Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800: Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872Poole, William Frederick
History
Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800: Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872
Poole, William Frederick
Antislavery movements -- United States; Slavery -- United States
This remarkable oration suggests some interesting questions of
historical inquiry. How far do these opinions represent the current
sentiments of that time on the subject of slavery? It will be seen
that they are of the most radical type. I am not aware that Wendell
Phillips or Wm. Lloyd Garrison ever claimed that the negro race was
equal in its capacity for improvement to the white race. While its
rhetoric was more chaste, they certainly never denounced the system in
more vigorous and condemnatory terms.
Forty-four years later (October 21, 1835), Mr. Garrison was waited
upon, in open day, by a mob of most respectable citizens, while
attending a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, dragged
through the streets of Boston with a rope around his body, and locked
up in jail by the Mayor of that sedate city to protect him from his
assailants. On the 4th of July, 1834, a meeting of the American
Anti-Slavery Society was broken up in New York, and the house of Lewis
Tappan was sacked by mob violence. A month later, in the city of
Philadelphia a mob against anti-slavery and colored men raged for
three days and nights. On the 28th of July, 1836, a committee of
thirteen citizens of Cincinnati, appointed by a public meeting, of
whom Jacob Burnet, late United States Senator and Judge of the Supreme
Court of Ohio, was chairman, waited upon Mr. James G. Birney and other
members of the executive committee of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society,
under whose direction the "Philanthropist," an anti-slavery
newspaper, was printed here, and informed them that unless they
desisted from its publication the meeting would not be responsible for
the consequences. Judge Burnet stated that the mob would consist of
five thousand persons, and that two-thirds of the property holders of
the city would join it. The committee gave Mr. Birney and his friends
till the next day to consider the question, when they decided to make
no terms with the rioters and to abide the consequences. That night
the office was sacked, and the press of the "Philanthropist" was
thrown into the Ohio river.
But here was an oration delivered in the city of Baltimore in the year
1791, advancing the most extreme opinions, and it created not a ripple
on the surface of Southern society.
That the opinions of the oration did not offend those to whom it was
addressed, the official action of the Society, which is printed on the
third page, attests. It is as follows:
"At a special meeting of the 'Maryland Society for Promoting the
Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Negroes and others
Unlawfully held in Bondage,' held at Baltimore, July 4, 1791,
unanimously
"_Resolved_, That the president present the thanks of the Society
to Dr. George Buchanan, for the excellent oration by him delivered
this day, and, at the same time, request a copy thereof in the
name and for the use of the Society.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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