SUPPLEMENTAL CHAPTER TO THE REVISED EDITION. Wherein the Criticisms of two Religious Journals are Weighed and Considered, the Subterfuges resorted to in Defence of a Recreant Ministry and Church exposed and swept away, and the Truth of GARRISON. By John G. Whittier, 1879, . THE DAY OF SMALL THINGS. By James Russell Lowell, UNIVERSITY CALIFORNIA GARRISON AND Preliminary ni Lundy I. The Revolutionary Period - The Qualers-Benja- r and au y in Baltimore THE abolition of slavery in the United States is an event of the past, and the generation now coming upon the stage will know no more of the struggles it cost, or of the men and women by whose toils and sacrifices it was brought about than can be found in a chapter of history but imperfectly written as yet, or than they may be able to gather from the private recollections of the now venerable actors who are rapidly disappearing from the field on which their triumphs were won. The war in which the great conflict was brought to its final culmination, and in which such mighty moral and material forces were engaged, will be duly celebrated in history; but the moral and political agitations that preceded and led up to that event, and the men and women who took a conspicuous and honorable part therein, are not so likely to receive from posterity the tribute due to their courageous devotion to the cause of justice and liberty. The lines of this picture are growing fainter day by day, and soon every hand that can retouch them will be mouldering in the dust. As one who took a constant, though modest part in those agitations, from their feeble beginning to their triumphant conclusion, I have undertaken to give the public the benefit of some of my recollections of the events of that time, and of the actors therein. All great changes in human affairs spring from causes whose workings may be traced, with more or less distinctness, to a remote past. Slavery being a very ancient institution, it was not left to America to make the first protest against it. There was not, and there could not be any originality in the American AntiSlavery movement. The principles involved were as old as humanity itself, and mpions and martyrs long before the New World. During the colonial period, our mistory, and for some years after e adoption of the Constitution, there was a strong current of opposition to slavery. The discussions that preceded the Revolutionary War, involving as they did the fundamental principles of human liberty, could not but remind all thoughtful persons of the guilt and shame of slaveholding. The Declaration of Independence, though adopted for no such purpose, virtually set the seal of condemnation upon slavery as a system at war with human nature and the law of God. In lifting up that beacon-light before the world, the American people challenged the judgment of mankind upon their shameful inconsistency in making merchandise of human flesh. The sting of "the world's reproach around them burning" was keenly felt by many of the most eminent statesmen, divines and philanthropists of that day. Franklin, Rush, Hamilton and Jay; Hopkins, Edwards and Wesley; and Woolman, Lay and Benezet, among the Quakers, deserve honorable mention for their sturdy and unyielding hostility to slavery. To the credit of the Quakers as a body it should be said, that as early as 1780, after a long and serious contest, they emancipated all their slaves, which were very numerous in Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, one monthly meeting setting free eleven hundred. They also refused to hire slave-labor of the masters. In a certain sense the Abolitionists of a later period entered into and completed the labors of these noble and far-seeing men. But I am not to write a history of the introduction of slavery into this country, nor to record the efforts of some of the founders of the Republic to resist its encroachments. I set my stake at the beginning of the later movement against slavery, which, dating from 1829, went forward with constantly increasing momentum until the fetters of the slave were melted in the hot flames of war. At the date above mentioned there was hardly a ripple of excitement about slavery in any part of the nation. The fathers of the Republic had fallen asleep; the AntiSlavery sentiment of the country, defeated in the spasmodic Missouri struggle in 1821, had become too feeble to utter even a whisper. From one year's end to another there was scarcely a newspaper in all the land that made the slightest allusion to the subject. The Abolition societies in which Franklin and Rush and Jay were once so active were either dead or sleeping. One voice there was, and one only. Need I say that was the voice of a Quaker? It was Benjamin Lundy, who, in his little paper with a great name, "The Genius of Universal Emancipation," lifted up that "voice crying in the wilderness," first in Ohio, next in Tennessee, and subsequently in Baltimore, then a mart of the domestic traffic in slaves. It was a brave and an earnest voice, but it was scarcely heard outside of the Quaker body, to which Mr. Lundy belonged, and which was fast becoming almost as torpid as other religious bodies on this question. There was a time, as some one has said, when one Quaker was enough to shake the country for twenty miles around; but the time came at length when it required the whole country for twenty miles around to shake one Quaker! The cotton traffic had become immensely profitable, and Quakers in the great cities loved its gains as well as others. The still, small voice of conscience was overwhelmed by the hoarse clamors of avarice. It was a universally accepted proverb that slavery was absolutely necessary to the production of a staple that was filling the coffers of Northern merchants and manufacturers with untold wealth. The moral sense of the people of the North became paralyzed. Pulpit and press were generally silent. If they spoke at all it was only to say that slavery was too dangerous a subject to be discussedthat the Union could not long survive its agitation. To Benjamin Lundy chiefly belongs the honor of keeping the flame of Anti-Slavery sentiment from utterly dying out in those dark days, and putting the burning torch of liberty into the hands of the man raised up by Providence to lead the new crusade against the Slave Power. No careful student of history can fail to be struck by the fact that in every crisis of human affairs men have been raised up with special qualifications for the work that needed to be done at that particular time. The hour strikes for the achievement of a great reform, and lo! a man appears upon the stage, commissioned and equipped of God for the task. He gives the keynote for rallying thousands; he sounds the charge against an iniquitous institution, mighty in aspect, but ripening for destruction. He calls a nation to repentance for its crimes against humanity, and warns it of the Divine retributions for sin. Such men are the prophets of God in their generation - misrepresented, persecuted, maligned, and sometimes slain; but always honored of God, and sure at last to be honored of men. What a catalogue of such men, "of whom the world was not worthy," might be culled from the pages of history men whose bloody footsteps are the way |