Not
included in the abolitionists goal of eradicating sin and slavery was
finding a peaceful and practical solution to the moral dilemma inherited
from the British, and perpetuated by New England slave trading and
numerous mills hungry for slave-produced cotton. The abolitionists
themselves caused secession as the South departed due to incessant
anti-slavery agitation and New England’s role in fomenting slave
insurrection and race war in the South.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Abolitionists Unpopular in Boston:
“The
truth is, that the Anti-slavery party had, as it were, two creeds, the
exoteric and the esoteric. According to the former, the popular faith,
slavery is the great evil, a calamity to any country addicted to it;
and, like every other national evil, should, as far as possible, be
checked by legislation, and still more by force of public opinion, but
above all, should be in no way promoted by any act of the government.
This is substantially the Republican creed; and owing chiefly to the
exertions of the Abolitionists, this Republican creed became practically
the creed of the North.
But
amongst themselves the Abolitionists, pure and simple, have an esoteric
creed, more logical perhaps, but less accommodating. With them slavery
is an absolute sin – not an evil, but a crime.
Slavery being thus in
itself a crime, the nation is bound to suppress it at all costs and all
dangers; and if that should be found impossible, the nation has no
choice but to put away the accursed thing, and to renounce all
partnership in the profits of iniquity.
This
esoteric faith was held by a very small and, I suspect, at the moment, a
decreasing party. New England was the headquarters of the
Abolitionists, and yet the outward evidences of their power – I might
almost say of their existence – were few indeed. In all Boston, with its
shoal of papers, there was not one Abolition daily newspaper. The
Courier, the most largely circulated of any Boston paper, reprinted
every morning at the head of its articles the resolution passed by the
House of Representatives in February, 1861, with a view of averting the
danger of Secession: “That neither the Federal Government, not the
people or Governments of the non-slaveholding States, have a purpose or a
constitutional right to legislate upon, or interfere with slavery, in
any of the States of the Union.”
From
this text the Courier preached regularly against the Abolitionists, and
especially against Wendell Phillips, whom it pursued with a bitter
personal animosity. The Boston Herald, a halfpenny paper, which has a
large popular circulation, was still more fiercely anti-Abolitionist.
Writing
of the gradual emancipation project of President Lincoln, it stated
that the scheme “meets with no favour, and is not acceptable to even the
Border Slave States. Emancipation, as advocated by Mr. [Charles] Sumner
and others, is condemned by all the States South, and by one-half of
the public in the Free States.”
The
Post, which was a moderate Republican paper, and is perhaps the
best-written and most respectable of American newspapers, used to
declaim against bringing forward the question of emancipation at all,
till Secession was suppressed.
On
the whole, I should say that the tome of Boston society is very like
that of the press. To advocate pro-slavery doctrines would be decidedly
unfashionable; to advocate immediate Abolition would be hardly less so.
Moderate anti-slaveryism is obviously the correct thing. Till within
the last few years, to avow the Abolition creed of Boston was to exclude
yourself from society. With the “John Brown year,” as the report of
the Anti-Slavery Society termed 1860, a change came. For the first time
almost, American Abolitionism emerged from the sentimentalism of the
Uncle Tom phase, and became a living fact and stern reality; and its
professors won that respect which society always accords to power.
The
rural districts are, I suspect, the stronghold of New England
Abolitionism. In the country, much more of the old Puritan feeling is to
be found than in the towns. During the access of the temperance mania,
which had the power to pass the Maine liquor law, but not power enough
to carry it into effect, the Massachusetts farmers in many places cut
down their apple trees with their own hands, in order to hinder the
possibility of cider being manufactured again.
The
same uncompromising spirit undoubtedly prevails still; and wherever
Abolition sentiments have made their way in the country villages, the
descendants of the Puritans are for cutting down slavery, root and
branch, without stint and without mercy.”
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