Note (return) — Chapter X

The great difference between the early abolition societies which resulted in the American Convention and the later anti-slavery movement of which Garrison was the representative figure was the difference between a humanitarian impulse tempered by expediency and one that had all the power of a direct challenge. Before 1831 "in the South the societies were more numerous, the members no less earnest, and the hatred of slavery no less bitter,... yet the conciliation and persuasion so noticeable in the earlier period in twenty years accomplished practically nothing either in legislation or in the education of public sentiment; while gradual changes in economic conditions at the South caused the question to grow more difficult."157 Moreover, "the evidence of open-mindedness can not stand against the many instances of absolute refusal to permit argument against slavery. In the Colonial Congress, in the Confederation, in the Constitutional Convention, in the state ratifying conventions, in the early Congresses, there were many vehement denunciations of anything which seemed to have an anti-slavery tendency, and wholesale suspicion of the North at all times when the subject was opened."158 One can not forget the effort of James G. Birney, or that Benjamin Lundy's work was most largely done in what we should now call the South, or that between 1815 and 1828 at least four journals which avowed the extinction of slavery as one, if not the chief one, of their objects were published in the Southern states.159 Only gradual emancipation, however, found any real support in the South; and, as compared with the work of Garrison, even that of Lundy appears in the distance with something of the mildness of "sweetness and light." Even before the rise of Garrison, Robert James Turnbull of South Carolina, under the name of "Brutus," wrote a virulent attack on anti-slavery; and Representative Drayton of the same state, speaking in Congress in 1828, said, "Much as we love our country, we would rather see our cities in flames, our plains drenched in blood—rather endure all the calamities of civil war, than parley for an instant upon the right of any power, than our own to interfere with the regulation of our slaves."160 More and more this was to be the real sentiment of the South, and in the face of this kind of eloquence and passion mere academic discussion was powerless.