In
1819, Rev. Moses Waddel “was induced to give up his academy business”
and take the reins of the University of Georgia. Born in North
Carolina, educated in the ministry in Virginia and a preacher in
Georgia, he had taught young John C. Calhoun and became the first
native-born Southerner to fill the University presidency. It was not
unusual then to hear open and reasoned discussion on ending the New
England slave trade and returning Africans to their homeland.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Abolition Sentiment in Georgia
“Athens
[Georgia] and the Lower South at this time [1810] were in the midst of
laying the foundations of that social order and culture, beautiful and
polished yet seamy, captivating the elite Englishman and practical
Yankee who touched it, the admiration of some, the curse of some . . .
In
the excitement of the Federal Constitutional Convention, Georgia had
stood for the foreign slave trade, but she no sooner won it than she
freely flung it away. In 1819 at a banquet in Athens this toast was
drunk: “The [Foreign] Slave Trade – The scourge of Africa; the disgrace
of humanity. May it cease forever, and may the voice of peace, of
Christianity and of Civilization, be heard on the savage shores.”
At
this time the whole subject of slavery was discussed in the Georgia
papers with reason and dispassion, and in 1824 the president of the
University “heard the Senior Forensic Disputation all day on the policy
of Congress abolishing Slavery – much fatigued but amused.” Apparently
the students were doing some thinking also.
The
trustees, were, likewise not opposed to a possible disposition of
slavery, for [Rev. Robert] Finley, whom they had just elected president
of the University, had been one of the organizers of the American
Colonization Society. He was, indeed, present in Washington at its
birth and had been made one of its vice-presidents; and so vital did his
work appear to one friend that he later wrote,
“If
this colony [Liberia] should ever be formed in Africa, great injustice
will be done to Mr. Finley, if in the history of it, his name be not
mentioned as the first mover, and if some town or district in the colony
be not called Finley.” He, indeed, never lost interest in the project
to his dying day – and then it “gave consolation to his last moments.”
The
South was genuinely interested in ridding itself of this incubus,
realizing, with Henry Clay, that Negroes freed and not removed were a
greater menace than if they remained in slavery.”
(College Life in the Old South, E. Merton Coulter, UGA Press, 1983 (originally published in
1928), pp. 27-28)
