The Union, Slavery, and Abolitionist Petitions: An Address Delivered in Hingham, Massachusetts, November 4, 1841
THE UNION, SLAVERY, AND ABOLITIONIST PETITIONS: ADDRESSES DELIVERED IN HINGHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, ON 4 NOVEMBER 1841
Hingham Patriot, 13 November 1841. Other texts in Liberator, 26 November, 3 December, 10 December 1841.
On 4 November 1841, Frederick Douglass attended a quarterly meeting of the Plymouth County Anti—Slavery Society in Hingham, Massachusetts. Present in the crowded church building were the prominent abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, John A. Collins, George Foster, Edmund Quincy, and escaped slave Lunsford Lane. The presiding officer, Samuel J. May, introduced Douglass as a runaway slave whose personal history it would not be expedient to publicize. An active participant in the floor debates, Douglass supported a resolution that it was slavery and not abolitionism which threatened to destroy the Union, urged the Plymouth County Society to help Lunsford Lane purchase his family from bondage, and described the encouragement slaves derived from abolitionist petitions to Congress. According to the Liberator of 12 November 1841, Douglass‘s
speeches produced a “very powerful effect.” The editor of the Hingham Patriot, struck by Douglass’s “forcible” and “very sarcastic" oratory, saw in Douglass a nineteenth-century counterpart of “Spartacus the Gladiator.” “A man of his shrewdness, and his power, both intellectually and physically,” the editor mused, “must be poor stuff . . to make a slave of.” Lib., 12 November 1841.
Mr. Douglass—“I want to say a word about this Union. It is the fact that the Northern people stand pledged by this union to return runaway slaves, that constitutes the bulwark of slavery; the slaves are told that if they escape to the North, they will be sent back; and this discourages very many from making any attempts to gain their freedom. This is the union whose “desolation” we want to accomplish; and he is no true abolitionist, who does not go against this union. The South care not how much you talk and act against slavery as an evil in the abstract; they will agree with you; yet they cling to it as to life; and it is this pledge binding the North to the South, on which they rely for its support.” He then alluded, and with considerable wit, to the union between the churches of the North and those of the South.
The Resolution was then passed.1The Business Committee’s resolution on abolitionisrn which prompted Douglass‘s remarks read: “Resolved, That the cry raised—‘that the measures of the Abolitionists tend to a dissolution of the Union,’—is without foundation; that the institution of Slavery is the stone of stumbling and rock of offence, which is dashing in pieces our liberties; and those only are the true friends of our country who are seeking its speedy and peaceful abolition." Hingham Patriot, 13 November 1841.
Lunsford Lane’s case was now discussed.2Born a slave in Raleigh, North Carolina, Lunsford Lane (1803—?) grew up a house servant owned by Sherwood Haywood, who allowed Lane to begin to purchase his freedom. After Haywood‘s death, Lane hired his own time, ultimately saving the $1000 necessary for self-purchase. Unable to make contracts while a slave, Lane persuaded his wife's owner Benjamin B. Smith to purchase and then emancipate him. Failing to obtain permission to free Lane in North Carolina for “meritorious conduct," Smith executed a deed of manumission in New York state early in the 18305. Lane returned to Raleigh and entered the tobacco trade. In January 1839, he contracted to purchase his wife and six children for $2500. payable to Smith in five annual installments. The next year local authorities declared Lane and other Raleigh free Negroes illegal immigrants and ordered them to leave the state. Failing to secure an exemption from the North Carolina legislature, Lane spent much of 1841 at abolitionist gatherings in New England soliciting the money to purchase his enslaved family. In April 1842 he returned to Raleigh to buy his relatives but was arrested for having delivered abolitionist lectures in Massachusetts. Released by the mayor, Lane narrowly escaped lynching at the hands of an enraged mob. Upon returning north with his wife, children, and aged mother, Lane settled in Massachusetts where he remained active in the antislavery cause. Lunsford Lane. The Narrative of Lunsford Lane (Boston, 1842); William G. Hawkins, Lumford Lane: Another Helper From North Carolina (1863; Miami, Fla., 1969); John Spencer Bassett, Anti Slavery Leaders ofNorth Carolina, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, set. 16, no, 6 (Baltimore, 1898). 60774; W. Sherman Savage, “The Influence of John Chavis and Lunsford Lane on the History of North Carolina,” JNH, 25 : 20—24 (January 1940). 2 Messrs. J. A. Collins3John Anderson Collins (1810—c. 1879) was born in Manchester, Vermont, and attended Middlebury College and AndOver Theological Seminary before becoming a lecture agent for the Massachusetts AntieSlavery Society in the late 18305. Collins toured England on the Society‘s behalf. edited the bolitionist Monthly Garland, participated in stmggles to desegregate New England‘s public transportation. and was a member of the Nonresistance Society of Boston. Increasingly attracted to the reform philosophy of Robert Owen, Collins broke with Garrison in 1843 and founded a short-lived communal farm near Skaneateles, New York. He later emigrated to California, where he edited a Whig newspaper and organized an unsuccessful mining venture during the 1850s. Carleton Mabee, Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 through the Civil War (London, 1970), "lo, 80—82, 88, 112—25, 212, 264, 394n.; Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), 140; Garrison to Henry C, Wright, 1 April 1863, Garrison to Henry W. Williams, 23 August 1843, in Walter Mr Merrill and Louis Ruchames, eds, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison (Cambridge, Mass. 1971—), 3 : 145, 198 (hereafter cited as Garrison Letters): DAB, 4 : 307-08
and S. J. May4Samuel Joseph May (1797—1871) mixed abolitionism with a variety of other humanitarian concerns during his long career as a Unitarian clergyman. Boston-born and Harvard-educated, May studied theology at Cambridge and was ordained in 1822 In the course of his forty-year ministry he championed such causes as temperance, women's rights, pacifism, universal education, and abolitionism. Originally a supporter of African colonization. May joined the abolitionist ranks in 1830, supported Prudence Crandall's efforts to establish a school for black youths in 1833, and enjoyed a long tenure as an agent of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. During the 1840s and 1850s he helped many fugitive slaves reach Canada and helped rescue Jerry McHenry from slave catchers in Syracuse, New York, in 1851. After the Civil War, he worked with black colleagues such as Jermain W. Loguen and Frederick Douglass to fight racial segregation in New York schools. Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, Bound With Them in Chains: A Biographical History of the Antislavery Movement (Westport, Conn., 1972), 276—307; NCAB, 2 : 313; DAB, 12 : 447—48. were opposed, as a matter of principle, to abolitionists contributing for the release of individuals.--Douglass made a brief appeal in behalf of Lane: Though he had four brothers and a sister in bondage for whom he asked no such aid, yet he would be glad to see something done to cheer the heart of one who had been a brother bondman. He sympathised with his feelings—Those who called themselves the owners of these slaves were castigated unmercifully; “they ride about in their carriages,” said he, “with the finest of cloth on their backs, with rings upon their fingers, and in the enjoyment of every luxury that wealth can buy—but who earns it all? whose labor pays for it all? the poor slaves’! Their masters bend not a finger in labor, and then are mean enough in soul to pocket the hard earnings of the poor slave, without giving him anything but just bread enough to support life from day to day, that he may still toil on to enrich them."
The Resolutions on political action were postponed till evening.
7th Resolution, about petitions, was then read.5The Business Committee’s resolution on petitions read: "Resolved, That it is recommended to the several towns in this County. to take prompt and decided measures to circulate the petitions issued by the State Society. “ Hingham Patriot, 13 November 1841. Mr. May gave an account of a conversation he had recently had with 3. Q. Adams as to the kind of petition which would probably be most effectual to present to Congress.6By 1841, American antislavery leaders had considerable experience in promoting abolitionism through petitions to Congress. In 1828 a national petition campaign had forced the House of Representatives to vote on abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. After Congress adopted the “gag rule" requiring immediate and permanent tabling of all antislavery memorials, the American Anti-Slavery Society began to circulate printed petitions among its local affiliates. In May 1837, the parent organization launched a national petition campaign which deluged Congress with over 400,000 petitions during the next twelve months, Massachusetts congressman and former president John Quincy Adams linked the issues of abolitionism and free speech in the fight to force Congress to consider these petitions. Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse. 1830—1844 (New York, 1933), 109-45; Merton L. Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority [Dekalb, Ill., 1974), 100—06; Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York, 1956), 326—83.
Mr. Collins opposed Mr. Adams’s recommendation on the subject.
Mr. Douglass was here requested to state what he knew in relation to the importance of petitioning. He said “My first knowlege of the abolition movements was through the petitions for the abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia. These petitions delight the hearts of the slaves; they rejoice to know that something is going on in their favor. Waiters hear their masters talk at table, cursing the abolitionists, John Quincy Adams, &c.; the masters imagine that their poor slaves are so ignorant that they don’t know the meaning of the language they are using; for the slaves always pretend to be very stupid, they commit all sorts of foolery and act like baboons and wild beasts in [the] presence of their masters; but every word is noted in the memory, and is told to their fellow-slaves; and when they get together, they talk over what they have heard—they talk about liberty, and about these petitions. They get a vague idea that somebody is doing something to ameliorate their condition. Thus these petitions hold the slave in check; thus they are good for the master as well as for the slave, for they have prevented many an assassination, many an insurrection. I was myself contemplating measures and making arrangements for my own emancipation, when hearing of these petitions stopped me. But, sit, the slaves are learning to read and to write, and the time is fast coming, when they will act in concert, and effect their own emancipation, if justice is not done by some other extraneous agency."