A Disease in the Public Mind (21 page)

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. But 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 decided 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.

In the aftermath of Nat Turner's 1831 uprising, Southerners became determined to intercept antislavery newspapers, pamphlets, and books that abolitionists sent to free blacks and sympathetic whites in the South. Antislavery societies also began sending petitions to Congress urging the lawmakers to demonstrate a federal disapproval of black bondage. These appeals were equally unpopular below the Mason-Dixon line.

The petitioners wanted to amend or even ban the 1790s law that gave federal marshals the power to seize runaway slaves and return them to their owners. The law was being abused by professional slave catchers who were much more diligent than the average marshal. In the 1830s, a man could earn
two hundred dollars by catching a runaway slave; that was several times the yearly salary of a common laborer. For that kind of money, these professionals soon became ready to seize free blacks as runaways and smuggle them South aboard ships or trains.
¹

New England poet John Greenleaf Whittier summed up the abolitionists' growing anger in a poem that proclaimed:

No slave-hunt in our borders—no pirate on our strand!

No fetters in the Bay State—no slave upon our land!
²

Another abolitionist cause was a ban on slavery in Washington, DC, which was governed by Congress. The abolitionists argued that if slavery was as great an evil as even many Southerners admitted, it was a disgrace to have blacks bought and sold and shackled virtually in the shadow of the capitol, with Old Glory rippling in the breeze above their heads.

Other petitions called for a ban on the interstate slave trade, which enabled Virginia, Maryland, and other states in the upper South to sell surplus blacks to the plantations in the deep South, where the cotton crop was becoming an ever-more-lucrative product. Numerous petitioners adopted William Lloyd Garrison's extremism and called on Congress to give every slave his or her freedom immediately. All heaped scorn on the nation's tolerance of this terrible institution. Southern legislators reacted to these requests with outrage, and John Quincy Adams's life as a congressman became very complicated.
³