Chapter 10: the Rynders Mob.—1850.
The New York Herald incites popular violence against the anniversary meeting of the American Anti-slavery Society in that city. Garrison presides, and speaks with the utmost composure in the midst of a mob led by a local bully, with the connivance of the city authorities. Second visit of George Thompson to America.‘We talk of the South and the North being parties to this question, and of the Slave Power being identified with the South. Do you remember how many slaveholders there are?’ This question, put by John G. Palfrey at the Free Soil Convention held in Faneuil Hall1 on February 27, 1850, he answered by computing from the latest ‘census’ of Kentucky that, out of some 5,000,000 whites in the South, only 100,000, including women and minors, held slaves. Judge Jay, reckoning2 from the same basis, but applying it to the census of 1840, arrived at the sum of 117,000, which, if we were3 to enlarge it by 70,000, would still exceed by less than one-half the population of Boston in this year of4 compromise, reaction, and violence.5 For the sake of the moneyed interests and social and political supremacy of this oligarchy, the whole country was plunging headlong into a frightful abyss of idolatry of the Union, and utter repudiation of the claims of humanity in the person of the enslaved—and especially of the fleeing, hunted, and imploring—negro. [273] Correspondingly small, in its own relation, was the group of three popular leaders who brought about this national degradation. All of them nearing or past the term of threescore years and ten, and standing on the brink of the grave,—two of them gray and extinct volcanoes of Presidential ambition, the third still glowing cavernously,—Clay, Calhoun, and Webster worked, in unequal and even discordant partnership, to establish a new reign of terror for anti-slavery fanatics and ensure the lasting domination of the Slave Power. They wielded a packed Senate in whose twenty-seven standing committees the South had sixteen chairmanships, to say6 nothing of those which she had assigned to Northern doughfaces, while in sixteen committees she had carefully secured a majority of actual slaveholders, and from all had insolently excluded the three truly Northern7 Senators, Hale, Seward, and Chase. A House, packed8 in like manner, completed the Congress whose destiny it was to pour oil upon the flames of the agitation it sought to extinguish. For eight months after Mr. Clay introduced his so-called Compromise Resolutions, they,9 and the measures to which they gave birth in an Omnibus Bill, engrossed the attention of both Houses and of the country. No appropriation bill could be passed.10 Everybody was in a fever of excitement till a ‘settlement’ should be arrived at; and when the settlement was enacted, all peace and quiet was at an end. Clay's programme was: To yield to the inevitable in11 the case of California, and admit her as a free State— [274] yet with the air of conceding something. To organize the Territories acquired from Mexico without raising the question of slavery—virtuously resisting the Southern demand for the prolongation of the Missouri Compromise parallel (because, said he, that would be to vote for the positive introduction of slavery, which Heaven forbid Henry Clay should do either north or south of 36° 30′— and because slavery would have an advantage in putting12 up no fences!). To bribe Texas to relinquish her preposterous claims to New Mexican territory. To gratify13 Northern sentiment, not by abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, or the slave-traffic within it, but by excluding adjacent slave-breeders from the Washington14 market. Finally, to satisfy the claims of the South by a more stringent law for the reclaiming of fugitive slaves. In summing up, he showed that the South would secure15 the practical abandonment of the Wilmot Proviso, and prevent a Texan invasion of New Mexico, which President Taylor would resist with Federal troops, even though the other Southern States sided forcibly with Texas—as16 would surely happen—in a civil war. Moreover, the Free Soilers would have the ground cut from under them. ‘As certain as that God exists in heaven,’ he cried to17 John P. Hale with passionate blasphemy, ‘your business, your avocation is gone! . . . There is California— she is admitted into the Union; will they [the Free Soilers] agitate about that? Well, there are the Territorial governments establishedwill they agitate about them? There is the settlement of the Texan boundary question— upon what can they agitate? . . . Then, will they agitate about the [abolition of the] slave-trade in the District of Columbia? That is accomplished.’ There remained the abolition disunionists, the Garrisonians, of whom Senator Toombs of Georgia had said: ‘In my18 judgment, their line of policy is the fairest, most just,19 most honest and defensible of all the enemies of our institutions—and such will be the judgment of impartial history’—they might, indeed, agitate, but impotently. [275] Calhoun's glazed eye, almost fixed in death, saw more clearly than Clay's. His last speech, read for him in the Senate, protested not against the Kentuckian's aims in behalf of slavery, but his methods. Disunion was the necessary end of an agitation which imperilled the equilibrium of slave and free States; and the Compromise did not protect that equilibrium. The Fugitive Slave Bill introduced by Senator Butler of South Carolina would20 not meet the hopes of its author and supporters. “It is impossible to execute any law of Congress until the people of the States shall cooperate.” Lib. 20.46. He did not despise the influence of the Garrisonians: he had seen its working21 since 1835 [and longer, but he naturally remembered by22 landmarks of mob violence], and witnessed the beginning of disunion in the rending of the great religious23 denominations—the Episcopal alone remaining intact.24 Daniel Webster's incredible 7th of March speech, in25 wholesale support of the Compromise, carried dismay to the Conscience Whigs, who had built their hopes of him on random utterances disconnected by any logic of principle or behavior, and infused by no warmth of heart or ray of pity for the slave. True, he had said at Marshfield,26 in September, 1842: ‘We talk of the North. There has for a long time been no North. I think the North Star is at last discovered; I think there will be a North’ exhibiting ‘a strong, conscientious, and united opposition to slavery.’ True, he had said in New York in March, 1837, during the Texas excitement:
The subject [of slavery] has not only attracted attention as27 a question of politics, but it has struck a far deeper-toned chord. [276] It has arrested the religious feeling of the country; it has taken strong hold on the consciences of men. He is a rash man, indeed, and little conversant with human nature, and especially has he a very erroneous estimate of the character of the people of this country, who supposes that a feeling of this kind is to be trifled with or despised. It will assuredly cause itself to be respected. It may be reasoned with, it may be made willing—I believe it is entirely willing—to fulfil all existing engagements and all existing duties, to uphold and defend the Constitution as it is established, with whatever regrets about some provisions which it does actually contain. But to coerce it into silence, to endeavor to restrain its free expression, to seek to compress and confine it, warm as it is, and more heated as such endeavors would inevitably render it—should this be attempted, I know nothing, even in the Constitution or in the Union itself, which would not be endangered by the explosion which might follow.But how consistently he had dodged every opportunity28 in Congress to make himself the spokesman of that muchdesired ‘North,’ or the protector of that respectable religious feeling when it was regularly ‘coerced into silence’ in both Houses! What word or act of his in support of John Quincy Adams since 1830 could be cited— what to vindicate the right of petition? How did he resent the expulsion of Massachusetts from the Federal29 courts in South Carolina in the person of Samuel Hoar?30 As the real stake of the ‘Compromise’ game was the Fugitive Slave Law,31 and Webster's main purpose was [277] to overcome Northern repugnance to that measure, the rest of his ‘indescribably base and wicked speech,’ as32 Mr. Garrison termed it, was simply confirmatory of his depravation. His historical dust-cloud about the origin33 of slavery in America, and of its guarantees in the Constitution; his pretext, in regard to California and New Mexico, that their physical conditions debarred African slavery, and he “would not take pains to reaffirm an ordinance of Nature, nor to reenact the will of God” Lib. 20.43 cf. 21.93.; his offer to support a Government scheme of colonizing34 the free colored population of the South35—all was mere surplusage. It was his advocacy of the duty of slave-hunting which brought upon him the withering censure of Northern manhood, the hollow applause of the South, the immoral thanks of the trader and the doughface. When he rose in his place on March 7 to break the word of promise to the hope of his eager constituency, the Fugitive Slave Bill was even more objectionable than at36 the time of its final passage. Its unwarranted extension of the Federal judiciary placed the liberty of every alleged fugitive at the mercy of any commissioner, clerk, or37 marshal of a Federal court, or Federal postmaster, or collector of customs, in the State where the seizure was made. The ‘Expounder of the Constitution’ was prepared to support this iniquity ‘to the fullest extent,’38 along with Senator Mason's amendments of January 23,39 affixing, not only to the rescue of an alleged fugitive, but40 to the harboring or concealing of any such, a penalty of one thousand dollars fine and twelve months imprisonment (ultimately mitigated, as regards imprisonment, to41 a term not exceeding six months); and denying the [278] alleged fugitive all right to testify in his own defence. Nor did Webster, who, while yet undecided on which side to commit himself, had drawn up an amendment42 providing for a trial by jury (which lay hid in his desk on the 7th of March), make this a sine qua non of his adhesion; or revolt at the effect given to the kidnapper's ex-parte43 affidavits;44 or denounce the omission to provide any redress for the abuse of the authority conferred by the bill. For thus having ‘convinced the understanding and touched the conscience of a nation,’ he was publicly thanked by some seven hundred addressers of Boston and45 vicinity—great lawyers, like Rufus Choate and Benjamin R. Curtis; men of letters, like George Ticknor, William H. Prescott, and Jared Sparks (the last also the President of Harvard College); theologians like Moses Stuart, Leonard Woods, and Ralph Emerson of Andover Seminary. Half as many gentlemen of Newburyport confessed46 their gratitude to Webster for his having recalled them to ‘a due sense of their Constitutional obligations’; and in this group we read the names of Francis Todd (who, if a novice in slave-catching, had known something of47 slave-trading) and of the Rev. Daniel Dana, D. D. These48 addresses, with Professor Stuart's obsequious pamphlet49 on “Conscience and the Constitution,” elicited acknowledgments from Webster, which were so many supplements50 to his 7th of March speech, coining fresh euphemisms for the shameful thing he invested with the sacred name of duty. At the Revere House, in Boston, the anti-slavery sentiment to which he had once allowed a religious origin51 [279] and intensity, he now declared to have its foundation in ‘unreal, ghostly abstractions.’ His Massachusetts52 fellow-citizens, reluctant to turn the fugitive from their doors, or assist in his capture, the Senator held bound to the discharge of ‘a disagreeable duty,’ adding: “Any man can perform an agreeable duty—it is not every man who can perform a disagreeable duty.” Lib. 20.70. Would Massachusetts, he asked sardonically, “conquer her own Prejudices?” Lib. 20.70. The answer to this question was rendered at the polls in November, when the Whig party received a crushing53 defeat in Massachusetts. But more immediately response was made in Faneuil Hall by abolitionists and Free54 Soilers; by the colored people of Boston; by the voters of55 Plymouth County, the home of Webster; and widely by the religious press. These fanned the excitement56 attending the debates over the Compromise in Congress; those which grew out of the petitions for peaceable disunion57 presented by John P. Hale in the Senate; the calling of the Nashville Convention to concert disunion from the58 Southern point of view; the various Southern legislative59 preparations for the same event. South Carolina made an appropriation for arms, and Governor Floyd of60 Virginia, for the better recovery of fugitives, recommended a system of taxation by license “so arranged as to transfer entirely the trade from those States which have trampled under foot the Constitution of the United States to those which are still willing to abide by its compromises and recognize our rights under it.” Lib. 20.61. This system he would apply to the manufactures, live stock, and soil products of the delinquent States, and withal would have the South start factories of her own. As in 1835, the attempt was made to cow the North61 through the medium of its trade, and the Union meetings62 with which the year opened and closed were largely sustained by the mercantile community. In Pennsylvania,63 the Democrats were ready to sacrifice the slavery issue to that of protection for the iron interest. In New York, [280] John A. Dix, lately United States Senator from that State, wrote on June 17, 1850:
Commercial interests rule the day. The prices of stocks and of merchandise are considered, by a large portion of the business men, as of more importance than the preservation of great principles. A merchant told me the other day he was satisfied our whole policy in relation to slavery was wrong— that we ought to repeal all laws prohibiting the introduction of slaves into the United States, beginning with an amendment of the Constitution. This gentleman is one of the most wealthy and respectable in this city [New York]. Another, of equal wealth and respectability, told me he had no objection to the reestablishment of slavery in this State. A few such examples of perverted principle and feeling are quite enough to satisfy me that our only hope is from the country. To Hon. Chas. A. Mann; in Mag. Am. Hist., June, 1885, p. 585.The readiness of ‘wealth and respectability’ to suppress the anti-slavery agitation by force was again to be illustrated, in 1850 as in 1835, in the person of Mr. Garrison. He began the year in poor health, though still in the lecture64 field, and taking some, if not his usual, part in the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in65 Faneuil Hall. He there offered a resolution condemning Longfellow's newly published ode to the Union, which he had already characterized in the Liberator as “a eulogy dripping with the blood of imbruted humanity.” Lib. 20.11. He now (in terms which, truthful and prophetic as they were, elicited hisses from the hostile part of his audience and66 vehement censure from the press) set over against the poet's conception of the ‘Ship of State’ rather a
perfidious bark67rotting through all her timbers, leaking from stem to stern, laboring heavily on a storm-tossed sea, surrounded by clouds of disastrous portent, navigated by those whose object is a piratical one (namely, the extension and perpetuity of slavery), and destined to go down, “full many a fathom deep,” to the joy and exultation of all who are yearning for the deliverance of a groaning world.Zzz He [281] had also drawn hostile attention to himself by a letter68 to the mass convention of abolitionists held at Syracuse, N. Y., on January 15, of which the closing sentence read: ‘I am for the abolition of slavery, therefore for the dissolution of the Union.’ Later, he drafted for himself and others a protest against the summary disposal of disunion69 petitions by the Massachusetts Legislature, alleging:
Built ia tha eclipse, and rigged with curses dark,
On the sixth of May, Mr. Garrison set out for New71 York to attend the anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The air was full of coming violence, of which a truly Satanic Scotchman, James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, was the prime invoker. He began on April 30 by charging the religious and72 philanthropic societies, indiscriminately, that held regular annual meetings in New York, and which were ‘all of one side of thinking in regard to slavery,’ with having brought the country to ‘the brink of a dissolution of the Union—a separation of these States—and, perhaps, a long and bloody civil war.’ He urged ‘the merchants, men of business, and men of property, in this city,’ to [282]（3.) That while your petitioners are subjected, by the70 Constitution and laws of the United States, and therefore of this Commonwealth, to heavy fines for obeying the law of God, and refusing to deliver up the fugitive slave, or giving him aid and protection, they feel that they have a right to be heard in asking to be relieved from such immoral obligations.
（4.) That while citizens of this Commonwealth, on visiting Southern States, are seized, thrust into prison, condemned to work with felons in the chain-gang, and frequently sold on the auction-block as slaves; and while the governments, both of the United States and of the Southern States, have refused, or made it penal, to attempt a remedy; and while this Commonwealth has given up all effort to vindicate the rights of its citizens as hopeless and impracticable, under the present Union —it is manifestly the duty of the Commonwealth, as a Sovereign State, to devise some other measure for the redress and prevention of so grievous a wrong, which your petitioners are profoundly convinced can be reached only by a secession from the present Union.Ante, p. 131.
frown down the meetings of these mad people, if they would save themselves. What business have all the religious lunatics of the free States to gather in this commercial city for purposes which, if carried into effect, would ruin and destroy its prosperity? Will the men of sense allow meetings to be held in this city which are calculated to make our country the arena of blood and murder, and render our city an object of horror to the whole South? We hope not. Public opinion should be regulated. These abolitionists should not be allowed to misrepresent New York.He besought his ‘regulators’ to
go on Tuesday morning to the Tabernacle, and there look at the black and white brethren and sisters, fraternizing, slobbering over each other, speaking, praying, singing, blaspheming, and cursing the Constitution of our glorious Union, and then say whether these things shall go forth to the South and the world as the feeling of the great city of New York. Every citizen has a right, legally, and more than morally, to have his say at the amalgamation meeting on Tuesday. The Union expects every man to do his duty; and duty to the Union, in the present crisis, points out to us that we should allow no more fuel to be placed upon the fire of abolitionism in our midst, when we can prevent it by sound reasoning and calm remonstrances. May 7, 1850.On May 2, the Herald returned to the subject, drawing somewhat nearer to the leader of the ‘anti-slavery delegates.’ Of these it said:
They will be full of all kinds of assaults upon all kinds of73 decency, and upon liberty itself. They will assault the people, the nation, the Constitution, the Representatives and Senators in Congress assembled, the President, the laws, and the press. Having dealt their blows upon these till the game is stale, they will next attack the church, then the clergy, then the Sabbath, then the Bible, then everything divine and human throughout the world, quarrelling amongst themselves at a fearful rate, and possibly kicking up a disgraceful riot, in order to become martyrs to their false patriotism, false pride, and sincere folly. Such will be the plan, the plot; the scenes can as yet scarcely be sketched. The house will be an overflowing one; and if, in the rush for places, the public should become interested, and get upon the stage, and turn the tables by talking down and voting [283] down the actors, it would be a case of real free discussion— popular opinion rising superior to local prejudice, and producing a good result out of the most mischievous elements.On May 6, the Herald singled out the Liberator, for its74 immediate abolitionism and disunionism, and enumerated the speakers announced for the following day: ‘Wm. H. Furness of Philadelphia, white man—from Anglo-Saxon blood; Frederick Douglass of Rochester, black man— from African blood; Wm. Lloyd Garrison of Boston, mulatto man—mixed race; Wendell Phillips of Boston, white man—merely from blood.’ Comparing the approaching meeting with the Nashville Disunion75 Convention, Bennett pronounced the former to be much the more mischievous, and renewed his appeal for its suppression in the most inflammatory language. On May 7, he singled out the editor of the Liberator,76 saying that, since the World's Convention, Garrison had
boldly urged the utter overthrow of the churches, the Sabbath, and the Bible. Nothing has been sacred with him but the ideal intellect of the negro race. To elevate this chimera, he has urged the necessity of an immediate overthrow of the Government, a total disrespect for the Constitution, actual disruption and annihilation of the Union, and a cessation of all order, legal or divine, which does not square with his narrow views of what constitutes human liberty. Never, in the time of the French Revolution and blasphemous atheism, was there more malevolence and unblushing wickedness avowed than by this same Garrison. Indeed, he surpasses Robespierre and his associates, for he has no design of building up. His only object is to destroy. . . . In Boston, a few months ago, a convention was held, the object of which was the overthrow of Sunday worship. Thus it appears that nothing divine or secular is respected by these fanatics. Ante, p. 262.The lesson of the hour was, that—
When free discussion does not promote the public good,77 it has no more right to exist than a bad government that is dangerous and oppressive to the common weal. It should be overthrown. On the question of usefulness to the public of the packed, organized meetings of these abolitionists, socialists, [284] Sabbath-breakers, and anarchists, there can be but one result arrived at by prudence and patriotism. They are dangerous assemblies—calculated for mischief, and treasonable in their character and purposes. Though the law cannot reach them, public opinion can; and as, in England, a peaceful dissent from such doctrines as these fellows would promulgate—a strong expression of dissent from them—would be conveyed by hisses and by counter statements and expositions, so here in New York we may anticipate that there are those who will enter the arena of discussion, and send out the true opinion of the public. That half-a-dozen madmen should manufacture opinion for the whole community, is not to be tolerated. It is to be hoped that, before long, we shall learn what public opinion upon the Union truly is—and what interest all the masses have in the perpetuity of the Sabbath and our institutions.This pious ruffianism was reinforced by the editor of78 the Globe on the same day. ‘The right to assemble79 peaceably for the overthrow of the Government is nowhere guaranteed by the Constitution. . . . No public building, no, not even the streets, must be desecrated by such a proposed assemblage of traitors.’ As for ‘one of the heralded orators for this Anniversary,’ ‘the black Douglass,’ who, at the Syracuse Convention in January,80 had invoked immediate disunion, and alleged that Washington, Jefferson, and Patrick Henry ‘were strangers to any just idea of Liberty’—‘This was uttered, says a contemporary, and “no hand was raised to fell the speaker to the earth!” ’ But, added the Globe, “if this Douglass shall re-proclaim his Syracuse treason here, and any man shall arrest him in his diabolical career, and not injure him, thousands will exclaim, in language of patriotic love for the Constitution and the rights of the South, ‘did he not strike the Villain dead?’ ” Lib. 20.77.
W. L. Garrison to his Wife.The Tabernacle was a Congregational place of worship, on the northeast corner of Broadway and Anthony (now Worth) Street. The revivalist Finney had formerly88 preached there. It was a large hall, nearly square, on the ground floor, with a gentle descent from the entrance. The platform faced this entrance, with tiers of seats rising rearward to the organ, and then merging with those of the gallery, which rested on four great pillars. Thither went Mr. Garrison on Tuesday morning, to take89 his place as President of the American Anti-Slavery Society. As the above letter shows, he was fully alive to the possibilities of the occasion, and perfectly tranquil in mind. He could well trust his general appearance to belie the Herald's caricature of him, physically and spiritually; but as he was to be the central figure of the meetings, he was resolved to avoid all outward singularity. For this reason he abandoned for good the turn-down collar which he had clung to through all the changes of fashion,90 and put on the stand — up collar of the day. Surrounded on the platform by the flower of the Massachusetts Board and by the speakers agreed upon, he entered calmly upon his duties to the Society and to the vast assembly about him. In front, he saw a most respectable company of men and women; behind and above him he felt the organized and impending mob. The passages which Mr. Garrison's “blasphemous atheism” Ante, p. 283. prompted him to read, as an opening exercise,91 from the Bible—a book, he said, ‘which the people of this country profess to receive as the word of God’— [287] were chosen for their bearing on the Union and the Fugitive Slave Bill:
The Lord standeth up to plead, and standeth to judge the people. . . What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord God of hosts. . . . Associate yourselves, O ye people, and ye shall be broken in pieces; gird yourselves, and ye shall be broken in pieces. . . . They all lie in wait for blood; they hunt every man his brother with a net. . . . Hide the outcasts, bewray not him that wandereth; let mine outcasts dwell with thee; be thou a covert to them from the face of the spoiler. Lib. 20.82.To Dr. Furness, who sat beside Mr. Garrison, these92 selections (in full, not in our abstract) seemed “most admirably adapted to the existing state of our country. His reading, however, was not remarkably effective. It was like the ordinary reading of the pulpit,” Lib. 20.81.—and hence, let us add, not calculated to stir the wrath of the ungodly.93 The reading of the Treasurer's report followed, and then Mr. Garrison, resigning the chair to Francis Jackson, proceeded to make the first speech of the day. He held in his hand the text or notes of his discourse, which was not one prepared for the occasion, but had been94 delivered in various parts of New England and well received. In a clear, ringing voice, he repeated it to his95 hearers in the Tabernacle, fixing the attention of those who had come to listen, but soaring above the comprehension [288] of the degraded creatures watching for a pretext for disturbance. ‘He began,’ relates Dr. Furness,96
with stating that they,97 the members of the Anti-Slavery Society, regarded the antislavery cause as emphatically the Christian movement of the day. Nothing could be more explicit than his recognition of the truth and divine authority of the Christianity of the New Testament. He went on to examine the popular tests of religion, and to show their defectiveness. In so doing, his manner was grave and dignified. There was no bitterness, no levity. His manner of speaking was simple, clerical, and Christian. His subject was, substantially, that we have, over and over again, in all the pulpits of the land—the inconsistency of our profession and practice—although not with the same application. . . . Mr. Garrison said great importance was attached to a belief in Jesus. We were told that we must believe in Jesus. And yet this faith in Jesus had no vitality, no practical bearing on conduct and character. He had previously, however, passed in rapid review the chief religious denominations, showing that they uttered no protest against the sins of the nation. He spoke first in this connection of the Roman Catholic Church, stating that its priests and members held slaves without incurring the rebuke of the Church.Up to this point the only symptoms of opposition had been some ill-timed and senseless applause—or what seemed such. And as it came from one little portion of the audience, Dr. Furness asked Wendell Phillips at his98 side what it meant. ‘ “It means,” he said, “that there is to be a row.” ’ The reference to the Catholic Church gave the first opening to the leader of the gang.
Captain Rynders (who occupied a position in the99 background, at one side of the organ-loft, and commanding a bird'seye view of the whole scene beneath) here said: Will you allow me to ask you a question? (Excitement and confusion.) Mr. Garrison—Yes, sir. Captain Rynders—The question I would ask is, whether there are no other churches as well as the Catholic Church, whose clergy and lay members hold slaves. [289] Mr. Garrison—Will the friend wait for a moment, and I will answer him in reference to other churches. (Cheers.)100 Captain Rynders then resumed his seat. Mr. Garrison then proceeded: Shall we look to the Episcopal church for hope? It was the boast of John C. Calhoun,101 shortly before his death, that that church was impregnable to anti-slavery. That vaunt was founded on truth, for the Episcopal clergy and laity are buyers and sellers of human flesh. We cannot, therefore, look to them. Shall we look to the Presbyterian church? The whole weight of it is on the side of oppression. Ministers and people buy and sell slaves, apparently without any compunctious visitings of conscience. We cannot, therefore, look to them, nor to the Baptists, nor the Methodists; for they, too, are against the slave, and all the sects are combined to prevent that jubilee which it is the will of God should come. . . . Be not startled when I say that a belief in Jesus is no evidence of goodness (hisses); no, friends. Voice—Yes it is. Mr. Garrison—Our friend says ‘yes’; my position is “no.” It is worthless as a test, for the reason I have already assigned in reference to the other tests. His praises are sung in Louisiana, Alabama, and the other Southern States just as well as in Massachusetts. Captain Rynders—Are you aware that the slaves in the South have their prayer-meetings in honor of Christ? Mr. Garrison—Not a slaveholding or a slave-breeding Jesus. (Sensation.) The slaves believe in a Jesus that strikes off chains. In this country, Jesus has become obsolete. A profession in him is no longer a test. Who objects to his course in Judaea? The old Pharisees are extinct, and may safely be denounced. Jesus is the most respectable person in the United States. (Great sensation, and murmurs of disapprobation.) Jesus sits in the President's chair of the United States. (A thrill of horror here seemed to run through the assembly.) Zachary Taylor sits there, which is the same thing, for he believes in Jesus. He believes in war, [290] and the Jesus that “gave the Mexicans hell.” 102 (Sensation, uproar, and confusion.)The name of Zachary Taylor had scarcely passed Mr.103 Garrison's lips when Captain Rynders, with something like a howl, forsaking his strategic position on the borderline of the gallery and the platform, dashed headlong down towards the speaker's desk, followed, with shouting and imprecations and a terrifying noise, by the mass of his backers. The audience, despite a natural agitation, gave way to no panic. The abolitionist leaders upon the platform remained imperturbable. ‘I was not aware,’ writes Dr. Furness, “of being under any apprehension of personal violence. We were all like General Jackson's cotton-bales at New Orleans. Our demeanor made it impossible for the rioters to use any physical force against us.” 50th Anniversary of a Pastorate, p. 30. The scene recalled the descent of the Gauls upon the Roman Senate. The barbarism of Rynders was confronted with the loftiest morality, the greatest personal dignity, of the time. He found himself in the midst of Francis and Edmund Jackson, of Wendell Phillips, of Edmund Quincy, of Charles F. Hovey, of William H. Furness, of Samuel May, Jr., of Sydney Howard Gay, of Isaac T. Hopper, of Henry C. Wright, of Abby Kelley Foster, of Frederick Douglass, of Mr. Garrison—against whom his menaces were specially directed. Never was a human being more out of his element. Isaiah Rynders, a native American, of mixed German104 and Irish lineage, was now some forty-six years of age. He began life as a boatman on the Hudson River, and, passing easily into the sporting class, went to seek his fortunes as a professional gambler in the paradise of the Southwest. In this region he became familiar with all forms of violence, including the institution of slavery. After many personal hazards and vicissitudes, he returned to New York city, where he proved to be admirably qualified for local political leadership in connection with Tammany [291] Hall. A sporting-house which he opened became a Democratic rendezvous and the headquarters of the Empire Club, an organization of roughs and desperadoes who acknowledged his ‘captaincy.’ His campaigning in behalf of Polk and Dallas in 1844 secured him the friendly105 patronage of the successful candidate for Vice-President,106 and he took office as Weigher in the Custom-house of the metropolis. He found time, while thus employed, to engineer the Astor Place riot on behalf of the actor107 Forrest against his English rival Macready, on May 10, 1849, and the year 1850 opened with his trial for this108 atrocity and his successful defence by John Van Buren. On February 16 he and his Club broke up an anti-Wilmot109 Proviso meeting in New York—a seeming inconsistency, but it was charged against Rynders that he had offered110 to ‘give the State of New York to Clay’ in the election of 1844 for $30,000, and met with a reluctant refusal. In March he was arrested for a brutal assault on a gentleman111 in a hotel, but the victim and the witnesses found it prudent not to appear against a ruffian who did not hesitate to threaten the district-attorney in open court. Meanwhile, the new Whig Administration quite justifiably discharged Rynders from the Custom-house, leaving him free to pose as a saviour of the Union against traitors—a saviour of society against blasphemers and infidels wherever encountered. There was a manifest disinterestedness, therefore, in his vindication, at the Tabernacle, of the President who had thrown him back upon his resources as a blackleg and bravo. We left him pushing his way to the front of the platform, with menace in his stride, his uplifted arm, the bellow of his voice. This, according to the Herald, was what greeted Mr. Garrison's ear:
Captain Rynders (clenching his fist)—I will not allow112 you to assail the President of the United States. You shan't do it (shaking his fist at Mr. Garrison). many voices—Turn him out, turn him out! Captain Rynders—If a million of you were there, I would [292] not allow the President of the United States to be insulted. As long as you confined yourself to your subject, I did not interfere; but I will not permit you or any other man to misrepresent the President.113Mr. Garrison, as the Rev. Samuel May testifies, “calmly replied that he had simply quoted some recent words of General Taylor, and appealed to the audience if he had said aught in disrespect of him.” Boston Commonwealth, Feb. 14, 1885. ‘You ought not to interrupt us,’ he continued to Rynders—‘in the quietest manner conceivable,’ as Dr. Furness relates. “We go upon the principle of hearing everybody. If you wish to speak, I will keep order, and you shall be heard.” 50th Anniversary of a Pastorate, p. 30. The din, however, increased. “The Hutchinsons, who were wont to sing at the anti-slavery meetings, were in the gallery, and they attempted to raise a song, to soothe the savages with music. But it was of no avail. Rynders drowned their fine voices with noise and shouting.” Ibid. Still, a knock-down argument with a live combatant would have suited him better than mere Bedlamitish disturbance. He was almost gratified by young Thomas L. Kane,114 son of115 Judge Kane of Philadelphia, who, seeing the rush of the116 mob upon the platform, had himself leaped there, to protect his townsman, Dr. Furness. ‘They shall not touch a hair of your head,’ he said in a tone of great excitement, and, as the strain became more intense, ‘he rushed up to Rynders and shook his fist in his face. He said to117 me [Dr. Furness] with the deepest emphasis: “If he touches Mr. Garrison I'll kill him.” But Mr. Garrison's composure was more than a coat of mail.’ [293] The knot was cut by Francis Jackson's formal offer of the floor to Rynders as soon as Mr. Garrison had finished his remarks; with an invitation meanwhile to take a seat on the platform. ‘This,’ says Mr. May, “he scoutingly refused; but, seeing the manifest fairness of the president's offer, drew back a little, and stood, with folded arms, waiting for Mr. Garrison to conclude, which soon he did” Rev. S. May, Boston Commonwealth, Feb. 14, 1885.—offering a resolution in these terms:
Resolved, That the anti-slavery movement, instead of being ‘infidel,’ in an evil sense (as is falsely alleged), is truly Christian, in the primitive meaning of that term, and the special embodiment in this country of whatever is loyal to God and benevolent to man; and that, in view of the palpable enormity of slavery —of the religious and political professions of the people—of the age in which we live, blazing with the concentrated light of many centuries—indifference or hostility to this movement indicates a state of mind more culpable than was manifested by the Jewish nation in rejecting Jesus as the Messiah, eighteen hundred years ago. Lib. 20.82.With these words the speaker retired, to resume the presidency of the meeting. ‘The close of Mr. Garrison's address,’ says Dr. Furness,118
brought down Rynders again, who vociferated and harangued, at one time on the platform, and then pushing down into the aisles, like a madman followed by his keepers. Through the whole, nothing could be more patient and serene than the bearing of Mr. Garrison. I have always revered Mr. Garrison for his devoted, uncompromising fidelity to his great cause. Today, I was touched to the heart by his calm and gentle manners. There was no agitation, no scorn, no heat, but the quietness of a man engaged in simple duties.After some parleying, it appeared that Rynders had a spokesman who preferred to follow Dr. Furness. ‘Accordingly,’ says the latter,
I spoke my little, anxiously119 prepared word. I never recall that hour without blessing myself that I was called to speak precisely at that moment. At any other stage of the proceedings, it would have been wretchedly out of place. As it was, my speech fitted in almost as well as if it had been impromptu, although a sharp eye might easily [294] have discovered that I was speaking memoriter. Rynders interrupted me again and again, exclaiming that I lied, that I was personal; but he ended with applauding me!No greater contrast to what was to follow could possibly be imagined than the genial manner, firm tones, and selfpossession, the refined discourse, of this Unitarian clergyman, who was felt to have turned the current of the120 meeting. Up rose, as per agreement, one ‘Professor’ Grant, a seedy-looking personage, having one hand tied round with a dirty cotton cloth. Mr. Garrison recognized121 him as a former pressman in the Liberator office. His thesis was that the blacks were not men, but belonged to the monkey tribe. His speech proved dull and tiresome, and was made sport of by his own set, whom Mr.122 Garrison had to call to order. There were now loud cries for Frederick Douglass, who came forward to where Rynders stood in the conspicuous position he had taken “when he thought the meeting was his, and remained in it, too mortified even to creep away, when he found it was somebody else's.” Nat. A. S. Standard, 10.199. ‘Now you can speak,’ said he to Douglass;123 ‘but mind what I say: if you speak disrespectfully [of the South, or Washington, or Patrick Henry] Ill knock you off the stage.’ Nothing daunted, the ex-fugitive from greater terrors began:
The gentleman who has just spoken has undertaken to prove that the blacks are not human beings. He has examined our whole conformation, from top to toe. I cannot follow him in his argument. I will assist him in it, however. I offer myself for your examination. Am I a man? Furness's 50th Anniversary of a Pastorate, p. 31.124 The audience responded with a thunderous affirmative, which Captain Rynders sought to break by exclaiming: ‘You are not a black man; you are only half a nigger.’ “ ‘Then,’ replied Mr. Douglass, turning upon him with the blandest of smiles and an almost affectionate obeisance, ‘I am half-brother to Captain Rynders!’ ” Nat. A. S. Standard. 10.199, 207. He would not deny that he was the son of a slaveholder, born of Southern ‘amalgamation’; a fugitive, too, like Kossuth— [295] ‘another half-brother of mine’ (to Rynders). He spoke of the difficulties thrown in the way of industrious colored people at the North, as he had himself experienced—this by way of answer to Horace Greeley, who had recently complained of their inefficiency and dependence. Criticism of the editor of the Tribune being grateful to Rynders, a political adversary, ‘he added a word to Douglass's125 against Greeley. “I am happy,” said Douglass, “to have the assent of my half-brother here,” pointing to Rynders, and convulsing the audience with laughter. After this, Rynders, finding how he was played with, took care to hold his peace; but some one of Rynders's company in the gallery undertook to interrupt the speaker. “It's of no use,” said Mr. Douglass, “I've Captain Rynders here to back me.” ’ We were born here, he said finally, we are not dying out, and we mean to stay here. We made the clothes you have on, the sugar you put into your tea. We would do more if allowed. ‘Yes,’ said a voice in the crowd, ‘you would cut our throats for us.’ ‘No,’ was the quick126 response, ‘but we would cut your hair for you.’ Douglass concluded his triumphant remarks by calling upon the Rev. Samuel R. Ward, editor of the Impartial Citizen, to succeed him. ‘All eyes,’ says Dr. Furness,127 ‘were instantly turned to the back of the platform, or stage rather, so dramatic was the scene; and there, amidst a group, stood a large man, so black that, as Wendell Phillips said, when he shut his eyes you could not see him. . . . As he approached, Rynders exclaimed: “ Well, this is the original nigger!” “I've heard of the magnanimity of Captain Rynders,” said Ward, “but the half has not been told me!” And then he went on with a noble voice, and his speech was such a strain of eloquence as I never heard excelled before or since.’ The mob had to applaud him, too, and it is the highest praise to128 record that his unpremeditated utterance maintained the level of Douglass's, and ended the meeting with a sense of climax—demonstrating alike the humanity and the capacity (Bennett's ‘ideal intellect’) of the full-blooded negro.129 [296] “When he ceased speaking, the time had expired for which the Tabernacle was engaged, and we had to adjourn. Never,” 50th Anniversary of a Pastorate, p. 34. continues Dr. Furness,
was there a grander triumph of intelligence, of mind, over brute force. Two colored men, whose claim to be considered human was denied, had, by mere force of intellect, overwhelmed their maligners with confusion. As the audience was thinning out, I went down on the floor to see some friends there. Rynders came by. I could not help saying to him: “ How shall we thank you for what you have done for us to-day?” “Well,” said he, “I do not like to hear my country abused, but that last thing that you said, that's the truth.” That last thing was, I believe, a simple assertion of the right of the people to think and speak freely.The magnitude of the victory won by the abolitionists can be understood only in view of the absolute non-interference of the city authorities on behalf of free speech and personal and civic rights. Both Isaac T. Hopper and Sydney H. Gay had called upon the Chief of Police130 (George W. Matsell) in advance of the meeting, to ask for protection against the disturbance which he as well as they knew to be inevitable, albeit he professed the contrary. Not a policeman was visible at the Tabernacle,131 though a captain was present, to whom, when the rush on to the platform occurred, Mr. Gay appealed; but he refused to interpose so long as the mob abstained from bodily injury. It was, he said in Rynders's hearing, a ‘free meeting’; and Mr. Gay had only menaces for his pains. Mr. Garrison reports that—
towards the close of the meeting, after two hours of violent132 interruption and great confusion, and during the speech of Mr. Douglass, when that gifted man had effectually put to shame his assailants by his wit and eloquence, Mr. Matsell did say to me, in a whisper, that he would remove Rynders133 whenever I demanded it, in case he proceeded to commit any further violence. My reply was, that I hoped we should be able to conclude the proceedings without rendering such a step necessary. But I regarded the offer of assistance under such circumstances as little better than a mockery, and made only to save appearances. [297] Happily, the members of the American A. S. Society are deeply imbued with the spirit of peace as well as of liberty, and believe in overcoming evil with good; for, abandoned as they were to the insults and outrages of the mob by the city authorities, had they resorted to violence in self-defence, the most deplorable consequences might have followed. That I uttered the calm conviction, that an assault so brutal and unjustifiable would aid, instead of injuring, the sacred cause of emancipation [is] true; but, of course, not with any gratification at such an outrage, in itself considered. I am fully persuaded of the truth of the scriptural declaration, that the God of justice will “cause the wrath of man to praise him, and the remainder of wrath he will restrain.”So far from curbing or preventing the mob, the134 Aldermen even passed resolves condemning the irreligious and blasphemous meetings of the abolitionists, and requesting Mayor Woodhull to break them up; but these were135 subsequently recalled. It was from the Mayor that the Chief of Police received his instructions to pay no136 attention to anything short of actual assault and battery. Hence his captains and their hundreds looked on137 passively at the scenes in the hall of the Society Library in the evening of May 7, when some two dozen rioters drowned with jocose and abusive interlocutions, with138 hisses, oaths, catcalls, and a general charivari, the attempted speeches of Parker Pillsbury, Stephen S. Foster, and Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose. Wednesday's sessions opened in the morning at the139 same place. According to the Tribune's report of the140 proceedings—
Mr. Garrison wished to say, once for all, that though this was a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, yet the doors were wide open to those who dissented; they were invited here in good faith, and should have, if they desired it, a full and fair hearing. They who are unwilling to accept an offer so generous, must certainly be conscious that they have no argument to bring against us, and in actions of noisy violence they do injury to the good name of Freedom. If any one wishes to address the meeting, either for or against the resolutions, this platform is at his or her service. Lib. 20:[78].[298] But Rynders, taught by experience, avoided a second humiliation as a debater, and ushered in a fresh series of brutish demonstrations. Mr. Garrison's magnanimity proved even a municipal safe-conduct for the captain of141 the Empire Club. For when Isaac T. Hopper reported him to the Mayor as again breaking up the meeting, that official protested—“But I understand that Capt. Rynders was invited to the meeting, and that blasphemy has been uttered by your speakers” Lib. 20.86, 106.; and denied all authority to interfere unless violence was committed. And so, at the hall, Mr. Garrison having asked, by request, if the Chief142 of Police was present—
Rynders responded derisively, ‘Oh don't! don't! You'll frighten us all to death!’ —the sovereign mob responding with shouts of laughter! There were present some thirty or forty of the police, besides Mr. Matsell and the high sheriff; and then it was, in the presence of these sworn conservators of the peace of the city, and with their approbation, I announced, under protest, that the proprietors of the building felt compelled to refuse us the further occupancy of it, for fear of the rioters, especially on account of the imminent peril in which the Public Library was placed. Lib. 20:[79].143The victims at this last session were the Rev. Henry Grew, Charles C. Burleigh, and Wendell Phillips. Mr. Burleigh's flowing beard and ringlets and eccentric costume especially evoked the buffoonery of the mob, and harmless personal indignities. “Shave that tall Christ and make a wig for Garrison,” Lib. 20:[78]. cried one; while Rynders, with arm around his neck, stroked his beard. Mr.144 Phillips's irreproachable appearance and famed eloquence did not save him, either, from failure to obtain a hearing, or from filthy verbal missiles. At every turn he was interrupted and overborne. Mention of Washington brought out a call for three cheers for the Father of his Country, vehemently given. ‘Yes,’ echoed Mr. Garrison145 from the chair; ‘three cheers for Washington, who [299] emancipated his slaves and died an abolitionist!’—and this time the genuine meeting shouted with a will, while the rioters, fairly caught, bore it with a laugh. At length the time came for them to take formal control of the meeting which their guerilla warfare had utterly deranged. Brushing aside the offer of ‘Professor’ Grant to resume his ethnological disquisition, they put forth an ex-policeman of the Eighth Ward, who had lately been broken “for being found drunk in a house of illfame.” Lib. 20:[78]. This exponent of the Christianity and Unionism of the hour proposed the following resolution:
Resolved, That this meeting does not see sufficient reasons146 for interfering with the domestic institutions of the South, even if it were constitutional—which it is not—and therefore will not countenance fanatical agitation whose aims and ends are the overthrow of the churches, a reign of anarchy, a division of interests, the supremacy of a hypocritical atheism, a general amalgamation, and a dissolution of the Union. For these reasons, this meeting recommends to these humanity-mongers the confining of its [sic] investigations to the progress of degradation among the negroes of the North, and the increasing inequality and poverty of the free whites and blacks of New York and similar places, instead of scurrility, blasphemy, and vituperation.Captain Rynders having put this resolution, and his obscene creatures having carried it by acclamation, and Mr. Garrison having announced the decision of the trustees to permit no further sessions, ‘thus closed,’ to use the Tribune's words, “anti-slavery free discussion in New York for 1850.” Lib. 20:[78]. And not alone for 1850, as the sequel will show; nor anti-slavery free discussion alone. Everywhere it was felt throughout the North, even by enemies147 of the abolitionists, that no speech could be free under such a license to the mob.
‘What are the consequences?’ asked, for example, the148 Philadelphia Ledger. ‘Why, that no public meetings can be held but by the permission of a mob; and the very men who put down an abolition meeting one day, may themselves be put down to-morrow. . . . It was not,’ continued the [300] Ledger, ‘an offence against the abolitionists that the mob comemitted when they broke up Garrison's meeting, but an offence against the Constitution, against the Union, against the people, against popular rights and the great cause of human freedom. As such, every republican must denounce it.’So did the Quaker poet of Massachusetts:
John G. Whittier to W. L. Garrison.Boston would fain have aped New York in dealing with the New England Anti-Slavery Convention, which opened at the Melodeon on May 28, and closed in Faneuil151 [301] Hall on May 30. The New York Herald's namesake—as vile as Bennett's paper, but feebler—did what it could152 to harass and abort the meeting, but in vain. The disorderly were now recruited not so much from the Democracy as from the ranks of the Webster Whigs—socially a153 distinction with some difference. In spite of them Burleigh154 had his say in splendid fashion; so had Phillips, Garrison, and their colleagues suppressed in New York—Theodore Parker, William H. Channing, and many others. The hostile press surpassed itself in the scurrility of its reports155 of the proceedings; but, for the moment, free speech was vindicated in the Puritan city, and a new anti-slavery campaign of one hundred conventions initiated.156 In the midst of the compromise debates in Congress and the growing excitement at the North, President Taylor died, on the 9th of July, 1850.157 ‘As Capt. Rynders thought it so intolerable and blasphemous158 to say anything against President Taylor,’ wrote Samuel May, Jr., to Mr. Garrison,
I wonder what he thinks of God, for what he has done to the President; for so pious a man as Rynders of course must think it to be God's doing. I really have felt sorry to hear of the old man's death. Spite of his past career, I find that I have a sort of regard for him; his course, the last year, certainly contrasts honorably with that of Clay and Webster. Small praise that, to be sure. A new source of confusion seems to be thrown into the national politics; not to be regretted, if it hastens the crisis, and lets us know what is before us.So far as his short administration went, President Taylor had exhibited remarkable independence of the section and the caste to which he belonged. There was something Lincolnian in his character—equal simplicity, sturdiness, and honesty—an equal resolution to be the chief magistrate of the whole country, with at least equal independence of party. His course justified Stephen A. Douglas's warning that his election boded no good to the159 Slave Power's schemes of expansion, for which, nevertheless, as a soldier, he had fought the war with Mexico. His160 attitude towards the grasping designs of Texas on New [302] Mexico, and repression of the Southern filibustering161 against Cuba; his recommendation that California be162 admitted a free State without conditions—dismayed the Southern extremists, and caused the anti-slavery North to regard his death as a calamity. It is incredible, however, that Taylor would not have signed the Fugitive Slave Bill. All we can say is, that he was fated not to have the opportunity, and that Douglas's prophecy again came true in the case of his successor, when the North (nominally) got the man, and the South163 got the measure. Quite otherwise was it with Robert C. Winthrop's prevision when, in 1848, on giving his adhesion to Taylor's nomination, he said: “And if any accident should befall him (which Heaven avert!), your own Millard Fillmore will carry out such an administration to its legitimate completion.” Lib. 18.105. This New York doughface, having called Webster to the Secretaryship of State, gave, “with alacrity” Lib. 20.119. and without scruple, his assent to the Fugitive164 Slave Bill, which else might have failed to become a law.165 The slave-catchers, already at work in anticipation of its166 enactment, now more boldly renewed their hunting of men in all parts of the North. The terror-stricken colored167 communities along the border—the free sharing the fears of the self-emancipated, and liable to the same fate— began a great northward movement, towards New168 England, towards Canada. Here and there they were encouraged to remain firm, they armed themselves, they were169 given arms; but even from Boston the exodus was170 marked. Senator Sumner estimated that, altogether, ‘as many as 6,000 Christian men and women,171 meritorious persons—a larger band than that of the escaping Puritans —precipitately fled from homes which they had established,’ to British soil.172 [303] On the other hand, in the principal cities, vigilance173 committees were formed to give timely notice of the coming of kidnappers and to thwart their purpose. Prominent clergymen and laymen publicly announced174 their readiness, in contempt of the law, to shelter the fugitive. Henry Ward Beecher in the Independent,175 Theodore Parker from the pulpit, invited the penalty of obedience to the higher law of humanity. Whittier proclaimed himself a ‘Nullifier’ to that extent. The176 venerable Josiah Quincy, shaming his successor in the177 presidency of Harvard College, headed a call for a178 meeting in Faneuil Hall on October 14, 1850, to consider the condition of fugitive slaves and other colored persons under the new law. In a letter read in his absence, he impugned the constitutionality both of the law of 1850 and of that of 1793 which it amended, alleging that Massachusetts accepted the compromise clause in the Federal Constitution concerning runaways on the understanding that the claim ‘should be enforced in conformity to and in coincidence with the known and established principles’ of her own Constitution. Charles Francis Adams, who presided, and Richard H. Dana, Jr., who offered the resolutions, called for the instant repeal, at the next session of Congress, of a measure both unconstitutional and repugnant to the moral sense, and promised to help defend the colored people, whom they advised to remain. Ten days before, at Belknap-Street Church, this179 class of citizens had resolved to arm, and to resist the kidnapper to the death. Mr. Garrison, while180 admonishing them that fugitives ‘would be more indebted to the moral power of public sentiment than to any display of physical resistance,’ yet bade them be ‘consistent with their own principles.’ And since they had invoked the religious sentiment in their behalf, he drew up for them an address to the clergy of Massachusetts.181 [304] The short-sighted framers of the Fugitive Slave Law had good reasons for not anticipating the revolt which it actually caused among the clergy, limited and partial as this was.182 For instance, the chances were that the Unitarian Convention at Springfield, Mass., in the fall of183 1850, would reject resolutions denouncing the law. In fact, John Pierpont having presented such, Dr. Parkman184 gave as chairman a casting vote to lay them on the table, though avowing his willingness to harbor fugitives. Dr. Gannett deprecated discussion and all action, as being185 liable to be misunderstood. Nevertheless, the resolutions were called up and passed, and other religious conventions186 took a similar stand, and the new phase of the old moral issue began again the work of dividing the denominations and plunging the pulpit into ‘politics.’ If an Orville Dewey stood up in the lyceum to urge the duty of187 obeying the Fugitive Slave Law, a Peter Lesley in his sermons set Deuteronomy 23 over against Romans 13; a Theodore188 Parker discoursed on “The Function and Place of Conscience in relation to the Laws of Men.” Lib. 20.175. On the eve of the November elections, into which the Fugitive Slave Law imported a new criterion and unwonted intensity of feeling; on the eve, too, of a fresh189 outbreak of Union-saving meetings, George Thompson revisited the country which had expelled him in 1835.190 He landed in Boston, the port of his covert and hasty Departure—the scene of the mob evoked against him191 only to fall upon the devoted head of his friend the192 editor of the Liberator—; the scene of the antecedent Union-saving meeting in Faneuil Hall, at which he was publicly held up as a foreign emissary, hurling firebrands,193 arrows, and death. The first Liberator he opened declared the whole country in commotion on the subject of slavery,194 and every page bore witness to the truth of the assertion. Webster was encouraging the ‘commercial interests of195 the great metropolis of the country [to] speak with united [305] hearts and voices’ for slavery and Union. Boston itself was in a fever of excitement caused by the presence of196 Georgia agents bent on recapturing William and Ellen197 Craft, who had to be hurried off to England. Mr.198 Thompson might have rubbed his eyes and asked himself if he had really been absent for fifteen years. What would be his reception now as an abolitionist, as a foreigner? Peleg Sprague had in 1835 malevolently bade him go199 back and brave the wrath of English respectability by denouncing the wrongs of India. Would his heroic labors meantime in the service of the Rajah of Sattara,200 and his present intention to lecture in America on British201 India, appease Boston respectability?—or his part in abolishing the Corn Laws, or his actual employment by202 the National Reform Association for enlarging the political rights and improving the condition of the working classes?203 Otis was dead and Sprague dumb; but all204 the moral callousness of their class, and all their legal idolatry of the Constitution, was typified in Benjamin205 R. Curtis, rising in December, 1850, to address another Union-saving meeting in the Cradle of Liberty, and206 pronouncing fugitive slaves ‘foreigners to us [in Massachusetts],’ with ‘no right to be here,’ and to be repelled on the same ground that foreign paupers and criminals were excluded. Thompson's welcome, clearly, was to come, now as before, from the abolitionists alone. The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society had extended theirs in January,207 [306] on an intimation of his intention to arrive somewhat earlier than he did. They promptly arranged for a208 reception in Faneuil Hall on November 15, and invitations to lecture on various topics began to pour in from all209 directions. But already the satanic press of the country had sounded the alarm to the mob. Bennett, in his Herald,210 making evil of Thompson's good, with absurd falsifications of his English career, advised him—“if he value not the peace of this country, to value his own, and to be exceedingly careful to restrain his tongue in this country. The difficulties which beset us are quite sufficient, without the presence of any foreign agitator, bent on the disunion and dissolution of these States, with the fancied belief of aiding British manufacturers.” Lib. 20.178. According to the Boston Times, Thompson had been imported by the abolitionists211 ‘as a “star” —to extinguish the Fugitive Slave Law,’ and the city authorities would be requested to deny the use of Faneuil Hall for the reception. What happened, however, was a repetition of the Rynders mob, in which simple uproar was substituted for violence or the show of it, and the rioters held the floor instead of the gallery and the platform. As there were no seats on the floor, it was easy to form rings “in which individual and general fights took place, hats were smashed, and ivory-headed canes flew briskly— then came a series of dances, with Indian war-whoop accompaniments. It was hell let loose, and no mistake.” Boston Herald; Lib. 20.186. Cheers for the Constitution and for Daniel Webster were mingled with cheers for every conceivable subject that came uppermost in frantic brains. Mr. Garrison succeeded in reading an address recapitulating Mr. Thompson's philanthropic engagements and political honors since his former visit, but not a speaker was allowed to be heard— not more Wendell Phillips than George Thompson himself; not Edmund Quincy nor Douglass; not Elizur Wright nor Theodore Parker. As in New York, the police looked on with indifference, Marshal Francis Tukey212 playing the part of Chief-of-Police Matsell, and Mayor [307] Bigelow that of Mayor Woodhull—the one giving and the other obeying instructions not to interfere except to protect the persons of the promoters of the meeting; and the Aldermen, on the Marshal's being subsequently213 arraigned, found his excuse satisfactory. The meeting was finally turned out of doors by the police, but the reception was adjourned to Worcester, and214 was supplemented by a second, at which the Mayor of that215 city presided in his unofficial capacity. In other Massachusetts cities, too, Mr. Thompson, who preserved the216 vigor of his appearance and all his old eloquence, was heard with pleasure and without molestation. He received and accepted invitations even from New Hampshire. Parker Pillsbury, however, wrote from Concord, N. H., to Mr. Garrison:
I take the liberty of calling your attention to the late Union217 meeting in Manchester in this State, as reported in the N. H. Patriot. You will, I think, be greatly edified by some of the speeches, particularly with Ichabod Bartlett's, a Portsmouth Whig and the most able lawyer in the State, and also with Chas. G. Atherton's, of gag-rule memory, and Senator Norris's,218 who arrested Geo. Storrs while praying in a pulpit. The219 indignation in this town on Mr. Thompson's visit to this country burns as hot as when he was here before. I think he would be mobbed as quick as then. . . . My decided opinion is, that a very large majority of the people of this State will support “with alacrity” 220 the doctrines of the Manchester meeting. Men in Concord who, three months—and three weeks—ago, defended the “higher law,” are now its open scoffers—and influential men, too. Such cholera of the human conscience never before swept over a nation.Concord was not more responsive to Manchester than to Richmond, Va., whose Enquirer (of the date of the Boston mob), going into a rage over Thompson's reappearance in the United States, asked if the Government would tolerate him in silence. ‘Does no law, no Power, exist to punish221 a member of Parliament who comes among us a disturber [308] of the public peace? He should be consumed in the wrath of an indignant people for his audacity.’ To this, and to a threat of assassination pencilled on the margin222 of the copy sent him,—‘Keep a sharp lookout for Colt's revolver,’—Mr. Thompson felicitously responded at Worcester: “Those who plead for the American slave are under the protection of Him who hath said: ‘No weapon formed against you shall prosper.’ ” Isa. 54.17. But Mr. Garrison's prediction to Father Mathew that violence and223 lawlessness would stalk the land in 1850 as in 1835, had been fulfilled; and the end was not yet. A pleasurable reminder of the earlier epoch was contained in the subjoined letter, from the author of “The martyr age of the United States,” which crossed the ocean almost simultaneously with Thompson:
Harriet Martineau to W. L. Garrison.It was shortly after the Rynders mob, and during a protracted assault on Mr. Garrison for his ‘blasphemous’225 utterances on that occasion by a scribbling fellow-citizen of Boston, that the Liberator came out with a new head.226 Substantially the previous design was retained, but redrawn by Hammatt Billings, as a labor of love. The two scenes of slave-auction and emancipation jubilee, however, were separated by a circular vignette exhibiting the Saviour, cross in hand, parting the slave-driver and his victim, while in a halo about him shone the legend—‘I come to break the bonds of the oppressor.’ A flowing scroll, unifying the design, bore the injunction, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ So far had blasphemy corrupted the editor. Miss Martineau, who had illustrated in the most signal manner both the intellectual and the political capacity of her sex, penned the letter just quoted on the day of the opening at Worcester of the first Woman's Rights227 Convention in Massachusetts. Mr. Garrison had attended in June a preliminary meeting, in Boston, at which he228 spoke in hearty approval of the movement: ‘I rise,’ he said,
to give my support, however feeble it may229 be, to the object which is sought to be accomplished by this meeting. I do so all the more cheerfully, not only because this movement is in its infancy, but because it will be sure to encounter popular odium at first, and to subject its advocates to ridicule. It is under just such circumstances that I wish to be identified with every reformatory struggle; not that reproach is desirable in itself, but because the last place for me to be seen taking a conspicuous part is that where popularity and applause are sure to follow the effort put forth. [310] I conceive that the first thing to be done by the women of this country is to demand their political enfranchisement. Among the ‘self-evident truths’ announced in the Declaration of Independence is this-“All government derives its just power from the consent of the governed.” Judging by this rule, the existing government is a despotism. One-half of the population is disfranchised on account of sex--three millions are dehumanized on account of complexion! Why should not women vote at the ballot-box? I am not pleading here as one very fond of voting. I am a disfranchised man, not because I do not believe in voting, but because I cannot vote under the United States Constitution, believing it to be unholy, knowing it to be a compromise with slavery. (Hisses in the gallery.) . . . I am just as anxious that women shall be allowed to vote as if I voted every day. I hate the law that disfranchises women. It is not for me or any man dogmatically to judge as to what is or what is not a sinful act, or to say to others you shall not exercise the right to think for yourselves. There is a law of the United States which says that no colored man shall be enrolled in the militia of this country. Now, I abhor the militia. I believe the whole military system is satanic. I do not want to see any black man enrolled in it. But I hate that law of Congress proscribing the colored man on account of his color just as I loathe a rattlesnake. It is a proscriptive spirit which has made that exception. I want the colored man to judge for himself whether he shall train or not. I want no opprobrium thrown upon him on account of his complexion.230 So with regard to women. I want the women to have the right to vote, and I call upon them to demand it perseveringly until they possess it. When they have obtained it, it will be for them to say whether they will exercise it or not . . . I wish I could see one-half of the members of Congress women. I wish I could see one-half of the members of our Legislature women. They are entitled to this. I am quite sure —I think I hazard nothing in saying—that the legislation of our country would be far different from what it is. I think the outrageous scenes which are witnessed on the floor of Congress [311] at Washington231 would for ever be banished; for it is a fact, cognizable by the whole earth, that men always behave in the presence of women better than when women are absent, as I presume the women behave a great deal better in the presence of men than when the men are absent. (Much merriment.) But there is a philosophical reason for this, particularly as it respects legislation. We cannot have too much intellect, nor have too much humanity, mingled in our national councils; and I say we are robbing ourselves of all this by disfranchising one-half of the population. No man can show any good reason why woman should not have her political rights in this country. She will have them sooner or later here, in France, in England, and in all civilized countries. It is only a question of time. I know that there are a great many women who are sensitive on this subject; who are satisfied with their present condition; who declare that they are happy and lack nothing. With plenty to eat and drink, and plenty to wear, they deem themselves well off, and they do not see a necessity for any stir on this subject. Then there are others who are alarmed when they see any of their number going forward to address a public assembly. They shiver not a little. They are afraid that she will make a fool of herself—as if men never made fools of themselves! I remember, when I first entered the anti-slavery cause, what extreme diffidence our colored brethren manifested in respect to their own advancement. It was with the greatest difficulty we could induce a man of them to stand up and address a public assembly. In the first place, he was aware of the prejudice he had to encounter. Then he feared that he might fail, and so injuriously affect the cause he wished to promote. But observe the change that has taken place within the last ten years! Who are among our ablest speakers? Who are the best qualified to address the public mind on the subject of slavery? Your fugitive slaves—your Douglasses, Browns, and232 Bibbs—who are astonishing all with the cogency of their words and the power of their reasoning. So it will be with woman.233 She may fail at first, but her efforts will be crowned with equal success. I have only to say, I bid you God-speed, women of Massachusetts and New England, in this good work! Whenever your [312] convention shall meet, and wherever it shall be, I shall endeavor to be there, to forward so good, so glorious a movement.Mr. Garrison kept his word. He signed the call headed234 by Lucy Stone, he attended the Convention, addressed it,235 and was placed on sundry important committees.236
