Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

in the late 1820s, and Northern workers were hostile to an abolitionism that concerned itself only with the plight of slave laborers and not northern “wage slaves.” Garrison did not help matters when he discounted any comparisons between slavery and the working conditions in many Northern mills: “It is an abuse of language to talk of the slavery of wages. … We cannot see that it is wrong to give or receive wages.” The close identification of evangelical Protestantism with the American Anti-Slavery Society did not improve the workers’ opinion of the abolitionists. Many Northern workers were new immigrants from Roman Catholic Ireland or southern Germany, and they spurned the anti-slavery zealots as part of an overall stratagem of evangelical Protestants to Americanize the immigrant. It could not have been far from the mind of Northern workers that a sudden flood of free black labor onto the country’s labor markets would depress white wages and jeopardize white jobs.93

Farmers in the free states also pulled shy of the abolitionists in the 1830s. Although Illinois was technically a free state (under the original mandate of the Northwest Ordinance), the ordinance had exempted French-speaking slave owners whose settlement predated the Revolution, and the Illinois legislature adopted highly flexible “transit laws,” which permitted slave laborers to be brought into Illinois for up to a year at a time. Illinoisans opposed legalizing slavery, but that was because they banned not only slaves but any African Americans at all, free or slave, from their state; in 1848, the new state constitution required the legislature to “pass such laws as will effectually prohibit free person of color from immigrating to and settling in this state, and to effectually prevent the owners of slaves from bringing them into this state.” So when the militant evangelical abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy set up an anti-slavery newspaper in Alton, Illinois, mobs threw his press into the Mississippi River, and when he persisted in setting up a new one, they attacked his office on November 7, 1837, and murdered him. It had not helped that Lovejoy was a rabid anti-Catholic who described Roman Catholicism as “an unmixed evil,” thereby uniting immigrants and Southern migrants in seeing him as a threat to their community identities. So long as the abolition movement chose men such as Lovejoy as its martyrs and examples, large segments of Northern society would balk at abolition.94

As it was, Garrison could scarcely hold his own followers together. The American Anti-Slavery Society was supposed to draw its support from a network of local and state auxiliary societies, but few of those auxiliaries kept their donations up to the necessary level. Although the anti-slavery societies claimed as many as 250,000 members, the Liberator had only 1,400 subscribers, and the Tappan brothers had to continually bail out Garrison’s newspaper. Garrison himself only made matters more difficult. When evangelical ministers questioned Garrison’s “harsh, unchristian vocabulary,” Garrison lashed out at them as “a cage of unclean birds and a synagogue of Satan.” When the Tappan brothers and other evangelical supporters of the American Anti-Slavery Society began to balk at Garrison’s criticism of the ministers, Garrison immediately accused them of plotting “to see me cashiered, or voluntarily leave the ranks.”95

Instead, Garrison cashiered the evangelicals. Garrison had been deeply impressed in the 1830s with the fervency and eloquence of two former South Carolina cotton heiresses, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who had been converted to abolition. Garrison promoted them as lecturers on the circuit of the local anti-slavery societies, and they brought Garrison into close contact with the new women’s rights movement and its leaders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Abby Kelley, and Lydia Maria Child. These early feminists argued that a campaign to emancipate slaves could not avert its eyes from the need to emancipate American women from social conventions and legal restraints that prevented them, like the slave, from owning property and voting, and kept them altogether subservient to the interests of white males. “Woman,” declared Stanton, is “more fully identified with the slave than man can possibly be… for while the man is born to do whatever he can, for the woman and the negro there is no such privilege.” And even if women’s rights did not fall precisely within the goals of an anti-slavery society, at least that society could admit women to its membership and leadership, and allow them to bear their “subjective” testimony against slavery. But when Garrison attempted to place Abby Kelley on the business committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society at its annual meeting in May 1840, the Tappan brothers and fully half of the society’s delegates rose and withdrew. 96

Garrison was left with a rump society, and although he now had a free hand to place three feminists—Lucretia Mott, Lydia Child, and Maria Chapman—on the society’s executive committee, the American Anti-Slavery Society was never more than a shadow of what it had been in the 1830s. The Tappans, meanwhile, organized a rival anti-slavery society, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, whose constitution expressly barred women from voting in its deliberations. Many of the other leaders and followers of the abolitionists wandered off to support various schemes of “gradual emancipation” or colonization for freed blacks in Africa or the Caribbean. Colonization turned out to be a particularly popular solution to the slavery problem, since it promised to eliminate both slavery and blacks from white view. The colonizationists did not much worry about the injustice of colonizing African Americans back to a continent from which many of them were six to eight generations removed.

But the South increasingly failed to see this evidence of fragmentation, poverty, and outright resistance to abolition in the North, and ignored how easily Northerners might oppose slavery on a variety of grounds without necessarily wishing for its abolition in the South. Instead, South Carolina governor James Hamilton thrust copies of the Liberator under the noses of state legislators, claiming that Nat Turner’s revolt had been “excited by incendiary newspapers and other publications, put forth in the non-slaveholding states,” and in