‘ [28] to take their seats in it, wherever it may be found, whether in a gentile synagogue, a railroad car, a steamboat, or a stagecoach.’1This had the approval of Messrs. Pillsbury and Collins, but not of H. C. Wright, or of Garrison, or of Edmund Quincy, and did not prevail. In fact, what J. H. Noyes called ‘the whole phalanx of Massachusetts Ultraists’2 had a conservative element of which the editor of the Liberator was, paradoxical as it might seem, the head. He was himself a shining example of moderate and calculated utterance, while little disturbed by the want of it in those whose anti-slavery sincerity, courage, zeal, and devotedness he felt to be equal to his own. “There is danger,” Lib. 12.94. he wrote in June, 1842, in a fine plea for toleration of idiosyncrasies, ‘of abolitionists becoming invidious and censorious toward each other, in consequence of making constitutional peculiarities virtuous or vicious traits,’ or, in other words, “on account of the manner in which the cause is advocated” Lib. 12.95. by this person or that. ‘I see by the Post,’ writes George Bradburn to Francis3 Jackson, on August 7, 1841, ‘that friend Loring does4 not choose to be understood as discussing abolition5 topics in the style of our friends Wright and Pillsbury. 6 ’
This text is part of:
1 With the extension of the railroad system, the inhuman prejudice against color was catered to by corporations even in excess of the requirements of average public sentiment. A ‘Jim Crow’ car was provided, in which colored travellers were forced to sit although they had purchased first-class tickets. They were expelled in the most ruffianly manner from white cars, against the remonstrances of white passengers, who not seldom were themselves dragged out for condemning such brutality (Lib. 11: 175, 180, 182), or for taking seats in the Jim Crow car by way of testimony, in the spirit of Mr. Foster's resolution. Colored servants, on the other hand, were allowed to accompany their employers (Lib. 11.132). The Eastern Railroad of Boston, of which a Quaker was the malignant superintendent (Lib. 12: 35), attained an evil preeminence in these outrages (Lib. 11: 47, 94, 143, 157, 162, 163, 165, 166, 170). Worst of all, police justices refused to punish the assaults even upon white passengers (Lib. 11.127, 128, 180). Yet it was asked, What has the North to do with slavery? And it is even now pretended that the North was peopled with abolitionists until the Liberator was founded (New-Englander, 45: 1, et seq.). See in Lib. 12: 56 the ‘Travellers' Directory’ time-tables of the several railroads, with a caption showing whether they make any distinction in regard to color.
2 Ante, p. 11.
3 Boston Post.
4 Ms.
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.