William D. Coleman as vice-president finished the incomplete term of President Cheeseman (to the end of 1897) and later was elected for two terms in his own right. In the course of his last administration, however, his interior policy became very unpopular, as he was thought to be harsh in his dealing with the natives, and he resigned in December, 1900. As there was at the time no vice-president, he was succeeded by the Secretary of State, Garretson W. Gibson, a man of scholarly attainments, who was afterwards elected for a whole term (1902-1903). The feature of this term was the discussion that arose over the proposal to grant a concession to an English concern known as the West African Gold Concessions, Ltd. This offered to the legislators a bonus of L1500, and for this bribe it asked for the sole right to prospect for and obtain gold, precious stones, and all other minerals over more than half of Liberia. Specifically it asked for the right to acquire freehold land and to take up leases for eighty years, in blocks of from ten to a thousand acres; to import all mining machinery and all other things necessary free of duty; to establish banks in connection with the mining enterprises, these to have the power to issue notes; to construct telegraphs and telephones; to organize auxiliary syndicates; and to establish its own police. It would seem that English impudence could hardly go further, though time was to prove that there were still other things to be borne. The proposal was indignantly rejected.

Arthur Barclay (1904-1911) had already served in three cabinet positions before coming to the presidency; he had also been a professor in the Liberia College and for some years had been known as the leader of the bar in Monrovia. It was near the close of his second term that the president's term of office was lengthened from two to four years, and he was the first incumbent to serve for the longer period. In his first inaugural address President Barclay emphasized the need of developing the resources of the hinterland and of attaching the native tribes to the interests of the state. In his foreign policy he was generally enlightened and broad-minded, but he had to deal with the arrogance of England. In 1906 a new British loan was negotiated. This also was for L100,000, more than two-thirds of which amount was to be turned over to the Liberian Development Company, an English scheme for the development of the interior. The Company was to work in cooeperation with the Liberian Government, and as security for the loan British officials were to have charge of the customs revenue, the chief inspector acting as financial adviser to the Republic. It afterwards developed that the Company never had any resources except those it had raised on the credit of the Republic, and the country was forced to realize that it had been cheated a second time. Meanwhile the English officials who, on various pretexts of reform, had taken charge of the barracks and the customs in Monrovia, were carrying things with a high hand. The Liberian force appeared with English insignia on the uniforms, and in various other ways the commander sought to overawe the populace. At the climax of the difficulties, on February 13, 1909, a British warship happened to appear in the waters of Monrovia, and a calamity was averted only by the skillful diplomacy of the Liberians. Already, however, in 1908, Liberia had sent a special commission to ask the aid of the United States. This consisted of Garretson W. Gibson, former president; J.J. Dossen, vice-president at the time, and Charles B. Dunbar. The commission was received by President Roosevelt and by Secretary Taft just before the latter was nominated for the presidency. On May 8, 1909, a return commission consisting of Roland P. Falkner, George Sale, and Emmett J. Scott, arrived in Monrovia. The work of this commission must receive further and special attention.

President Barclay was succeeded by Daniel Edward Howard (two long terms, 1912-1919), who at his inauguration began the policy of giving prominence to the native chiefs. The feature of President Howard's administrations was of course Liberia's connection with the Great War in Europe. War against Germany having been declared, on the morning of April 10, 1918, a submarine came to Monrovia and demanded that the French wireless station be torn down. The request being refused, the town was bombarded. The excitement of the day was such as has never been duplicated in the history of Liberia. In one house two young girls were instantly killed and an elderly woman and a little boy fatally wounded; but except in this one home the actual damage was comparatively slight, though there might have been more if a passing British steamer had not put the submarine to flight. Suffering of another and more far-reaching sort was that due to the economic situation. The comparative scarcity of food in the world and the profiteering of foreign merchants in Liberia by the summer of 1919 brought about a condition that threatened starvation; nor was the situation better early in 1920, when butter retailed at $1.25 a pound, sugar at 72 cents a pound, and oil at $1.00 a gallon.

President Howard was succeeded by Charles Dunbar Burgess King, who as president-elect had visited Europe and America, and who was inaugurated January 5, 1920. His address on this occasion was a comprehensive presentation of the needs of Liberia, especially along the lines of agriculture and education. He made a plea also for an enlightened native policy. Said he: "We cannot afford to destroy the native institutions of the country. Our true mission lies not in the building here in Africa of a Negro state based solely on Western ideas, but rather a Negro nationality indigenous to the soil, having its foundation rooted in the institutions of Africa and purified by Western thought and development."

3. International Relations

Our study of the history of Liberia has suggested two or three matters that call for special attention. Of prime importance is the country's connection with world politics. Any consideration of Liberia's international relations falls into three divisions: first, that of titles to land; second, that of foreign loans; and third, that of so-called internal reform.

In the very early years of the colony the raids of slave-traders gave some excuse for the first aggression on the part of a European power. "Driven from the Pongo Regions northwest of Sierra Leone, Pedro Blanco settled in the Gallinhas territory northwest of the Liberian frontier, and established elaborate headquarters for his mammoth slave-trading operations in West Africa, with slave-trading sub-stations at Cape Mount, St. Paul River, Bassa, and at other points of the Liberian coast, employing numerous police, watchers, spies, and servants. To obtain jurisdiction the colony of Liberia began to purchase from the lords of the soil as early as 1824 the lands of the St. Paul Basin and the Grain Coast from the Mafa River on the west to the Grand Sesters River on the east; so that by 1845, twenty-four years after the establishment of the colony, Liberia with the aid of Great Britain had destroyed throughout these regions the baneful traffic in slaves and the slave barracoons, and had driven the slave-trading leaders from the Liberian coast."[1] The trade continued to flourish, however, in the Gallinhas territory, and in course of time, as we have seen, the colony had also to reckon with British merchants in this section, the Declaration of Independence in 1847 being very largely a result of the defiance of Liberian revenue-laws by Englishmen. While President Roberts was in England not long after his inauguration, Lord Ashley, moved by motives of philanthropy, undertook to raise L2000 with which he (Roberts) might purchase the Gallinhas territory; and by 1856 Roberts had secured the title and deeds to all of this territory from the Mafa River to Sherbro Island. The whole transaction was thoroughly honorable, Roberts informed England of his acquisition, and his right to the territory was not then called in question. Trouble, however, developed out of the attitude of John M. Harris, a British merchant, and in 1862, while President Benson was in England, he was officially informed that the right of Liberia was recognized only to the land "east of Turner's Peninsula to the River San Pedro." Harris now worked up a native war against the Vais; the Liberians defended themselves; and in the end the British Government demanded L8878.9.3 as damages for losses sustained by Harris, and arbitrarily extended its territory from Sherbro Island to Cape Mount. In the course of the discussion claims mounted up to L18,000. Great Britain promised to submit this boundary question to the arbitration of the United States, but when the time arrived at the meeting of one of the commissions in Sierra Leone she firmly declined to do so. After this, whenever she was ready to take more land she made a plausible pretext and was ready to back up her demands with force. On March 20, 1882, four British men-of-war came to Monrovia and Sir A.E. Havelock, Governor of Sierra Leone, came ashore; and President Gardiner was forced to submit to an agreement by which, in exchange for L4750 and the abandonment of all further claims, the Liberian Government gave up all right to the Gallinhas territory from Sherbro Island to the Mafa River. This agreement was repudiated by the Liberian Senate, but when Havelock was so informed he replied, "Her Majesty's Government can not in any case recognize any rights on the part of Liberia to any portions of the territories in dispute." Liberia now issued a protest to other great powers; but this was without avail, even the United States counseling acquiescence, though through the offices of America the agreement was slightly modified and the boundary fixed at the Mano River. Trouble next arose on the east. In 1846 the Maryland Colonization Society purchased the lands of the Ivory Coast east of Cape Palmas as far as the San Pedro River. These lands were formally transferred to Liberia in 1857, and remained in the undisputed possession of the Republic for forty years. France now, not to be outdone by England, on the pretext of title deeds obtained by French naval commanders who visited the coast in 1890, in 1891 put forth a claim not only to the Ivory Coast, but to land as far away as Grand Bassa and Cape Mount. The next year, under threat of force, she compelled Liberia to accept a treaty which, for 25,000 francs and the relinquishment of all other claims, permitted her to take all the territory east of the Cavalla River. In 1904 Great Britain asked permission to advance her troops into Liberian territory to suppress a native war threatening her interests. She occupied at this time what is known as the Kaure-Lahun section, which is very fertile and of easy access to the Sierra Leone railway. This land she never gave up; instead she offered Liberia L6000 or some poorer land for it. France after 1892 made no endeavor to delimit her boundary, and, roused by the action of Great Britain, she made great advances in the hinterland, claiming tracts of Maryland and Sino; and now France and England each threatened to take more land if the other was not stopped. President Barclay visited both countries; but by a treaty of 1907 his commission was forced to permit France to occupy all the territory seized by force; and as soon as this agreement was reached France began to move on to other land in the basin of the St. Paul's and St. John's rivers. This is all then simply one more story of the oppression of the weak by the strong. For eighty years England has not ceased to intermeddle in Liberian affairs, cajoling or browbeating as at the moment seemed advisable; and France has been only less bad. Certainly no country on earth now has better reason than Liberia to know that "they should get who have the power, and they should keep who can."

[Footnote 1: Ellis in Journal of Race Development, January, 1911.]

The international loans and the attempts at reform must be considered together. In 1871, at the rate of 7 per cent, there was authorized a British loan of L100,000. For their services the British negotiators retained L30,000, and L20,000 more was deducted as the interest for three years. President Roye ordered Mr. Chinery, a British subject and the Liberian consul general in London, to supply the Liberian Secretary of Treasury with goods and merchandise to the value of L10,000; and other sums were misappropriated until the country itself actually received the benefit of not more than L27,000, if so much. This whole unfortunate matter was an embarrassment to Liberia for years; but in 1899 the Republic assumed responsibility for L80,000, the interest being made a first charge on the customs revenue. In 1906, not yet having learned the lesson of "Cavete Graecos dona ferentes," and moved by the representations of Sir Harry H. Johnston, the country negotiated a new loan of L100,000. L30,000 of this amount was to satisfy pressing obligations; but the greater portion was to be turned over to the Liberian Development Company, a great scheme by which the Government and the company were to work hand in hand for the development of the country. As security for the loan, British officials were to have charge of the customs revenue, the chief inspector acting as financial adviser to the Republic. When the Company had made a road of fifteen miles in one district and made one or two other slight improvements, it represented to the Liberian Government that its funds were exhausted. When President Barclay asked for an accounting the managing director expressed surprise that such a demand should be made upon him. The Liberian people were chagrined, and at length they realized that they had been cheated a second time, with all the bitter experiences of the past to guide them. Meanwhile the English representatives in the country were demanding that the judiciary be reformed, that the frontier force be under British officers, and that Inspector Lamont as financial adviser have a seat in the Liberian cabinet and a veto power over all expenditures; and the independence of the country was threatened if these demands were not complied with. Meanwhile also the construction of barracks went forward under Major Cadell, a British officer, and the organization of the frontier force was begun. Not less than a third of this force was brought from Sierra Leone, and the whole Cadell fitted out with suits and caps stamped with the emblems of His Britannic Majesty's service. He also persuaded the Monrovia city government to let him act without compensation as chief of police, and he likewise became street commissioner, tax collector, and city treasurer. The Liberian people naturally objected to the usurping of all these prerogatives, but Cadell refused to resign and presented a large bill for his services. He also threatened violence to the President if his demands were not met within twenty-four hours. Then it was that the British warship, the Mutiny, suddenly appeared at Monrovia (February 12, 1909). Happily the Liberians rose to the emergency. They requested that any British soldiers at the barracks be withdrawn in order that they might be free to deal with the insurrectionary movement said to be there on the part of Liberian soldiers; and thus tactfully they brought about the withdrawal of Major Cadell.

By this time, however, the Liberian commission to the United States had done its work, and just three months after Cadell's retirement the return American commission came. After studying the situation it made the following recommendations: That the United States extend its aid to Liberia in the prompt settlement of pending boundary disputes; that the United States enable Liberia to refund its debt by assuming as a guarantee for the payment of obligations under such arrangement the control and collection of the Liberian customs; that the United States lend its assistance to the Liberian Government in the reform of its internal finances; that the United States lend its aid to Liberia in organizing and drilling an adequate constabulary or frontier police force; that the United States establish and maintain a research station at Liberia; and that the United States reopen the question of establishing a coaling-station in Liberia. Under the fourth of these recommendations Major (now Colonel) Charles Young went to Liberia, where from time to time since he has rendered most efficient service. Arrangements were also made for a new loan, one of $1,700,000, which was to be floated by banking institutions in the United States, Germany, France, and England; and in 1912 an American General Receiver of Customs and Financial Adviser to the Republic of Liberia (with an assistant from each of the other three countries mentioned) opened his office in Monrovia. It will be observed that a complicated and expensive receivership was imposed on the Liberian people when an arrangement much more simple would have served. The loan of $1,700,000 soon proving inadequate for any large development of the country, negotiations were begun in 1918 for a new loan, one of $5,000,000. Among the things proposed were improvements on the harbor of Monrovia, some good roads through the country, a hospital, and the broadening of the work of education. About the loan two facts were outstanding: first, any money to be spent would be spent wholly under American and not under Liberian auspices; and, second, to the Liberians acceptance of the terms suggested meant practically a surrender of their sovereignty, as American appointees were to be in most of the important positions in the country, at the same time that upon themselves would fall the ultimate burden of the interest of the loan. By the spring of 1920 (in Liberia, the commencement of the rainy season) it was interesting to note that although the necessary measures of approval had not yet been passed by the Liberian Congress, perhaps as many as fifteen American officials had come out to the country to begin work in education, engineering, and sanitation. Just a little later in the year President King called an extra session of the legislature to consider amendments. While it was in session a cablegram from the United States was received saying that no amendments to the plan would be accepted and that it must be accepted as submitted, "or the friendly interest which has heretofore existed would become lessened." The Liberians were not frightened, however, and stood firm. Meanwhile a new presidential election took place in the United States; there was to be a radical change in the government; and the Liberians were disposed to try further to see if some changes could not be made in the proposed arrangements. Most watchfully from month to month, let it be remembered, England and France were waiting; and in any case it could easily be seen that as the Republic approached its centennial it was face to face with political problems of the very first magnitude.[1]

[Footnote 1: Early in 1921 President King headed a new commission to the United States to take up the whole matter of Liberia with the incoming Republican administration.]

4. Economic and Social Conditions

From what has been said, it is evident that there is still much to be done in Liberia along economic lines. There has been some beginning in cooeperative effort; thus the Bassa Trading Association is an organization for mutual betterment of perhaps as many as fifty responsible merchants and farmers. The country has as yet (1921), however, no railroads, no street cars, no public schools, and no genuine newspapers; nor are there any manufacturing or other enterprises for the employment of young men on a large scale. The most promising youth accordingly look too largely to an outlet in politics; some come to America to be educated and not always do they return. A few become clerks in the stores, and a very few assistants in the customs offices. There is some excellent agriculture in the interior, but as yet no means of getting produce to market on a large scale. In 1919 the total customs revenue at Monrovia, the largest port, amounted to $196,913.21. For the whole country the figure has recently been just about half a million dollars a year. Much of this amount goes to the maintenance of the frontier force. Within the last few years also the annual income for the city of Monrovia—for the payment of the mayor, the police, and all other city officers—has averaged $6000.

In any consideration of social conditions the first question of all of course is that of the character of the people themselves. Unfortunately Liberia was begun with faulty ideals of life and work. The early settlers, frequently only recently out of bondage, too often felt that in a state of freedom they did not have to work, and accordingly they imitated the habits of the old master class of the South. The real burden of life then fell upon the native. There is still considerable feeling between the native and the Americo-Liberian; but more and more the wisest men of the country realize that the good of one is the good of all, and they are endeavoring to make the native chiefs work for the common welfare. From time to time the people of Liberia have given to visitors an impression of arrogance, and perhaps no one thing had led to more unfriendly criticism of this country than this. The fact is that the Liberians, knowing that their country has various shortcomings according to Western standards, are quick to assume the defensive, and one method of protecting themselves is by erecting a barrier of dignity and reserve. One has only to go beyond this, however, to find the real heartbeat of the people. The comparative isolation of the Republic moreover, and the general stress of living conditions have together given to the everyday life an undue seriousness of tone, with a rather excessive emphasis on the church, on politics, and on secret societies. In such an atmosphere boys and girls too soon became mature, and for them especially one might wish to see a little more wholesome outdoor amusement. In school or college catalogues one still sees much of jurisprudence and moral philosophy, but little of physics or biology. Interestingly enough, this whole system of education and life has not been without some elements of very genuine culture. Literature has been mainly in the diction of Shakespeare and Milton; but Shakespeare and Milton, though not of the twentieth century, are still good models, and because the officials have had to compose many state documents and deliver many formal addresses, there has been developed in the country a tradition of good English speech. A service in any one of the representative churches is dignified and impressive.

The churches and schools of Liberia have been most largely in the hands of the Methodists and the Episcopalians, though the Baptists, the Presbyterians, and the Lutherans are well represented. The Lutherans have penetrated to a point in the interior beyond that attained by any other denomination. The Episcopalians have excelled others, even the Methodists, by having more constant and efficient oversight of their work. The Episcopalians have in Liberia a little more than 40 schools, nearly half of these being boarding-schools, with a total attendance of 2000. The Methodists have slightly more than 30 schools, with 2500 pupils. The Lutherans in their five mission stations have 20 American workers and 300 pupils. While it seems from these figures that the number of those reached is small in proportion to the outlay, it must be remembered that a mission school becomes a center from which influence radiates in all directions.

While the enterprise of the denominational institutions can not be doubted, it may well be asked if, in so largely relieving the people of the burden of the education of their children, they are not unduly cultivating a spirit of dependence rather than of self-help. Something of this point of view was emphasized by the Secretary of Public Instruction, Mr. Walter F. Walker, in an address, "Liberia and Her Educational Problems," delivered in Chicago in 1916. Said he of the day schools maintained by the churches: "These day schools did invaluable service in the days of the Colony and Commonwealth, and, indeed, in the early days of the Republic; but to their continuation must undoubtedly be ascribed the tardy recognition of the government and people of the fact that no agency for the education of the masses is as effective as the public school.... There is not one public school building owned by the government or by any city or township."

It might further be said that just now in Liberia there is no institution that is primarily doing college work. Two schools in Monrovia, however, call for special remark. The College of West Africa, formerly Monrovia Seminary, was founded by the Methodist Church in 1839. The institution does elementary and lower high school work, though some years ago it placed a little more emphasis on college work than it has been able to do within recent years. It was of this college that the late Bishop A.P. Camphor served so ably as president for twelve years. Within recent years it has recognized the importance of industrial work and has had in all departments an average annual enrollment of 300. Not quite so prominent within the last few years, but with more tradition and theoretically at the head of the educational system of the Republic is the Liberia College. In 1848 Simon Greenleaf of Boston, received from John Payne, a missionary at Cape Palmas, a request for his assistance in building a theological school. Out of this suggestion grew the Board of Trustees of Donations for Education in Liberia incorporated in Massachusetts in March, 1850. The next year the Liberia legislature incorporated the Liberia College, it being understood that the institution would emphasize academic as well as theological subjects. In 1857 Ex-President J.J. Roberts was elected president; he superintended the erection of a large building; and in 1862 the college was opened for work. Since then it has had a very uneven existence, sometimes enrolling, aside from its preparatory department, twenty or thirty college students, then again having no college students at all. Within the last few years, as the old building was completely out of repair, the school has had to seek temporary quarters. It is too vital to the country to be allowed to languish, however, and it is to be hoped that it may soon be well started upon a new career of usefulness. In the course of its history the Liberia College has had connected with it some very distinguished men. Famous as teacher and lecturer, and president from 1881 to 1885, was Edward Wilmot Blyden, generally regarded as the foremost scholar that Western Africa has given to the world. Closely associated with him in the early years, and well known in America as in Africa, was Alexander Crummell, who brought to his teaching the richness of English university training. A trustee for a number of years was Samuel David Ferguson, of the Protestant Episcopal Church, who served with great dignity and resource as missionary bishop of the country from 1884 until his death in 1916. A new president of the college, Rev. Nathaniel H.B. Cassell, was elected in 1918, and it is expected that under his efficient direction the school will go forward to still greater years of service.

Important in connection with the study of the social conditions in Liberia is that of health and living conditions. One who lives in America and knows that Africa is a land of unbounded riches can hardly understand the extent to which the West Coast has been exploited, or the suffering that is there just now. The distress is most acute in the English colonies, and as Liberia is so close to Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast, much of the same situation prevails there. In Monrovia the only bank is the branch of the Bank of British West Africa. In the branches of this great institution all along the coast, as a result of the war, gold disappeared, silver became very scarce, and the common form of currency became paper notes, issued in denominations as low as one and two shillings. These the natives have refused to accept. They go even further: rather than bring their produce to the towns and receive paper for it they will not come at all. In Monrovia an effort was made to introduce the British West African paper currency, and while this failed, more and more the merchants insisted on being paid in silver, nor in an ordinary purchase would silver be given in change on an English ten-shilling note. Prices accordingly became exorbitant; children were not properly nourished and the infant mortality grew to astonishing proportions. Nor were conditions made better by the lack of sanitation and by the prevalence of disease. Happily relief for these conditions—for some of them at least—seems to be in sight, and it is expected that before very long a hospital will be erected in Monrovia.

One or two reflections suggest themselves. It has been said that the circumstances under which Liberia was founded led to a despising of industrial effort. The country is now quite awake, however, to the advantages of industrial and agricultural enterprise. A matter of supreme importance is that of the relation of the Americo-Liberian to the native; this will work itself out, for the native is the country's chief asset for the future. In general the Republic needs a few visible evidences of twentieth century standards of progress; two or three high schools and hospitals built on the American plan would work wonders. Finally let it not be forgotten that upon the American Negro rests the obligation to do whatever he can to help to develop the country. If he will but firmly clasp hands with his brother across the sea, a new day will dawn for American Negro and Liberian alike.



CHAPTER X

THE NEGRO A NATIONAL ISSUE

1. Current Tendencies

It is evident from what has been said already that the idea of the Negro current about 1830 in the United States was not very exalted. It was seriously questioned if he was really a human being, and doctors of divinity learnedly expounded the "Cursed be Canaan" passage as applying to him. A prominent physician of Mobile[1] gave it as his opinion that "the brain of the Negro, when compared with the Caucasian, is smaller by a tenth ... and the intellect is wanting in the same proportion," and finally asserted that Negroes could not live in the North because "a cold climate so freezes their brains as to make them insane." About mulattoes, like many others, he stretched his imagination marvelously. They were incapable of undergoing fatigue; the women were very delicate and subject to all sorts of diseases, and they did not beget children as readily as either black women or white women. In fact, said Nott, between the ages of twenty-five and forty mulattoes died ten times as fast as either white or black people; between forty and fifty-five fifty times as fast, and between fifty-five and seventy one hundred times as fast.

[Footnote 1: See "Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races. By Josiah C. Nott, M.D., Mobile, 1844."]

To such opinions was now added one of the greatest misfortunes that have befallen the Negro race in its entire history in America—burlesque on the stage. When in 1696 Thomas Southerne adapted Oroonoko from the novel of Mrs. Aphra Behn and presented in London the story of the African prince who was stolen from his native Angola, no one saw any reason why the Negro should not be a subject for serious treatment on the stage, and the play was a great success, lasting for decades. In 1768, however, was presented at Drury Lane a comic opera, The Padlock, and a very prominent character was Mungo, the slave of a West Indian planter, who got drunk in the second act and was profane throughout the performance. In the course of the evening Mungo entertained the audience with such lines as the following:

Dear heart, what a terrible life I am led! A dog has a better, that's sheltered and fed. Night and day 'tis the same; My pain is deir game: Me wish to de Lord me was dead! Whate'er's to be done, Poor black must run. Mungo here, Mungo dere, Mungo everywhere: Above and below, Sirrah, come; sirrah, go; Do so, and do so, Oh! oh! Me wish to de Lord me was dead!

The depreciation of the race that Mungo started continued, and when in 1781 Robinson Crusoe was given as a pantomime at Drury Lane, Friday was represented as a Negro. The exact origins of Negro minstrelsy are not altogether clear; there have been many claimants, and it is interesting to note in passing that there was an "African Company" playing in New York in the early twenties, though this was probably nothing more than a small group of amateurs. Whatever may have been the beginning, it was Thomas D. Rice who brought the form to genuine popularity. In Louisville in the summer of 1828, looking from one of the back windows of a theater, he was attracted by an old and decrepit slave who did odd jobs about a livery stable. The slave's master was named Crow and he called himself Jim Crow. His right shoulder was drawn up high and his left leg was stiff at the knee, but he took his deformity lightly, singing as he worked. He had one favorite tune to which he had fitted words of his own, and at the end of each verse he made a ludicrous step which in time came to be known as "rocking the heel." His refrain consisted of the words:

Wheel about, turn about, Do jis so, An' ebery time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.

Rice, who was a clever and versatile performer, caught the air, made up like the Negro, and in the course of the next season introduced Jim Crow and his step to the stage, and so successful was he in his performance that on his first night in the part he was encored twenty times.[1] Rice had many imitators among the white comedians of the country, some of whom indeed claimed priority in opening up the new field, and along with their burlesque these men actually touched upon the possibilities of plaintive Negro melodies, which they of course capitalized. In New York late in 1842 four men—"Dan" Emmett, Frank Brower, "Billy" Whitlock, and "Dick" Pelham—practiced together with fiddle and banjo, "bones" and tambourine, and thus was born the first company, the "Virginia Minstrels," which made its formal debut in New York February 17, 1843. Its members produced in connection with their work all sorts of popular songs, one of Emmett's being "Dixie," which, introduced by Mrs. John Wood in a burlesque in New Orleans at the outbreak of the Civil War, leaped into popularity and became the war-song of the Confederacy. Companies multipled apace. "Christy's Minstrels" claimed priority to the company already mentioned, but did not actually enter upon its New York career until 1846. "Bryant's Minstrels" and Buckley's "New Orleans Serenaders" were only two others of the most popular aggregations featuring and burlesquing the Negro. In a social history of the Negro in America, however, it is important to observe in passing that already, even in burlesque, the Negro element was beginning to enthrall the popular mind. About the same time as minstrelsy also developed the habit of belittling the race by making the name of some prominent and worthy Negro a term of contempt; thus "cuffy" (corrupted from Paul Cuffe) now came into widespread use.

[Footnote 1: See Laurence Hutton: "The Negro on the Stage," in Harper's Magazine, 79:137 (June, 1889), referring to article by Edmon S. Conner in New York Times, June 5, 1881.]

This was not all. It was now that the sinister crime of lynching raised its head in defiance of all law. At first used as a form of punishment for outlaws and gamblers, it soon came to be applied especially to Negroes. One was burned alive near Greenville, S.C., in 1825; in May, 1835, two were burned near Mobile for the murder of two children; and for the years between 1823 and 1860 not less than fifty-six cases of the lynching of Negroes have been ascertained, though no one will ever know how many lost their lives without leaving any record. Certainly more men were executed illegally than legally; thus of forty-six recorded murders by Negroes of owners or overseers between 1850 and 1860 twenty resulted in legal execution and twenty-six in lynching. Violent crimes against white women were not relatively any more numerous than now; but those that occurred or were attempted received swift punishment; thus of seventeen cases of rape in the ten years last mentioned Negroes were legally executed in five and lynched in twelve.[1]

[Footnote 1: See Hart: Slavery and Abolition, 11 and 117, citing Cutler: Lynch Law, 98-100 and 126-128.]

Extraordinary attention was attracted by the burning in St. Louis in 1835 of a man named McIntosh, who had killed an officer who was trying to arrest him.[1] This event came in the midst of a period of great agitation, and it was for denouncing this lynching that Elijah P. Lovejoy had his printing-office destroyed in St. Louis and was forced to remove to Alton, Ill., where his press was three times destroyed and where he finally met death at the hands of a mob while trying to protect his property November 7, 1837. Judge Lawless defended the lynching and even William Ellery Channing took a compromising view. Abraham Lincoln, however, then a very young man, in an address on "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions" at Springfield, January 27, 1837, said: "Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creatures of climate, neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the nonslaveholding states.... Turn to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim only was sacrificed there. This story is very short, and is perhaps the most highly tragic of anything that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man by the name of McIntosh was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a free man attending to his own business and at peace with the world.... Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order, and the stories of which have even now grown too familiar to attract anything more than an idle remark."

[Footnote 1: Cutler: Lynch Law, 109, citing Niles's Register, June 4, 1836.]

All the while flagrant crimes were committed against Negro women and girls, and free men in the border states were constantly being dragged into slavery by kidnapers. Two typical cases will serve for illustration. George Jones, a respectable man of New York, was in 1836 arrested on Broadway on the pretext that he had committed assault and battery. He refused to go with his captors, for he knew that he had done nothing to warrant such a charge; but he finally yielded on the assurance of his employer that everything possible would be done for him. He was placed in the Bridewell and a few minutes afterwards taken before a magistrate, to whose satisfaction he was proved to be a slave. Thus, in less than two hours after his arrest he was hurried away by the kidnapers, whose word had been accepted as sufficient evidence, and he had not been permitted to secure a single friendly witness. Solomon Northrup, who afterwards wrote an account of his experiences, was a free man who lived in Saratoga and made his living by working about the hotels, where in the evenings he often played the violin at parties. One day two men, supposedly managers of a traveling circus company, met him and offered him good pay if he would go with them as a violinist to Washington. He consented, and some mornings afterwards awoke to find himself in a slave pen in the capital. How he got there was ever a mystery to him, but evidently he had been drugged. He was taken South and sold to a hard master, with whom he remained twelve years before he was able to effect his release.[1] In the South any free Negro who entertained a runaway might himself become a slave; thus in South Carolina in 1827 a free woman with her three children suffered this penalty because she gave succor to two homeless and fugitive children six and nine years old.

[Footnote 1: McDougall: Fugitive Slaves, 36-37.]

Day by day, moreover, from the capital of the nation went on the internal slave-trade. "When by one means and another a dealer had gathered twenty or more likely young Negro men and girls, he would bring them forth from their cells; would huddle the women and young children into a cart or wagon; would handcuff the men in pairs, the right hand of one to the left hand of another; make the handcuffs fast to a long chain which passed between each pair of slaves, and would start his procession southward."[1] It is not strange that several of the unfortunate people committed suicide. One distracted mother, about to be separated from her loved ones, dumbfounded the nation by hurling herself from the window of a prison in the capital on the Sabbath day and dying in the street below.

[Footnote 1: McMaster, V, 219-220.]

Meanwhile even in the free states the disabilities of the Negro continued. In general he was denied the elective franchise, the right of petition, the right to enter public conveyances or places of amusement, and he was driven into a status of contempt by being shut out from the army and the militia. He had to face all sorts of impediments in getting education or in pursuing honest industry; he had nothing whatever to do with the administration of justice; and generally he was subject to insult and outrage.

One might have supposed that on all this proscription and denial of the ordinary rights of human beings the Christian Church would have taken a positive stand. Unfortunately, as so often happens, it was on the side of property and vested interest rather than on that of the oppressed. We have already seen that Southern divines held slaves and countenanced the system; and by 1840 James G. Birney had abundant material for his indictment, "The American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery." He showed among other things that while in 1780 the Methodist Episcopal Church had opposed slavery and in 1784 had given a slaveholder one month to repent or withdraw from its conferences, by 1836 it had so drifted away from its original position as to disclaim "any right, wish, or intention to interfere in the civil and political relation between master and slave, as it existed in the slaveholding states of the union." Meanwhile in the churches of the North there was the most insulting discrimination; in the Baptist Church in Hartford the pews for Negroes were boarded up in front, and in Stonington, Conn., the floor was cut out of a Negro's pew by order of the church authorities. In Boston, in a church that did not welcome and that made little provision for Negroes, a consecrated deacon invited into his own pew some Negro people, whereupon he lost the right to hold a pew in his church. He decided that there should be some place where there might be more freedom of thought and genuine Christianity, he brought others into the plan, and the effort that he put forth resulted in what has since become the Tremont Temple Baptist Church.

Into all this proscription, burlesque, and crime, and denial of the fundamental principles of Christianity, suddenly came the program of the Abolitionists; and it spoke with tongues of fire, and had all the vigor and force of a crusade.

2. The Challenge of the Abolitionists

The great difference between the early abolition societies which resulted in the American Convention and the later anti-slavery movement of which Garrison was the representative figure was the difference between a humanitarian impulse tempered by expediency and one that had all the power of a direct challenge. Before 1831 "in the South the societies were more numerous, the members no less earnest, and the hatred of slavery no less bitter,... yet the conciliation and persuasion so noticeable in the earlier period in twenty years accomplished practically nothing either in legislation or in the education of public sentiment; while gradual changes in economic conditions at the South caused the question to grow more difficult."[1] Moreover, "the evidence of open-mindedness can not stand against the many instances of absolute refusal to permit argument against slavery. In the Colonial Congress, in the Confederation, in the Constitutional Convention, in the state ratifying conventions, in the early Congresses, there were many vehement denunciations of anything which seemed to have an anti-slavery tendency, and wholesale suspicion of the North at all times when the subject was opened."[2] One can not forget the effort of James G. Birney, or that Benjamin Lundy's work was most largely done in what we should now call the South, or that between 1815 and 1828 at least four journals which avowed the extinction of slavery as one, if not the chief one, of their objects were published in the Southern states.[3] Only gradual emancipation, however, found any real support in the South; and, as compared with the work of Garrison, even that of Lundy appears in the distance with something of the mildness of "sweetness and light." Even before the rise of Garrison, Robert James Turnbull of South Carolina, under the name of "Brutus," wrote a virulent attack on anti-slavery; and Representative Drayton of the same state, speaking in Congress in 1828, said, "Much as we love our country, we would rather see our cities in flames, our plains drenched in blood—rather endure all the calamities of civil war, than parley for an instant upon the right of any power, than our own to interfere with the regulation of our slaves."[4] More and more this was to be the real sentiment of the South, and in the face of this kind of eloquence and passion mere academic discussion was powerless.

[Footnote 1: Adams: The Neglected Period of Anti-Slavery, 1808-1831, 250-251.]

[Footnote 2: Ibid., 110.]

[Footnote 3: William Birney: James G. Birney and His Times, 85-86.]

[Footnote 4: Register of Debates, 4,975, cited by Adams, 112-3.]

The Liberator was begun January 1, 1831. The next year Garrison was the leading spirit in the formation of the New England Anti-Slavery Society; and in December, 1833, in Philadelphia, the American Anti-Slavery Society was organized. In large measure these organizations were an outgrowth of the great liberal and humanitarian spirit that by 1830 had become manifest in both Europe and America. Hugo and Mazzini, Byron and Macaulay had all now appeared upon the scene, and romanticism was regnant. James Montgomery and William Faber wrote their hymns, and Reginald Heber went as a missionary bishop to India. Forty years afterwards the French Revolution was bearing fruit. France herself had a new revolution in 1830, and in this same year the kingdom of Belgium was born. In England there was the remarkable reign of William IV, which within the short space of seven years summed up in legislation reforms that had been agitated for decades. In 1832 came the great Reform Bill, in 1833 the abolition of slavery in English dominions, and in 1834 a revision of factory legislation and the poor law. Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning began to be heard, and in 1834 came to America George Thompson, a powerful and refined speaker who had had much to do with the English agitation against slavery. The young republic of the United States, lusty and self-confident, was seething with new thought. In New England the humanitarian movement that so largely began with the Unitarianism of Channing "ran through its later phase in transcendentalism, and spent its last strength in the anti-slavery agitation and the enthusiasms of the Civil War."[1] The movement was contemporary with the preaching of many novel gospels in religion, in sociology, in science, education, and medicine. New sects were formed, like the Universalists, the Spiritualists, the Second Adventists, the Mormons, and the Shakers, some of which believed in trances and miracles, others in the quick coming of Christ, and still others in the reorganization of society; and the pseudo-sciences, like mesmerism and phrenology, had numerous followers. The ferment has long since subsided, and much that was then seething has since gone off in vapor; but when all that was spurious has been rejected, we find that the general impulse was but a new baptism of the old Puritan spirit. Transcendentalism appealed to the private consciousness as the sole standard of truth and right. With kindred movements it served to quicken the ethical sense of a nation that was fast becoming materialistic and to nerve it for the conflict that sooner or later had to come.

[Footnote 1: Henry A. Beers: Initial Studies in American Letters, 95-98 passim.]

In his salutatory editorial Garrison said with reference to his position: "In Park Street Church, on the Fourth of July, 1829, in an address on slavery, I unreflectingly assented to the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition. I seize this opportunity to make a full and unequivocal recantation, and thus publicly to ask pardon of my God, of my country, and of my brethren, the poor slaves, for having uttered a sentiment so full of timidity, injustice, and absurdity.... I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present! I am in earnest. I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD." With something of the egotism that comes of courage in a holy cause, he said: "On this question my influence, humble as it is, is felt at this moment to a considerable extent, and shall be felt in coming years—not perniciously, but beneficially—not as a curse, but as a blessing; and POSTERITY WILL BEAR TESTIMONY THAT I WAS RIGHT."

All the while, in speaking to the Negro people themselves, Garrison endeavored to beckon them to the highest possible ground of personal and racial self-respect. Especially did he advise them to seek the virtues of education and cooeperation. Said he to them:[1] "Support each other.... When I say 'support each other,' I mean, sell to each other, and buy of each other, in preference to the whites. This is a duty: the whites do not trade with you; why should you give them your patronage? If one of your number opens a little shop, do not pass it by to give your money to a white shopkeeper. If any has a trade, employ him as often as possible. If any is a good teacher, send your children to him, and be proud that he is one of your color.... Maintain your rights, in all cases, and at whatever expense.... Wherever you are allowed to vote, see that your names are put on the lists of voters, and go to the polls. If you are not strong enough to choose a man of your own color, give your votes to those who are friendly to your cause; but, if possible, elect intelligent and respectable colored men. I do not despair of seeing the time when our State and National Assemblies will contain a fair proportion of colored representatives—especially if the proposed college at New Haven goes into successful operation. Will you despair now so many champions are coming to your help, and the trump of jubilee is sounding long and loud; when is heard a voice from the East, a voice from the West, a voice from the North, a voice from the South, crying, Liberty and Equality now, Liberty and Equality forever! Will you despair, seeing Truth, and Justice, and Mercy, and God, and Christ, and the Holy Ghost, are on your side? Oh, no—never, never despair of the complete attainment of your rights!"

[Footnote 1: "An Address delivered before the Free People of Color in Philadelphia, New York, and other cities, during the month of June, 1831, by Wm. Lloyd Garrison. Boston, 1831," pp. 14-18.]

To second such sentiments rose a remarkable group of men and women, among them Elijah P. Lovejoy, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, John Greenleaf Whittier, Lydia Maria Child, Samuel J. May, William Jay, Charles Sumner, Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown. Phillips, the "Plumed Knight" of the cause, closed his law office because he was not willing to swear that he would support the Constitution; he relinquished the franchise because he did not wish to have any responsibility for a government that countenanced slavery; and he lost sympathy with the Christian Church because of its compromising attitude. Garrison himself termed the Constitution "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell." Lydia Maria Child in 1833 published an Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, and wrote or edited numerous other books for the cause, while the anti-slavery poems of Whittier are now a part of the main stream of American literature. The Abolitionists repelled many conservative men by their refusal to countenance any laws that recognized slavery; but they gained force when Congress denied them the right of petition and when President Jackson refused them the use of the mails.

There could be no question as to the directness of their attack. They held up the slaveholder to scorn. They gave thousands of examples of the inhumanity of the system of slavery, publishing scores and even hundreds of tracts and pamphlets. They called the attention of America to the slave who for running away was for five days buried in the ground up to his chin with his arms tied behind him; to women who were whipped because they did not breed fast enough or would not yield to the lust of planters or overseers; to men who were tied to be whipped and then left bleeding, or who were branded with hot irons, or forced to wear iron yokes and clogs and bells; to the Presbyterian preacher in Georgia who tortured a slave until he died; to a woman in New Jersey who was "bound to a log, and scored with a knife, in a shocking manner, across her back, and the gashes stuffed with salt, after which she was tied to a post in a cellar, where, after suffering three days, death kindly terminated her misery"; and finally to the fact that even when slaves were dead they were not left in peace, as the South Carolina Medical College in Charleston advertised that the bodies were used for dissection.[1] In the face of such an indictment the South appeared more injured and innocent than ever, and said that evils had been greatly exaggerated. Perhaps in some instances they were; but the South and everybody also knew that no pen could nearly do justice to some of the things that were possible under the iniquitous and abominable system of American slavery.

[Footnote 1: See "American Slavery as it is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. By Theodore Dwight Weld. Published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, New York, 1839"; but the account of the New Jersey woman is from "A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States, by Jesse Torrey, Ballston Spa, Penn., 1917," p. 67.]

The Abolitionists, however, did not stop with a mere attack on slavery. Not satisfied with the mere enumeration of examples of Negro achievement, they made even higher claims in behalf of the people now oppressed. Said Alexander H. Everett:[1] "We are sometimes told that all these efforts will be unavailing—that the African is a degraded member of the human family—that a man with a dark skin and curled hair is necessarily, as such, incapable of improvement and civilization, and condemned by the vice of his physical conformation to vegetate forever in a state of hopeless barbarism. I reject with contempt and indignation this miserable heresy. In replying to it the friends of truth and humanity have not hitherto done justice to the argument. In order to prove that the blacks were capable of intellectual efforts, they have painfully collected a few specimens of what some of them have done in this way, even in the degraded condition which they occupy at present in Christendom. This is not the way to treat the subject. Go back to an earlier period in the history of our race. See what the blacks were and what they did three thousand years ago, in the period of their greatness and glory, when they occupied the forefront in the march of civilization—when they constituted in fact the whole civilized world of their time. Trace this very civilization, of which we are so proud, to its origin, and see where you will find it. We received it from our European ancestors: they had it from the Greeks and Romans, and the Jews. But, sir, where did the Greeks and the Romans and the Jews get it? They derived it from Ethiopia and Egypt—in one word, from Africa.[2] ... The ruins of the Egyptian temples laugh to scorn the architectural monuments of any other part of the world. They will be what they are now, the delight and admiration of travelers from all quarters, when the grass is growing on the sites of St. Peter's and St. Paul's, the present pride of Rome and London.... It seems, therefore, that for this very civilization of which we are so proud, and which is the only ground of our present claim of superiority, we are indebted to the ancestors of these very blacks, whom we are pleased to consider as naturally incapable of civilization."

[Footnote 1: See "The Anti-Slavery Picknick: a collection of Speeches, Poems, Dialogues, and Songs, intended for use in schools and anti-slavery meetings. By John A. Collins, Boston, 1842," 10-12.]

[Footnote 2: It is worthy of note that this argument, which was long thought to be fallacious, is more and more coming to be substantiated by the researches of scholars, and that not only as affecting Northern but also Negro Africa. Note Lady Lugard (Flora L. Shaw): A Tropical Dependency, London, 1906, pp. 16-18.]

In adherence to their convictions the Abolitionists were now to give a demonstration of faith in humanity such as has never been surpassed except by Jesus Christ himself. They believed in the Negro even before the Negro had learned to believe in himself. Acting on their doctrine of equal rights, they traveled with their Negro friends, "sat upon the same platforms with them, ate with them, and one enthusiastic abolitionist white couple adopted a Negro child."[1]

[Footnote 1: Hart: Slavery and Abolition, 245-6.]

Garrison appealed to posterity. He has most certainly been justified by time. Compared with his high stand for the right, the opportunism of such a man as Clay shrivels into nothingness. Within recent years a distinguished American scholar,[1] writing of the principles for which he and his co-workers stood, has said: "The race question transcends any academic inquiry as to what ought to have been done in 1866. It affects the North as well as the South; it touches the daily life of all of our citizens, individually, politically, humanly. It molds the child's conception of democracy. It tests the faith of the adult. It is by no means an American problem only. What is going on in our states, North and South, is only a local phase of a world-problem.... Now, Whittier's opinions upon that world-problem are unmistakable. He believed, quite literally, that all men are brothers; that oppression of one man or one race degrades the whole human family; and that there should be the fullest equality of opportunity. That a mere difference in color should close the door of civil, industrial, and political hope upon any individual was a hateful thing to the Quaker poet. The whole body of his verse is a protest against the assertion of race pride, against the emphasis upon racial differences. To Whittier there was no such thing as a 'white man's civilization.' The only distinction was between civilization and barbarism. He had faith in education, in equality before the law, in freedom of opportunity, and in the ultimate triumph of brotherhood.

'They are rising,— All are rising, The black and white together.'

This faith is at once too sentimental and too dogmatic to suit those persons who have exalted economic efficiency into a fetish and who have talked loudly at times—though rather less loudly since the Russo-Japanese War—about the white man's task of governing the backward races. But whatever progress has been made by the American Negro since the Civil War, in self-respect, in moral and intellectual development, and—for that matter—in economic efficiency, has been due to fidelity to those principles which Whittier and other like-minded men and women long ago enunciated.[2] The immense tasks which still remain, alike for 'higher' as for 'lower' races, can be worked out by following Whittier's program, if they can be worked out at all."

[Footnote 1: Bliss Perry: "Whittier for To-Day," Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 100, 851-859 (December, 1907).]

[Footnote 2: The italics are our own.]

3. The Contest

Even before the Abolitionists became aggressive a test law had been passed, the discussion of which did much to prepare for their coming. Immediately after the Denmark Vesey insurrection the South Carolina legislature voted that the moment that a vessel entered a port in the state with a free Negro or person of color on board he should be seized, even if he was the cook, the steward, or a mariner, or if he was a citizen of another state or country.[1] The sheriff was to board the vessel, take the Negro to jail and detain him there until the vessel was actually ready to leave. The master of the ship was then to pay for the detention of the Negro and take him away, or pay a fine of $1,000 and see the Negro sold as a slave. Within a short time after this enactment was passed, as many as forty-one vessels were deprived of one or more hands, from one British trading vessel almost the entire crew being taken. The captains appealed to the judge of the United States District Court, who with alacrity turned the matter over to the state courts. Now followed much legal proceeding, with an appeal to higher authorities, in the course of which both Canning and Adams were forced to consider the question, and it was generally recognized that the act violated both the treaty with Great Britain and the power of Congress to regulate trade. To all of this South Carolina replied that as a sovereign state she had the right to interdict the entry of foreigners, that in fact she had been a sovereign state at the time of her entrance into the Union and that she never had surrendered the right to exclude free Negroes. Finally she asserted that if a dissolution of the Union must be the alternative she was quite prepared to abide by the result. Unusual excitement arose soon afterwards when four free Negroes on a British ship were seized by the sheriff and dragged from the deck. The captain had to go to heavy expense to have these men released, and on reaching Liverpool he appealed to the Board of Trade. The British minister now sent a more vigorous protest, Adams referred the same to Wirt, the Attorney General, and Wirt was forced to declare South Carolina's act unconstitutional and void. His opinion with a copy of the British protest Adams sent to the Governor of the state, who immediately transmitted the same to the legislature. Each branch of the legislature passed resolutions which the other would not accept, but neither voted to repeal the law. In fact, it remained technically in force until the Civil War. In 1844 Massachusetts sent Samuel Hoar as a commissioner to Charleston to make a test case of a Negro who had been deprived of his rights. Hoar cited Article II, Section 2, of the National Constitution ("The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states"), intending ultimately to bring a case before the United States Supreme Court. When he appeared, however, the South Carolina legislature voted that "this agent comes here not as a citizen of the United States, but as an emissary of a foreign Government hostile to our domestic institutions and with the sole purpose of subverting our internal police." Hoar was at length notified that his life was in danger and he was forced to leave the state. Meanwhile Southern sentiment against the American Colonization Society had crystallized, and the excitement raised by David Walker's Appeal was exceeded only by that occasioned by Nat Turner's insurrection.

[Footnote 1: Note McMaster, V, 200-204.]

When, then, the Abolitionists began their campaign the country was already ripe for a struggle, and in the North as well as the South there was plenty of sentiment unfavorable to the Negro. In July, 1831, when an attempt was made to start a manual training school for Negro youth in New Haven, the citizens at a public meeting declared that "the founding of colleges for educating colored people is an unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other states, and ought to be discouraged"; and they ultimately forced the project to be abandoned. At Canterbury in the same state Prudence Crandall, a young Quaker woman twenty-nine years of age, was brought face to face with the problem when she admitted a Negro girl, Sarah Harris, to her school.[1] When she was boycotted she announced that she would receive Negro girls only if no others would attend, and she advertised accordingly in the Liberator. She was subjected to various indignities and efforts were made to arrest her pupils as vagrants. As she was still undaunted, her opponents, on May 24, 1833, procured a special act of the legislature forbidding, under severe penalties, the instruction of any Negro from outside the state without the consent of the town authorities. Under this act Miss Crandall was arrested and imprisoned, being confined to a cell which had just been vacated by a murderer. The Abolitionists came to her defense, but she was convicted, and though the higher courts quashed the proceedings on technicalities, the village shopkeepers refused to sell her food, manure was thrown into her well, her house was pelted with rotten eggs and at last demolished, and even the meeting-house in the town was closed to her. The attempt to continue the school was then abandoned. In 1834 an academy was built by subscription in Canaan, N.H.; it was granted a charter by the legislature, and the proprietors determined to admit all applicants having "suitable moral and intellectual recommendations, without other distinctions." The town-meeting "viewed with abhorrence" the attempt to establish the school, but when it was opened twenty-eight white and fourteen Negro scholars attended. The town-meeting then ordered that the academy be forcibly removed and appointed a committee to execute the mandate. Accordingly on August 10 three hundred men with two hundred oxen assembled, took the edifice from its place, dragged it for some distance and left it a ruin. From 1834 to 1836, in fact, throughout the country, from east to west, swept a wave of violence. Not less than twenty-five attempts were made to break up anti-slavery meetings. In New York in October, 1833, there was a riot in Clinton Hall, and from July 7 to 11 of the next year a succession of riots led to the sacking of the house of Lewis Tappan and the destruction of other houses and churches. When George Thompson arrived from England in September, 1834, his meetings were constantly disturbed, and Garrison himself was mobbed in Boston in 1835, being dragged through the streets with a rope around his body.

[Footnote 1: Note especially "Connecticut's Canterbury Tale; its Heroine, Prudence Crandall, and its Moral for To-Day, by John C. Kimball," Hartford (1886).]

In general the Abolitionists were charged by the South with promoting both insurrection and the amalgamation of the races. There was no clear proof of these charges; nevertheless, May said, "If we do not emancipate our slaves by our own moral energy, they will emancipate themselves and that by a process too horrible to contemplate";[1] and Channing said, "Allowing that amalgamation is to be anticipated, then, I maintain, we have no right to resist it. Then it is not unnatural."[2] While the South grew hysterical at the thought, it was, as Hart remarks, a fair inquiry, which the Abolitionists did not hesitate to put—Who was responsible for the only amalgamation that had so far taken place? After a few years there was a cleavage among the Abolitionists. Some of the more practical men, like Birney, Gerrit Smith, and the Tappans, who believed in fighting through governmental machinery, in 1838 broke away from the others and prepared to take a part in Federal politics. This was the beginning of the Liberty party, which nominated Birney for the presidency in 1840 and again in 1844. In 1848 it became merged in the Free Soil party and ultimately in the Republican party.

[Footnote 1: Hart, 221, citing Liberator, V, 59.]

[Footnote 2: Hart, 216, citing Channing, Works, V. 57.]

With the forties came division in the Church—a sort of prelude to the great events that were to thunder through the country within the next two decades. Could the Church really countenance slavery? Could a bishop hold a slave? These were to become burning questions. In 1844-5 the Baptists of the North and East refused to approve the sending out of missionaries who owned slaves, and the Southern Baptist Convention resulted. In 1844, when James O. Andrew came into the possession of slaves by his marriage to a widow who had these as a legacy from her former husband, the Northern Methodists refused to grant that one of their bishops might hold a slave, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was formally organized in Louisville the following year. The Presbyterians and the Episcopalians, more aristocratic in tone, did not divide.

The great events of the annexation of Texas, with the Mexican War that resulted, the Compromise of 1850, with the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, and the Dred Scott decision of 1857 were all regarded in the North as successive steps in the campaign of slavery, though now in the perspective they appear as vain efforts to beat back a resistless tide. In the Mexican War it was freely urged by the Mexicans that, should the American line break, their host would soon find itself among the rich cities of the South, where perhaps it could not only exact money, but free two million slaves as well, call to its assistance the Indians, and even draw aid from the Abolitionists in the North.[1] Nothing of all this was to be. Out of the academic shades of Harvard, however, at last came a tongue of flame. In "The Present Crisis" James Russell Lowell produced lines whose tremendous beat was like a stern call of the whole country to duty:

[Footnote 1: Justin H. Smith: The War with Mexico, I, 107.]

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

* * * * *

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit and 'tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified, And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

* * * * *

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key.

As "The Present Crisis" came after the Mexican War, so after the new Fugitive Slave Law appeared Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). "When despairing Hungarian fugitives make their way, against all the search-warrants and authorities of their lawful governments, to America, press and political cabinet ring with applause and welcome. When despairing African fugitives do the same thing—it is—what is it?" asked Harriet Beecher Stowe; and in her remarkable book she proceeded to show the injustice of the national position. Uncle Tom's Cabin has frequently been termed a piece of propaganda that gave an overdrawn picture of Southern conditions. The author, however, had abundant proof for her incidents, and she was quite aware of the fact that the problem of the Negro, North as well as South, transcended the question of slavery. Said St. Clair to Ophelia: "If we emancipate, are you willing to educate? How many families of your town would take in a Negro man or woman, teach them, bear with them, and seek to make them Christians? How many merchants would take Adolph, if I wanted to make him a clerk; or mechanics, if I wanted to teach him a trade? If I wanted to put Jane and Rosa to school, how many schools are there in the Northern states that would take them in?... We are in a bad position. We are the more obvious oppressors of the Negro; but the unchristian prejudice of the North is an oppressor almost equally severe."

Meanwhile the thrilling work of the Underground Railroad was answered by a practical reopening of the slave-trade. From 1820 to 1840, as the result of the repressive measure of 1819, the traffic had declined; between 1850 and 1860, however, it was greatly revived, and Southern conventions resolved that all laws, state or Federal, prohibiting the slave-trade, should be repealed. The traffic became more and more open and defiant until, as Stephen A. Douglas computed, as many as 15,000 slaves were brought into the country in 1859. It was not until the Lincoln government in 1862 hanged the first trader who ever suffered the extreme penalty of the law, and made with Great Britain a treaty embodying the principle of international right of search, that the trade was effectually checked. By the end of the war it was entirely suppressed, though as late as 1866 a squadron of ships patrolled the slave coast.

The Kansas-Nebraska Bill, repealing the Missouri Compromise and providing for "squatter sovereignty" in the territories in question, outraged the North and led immediately to the forming of the Republican party. It was not long before public sentiment began to make itself felt, and the first demonstration took place in Boston. Anthony Burns was a slave who escaped from Virginia and made his way to Boston, where he was at work in the winter of 1853-4. He was discovered by a United States marshal who presented a writ for his arrest just at the time of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in May, 1854. Public feeling became greatly aroused. Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker delivered strong addresses at a meeting in Faneuil Hall while an unsuccessful attempt to rescue Burns from the Court House was made under the leadership of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who with others of the attacking party was wounded. It was finally decided in court that Burns must be returned to his master. The law was obeyed; but Boston had been made very angry, and generally her feeling had counted for something in the history of the country. The people draped their houses in mourning, hissed the procession that took Burns to his ship and at the wharf a riot was averted only by a minister's call to prayer. This incident did more to crystallize Northern sentiment against slavery than any other except the exploit of John Brown, and this was the last time that a fugitive slave was taken out of Boston. Burns himself was afterwards bought by popular subscription, and ultimately became a Baptist minister in Canada.

In 1834 Dr. Emerson, an army officer stationed in Missouri, removed to Illinois, taking with him his slave, Dred Scott. Two years later, again accompanied by Scott, he went to Minnesota. In Illinois slavery was prohibited by state law and Minnesota was a free territory. In 1838 Emerson returned with Scott to Missouri. After a while the slave raised the important question: Had not his residence outside of a slave state made him a free man? Beaten by his master in 1848, with the aid of anti-slavery lawyers Scott brought a suit against him for assault and battery, the circuit court of St. Louis rendering a decision in his favor. Emerson appealed and in 1852 the Supreme Court of the state reversed the decision of the lower court. Not long after this Emerson sold Scott to a citizen of New York named Sandford. Scott now brought suit against Sandford, on the ground that they were citizens of different states. The case finally reached the Supreme Court of the United States, which in 1857 handed down the decision that Scott was not a citizen of Missouri and had no standing in the Federal courts, that a slave was only a piece of property, and that a master might take his property with impunity to any place within the jurisdiction of the United States. The ownership of Scott and his family soon passed to a Massachusetts family by whom they were liberated; but the important decision that the case had called forth aroused the most intense excitement throughout the country, and somehow out of it all people remembered more than anything else the amazing declaration of Chief Justice Taney that "the Negroes were so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The extra-legal character and the general fallacy of his position were exposed by Justice Curtis in a masterly dissenting opinion.

No one incident of the period showed more clearly the tension under which the country was laboring than the assault on Charles Sumner by Preston S. Brooks, a congressional representative from South Carolina. As a result of this regrettable occurrence splendid canes with such inscriptions as "Hit him again" and "Use knock-down arguments" were sent to Brooks from different parts of the South and he was triumphantly reelected by his constituency, while on the other hand resolutions denouncing him were passed all over the North, in Canada, and even in Europe. More than ever the South was thrown on the defensive, and in impassioned speeches Robert Toombs now glorified his state and his section. Speaking at Emory College in 1853 he had already made an extended apology for slavery;[1] speaking in the Georgia legislature on the eve of secession he contended that the South had been driven to bay by the Abolitionists and must now "expand or perish." A writer in the Southern Literary Messenger,[2] in an article "The Black Race in North America," made the astonishing statement that "the slavery of the black race on this continent is the price America has paid for her liberty, civil and religious, and, humanly speaking, these blessings would have been unattainable without their aid." Benjamin M. Palmer, a distinguished minister of New Orleans, in a widely quoted sermon in 1860 spoke of the peculiar trust that had been given to the South—to be the guardians of the slaves, the conservers of the world's industry, and the defenders of the cause of religion.[3] "The blooms upon Southern fields gathered by black hands have fed the spindles and looms of Manchester and Birmingham not less than of Lawrence and Lowell. Strike now a blow at this system of labor and the world itself totters at the stroke. Shall we permit that blow to fall? Do we not owe it to civilized man to stand in the breach and stay the uplifted arm?... This trust we will discharge in the face of the worst possible peril. Though war be the aggregation of all evils, yet, should the madness of the hour appeal to the arbitration of the sword, we will not shrink even from the baptism of fire.... The position of the South is at this moment sublime. If she has grace given her to know her hour, she will save herself, the country, and the world."

[Footnote 1: See "An Oration delivered before the Few and Phi Gamma Societies of Emory College: Slavery in the United States; its consistency with republican institutions, and its effects upon the slave and society. Augusta, Ga., 1853."]

[Footnote 2: November, 1855.]

[Footnote 3: "The Rights of the South defended in the Pulpits, by B.M. Palmer, D.D., and W.T. Leacock, D.D., Mobile, 1860."]

All of this was very earnest and very eloquent, but also very mistaken, and the general fallacy of the South's position was shown by no less a man than he who afterwards became vice-president of the Confederacy. Speaking in the Georgia legislature in opposition to the motion for secession, Stephens said that the South had no reason to feel aggrieved, for all along she had received more than her share of the nation's privileges, and had almost always won in the main that which was demanded. She had had sixty years of presidents to the North's twenty-four; two-thirds of the clerkships and other appointments although the white population in the section was only one-third that of the country; fourteen attorneys general to the North's five; and eighteen Supreme Court judges to the North's eleven, although four-fifths of the business of the court originated in the free states. "This," said Stephens in an astonishing declaration, "we have required so as to guard against any interpretation of the Constitution unfavorable to us."

Still another voice from the South, in a slightly different key, attacked the tendencies in the section. The Impending Crisis (1857), by Hinton Rowan Helper, of North Carolina, was surpassed in sensational interest by no other book of the period except Uncle Tom's Cabin. The author did not place himself upon the broadest principles of humanity and statesmanship; he had no concern for the Negro, and the great planters of the South were to him simply the "whelps" and "curs" of slavery. He spoke merely as the voice of the non-slaveholding white men in the South. He set forth such unpleasant truths as that the personal and real property, including slaves, of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas, taken all together, was less than the real and personal estate in the single state of New York; that representation in Southern legislatures was unfair; that in Congress a Southern planter was twice as powerful as a Northern man; that slavery was to blame for the migration from the South to the West; and that in short the system was in every way harmful to the man of limited means. All of this was decidedly unpleasant to the ears of the property owners of the South; Helper's book was proscribed, and the author himself found it more advisable to live in New York than in his native state. The Impending Crisis was eagerly read, however, and it succeeded as a book because it attempted to attack with some degree of honesty a great economic problem.

The time for speeches and books, however, was over, and the time for action had come. For years the slave had chanted, "I've been listenin' all the night long"; and his prayer had reached the throne. On October 16, 1859, John Brown made his raid on Harper's Ferry and took his place with the immortals. In the long and bitter contest on American slavery the Abolitionists had won.



CHAPTER XI

SOCIAL PROGRESS, 1820-1860[1]

[Footnote 1: This chapter follows closely upon Chapter III, Section 5, and is largely complementary to Chapter VIII.]

So far in our study we have seen the Negro as the object of interest on the part of the American people. Some were disposed to give him a helping hand, some to keep him in bondage, and some thought that it might be possible to dispose of any problem by sending him out of the country. In all this period of agitation and ferment, aside from the efforts of friends in his behalf, just what was the Negro doing to work out his own salvation? If for the time being we can look primarily at constructive effort rather than disabilities, just what do we find that on his own account he was doing to rise to the full stature of manhood?

Naturally in the answer to such a question we shall have to be concerned with those people who had already attained unto nominal freedom. We shall indeed find many examples of industrious slaves who, working in agreement with their owners, managed sometimes to purchase themselves and even to secure ownership of their families. Such cases, while considerable in the aggregate, were after all exceptional, and for the ordinary slave on the plantation the outlook was hopeless enough. In 1860 the free persons formed just one-ninth of the total Negro population in the country, there being 487,970 of them to 3,953,760 slaves. It is a commonplace to remark the progress that the race has made since emancipation. A study of the facts, however, will show that with all their disadvantages less than half a million people had before 1860 not only made such progress as amasses a surprising total, but that they had already entered every large field of endeavor in which the race is engaged to-day.

When in course of time the status of the Negro in the American body politic became a live issue, the possibility and the danger of an imperium in imperio were perceived; and Rev. James W.C. Pennington, undoubtedly a leader, said in his lectures in London and Glasgow: "The colored population of the United States have no destiny separate from that of the nation in which they form an integral part. Our destiny is bound up with that of America. Her ship is ours; her pilot is ours; her storms are ours; her calms are ours. If she breaks upon any rock, we break with her. If we, born in America, can not live upon the same soil upon terms of equality with the descendants of Scotchmen, Englishmen, Irishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Hungarians, Greeks, and Poles, then the fundamental theory of America fails and falls to the ground."[1] While everybody was practically agreed upon this fundamental matter of the relation of the race to the Federal Government, more and more there developed two lines of thought, equally honest, as to the means by which the race itself was to attain unto the highest things that American civilization had to offer. The leader of one school of thought was Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. When this man and his friends found that in white churches they were not treated with courtesy, they said, We shall have our own church; we shall have our own bishop; we shall build up our own enterprises in any line whatsoever; and even to-day the church that Allen founded remains as the greatest single effort of the race in organization. The foremost representative of the opposing line of thought was undoubtedly Frederick Douglass, who in a speech in Rochester in 1848 said: "I am well aware of the anti-Christian prejudices which have excluded many colored persons from white churches, and the consequent necessity for erecting their own places of worship. This evil I would charge upon its originators, and not the colored people. But such a necessity does not now exist to the extent of former years. There are societies where color is not regarded as a test of membership, and such places I deem more appropriate for colored persons than exclusive or isolated organizations." There is much more difference between these two positions than can be accounted for by the mere lapse of forty years between the height of the work of Allen and that of Douglass. Allen certainly did not sanction segregation under the law, and no man worked harder than he to relieve his people from proscription. Douglass moreover, who did not formally approve of organizations that represented any such distinction as that of race, again and again presided over gatherings of Negro men. In the last analysis, however, it was Allen who was foremost in laying the basis of distinctively Negro enterprise, and Douglass who felt that the real solution of any difficulty was for the race to lose itself as quickly as possible in the general body politic.