1827. SOUTH CAROLINA ON STATE RIGHTS. 207 general welfare. When the Colonization Society was established the people of the South were led to believe that its purpose was the removal from the United States of the free people of color and none others. But this impression, it now appears, was erroneous. The society boldly avows that its object is, and ever has been, to remove the whole colored population of the Union from our own to another land, and to accomplish the purpose so wild, so fanatical, so destructive to Southern interests, they ask that the general fund of the United States be used a fund to which the slave-holding States have contributed so largely. The cold-blooded selfishness, the unthinking zeal which prompts so many of our fellow-citizens in other States to meddle with our internal concerns and domestic relations—an interference totally unwarranted either by humanity or constitutional right-cannot be too severely reprobated. The result of such meddling if continued is awful and inevitable. The people of Georgia know and feel the advantages of the Union; but they cannot and will not, even for the preservation of that Union, permit their rights to be assailed. But how is this evil to be met? Nothing can be hoped from remonstrance. Our own Legislature cannot check it by laws. It can be met and stopped only "by a union of the people and the States of the South, declaring through their legislative bodies, in a voice that must be heard, that they are ready and willing to make any sacrifice rather than submit longer to such ruinous interference, and warning their enemies that they are unwittingly preparing a mine which, once exploded, will lay our much loved country in one common ruin.* In these remonstrances and threatenings Georgia was soon joined by South Carolina. A committee of her Senate, to which the question was referred, reported that it had no hesitation in saying that on such a subject there could be no reasoning between South Carolina and any other government. In the whole catalogue of human evils the worst was that state of affairs in which the slaves should be encouraged to look for emancipation to any other body than the Legislature. † On * Executive Documents, Twentieth Congress, First Session, vol. iii, No. 126. + Executive Documents, Twentieth Congress, First Session, vol. iii, No. 65. The Legislature resolved "that the American Colonization Society is not an ob * the other hand, the border slave States approved of the purpose of the society. Maryland voted it one thousand dollars annually for ten years. Kentucky expressed her deepest interest in the colonization movement, and requested her senators and representatives in Congress to use their best efforts to secure the protection and patronage of the General Government for the society. Ohio ‡ and Vermont * did the same; Virginia on two occasions gave the society money. # Yet, despite this widespread interest, the work of emancipation was not to be done by the Colonization Society. Already a little band of men, whose names were quite unknown to the mass of their fellow-citizens, had set in motion agents which in the course of time proved far more effective. Foremost among these antislavery leaders was Benjamin Lundy, a native of Handwich, Sussex County, New Jersey, where he was born in 1789. Like so many of those who had labored in the cause of abolition since the day when the first public protest against slave-holding was made at Germantown, Lundy came of Quaker stock. His hatred of slavery seems to have begun when, as a lad of nineteen, he went to learn the saddler's trade at Wheeling, Virginia, then a rival of Pittsburg as a place where emigrants obtained their outfits for the West, and a thoroughfare on the route of the interstate slave-trade. Hardly a week passed but coffles of negroes, gathered from the plantations of Virginia or bought from the dealers in the slave marts of Baltimore and Washington, were driven through its streets. The misery and suffering of these unhappy people deeply affected Lundy. From a sympathizer he became an earnest worker in their behalf, and, on removing to St. Clairsville, in eastern Ohio, he founded an antislavery association, which he called the Union Humane Society, wrote an appeal to antislavery people in the United States urging them to form like associations, and began to contribute antislavery articles to the Philanthropist, a weekly journal pub ject of national interest, and that Congress has no power in any way to patronize or direct appropriations for the benefit of this or any other society." * Laws of Maryland, Act 172, Session of 1826-27. Niles's Weekly Register, March 24, 1827. # November 12, 1827. 1820. BENJAMIN LUNDY. 209 lished at Mount Pleasant, and devoted to the interests of peace, temperance, and antislavery.* The editor was a Quaker preacher named Charles Osborn, who, after visiting most of the meetings in the South, urging immediate emancipation and encouraging the establishment of manumission societies, had settled at Mount Pleasant and begun the publication of the first newspaper that ever advocated immediate and uncompensated emancipation in the United States. To the Philanthropist Lundy became a steady contributor, and when, in 1818, a partnership was offered him by Osborn, willingly accepted it, and set off for St. Louis, there to dispose of his stock in trade. On a second trip, made in the autumn of 1819, he reached the city just at the time when excitement over the admission of Missouri as a slave State was at its height, and, entering the contest, wrote vigorously against slavery and the compromise. Meantime Osborn, despairing of Lundy's return, sold his paper, and another Friend, Elihu Embree, of Jonesborough, in East Tennessee, established The Emancipator, the first newspaper in our country founded for the sole purpose of attacking slavery. When Lundy heard of these things, he seems to have abandoned all thought of becoming an editor. Nevertheless, he determined to return to Ohio, and, having no money, he made the journey of more than seven hundred miles on foot in the dead of winter. But, as he trudged along, news of Embree's death reached him, and he thereupon decided to found an antislavery periodical at Mount Pleasant. He had no press and no money, yet when six subscribers were secured Lundy walked with his manuscript to Steubenville, ten miles away, and carried home on his back the little edition of the first number of the Genius of Universal Emancipation. This resounding name, borrowed from a phrase that dropped from the lips of Curran in the course of one of his great speeches, was bestowed on a small sixteenpage monthly of most humble appearance. The paper was poor, the printing was bad, but the vigor and earnestness of the matter brought a hearty support and a long subscription list before the fourth number was published.. Such was his * Life of Benjamin Lundy.-Earle. success that within a year the friends of Embree persuaded Lundy to remove his paper to Jonesborough, where he stayed till 1824, when he carried out a long-meditated plan and started East to establish the Genius at Baltimore. In Maryland at that time the antislavery sentiment was strong. A public meeting at Baltimore had protested against the Missouri Compromise; nearly one thousand abolition votes were cast at the polls, and the day seemed near when the State would accept gradual emancipation and take her place with the free States of the North and West. From the start, therefore, the Genius was well received, well supported, and widely circulated. But the day of prosperity was short. The events of the next three years wrought a change in public opinion in the slave-holding States. Subscriptions to the Genius fell off, and in the spring of 1828 the list was so short that Lundy made a tour of the free States in search of new subscribers. He went as far north as Albany and as far east as Boston, where, at a boarding house, he met William Lloyd Garrison, then a young man of twenty-three. Garrison was a native of Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1805. After a boyhood passed in great poverty, he was apprenticed at thirteen to a printer of his native town, and began to set type in the office of the Newburyport Herald, but rose quickly to the position of foreman, and before he was seventeen was contributing anonymous articles of no mean kind on current topics of importance. His apprenticeship over, Garrison, at twenty, became editor and publisher of the Newburyport Free Press, and when, a few months later, that journal closed its career, went to Boston, and at twenty-three was editor of the National Philanthropist, the first temperance newspaper in the United States.* It was at this time that Garrison met Lundy, heard him explain his views to a little meeting of Boston clergymen, and, when they failed to respond, indorsed the Genius in the columns of the Philanthropist. With a few new subscribers as the fruit of this visit to * The National Philanthropist was founded in 1826 by Rev. William Collier, and was "devoted to the suppression of intemperance and its kindred vices, and to the promotion of industry, education, and morality." 1829. LUNDY AND GARRISON. 211 the North, Lundy went back to Baltimore, but almost immediately returned to Boston, where, one midsummer evening, he spoke to a public meeting in the vestry of the Baptist Church. He dwelt on the folly of seeking to abolish slavery by the method used by the Colonization Society, told his hearers that the increase in slave population for one year was greater than the diminution the society could effect in fifty years, and urged them to found an antislavery society and petition Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. Scarcely had Lundy finished speaking when the pastor of the church denounced the agitation of the slavery question in New England, declared that the people of the North had no business to meddle with the institution, and dismissed the meeting. Garrison was present, and it was largely by his influence that another meeting was held, that an antislavery committee was formed, and a petition written, circulated, signed, and sent to Congress. Again Lundy obtained new subscribers; but the support was of no avail, and in January, 1829, the Genius of Universal Emancipation ceased to appear. It was suspended. "It shall never be abandoned," said Lundy, "while the labor of my own hands will support life and produce revenue sufficient to print and publish one sheet per annum." * True to his pledge, Lundy began at once to canvass for new subscribers, to collect unpaid subscriptions, and, what was far more important, he now persuaded Garrison to come to Baltimore and join him in the effort to revive the Genius. Garrison had retired from the National Philanthropist, had gone to Bennington, and was there editing The Journal of the Times, a newspaper whose mission it was to advocate the cause of antislavery, temperance, peace, and moral reform.† To quit the Journal at once was not possible; but as soon as he could, Garrison left Bennington, and in the autumn of 1829 joined Lundy at Baltimore, where, in September, the publication of the Genius was again resumed.‡ * Genius of Universal Emancipation, January 3, 1829. James G. Birney and his Times. William Birney, p. 396. The first number appeared October 3, 1828. VOL. V. September 5, 1829. |