Bound for Canaan (23 page)

In 1838 Gerrit Smith himself undertook several lecture tours on behalf of the New York Anti-Slavery Society. One of them took him to the handsome lakeside village of Cooperstown, where he debated the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, a hardcore Jacksonian Democrat, who spoke for almost five hours straight in defense of slavery to a hall so crowded that hundreds failed to gain admittance and milled around on the streets outside. Although the debate, between the greatest American writer of his age and the “second Webster,” was not recorded, Cooper recounted his views on slavery in
The American Democrat
, published the same year. Slavery was as old as time, he asserted, and it was “no more sinful, by the christian code, than it is sinful to wear a whole coat, while another is in tatters.” There was nothing that made it impossible to be an excellent Christian and a slaveholder at the same time. Indeed, slavery had distinct virtues. For instance, it enabled the master to exhibit toward his slave some of the mildest graces of human character, such as between king and subject.
Moreover, North American slaves were no worse off than the average European peasant. “In one sense,” Cooper proposed, “slavery may actually benefit a man, there being no doubt that the African is, in nearly all respects, better off in servitude in this country, than when living in a state of barbarism at home.” Although American slavery was generally mild, and therefore “physical suffering cannot properly be enumerated among its evils,” the question was really moot since blacks were essentially brutes. Their ignorance was a positive blessing. “Neither is it just to lay too heavy stress on the personal restraints of the system,” he concluded, “as it is a question whether men feel very keenly, if at all, privations of the amount of which they knew nothing.”

Cooper was far from alone in his hostility to abolition. Abolitionist speakers were greeted with rocks, eggs, mob attacks, and public calls for repression. When it was learned that a traveling agent was to speak at Poughkeepsie, in the Hudson Valley, handbills entitled “OUTRAGE” suddenly appeared all over the city, warning that a “seditious lecture” was to be delivered at the Presbyterian church, and calling upon citizens to “unite in putting down and silencing by peaceable means this tool of evil and fanaticism.” Henry B. Stanton claimed to have been mobbed 150 times before 1840. Major antiabolition riots occurred in Newark, New Jersey; Concord, New Hampshire; New Britain and Norwich, Connecticut, and New York City, where rioters burned to the ground the home of the wealthy abolitionist Lewis Tappan, the president of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In Ohio, antislavery lecturers were tarred and feathered, pelted with broken glass, and attacked by club-wielding thugs. And in November 1837 abolitionism acquired its first white martyr, when the newspaper editor Elijah P. Lovejoy was shot to death while defending his press—his fourth, after three previous ones had been destroyed—from an attacking mob at Alton, Illinois.

If Northerners regarded abolitionists as deluded and sanctimonious troublemakers, Southerners saw them as a mortal enemy determined to destroy both the foundation of their economy and their way of life, by means of agitation that could only lead to a national bloodbath. In the aftermath of Nat Turner's rebellion, the South increasingly moved in the direction of authoritarian controls that affected not only (as always) blacks, both slave and free, but also whites whose actions or utterances in any way might be deemed to threaten, however obliquely, the institution of slav
ery. New laws, vigilante activity, and public pressure increasingly shackled the press, censored literature, and coerced individuals who dared speak out against the prevailing proslavery opinions. Rights commonly taken for granted by other Americans—the right of free speech, free press, and assembly—were increasingly curtailed. With the open acquiescence of federal authorities, mail coming from the North was searched and local postmasters were empowered to destroy anything that they judged subversive. In Charleston, mobs seized mailbags containing antislavery literature and burned them at the post office. The monitoring of free blacks and the movements of slaves sharply increased, while suspicious travelers were interrogated by local vigilante committees, and their belongings investigated by force. Laws in several states provided up to twenty years in prison for the publication or circulation of materials “tending to incite insurrection.” The Vigilance Association of Columbia, South Carolina, offered a fifteen-hundred-dollar reward for the arrest and conviction of any white person circulating “publications of a seditious tendency.” In 1835 Georgia imposed the death penalty for anyone publishing materials that could be construed as inciting slaves to rebellion. A Virginia law of 1836 barred members of abolition societies from even entering the state. Louisiana laws made it a crime to write, publish, or speak anything in court, stage, or pulpit that tended to “destroy that line of distinction which the law has established between the several classes of this community.” All over the South, public figures openly threatened to kill any abolitionist they could lay their hands on, and watchdog committees put bounties of tens of thousands of dollars on the heads of abolitionist leaders. President Jackson bluntly demanded that the Northern states outlaw the activities of the abolitionists, while in 1838 South Carolina congressman Robert B. Rhett published a letter to his constituents in which he declared that either the Constitution should be amended to limit freedom of speech on the subject of slavery, or else the Union must be dissolved.

Southerners confused—and would continue until the Civil War to confuse—the abolitionist movement as a whole with the Underground Railroad. The two were never completely congruent. The American Anti-Slavery Society never advocated breaking the law, although it refused to censure any of its members who assisted slaves in their escape. There were active members of the underground, including at least some Democrats, who never joined any formal organization, just as there were countless
abolitionists who refused to break federal law. To use a modern analogy, membership in an antislavery society was no more proof of participation in Underground Railroad than belonging to the Sierra Club means that one would personally sabotage lumber company equipment in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. The two networks existed, however, in a symbiotic relationship, with the societies serving as a fertile recruiting ground for clandestine activists, and the Underground Railroad in turn supplying abolitionist lecture halls and fund-raisers with a steady stream of flesh-and-blood fugitives who, like figments come to life from the nation's collective nightmare, were living proof of slavery's inhumanity.

Structurally, the aboveground abolitionist movement was a layered pyramid whose national leadership exerted little overall control, and whose center of gravity lay solidly within its sprawling popular base. Wherever they went, antislavery agents preached that success depended on the local units, and specifically on their members' personal commitment to the cause. Local societies could have no more strength “than is possessed by the INDIVIDUALS of which they are composed and can
exist
only by the INDIVIDUALS' self-denial and labor,” the New York Anti-Slavery Society stressed in its annual report for 1837. Every community was advised to appoint two agents, a man and a woman, to canvass each school district in the town, conversing with individuals, from house to house, from shop to shop, in the counting room, in the harvest field, and by the family fireside,” talking to them about slavery and selling them an antislavery almanac; if they couldn't sell the almanac, they were to give it away free. Another tactic was to go from door to door, carrying petitions calling for the federal government to abolish slavery in the western territories and in the District of Columbia, to reject the annexation of Texas as a slave state, to halt interstate traffic in slaves, and so on. “Nothing is easier than for them in one short year to have every village and neighborhood within their limits reading, thinking and talking on the stirring topic of ‘human rights,'” the executive committee of the state society proclaimed. “And for people to read, think, and talk on that subject is to become thorough converts to the great doctrines of impartial liberty.” Children were not forgotten either. Each school district was urged to purchase a library of antislavery literature. The American Anti-Slavery Society also produced a periodical called
The Slave's Friend
, which explained abolition in easy-to-read fashion, accompanied by woodcuts. The pitch was not sub
tle. One article profiled Henry Wright, who oversaw the society's juvenile auxiliaries: “He will try to get every little boy and girl to take hold of the great work of pulling slavery up by the roots,” the piece opined. “I think they will all like to take hold, and pull as hard as they can.”

The executive bureau of the American Anti-Slavery Society limited itself mainly to lobbying Congress, hiring agents to organize states that had not yet formed local groups, and publishing antislavery propaganda, while local antislavery groups typically functioned as divisions of their state and county societies. The state societies appointed their own traveling agents, and sponsored regional conventions as well as an annual meeting to which all abolitionists were invited. County societies were expected to hold their own conventions several times a year. Local meetings served as a forum for educating both new members and the general public. Whatever other purpose they served, at every level these gatherings also enabled underground activists to network with like-minded men and women from different parts of their state or county, to whom a fugitive might safely be sent.

For example, one day in the autumn of 1837, an abolitionist in the town of Mexico, New York, was looking out his window when he saw a “colored man” enter the tavern across the street. “Someone asked if that was not one of
our
people,” the abolitionist—probably a local tinsmith named Starr Clark—wrote in the
Friend of Man
, on February 28, 1838. He went on to describe what happened next: “I went over to the tavern, and saw the colored man sitting by the fire. After waiting till all had left the bar-room, I stepped carelessly toward him, and asked him if he was going to Oswego. No was the answer. Which way are you traveling?—No answer. Do you know what an abolitionist is?—No answer. I took a chair and sat down close to him; told him that I did not wish to intrude upon him, but that I was an abolitionist and friendly towards the colored people. The only answer he gave was that there was a difference in abolitionists. This was all I could get him to say, and I was about to give him up, when I observed to him that if he wanted any assistance, my store was directly opposite, and he could call over. For once he looked up and said, ‘Sir what may I call your name?' I told him, and now came the change in his countenance. He thrust his hand into his pocket, and drew out two letters directed to me…. The letters were from brethren in the south part of the county, recommending him to me as a fugitive and a Christian; and so we
found him to be.” The abolitionist later learned that George had escaped by sea from somewhere in the South and had walked all the way from Pennsylvania to Onondaga County, where he had encountered a chain of abolitionists who passed him northward from friend to friend. On December 5 the local abolitionists helped him on his way to Canada.

By the late 1830s, thanks mainly to the dynamic effect of the proliferating antislavery societies, the Underground Railroad had taken recognizable form. Where apathy had ruled only a few years earlier, fugitives were now forwarded smoothly from town to town, county to county, and state to state. Oliver Johnson could confidently arrange for “Simon” to travel from western Pennsylvania to northern Vermont, a distance of six hundred miles. Starr Clark of Mexico could expect his collaborators elsewhere in Onondaga County to send fugitives to him as a matter of course, and knew that others in Oswego and Canada were standing by to receive them when he was ready to move them on. The fact that Clark felt free to report his own role in a newspaper also makes quite clear that the transit of fugitives was not only an open secret but also virtually risk free through large parts of the North. So secure did he feel that he even mentioned by name two other abolitionists—Hiram Gilbery of Schroepell, and a Deacon Gilbert, who had given the man a pair of boots—who assisted the fugitive along the way.

The fourth annual meeting of the New York Anti-Slavery Society in 1838 was, with good reason, an optimistic affair. From a despised fringe group, abolitionists had become a political force to be reckoned with. In 1837 alone, 161 new local societies had been formed in New York, more than any other state, and the state's abolitionists were contributing more than half the funds necessary to operate the national office in Manhattan. There were forty thousand committed abolitionists in the state, enough to deter the election of proslavery candidates to state office. The once-hostile state assembly had recently passed several resolutions favoring antislavery principles. Thirty-seven of the state's fifty-seven counties had antislavery societies, and five of them had placed antislavery libraries in every village. New York was not alone. After three years of intensive grassroots effort, public opinion had significantly shifted in other parts of the North as well. Between 1835 and 1836, the number of antislavery societies in the nation grew to more than five hundred, and then doubled again by 1837. That year the American Anti-Slavery Society claimed more
than one hundred thousand members, and listed more than a thousand affiliates across the country.

And Gerrit Smith, who only three years earlier had regarded abolitionism as little more than a sideshow in the gallery of American reform, was now entering his third term as president of the New York Anti-Slavery Society. In years to come, his home in Peterboro would become a mecca for the most radical reformers in the nation. Among them would come William Lloyd Garrison, Lincoln's future Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, the black abolitionists Henry Highland Garnett and Samuel Ringgold Ward, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Tubman, John Brown (to whom Smith would sell a farm, and later provide money for his attack on Harpers Ferry), and an untold number of fugitive slaves.