The Negro and the Nation: A History of American Slavery and EnfranchisementMerriam, George Spring
History
The Negro and the Nation: A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement
Merriam, George Spring
African Americans -- History; Slavery -- United States -- History
As the anti-slavery movement developed, the call for immediate
liberation became more insistent and imperative. The colonization method
lost credit. Slavery was coming to be regarded by its opponents not
merely as a social evil to be eradicated, but as a personal sin of the
slave-holder, to be renounced as promptly as any other sin. John Wesleys
words were a keynote: "Instantly, at any price, were it the half of your
goods, deliver thyself from blood-guiltiness!" A Virginia minister, Rev.
George Bourne, published in 1816 _Slavery and the Book Irreconcilable_,
in which he said: "The system is so entirely corrupt that it admits of
no cure but by a total and immediate abolition." Two other Southern
ministers, James Duncan and John Rankin, wrote to the same effect. In
England, the abolition of slavery in the West India colonies was being
persistently urged; the impulse was a part of the philanthropic movement
that went along with the evangelical revival, and Wilberforce was its
leader. These English abolitionists were coming to "immediatism" from
1824, and their influence told in America.
Among the most unselfish and devoted laborers for the slave was Benjamin
Lundy. He was a Quaker by birth and training; he overtaxed his strength
and permanently impaired his hearing by prematurely trying to do a man's
work on his father's farm in New Jersey, and settled at the saddler's
trade in Wheeling, Va., in 1808. With the outlawing of the African slave
trade, there was beginning the sale of slaves from Virginia to the
Southern cotton-fields, and the sight of the sorrowful exiles moved
Lundy's heart to a lifelong devotion of himself to pleading the cause of
the slave. Infirm, deaf, unimpressive in speech and bearing, trudging on
long journeys, and accepting a decent poverty, he gave all the resources
of a strong and sweet nature to the service of the friendless and
unhappy. He supported himself by his trade, while he lectured and wrote.
He established in 1821 a weekly _Genius of Universal Emancipation_, at
Mt. Pleasant, O., starting without a dollar of capital and only six
subscribers; and at first walking twenty miles every week to the
printing press, and returning with his edition on his back. Four years
later he moved his paper to Baltimore. Anti-slavery agitation was still
tolerated in the border States, though once Lundy was attacked by a
bully who almost murdered him. When the impending election of Jackson
in 1828 came as a chill to the anti-slavery cause, the waning fortunes
of his paper sent Lundy to Boston to seek aid. There he found sympathy
in a number of the clergy, though fear of arousing the hostility of the
South kept them cautious. Dr. Channing wrote to Daniel Webster,
expressing the fullest sympathy with Lundy's devotion to freedom, but
also the gravest apprehension that unless the slaveholders were
approached in a spirit of friendliness rather than denunciation, there
would result a sectional strife fraught with the greatest danger. We
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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