy his "Life of Elisha Tyson"; Stroud his "Sketch of the Laws relating to Slavery in the Several States." But the list need not be called. Hostility to slavery as a moral and political wrong was spreading and growing in intensity. The issue between slavery and freedom had now been raised never to be abandoned till settled forever, and on this issue the great geographical sections of our country were taking sides. * The list of such newspapers is given in James G. Birney and his Times, by William Birney, p. 405. 1826. ANTISLAVERY SOCIETIES. 213 The people of the cotton belt, holding that slavery was a domestic State institution, denied the right of Congress to touch it in any way, and denounced the work of antislavery men and colonizationists as fanaticism. New England, bound to the cotton States by ties of business interest, was indifferent. In the middle belt of States, from Pennsylvania to North Carolina and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, the friends of the negro were all activity. Of one hundred and one antislavery societies in existence in 1826, ninety-five were in this region, and seventy-seven of the ninety-five were in the slaveholding States of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Of fifty-seven societies auxiliary to the American Colonization Society in 1826, forty-four were in the slave-holding States of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina.* Two years later, Address of the Maryland Antislavery Society, American Daily Advertiser, November 22, 1825. Memorial of the Colonization Society to Congress, 1828. Executive Docu ments, Twentieth Congress, First Session, vol. iii, No. 99. when the number had risen to ninety-eight, more than half were still to be found in the border slave States, although during the interval twenty-five societies devoted to the cause of colonization sprang up in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Some of the people were in favor of immediate abolition; some demanded gradual emancipation without compensation; some insisted on immediate emancipation with compensation; others threw all their influence in support of emigration and colonization.* The existence of a society or of a host of societies is, indeed, no indication of vigorous activity, but the work done by these antislavery organizations before 1829 is manifest in many ways. In North Carolina the Friends, who composed the great body of the antislavery party, procured the freedom of two thousand slaves between 1824 and 1826, and, as the law required, removed them from the State. In Maryland, in 1825 and 1826, the State Antislavery Society nominated a candidate for the House of Delegates on an abolition platform, and polled almost a thousand votes. In Delaware the Friend Wilmington Monthly Meeting sent a long memorial to the Legislature praying for the abolition of slavery within that State. It appealed to reason, to justice, to humanity; to the self-evident truths and requisitions of the Christian religion; to reasons of state, motives of expediency, the common interest and general welfare; pointed out how much more profitable voluntary rewarded labor was than the compulsory, unrequited *In 1825 the managers of the Manumission Society of North Carolina sent out a series of questions to be answered by its branches. One of the questions was, "Is a majority of the citizens of North Carolina opposed to slavery?" The answer as based on the census of opinions gathered in forty-five different localities in the State was: "One thirtieth of the people are crying out for immediate emancipation among us; one twentieth are for gradual emancipation; one fifteenth are supporting schemes of emigration and colonization; three fifths are ready to support emancipation by paying their money and otherwise; one twentieth have never thought on the subject and neither know nor care anything about it; three twentieths are moderately opposed to emancipation, merely because they think it impracticable; and one twentieth are bitterly opposed to it in almost every shape." Queries proposed by the Board of Managers of the Manumission Society of North Carolina. Genius of Universal Emancipation, September, 1825. James G. Birney and his Times, by William Birney, pp. 78, 79. James G. Birney and his Times. William Birney, pp. 83, 84. Genius of Universal Emancipation, September 2, 1825. Ibid., October 7, 1826. 1826. RENDITION OF FUGITIVE SLAVES. 215 drudgery of slaves; how since Independence the States that had abolished slavery had outstripped those retaining it; how the first glance of the eye over the regions burdened with it betrayed its presence; how the fields, fences, roads, buildings, the price of property all declared it; how where it no longer existed property had risen, internal improvements had advanced with astonishing rapidity, and the happiness of all classes had been increased.* The Legislature made no response. Indeed, it had just placed on the statute-book a law whose enactment aroused no little popular indignation, for of all the incidents to slavery there were none more irritating in the border States-both slave and free-than the rendition of fugitive slaves and the kidnapping of free negroes. The constitutional obligation to deliver up fugitives from labor or service on demand of those to whom such labor or service was due, had been embodied in an act of Congress which depended for its execution on the judiciary of the States. Under the provisions of this law the owner of a runaway slave, or a duly appointed agent of the owner, might seize and arrest the fugitive, take him before a judge of a circuit or district court of the United States, or before a magistrate of a county, city, or corporate town, claim the negro as a slave, and, having proved the claim to the satisfaction of the magistrate, become entitled to a certificate empowering him to convey the wretched creature out of the State and back to the plantation. No warrant was required for the seizure and arrest; no opportunity was given the negro to be heard in his own defence, or to summon witnesses, or be represented by council, for the testimony of the claimant was all-sufficient. The fugitive in the eye of the law was a chattel, a piece of property, a human being destitute of the rights of man, and, having no legal standing in the State whence he fled, he was entitled to none in the State where he sought a refuge. The purpose of the law was to make easy the return of fugitive slaves, but at the same time it made easy the kidnapping and condemnation to slavery of free negroes living in the border States. * Gazette of the United States, April 16, 1826. Evilly disposed men had but to visit some little town in a free State, or, indeed, in any State where free negroes were allowed to dwell, select their intended victim, lure him from home on some pretext, seize and hurry him off by night to another town, and there claim him as a slave. If the lie they told imposed on the magistrate, a certificate was granted which enabled them openly and in the light of day to take their prisoner out of the State and sell him for transportation to that place of terrors-the far South. Again and again the attention of Congress had been called to the crimes thus perpetrated with impunity under the law, and a remedy had as often been sought in vain. Respectful petitions of free negroes were treated with every mark of indignity.* From time to time committees were appointed to inquire into the expediency of amending the fugitive slave law, and either did nothing † or reported bills which failed to pass. One of these went so far as to require that every free negro in the United States should provide himself with a certificate of freedom bearing the seal of the county in which he resided, and made it a misdemeanor for a white man to employ a negro not so certificated. Infamous as the bill was, it came within three votes of passing the House of Representatives.* Another, which did pass the House, was amended in the Senate, and then tabled in the House. A third never came to a final vote. # Meantime kidnapping grew more and more frequent. The high price of cotton expanded the cotton-raising area and increased the demand for slaves. With the demand for slaves went a rise in their market value, which made the kidnappers and negro-stealers bolder than ever. Pennsylvania, as a free State and the home of thousands of free negroes, was so infested that a stringent law against the crime of negro-stealing was enacted. No warrant for the arrest of the fugitive was required. But justices of the peace and aldermen were forbidden to take cognizance of such cases or grant certificates of * History of the People of the United States, vol. ii, pp. 454–456. Annals of Congress, 1799-1801. Annals of Congress, 1801-'03, p. 317. # December 18, 1802. Ibid., p. 423. |