Bound for Canaan (21 page)

The police warned that they could not guarantee anyone's safety after dark. Denied other facilities for fear of mob violence, they finally met at the small Adelphi Building, which was owned by a black benevolent association.

The delegates were mostly young, and came mainly from New York, New England, and Pennsylvania, although a hardy few had made the arduous journey from as far away as the Western Reserve of Ohio. Most were evangelical Christians. About one-third were Quaker. A handful were African Americans, most notably Robert Purvis and James McCrummel, who before the decade was out would form the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, one of the most efficient underground operations in the country. There were also “a number of excellent women,” including the Quaker Lucretia Mott. Her participation was a revolutionary event in itself, the first time that most of the men there, except her fellow Quakers, had ever heard a woman speak in public. Although she made only minor suggestions, they were the first seeds of the increasingly important women's wing of the antislavery movement, and of its mighty offshoot, the women's rights crusade. Beriah Green, the strident, sandy-haired president of the country's first racially integrated college, the Oneida Institute in upstate New York, was chosen as the convention's presiding officer, and the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier and Lewis Tappan were elected as secretaries. On December 3 Green's clarion voice opened the convention with words from Isaiah: “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their
sins.” For the next three days, the assembly met almost continuously, declining to break even for meals, and pausing only long enough for the hungry to gulp down crackers and cold water.

On the penultimate day of the convention, Garrison, “our Coryphaeus” May called him, was assigned to write the draft text of a declaration. May left him at ten o'clock at night, at the home of the grocer James McCrummel. When he returned at eight in the morning, Garrison was polishing the last paragraph of one of the most momentous documents in American history. Garrison dramatically entered the Adelphi Building with the “Declaration of Sentiments” in his hand. It was a ringing proclamation of the principles that would guide the core of the abolition movement until the Civil War, and that would codify concisely the values that would inspire most of the conductors and stationmasters on the Underground Railroad. Its language was not political but religious, an appeal to men and women whose hearts had already been tilled by evangelical proselytizing. Its message was one of urgent moral regeneration, and it uncompromisingly insisted that each individual squarely face his duty to take immediate action against the overarching sin of the age. The declaration called unambiguously for immediate emancipation, stating “that all those laws which are now in force, admitting the right of slavery, are therefore before God utterly null and void; being an audacious usurpation of Divine prerogative, a daring infringement on the law of nature, a base overthrow of the very foundations of the social compact…and a presumptuous transgression of all the holy commandments.” Contemptuously rejecting slaveholders' protestations that slavery had been an accepted practice since the dawn of civilization, it asserted “that if [slaves] had lived from the time of Pharaoh down to the present period, and had been entailed through successive generations, their right to be free could never have been alienated, but their claims would have constantly risen in solemnity.”

All persons of color, the declaration went on to say, ought to be immediately granted the same privileges as other Americans, and “the paths of preferment, of wealth, and of intelligence” opened to them as widely as to any white. Freedom must be unconditional. Schemes of colonization were “delusive, cruel, and dangerous.” The payment of compensation to slave owners was also unacceptable. “Because the holders of slaves are not the just proprietors of what they claim; freeing the slaves is not depriving them of property, but restoring it to the right owner; it is not wronging the master,
but righting the slave—restoring him to himself.” Compensation, if it was to be given at all, ought to be given to the slave “not to those who have plundered and abused them.” Crucially, the statement asserted that all Americans, not just slave-owning Southerners, were entangled in the sin of slavery. Northerners too were guilty of fastening “the galling fetters of tyranny” upon the enslaved millions, by tolerating the Constitution's provision that allowed a slave owner to vote for three-fifths of his slaves as property, by supporting a standing army to help protect Southern oppressors, and by silently permitting slave hunters or public officials to seize a fugitive “who has escaped into their territories, and send him back to be tortured by an enraged master or a brutal driver.” The “highest obligations” thus rested upon the people of the free states “to remove slavery by moral and political action.”

Two short years after Nat Turner's rebellion, when fears of slave uprisings in the South remained pervasive and raw, the delegates explicitly renounced violence, or “carnal means” of bringing about a general emancipation, as the pacifist Garrison put it. Slavery must be overcome only by persuasion. Asserting that “we shall spare no exertions nor means to bring the whole nation to speedy repentance,” the delegates promised to organize antislavery societies “in every city, town and village” in the nation. Building on Garrison's model, which itself drew on an evangelical style borrowed from the religious revivals that had swept the country in recent years, a new national organization, to be named the American Anti-Slavery Society, would send out trained agents to carry the abolitionist message, to disseminate antislavery materials nationally, and to “aim at a purification of the churches from all participation in the guilt of slavery.”

The declaration did not call for a specific effort to assist fugitive slaves. Nor did it contain any language that could be construed as ordering Americans to disobey the law. But the logic of the declaration was inescapable: slavery must be terminated without delay, and every individual, North and South, had a duty to do what he—or as Lucretia Mott's presence testified,
she
—could to end it. In the coming years, many thousands of Northerners would come face to face with that duty, and with laws that they could not in conscience obey, in the living form of fugitive slaves. As they gathered to put their names to the document, it seemed to Samuel May that a “holy enthusiasm” lighted up every face. “It seemed to me that every man's heart was in his hand,—as if every one felt that he was about to offer himself a living sacrifice in the cause of
freedom
, and to do it cheerfully.”

1

As Gerrit Smith drove at a brisk trot toward Utica over the steep hills of central New York with their freight of stubbled fields in the early morning hours of October 21, 1835, thoughts of sin and slavery intruded on his generous mind. That evening, he intended to see his elderly and difficult father at Schenectady, where he lived in retirement. Smith would catch a canal boat at Utica for the trip east along the Erie Canal. But first he would stop at the Bleecker Street Presbyterian Church, where delegates from around the state were meeting that day to form a New York affiliate of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Smith was a man who made a pow
erful impression on people. William Goodell, an associate of William Lloyd Garrison who knew him well, particularly praised Smith's “strong discriminating mind” and polished manners, and compared his eloquence to that of Daniel Webster, the most famous orator of the age.

Though only thirty-eight years old, the manic-depressive, hulking Smith—he was six feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds—was heir to a huge fortune and vast holdings of land in three states. Even now, with his father, Peter, slipping into an old age of increasing instability, there was little affection between them. The elder Smith was a rough-cut, self-made man, and emotionally cold, who had come to what was then Oneida Indian territory in 1794, and had made his fortune trading in furs with his partner John Jacob Astor, and later by speculating in Indian lands. He had forced his sons to work alongside his slaves as boys, a humiliating experience that inspired the sensitive Gerrit with an instinctive empathy for the victims of slavery. Although Gerrit had adored the poetry of Byron, and for a time even aspired to a literary career, after graduation from Hamilton College he agreed to take over his father's business instead. Smith was already a potent force in many of the reform movements that were sweeping through the country. “Boundless was his faith in moral powers,” sighed his first, adoring biographer, Octavius Frothingham. Smith's moral sensibility was a product of the passionate religious revivalism that had flared across central New York in the 1820s with such frequency and fury that the region became known as the Burned Over District, conjuring a vivid image indeed in an era when memories of charred landscapes cleared for settlement were still fresh across the interior of the state.

Smith had thought deeply about slavery. He dismissed as hypocrisy the argument that if slavery were simply left alone it would die a natural death. True Christians tolerated no other sins with such complacency: did they supinely expect intemperance or adultery to disappear on their own? Hardly. Even were it “indisputably evident” that if slavery survived another century the slaves would be “better prepared than they now are for the boon of freedom,” he wrote in 1834, it was still immoral to prolong their bondage. “By such a concession, I might be sanctioning the abhorrent doctrine of doing evil, that good may come.” As early as 1826, Smith lent support to the establishment of a seminary to educate blacks for missionary work in Africa, and he had recently decided to refuse any commodity that derived from slavery—no small sacrifice at a time when nearly
all the cotton and sugar sold in the United States were produced by slave labor. But he was not an abolitionist. He was, in fact, a major contributor to the American Colonization Society, which envisioned the deportation of blacks back to Africa as the only acceptable alternative to slavery. He hated slavery because it was a sin, and fear of sin burned so deeply and unquenchably in his capacious heart that he would devote his life to the eradication of it from the American soul.

The atmosphere in Utica was very tense. A few days before the antislavery convention, a public protest meeting chaired by the mayor had declared the abolitionists to be “enemies of the most valued institutions of their own country; of her happy experiment of free government; emphatically, of the slave population of the South; and the human race.” One speaker, to wild cheers, had declared, “Whenever a servile insurrection shall commence at the South, the best blood of the North will be spilt in her defense. Is there a man here who would not buckle on his armor and go?” The area's demagogic and well-connected Democratic congressman, Samuel Beardsley, threatened violence, saying that “it would be better to have Utica razed to its foundations, or to have it destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah, than to have the convention meet here.”

The Democratic hostility to abolitionism was in part unembarrassed racism, and in part political hardball. New York Democrats regarded African Americans as tools of the Whig opposition. In 1800 the vote of a single black-dominated ward had won control of New York City for the Federalists, and again in 1813 the votes of three hundred free blacks in New York City swept the Federalists into power, and gave them control of the state legislature. The Democrats took their revenge in 1821, when the new state constitution effectively disenfranchised almost every black voter in New York by requiring that they prove that they owned at least two hundred and fifty dollars' worth of property, a restriction not imposed on whites. In 1821 the triumphant Democrats changed the New York State constitution to enfranchise all white males, while erecting barriers to black male voters, so that by 1825 fewer than three hundred blacks out of a total state population of almost thirty thousand, and only
sixteen
of New York City's more than twelve thousand blacks, could actually vote.

In the teeth of savage local opposition, more than six hundred antislavery delegates turned up in Utica. The organizers of the convention had pressed Smith to lend his prestige to the event to help “call out the
moral energies of this region.” He had agreed, though only as an observer. But what was about to happen to Smith that morning would have a profound impact on the antislavery movement in America. It would turn the wealthiest man in New York state into one of the most subversive, and a stationmaster for the Underground Railroad.

The convention got under way at 10
A.M.
Alvan Stewart, a Utica lawyer and a leading abolitionist, spoke first. “We have been proclaimed traitors to our own dear native land, because we love its inhabitants,” he declared, with feeling. “Our humanity is treason, our philanthropy is in-cendiarism, our pity for the convulsive yearnings of downtrodden man is fanaticism.” This was not empty rhetoric. Even as he spoke, a mob of at least several hundred milled menacingly outside the church. Stewart warned his listeners that their own liberties would be in immediate danger were they to allow themselves to be silenced by intimidation. “My countrymen, ye sons of the Pilgrims, the
tyrant
is at your doors, liberty is dying, slavery has robbed you of the liberty of discussion, of conscience and the press.” Afterward, while the evangelical New York City dry goods merchant Lewis Tappan was reading a declaration of sentiments, a crowd led by Congressman Beardsley pushed and shoved its way down the aisle, shouting, “Open the way! Damn the fanatics! Stop your damn stuff!” There were roughnecks and riffraff among the mob, but it was leavened with the town's respectable elite, its businessmen and lawyers, all of them howling in an effort to drown out Tappan. James Caleb Jackson, a young delegate from Oswego who was sitting halfway between the pulpit and the door, feared that any kind of violence was possible. But he was inspired to a state of religious exaltation by the feeling of willing martyrdom that he sensed among the abolitionists around him: “I have no doubt that they would have consented to stay there and be massacred, before they would have left the church, if it had not been for two or three members in the meeting, who knowing how outraged the moral sense of the citizens of Utica was held counsel of nonresistance.” Among the many delegates who clamored to be heard the chairman recognized Gerrit Smith. To the excited Jackson, it seemed that “his face was clothed with a glory that was more than human.” Declaring that he was “no abolitionist,” but that he loved fair play, Smith's clarion voice shouted above the uproar, “It seems from what appears here this morning that it is a crime not only to be black, but to be a friend of the black man.” He spontaneously invited the entire
convention to reconvene at his own home in Peterboro, where, he promised, he could guarantee “a peaceful meeting.”

The delegates made their way out through an even larger mob screaming insults at them, and that pursued them to their hotels and lodgings. Meanwhile, hooligans raided the office of the local antislavery newspaper and threw its type into the street. Beardsley's followers even pursued the carriages of delegates for miles along the road to Peterboro, hurling curses and stones until they were out of sight. James Caleb Jackson had an easier journey. Along with a large group of delegates, he hailed a freight boat passing through Utica along the Erie Canal. Singing, and praying, and swearing eternal hostility to slavery as they traveled through the night, Jackson thought of the early, persecuted Christians at prayer in the catacombs of Rome and the martyred Albigensians of medieval France. At 3
A.M.
the boat arrived in Canastota, and in a drizzling rain Jackson's party, more than a hundred strong, set off on foot for Peterboro ten miles away, still “singing and shouting, and laughing and praying” as they marched, startling farmers milking their cows, and shoemakers and carpenters on their way to work. To Jackson, the scene of marching men was a vision in flesh and blood of the power of Christian righteousness, an unstoppable, divinely inspired force. “When asked, ‘What is the matter, has war been declared?' our answer was, ‘Yes, war to the death against slavery. We have been mobbed out of the city of Utica, and we are going to Peterboro to hold a convention. We have begun the grandest revolution the world has ever seen; and if we do not die, we mean to see that revolution accomplished, and our land freed from the tread and fetter of the slave.'”

The events in Utica were part of a coordinated crackdown on abolitionists across the North. On the same day, mobs led by men affiliated with the Democratic Party also attacked abolitionist speakers in Newport, Rhode Island; Montpelier, Vermont; and Boston, where William Lloyd Garrison was physically seized and led through the streets with a noose around his neck. The spread of democracy in the Jacksonian era had done nothing to help the cause of the slave. The Northern men whom the Jacksonians brought into office had close ties to the South, and their prospects depended on the proslavery party leaders. Samuel Beardsley was, in fact, vice president Martin Van Buren's closest associate in the House of Representatives. Van Buren, a wealthy landowner from New
York's Hudson Valley whose family had been slave owners, was himself under heavy pressure to appease the South by suppressing abolitionist activity, especially in what amounted to his own political backyard. Charging a politician with being “soft” on abolitionism in the 1830s was much like accusing one of being “soft” on Communism in the 1950s, and Van Buren, who expected to run for president in 1836, knew that he could not win his party's nomination without the South's support. Not long after the Utica riot Beardsley was rewarded for his rabble rousing with appointment as the attorney general of New York state.

Meanwhile, abandoning his trip to see his father in Schenectady, Gerrit Smith raced back to Peterboro and awakened his household. Inside the white Greek Revival mansion, servants spent all night mixing bread, grinding coffee, paring apples for pies, and baking rolls for the abolitionists who straggled in through the early morning hours. The day dawned with what must have seemed to be the blessing of God himself, the rain having blown past to reveal the austere hamlet in all its Yankee plainness in the crisp, clear light of an autumn morning. Later the three hundred remaining delegates met at the ample, three-story Presbyterian church across the village green from Smith's pillared home. Smith, no pacifist, had posted armed men around the church to fend off a new attack by the mob. In the course of the day, the delegates agreed to call for “universal and immediate emancipation.” They further resolved—and this was the argument that more than any other would eventually win the abolitionists tens of thousands of allies in the North—“that the time has come to settle the great question, whether the North shall give up its liberty to preserve slavery to the south, or the South shall give up its slavery to preserve liberty to the whole nation.”

After this, Smith himself rose to speak. His words, penned in the course of a sleepless night, articulated the inner thoughts of countless men and women who were coming to the conclusion that civil power must be challenged by moral law. He spoke of the outrage that had been committed upon young Amos Dresser, a divinity student from Cincinnati, who while traveling in Tennessee selling religious literature to earn money for his tuition, had been publicly stripped and flogged in Nashville simply because abolitionist tracts had been found in his luggage. The suppression of free speech was a crime not only against treasured American values, but against the laws of God, Smith boomed. “Take from the men who com
pose the church of Christ on earth, the right of free discussion, and you disable them for His service. They are now the lame and the dumb and the blind. If God made me to be one of his instruments for carrying forward the salvation of the world, then is the right of free discussion among my inherent rights; then may I, must I speak of sin, any sin, every sin, that comes in my way—any sin, every sin, which it is my duty to search out and assail.” Northern men were being asked to lie down in front of the menacing slaveholders “like whipped and trembling spaniels.” To stand up for the slave was therefore a matter now not only of spiritual and patriotic imperative, but a matter of simple manhood. “The sword, which is now drawn, will never be returned to its scabbard, until victory, entire, decisive victory is ours or theirs,” he concluded.

The events of the past day had transformed Smith from an intellectual bystander to the drama of slavery into a committed activist, a patrician revolutionary who would not rest until the sinful national compact was overthrown. By the end of the day, he made clear that he would commit his property, his reputation, and his life if necessary, to the struggle. A month after the Peterboro convention, Smith resigned from the American Colonization Society, pronouncing himself cured of the “colonization delusion.” In 1836 he would be elected to the first of four terms as president of the New York Anti-Slavery Society. By mid-1837 he would be secretly shipping abolitionist tracts into the South. By the next year he would be harboring slaves, and the mansion in Peterboro would be a station on the Underground Railroad.