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CHAPTER V—GROWTH OF THE SLAVE-POWER.

       Table of Contents

      Introduction of the Cotton-gin.—Its effect on Slavery.—Fugitive Slave Law.—Anthony Burns.—The Dred Scott Decision.—Imprisonment for reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”—Struggles with Slavery.

      The introduction of the cotton-gin into the South, by Whitney of Connecticut, had materially enhanced the value of slave property; the emancipation societies of Virginia and Maryland had ceased to petition their Legislatures for the “Gradual Emancipation” of the slaves; and the above two States had begun to make slave-raising a profitable business, when the American Antislavery Society was formed in the city of Philadelphia, in the year 1833. The agitation of the question in Congress, the mobbing of William Lloyd Garrison in Boston, the murder of the Rev. E. P. Lovejoy in Illinois, and the attempt to put down free speech throughout the country, only hastened the downfall of the institution.

      In the earlier days of the Antislavery movement, not a year, sometimes hardly a month, passed that did not bear upon its record the report of mobs, almost always ferocious in spirit, and sometimes cruel and blood-stained in act. It was the first instinctive and brutal response of a proslavery people convicted of guilt and called to repentance; and it was almost universal. Wherever antislavery was preached, honestly, and effectually, there the mobocratic spirit followed it; so that, in those times, he who escaped this ordeal was, with some justice, held to be either inefficient or unfaithful. Hardly a town or city, from Alton to Portland, where much antislavery labor was bestowed, in the first fifteen years of this enterprise, that was not the scene of one of these attempts to crush all free discussion of the subject of slavery by violence or bloodshed. Hardly one of the earlier public advocates of the cause that was not made to suffer, either in person or in property, or in both, from popular violence—the penalty of obedience to the dictates of his own conscience. Nor was this all: official countenance was often given to the mad proceedings of the mob; or, if not given, its protection was withheld from those who were the objects of popular hatred; and, as if this were not enough, legislation was invoked to the same end. It was suggested to the Legislature of one of the Southern States, that a large reward be offered for the head of a citizen of Massachusetts who was the pioneer in the modern antislavery movement. A similar reward was offered for the head of a citizen of New York. Yet so foul an insult excited neither the popular indignation nor legislative resentment in either of those States.

      Great damage was done to the cause of Christianity by the position assumed on the question of slavery by the American churches, and especially those in the Southern States. Think of a religious kidnapper! a Christian slave-breeder! a slave-trader, loving his neighbor as himself, receiving the “sacraments” in some Protestant church from the hand of a Christian apostle, then the next day selling babies by the dozen, and tearing young women from the arms of their husbands to feed the lust of lecherous New Orleans! Imagine a religious man selling his own children into eternal bondage! Think of a Christian defending slavery out of the Bible, and declaring there is no higher law, but atheism is the first principle of Republican Government!

      Yet this was the stand taken, and maintained, by the churches in the slave States down to the day that Lee surrendered to Grant.

      One of the bitterest fruits of slavery in our land is the cruel spirit of caste, which makes the complexion even of the free negro a badge of social inferiority, exposing him to insult in the steamboat and the railcar, and in all places of public resort, not even excepting the church; banishing him from remunerative occupations; expelling him from the legislative hall, the magistrate’s bench, and the jury-box; and crushing his noblest aspirations under a weight of prejudice and proscription which he struggles in vain to throw off. Against this unchristian and hateful spirit, every lover of liberty should enter his solemn protest. This hateful prejudice caused the breaking up of the school of Miss Prudence Crandall, in the State of Connecticut, in the early days of the antislavery agitation.

      Next came the burning of Pennsylvania Hall, one of the most beautiful edifices in the City of Brotherly Love, simply because colored persons were permitted to occupy seats by the side of whites.

      The enactment by Congress of the Fugitive Slave Law caused the friends of freedom, both at home and abroad, to feel that the General Government was fast becoming the bulwark of slavery. The rendition of Thomas Sims, and still later that of Anthony Burns, was, indeed, humiliating in the extreme to the people of the Northern States.

      On that occasion, the sons of free, enlightened, and Christian Massachusetts, descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, bowed submissively to the behests of a tyranny more cruel than Austrian despotism; yielded up their dignity and self-respect; became the allies of slave-catchers, the associates and companions of bloodhounds. At the bidding of slaveholders and serviles, they seized the image of God, bound their fellow-man with chains, and consigned him to torture and premature death under the lash of a piratical overseer. God’s law and man’s rights were trampled upon; the self-respect, the constitutional privileges, of the free States, were ignominiously surrendered. A people who resisted a paltry tax upon tea, at the cannon’s mouth, basely submitted to an imposition tenfold greater, in favor of brutalizing their fellow-men. Soil which had been moistened with the blood of American patriots was polluted by the footsteps of slave-catchers and their allies.

      The Boston Court House in chains, two hundred rowdies and thieves sworn in as special policemen, respectable citizens shoved off the side-walks by these slave-catchers; all for the purpose of satisfying “our brethren of the South.” But this act did not appease the feelings, or satisfy the demands, of the slave-holders, while it still further inflamed the fire of abolitionism.

      The “Dred Scott Decision” added fresh combustibles to the smouldering heap. Dred Scott, a slave, taken by his master into free Illinois, and then beyond the line of 36° 30’, and then back into Missouri, sued for and obtained his freedom on the ground, that, having been taken where by the Constitution slavery was illegal, his master had lost all claim. But the Supreme Court, on appeal, reversed the judgment; and Dred Scott, with his wife and children, was taken back into slavery. By this decision in the highest court of American law, it was affirmed that no free negro could claim to be a citizen of the United States, but was only under the jurisdiction of the separate State in which he resided; that the prohibition of slavery in any Territory of the Union was unconstitutional; and that the slave-owner might go where he pleased with his property, throughout the United States, and retain his right.

      This decision created much discussion, both in America and in Europe, and materially injured the otherwise good name of our country abroad.

      The Constitution, thus interpreted by Judge Taney, became the emblem of the tyrants and the winding sheet of liberty, and gave a boldness to the people of the South, which soon showed itself, while good men at the North felt ashamed of the Government under which they lived.

      The slave-holders in the cotton, sugar, and rice growing States began to urge the re-opening of the African slave-trade, and the driving out from the Southern States of all free colored persons.

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