1831.1

INSURRECTIONS.

5

Charleston, planned an insurrection; but the plot was discovered, and Vesey, with thirty-four of his followers, was hanged. In 1831 Nat Turner, a slave of Southampton County, Virginia, who saw visions and dreamed dreams, conceived that he had been chosen by the Lord to lead the blacks out of bondage. Setting out with six men, he undertook to rouse the entire colored population and kill all the whites. The band of insurgents increased as it went, and in two days fifty-five whites were murdered. But the alarm spread rapidly, the planters came riding in from all directions, armed to the teeth, and after a fight the insurgents were overcome. Seventeen negroes were hanged, and others who were suspected were tortured, burned, or shot.

In one respect, these two affairs produced precisely opposite effects. In South Carolina, after Vesey's insurrection, a law was passed forbidding free negroes to reside in the State, and reducing to slavery any black person that should enter it. In pursuance of this, negro sailors, citizens of Massachusetts, employed on vessels entering the port of Charleston, were seized and imprisoned; and when Massachusetts sent a commissioner to lay her protest before the South Carolina authorities, he was ordered to leave that State at once, on peril of his life. On the other hand, Turner's insurrection was followed by a proposition in the Virginia Legislature to abolish slavery; and though this was voted down, it received considerable support from able and earnest men.

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ANTI-SLAVERY PUBLICATIONS.

[1837.

Almost simultaneously with the Southampton insurrection appeared in Boston the first number of a weekly paper entitled "The Liberator." It was edited by William Lloyd Garrison, whose sole purpose was to declaim constantly against the injustice and sinfulness of slavery, and to demand its immediate abolition. His first words in the cause have become famous: "I am in earnest. I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard." Other publications of this character were established within a few years, at various points in the Northern States. Among them were the "AntiSlavery Standard," New York, edited by Sydney Howard Gay, and the "North Star," at Rochester, edited by Frederick Douglass, a runaway slave from Maryland. The Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy attempted to establish a religious and anti-slavery paper, first at St. Louis and afterward at Alton, Illinois, in 1835-37; but three times a pro-slavery mob threw his press and types into the river, and the last time they murdered Lovejoy, who was defending his property. Anti-slavery societies were formed, public addresses were issued, conventions were held, and lecturers went through the Northern States, to rouse the public conscience on the subject of the great national wrong, of which they held that the North was almost equally guilty with the South. They were hissed, ridiculed, and often mobbed, and the great political partiesWhig and Democratic-were very careful not to be identified with the cause. The now venerable

1837.]

ANTI-SLAVERY PUBLICATIONS.

7

poet Whittier just escaped death at the hands of a mob in Concord, New Hampshire, when he went there with George Thompson in 1835 to hold an anti-slavery meeting. "They came with guns," said he in speaking of it recently, “though I did n't see the necessity, as we were not armed."

66

The work of the journalists and lecturers was powerfully supplemented by publications in book form. The American Anti-Slavery Society issued compilations of advertisements, news-paragraphs, and other documents from Southern sources, designed to show that overworking, starving, cruelly flogging, and otherwise maltreating slaves, both men and women, and hunting fugitives with guns and bloodhounds, were common incidents in plantation life. Here are a few out of thousands: "Committed to jail, a negro-had on his right leg an iron band with one link of a chain." Ranaway, the negress Fanny-had on an iron band about her neck.""Ranaway, Sam-he was shot a short time since through the hand, and has several shots in his left arm and side.' Ranaway, Anthonyone of his ears cut off, and his left hand cut with an axe." "Ranaway, a negro woman and two children. A few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M." Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which some of the great book houses were afraid to publish, lest it should hurt their Southern trade, was brought out by a new Boston house in 1852, created a profound sensation, and has proved the most popular of all novels

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ANTI-SLAVERY PUBLICATIONS.

[1849.

that were ever written. Two years later Richard Hildreth, the historian, published his "Despotism in America," a learned review of the whole subject of slavery. In 1897 George M. Stroud brought out a compilation of the slave laws of the several States, (of which he issued an enlarged edition in 1856), and found no difficulty in filling many pages with such extracts as these, from the Virginia code of 1849: "Every assemblage of negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing shall be an unlawful assembly." "Every assemblage of negroes for the purpose of religious worship, when such worship is conducted by a negro, shall be an unlawful assembly; and a justice may issue his warrant to any officer or other person, requiring him to enter any place where such assemblage may be, and seize any negro therein, and he or any other justice may order such negro to be punished with stripes." And this from Kentucky's: "If any negro, mulatto, or Indian, bond or free, shall at any time lift his or her hand in opposition to any person not being a negro, mulatto, or Indian, he or she so offending shall for such offense, proved by the oath of the party before a justice of the peace of the county where such offence shall be committed, receive thirty lashes on his or her bare back, well laid on, by order of such justice." And this from Alabama's:

Any person who shall attempt to teach any free person of color or slave to spell, read, or write, shall be fined not less than two hundred and fifty dollars nor more than five hundred dollars." And

1857.]

ANTI-SLAVERY PUBLICATIONS.

this from Louisiana's:

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"Whoever shall make use

of language in any public discourse from the bar, the bench, the stage, the pulpit, or in any place whatsoever, or whoever shall make use of language in private discourses or conversations, or shall make use of signs or actions, having a tendency to produce discontent among the free colored population of this State, or to excite insubordination among the slaves, shall suffer imprisonment at hard labor not less than three years nor more than twenty-one years, or death, at the discretion of the court." Some of these books had no great popular circulation, but they furnished orators and editors with facts and arguments in a convenient form, which were elaborated and repeated in a thousand ways. Special emphasis was given to the fact that the slave codes necessarily ignored the sacredness of the marriage relation and practically gave the master power of life and death over his servants. In 1857 Hinton Rowan Helper, a North-Carolinian, published a volume that created almost as much of a sensation as "Uncle Tom's Cabin." It was entitled "The Impending Crisis of the South: how to meet it"was an argument against slavery not only on moral but on economic grounds, and was crowded with significant facts and statistics. Its author was one of the non-slaveholders at the South, and pleaded for the rights of his class, which he declared were completely and systematically sacrificed for the interests of the three hundred and forty-seven thousand slaveholders. This book was made a