Note 29 — Chapter III
Reading edition
The late Professor William Graham Sumner, of Yale, in his "Life of Andrew Jackson," 1888, treats of the excitement at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1835, during Jackson's administration, over Abolition circulars, etc. Dr. Albert Bushnell Hart, Professor of History at Harvard, in his "Abolition and Slavery," 1906, treats of the same subject. The following extracts from these books will show how these authors picture that exciting period, and our italics will emphasize the sang-froid with which they touch off what so profoundly affected public sentiment, both North and South, when the events were occurring. Professor Sumner has this to say:
"The Abolition Society adopted the policy of sending documents, papers, and pictures against slavery to the Southern States.
"If the intention was, as charged, to excite the slaves to revolt, the device, as it seems to us now, must have fallen short of its object, for the chance that anything could get into the hands of the black man must have been poor indeed.
"These publications, however, caused a panic and a wild indignation in the South."—Sumner's "Jackson," p. 350.
Why should the Southerners of that day go wild over conduct for which the professor of this era has no word of condemnation?
Dr. Hart follows Professor Sumner's treatment. These are his words:
"The free negroes of the South, the Abolitionists could not reach except by mailing publications to them, a process which fearfully exasperated the South without reaching the persons addressed."—Hart's "Abolition and Slavery," p. 216.
Why should Southerners be "fearful" when they were intercepting all the dangerous circulars, etc., they could find? And why should they be exasperated at all?
Dr. Hart's chair at Harvard is within gunshot of Faneuil Hall, yet the great meeting there of August 31, 1835, is not mentioned in either his or Professor Sumner's book, nor is there to be found in either of them any explanation of the reasons underlying the general and emphatic condemnation throughout the North at that period of the Abolitionists and their methods.