The plan of colonization arose in Washington, D. C., where men from North and South assembled in 1816 to discuss the “growing evil” of the free Negro population. From this meeting came the simple solution: send them back to Africa; and the American Colonization Society was forthwith formed for that purpose.27 In the next year the Society sent two representatives to the west coast of Africa to investigate the possibility of establishing a Negro colony there. Both these emissaries were ministers, the Reverend Samuel J. Mills of Connecticut and the Reverend Ebenezer Burgess of Massachusetts; and both had the honest belief that colonization would encourage emancipation. They completed their mission and recommended a site. It was not, as things turned out, the place where the first American asylum for free Negroes was established, yet Mills and Burgess may be called the pioneers of the Liberian settlement.28
The colonization movement gained ground apace. Beginning in 1820, the Connecticut Colonization Society met annually at Hartford, and auxiliaries of this group sprang up in many sections of the state—among them, a juvenile association formed in Middletown in 1828.29 From the very beginning, however, the genuine friends of colored people saw the colonization scheme as a sort of “gentleman’s agreement” between free and slave states. It was nicely calculated to drain off the insurrectionary free Negroes of the South and to strengthen the bonds of the slave system, thus serving an economic purpose. In the North, however, colonization would reduce the number of Negroes and work against the amalgamation or equalization of races—effects that would be primarily social.30
However good or evil the intentions of the colonizationists, one outcome of their activity was certainly to dampen the growing ardor for abolition. At least partly as a result of their work, the decade 1820–1830 was “a period of general apathy and indifference on the subject of slavery and the wrongs and needs of the colored race.”31 The colonizationists were concerned only with the free Negroes, and by focusing a spotlight in that direction, they distracted attention from the larger matter of slavery itself and from the increasingly unbearable plight of the slaves. Antislavery writings became less frequent and generally milder in tone than they had been in preceding decades.32 The country as a whole—and Connecticut with it— was lulled into a false sense of complacency by the Missouri Compromise and by colonizationist propaganda. As a leading abolitionist said later, it began to take on the appearance of a nation “slumbering in the lap of moral death.”33
CHAPTER 2
THORNY IS THE PATHWAY
IN BOSTON, on the first day of the year 1831, that same abolitionist issued a forthright call to action in the anti-slavery cause. His name was William Lloyd Garrison; and in the initial number of his newspaper The Liberator he stated his position in words that no man could fail to understand:1
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 !
Garrison was as good as his word. For three decades, in the face of opposition at first nearly overwhelming and always formidable, he led the fight for emancipation—not partial, not gradual, not linked to such disguised forms of discrimination as colonization, but immediate, unconditional, and complete. The band of reformers who gathered about his standard were idealists all, stirred by the same zeal for human betterment that inspired the contemporary movements for temperance and for universal popular education. Among themselves, abolitionists might—and sometimes did—differ over strategy and tactics, but never over the ultimate goal. To these standard-bearers, with their crusading spirit and selfless deeds, the Underground Railroad owed more of its organization and effectiveness than to any other group.
An early result of Garrison’s challenge was the formation of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, established at Boston in 1832. Within a year it had become the American Anti-Slavery Society and had spread over the North, carrying Garrison’s principles wherever it went. Its purpose was dual: “To endeavor, by all means sanctioned by law, to effect the abolition of slavery; and to improve the character and condition of the free people of color.” Its program included the following points:
1. To organize in every city, town, and village.
2. To send forth agents to preach the gospel.
3. To circularize antislavery tracts and periodicals.
4. To encourage the employment of free laborers, rather than of slaves, by giving market preference to their products.2
A fifth purpose, not explicitly stated but evident in the acts of many Society members, was to encourage and assist the escape of fugitives from slavery—the passengers of the Underground Railroad.
Among the earliest antislavery societies in New England was that of New Haven, established in 1833. Two of its leading spirits were clergymen, the Reverend Samuel J. May of Brooklyn, Connecticut, and the Reverend Simeon S. Jocelyn. Their reasons for enlisting in the cause of immediate, complete emancipation were well phrased by May:
Often it was roughly demanded of us Abolitionists “Why we espoused so zealously the cause of the enslaved? Why we meddled so with the civil and domestic institutions of the Southern States?” Our first answer always was, in the memorable words of old Terence, “Because we are men, and therefore, cannot be indifferent to anything that concerns humanity!” Liberty cannot be enjoyed nor long preserved at the North, if slavery be tolerated at the South.3
In the South, indeed, slavery was not merely tolerated; it was encouraged and was growing apace. The cotton gin, invented as far back as 1793, was by now in widespread use; and with it, cotton production became increasingly profitable, so that more and more land was brought under cultivation and more and more slaves were demanded to work it. Moreover, the trans-Appalachian region of Alabama and the Mississippi Delta had become safe for full-scale settlement and exploitation only comparatively recently, with Andrew Jackson’s victory over the Creeks in 1814. After that came a rush of settlers to the newly opened areas—hard-driving men, intent on carving a cotton empire out of the forests and canebrakes, and more than willing to burn up any amount of slave labor in the process. Where once the buckskin-clad hunter had roamed, it was now the overseer and the slave coffle, the endless rows of cotton growing through the long hot season, the back-breaking tasks of chopping and picking, and the human beasts, ill fed, ill clothed, and ill treated, on whose driven labors the master might wax fat. Even the planters of the upper South, whose eighteenth-century forebears may in fact have treated their slaves with a certain patriarchal concern, could not fail to realize that the auction block now offered them high profits in human flesh sold down the river—especially since the importation of slaves from overseas had been banned in 1807. Everywhere, the lot of the slaves grew steadily worse, while the Southern slaveowners—never more than a small percentage of the white population in the slave states themselves—grew steadily more powerful and more arrogant.4
As reports of these conditions filtered back to the North, more and more persons of conscience came to see that slavery could no longer be regarded as a local matter but was becoming a national concern. This conviction fed the rolls of the antislavery