  The Northern Abolitionists and Their Reactionary Influence upon Anti-Slavery Sentiment in Virginia Thomas Jefferson Randolph was the foremost advocate of gradual emancipation in the Virginia Legislature of 1832. In a pamphlet printed in 1870 reviewing political conditions in Virginia he makes the following statement with reference to the subject of emancipation and the influences which hindered its accomplishment after the year 1833: "After the adjournment of the Legislature in 1833, the question was discussed before the people fairly and squarely, as one of the abolition of slavery. I was re-elected on that ground in my county. The feeling extended rapidly from that time in Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri until Northern abolitionism reared its head. Southern abolition was reform and an appeal to the master; Northern abolition was revolution and an appeal to the slave. One was peaceful and the other mutually destructive of both races by a servile insurrection. The Southern people feared to trust to the intervention of persons themselves exempt by position from the imagined dangers of the transition." VIEWS OF PROMINENT VIRGINIANS George Tucker, Professor of Political Economy, in the University of Virginia, in his work, The Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth, published in 1843, referring to the subject, writes: In 1847, Dr. Henry Ruffner, President of Washington College, delivered an address upon the subject of slavery in Virginia which attracted widespread attention. In this speech, made in the midst of the growing controversy, he refers to the reactionary influence of the Abolitionists as follows: "But this unfavorable change of sentiment is due chiefly to the fanatical violence of those Northern anti-slavery men usually called Abolitionists.... They have not, by honourable means, liberated a single slave, and they never will by such a course of procedure as they have pursued. On the contrary they have created new difficulties in the way of all judicious schemes of emancipation by prejudicing the minds of slaveholders, and by If it be thought, that Mr. Randolph, Professor Tucker, and Dr. Ruffner were influenced by their environment and a desire to shift from the people of Virginia to the Abolitionists responsibility for the growth in the state of reactionary sentiments, with regard to slavery, it may be well to quote the contemporary views of prominent anti-slavery men of the North. VIEWS OF CHANNING Dr. William Ellery Channing, writing in 1835, said: "The adoption of the common system of agitation by the Abolitionists has not been justified by success. From the beginning it created alarm in the considerate and strengthened the sympathies of the free states with the slaveholder. It made converts of a few individuals but alienated multitudes. "Its influence at the South has been almost wholly evil. It has stirred up bitter passions and a fierce fanaticism which have shut every ear and every heart against its arguments and persuasions. These effects are more to be deplored because the hope of freedom to the slaves lies chiefly in the disposition of his master. The Abolitionist proposed indeed to convert the slaveholders; and for this reason he approached them with vituperation and exhausted upon them the vocabulary of reproach. And he has reaped as he sowed.... Thus, with good purpose, nothing seems to have been gained. Perhaps (though I am anxious to repel the thought) something has been lost to the cause of freedom and humanity." VIEWS OF LINCOLN In 1837, the Legislature of Illinois adopted a series of resolutions of a pro-slavery character reprobating the methods of the Abolitionists. Against the resolutions "They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils." This declaration of Mr. Lincoln was at once a protest and a prophecy. It is sometimes urged that because of Mr. Lincoln's youth, at this time, his estimate of the injuries wrought by the "promulgation of abolition doctrines" is not entitled to much weight. It is true that he was then in his twenty-ninth year. A quotation from an even more notable deliverance, made fifteen years later, will show "Cast into life when slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated without producing a greater evil even to the cause of human liberty itself. His feeling and his judgment, therefore, ever led him to oppose both extremes of opinion on the subject. Those who would shiver into fragments the Union of these states, tear to tatters its now venerated constitution, and even burn the last copy of the Bible, rather than slavery should continue a single hour, together with all their more halting sympathizers, have received, and are receiving their just execration; and the name and opinion and influence of Mr. Clay are fully and, as I trust, effectually and enduringly arrayed against them." VIEWS OF WEBSTER This estimate of Mr. Lincoln had already been anticipated by that of Mr. Webster who, in his speech of March 7th, 1850, in the United States Senate made a special reference to the disastrous influence exerted by the Abolitionists upon the cause of emancipation in Virginia. "Public opinion," he said, "which in Virginia had begun to be exhibited against slavery and was opening out for the discussion of the question, drew back and shut itself up in its castle. I would like to know whether anybody in Virginia can now talk openly as Mr. Randolph, Governor McDowell and others talked in 1832, and sent their remarks to the press? We all know the facts and we all know the cause; and everything that these agitating people have done has been not to enlarge but to restrain, VIEWS OF DOUGLAS Stephen A. Douglas, speaking at Bloomington, Illinois, July 16, 1859, said: "There is but one possible way in which slavery can be abolished and that is by leaving the state according to the principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, perfectly free to form and regulate its institutions in its own way. That was the principle upon which this Republic was founded.... Under its operations slavery disappeared from ... six of the twelve original slaveholding states; and this gradual system of emancipation went on quietly, peacefully and steadily so long as we in the free states minded our own business and left our neighbors alone. But the moment the abolition societies were organized throughout the North, preaching a violent crusade against slavery in the Southern States, this combination necessarily caused a counter-combination in the South, and a sectional line was drawn which was a barrier to any further emancipation. Bear in mind that emancipation has not taken place in any one state since the Free-soil Party was organized as a political party in this country.... The moment the North proclaimed itself the determined master of the South, that moment the South combined to resist the attack, and thus sectional parties were formed and gradual emancipation ceased in all the Northern slaveholding states." In this speech, Mr. Douglas not only points out the methods by which slavery had been abolished in six of the twelve original slaveholding states, but he bears testimony, like his great contemporaries, to the reactionary influence resulting from the attitude of the Northern Abolitionists. This estimate of Senator Douglas was reaffirmed in the frank declaration of Thomas Ewing, of Ohio, who, speaking in the Peace Conference, at Washington, February, VIEWS OF LUNT AND CURTIS If it be urged that the views of Channing, Lincoln, Webster, Douglas and Ewing were unfair in their estimate of the reactionary influence of the Abolitionists, because of the temper of the times in which they lived, it may be well to quote the conclusions of publicists not so situated. Mr. George Lunt, of Boston, writing in December, 1865, says: "After the years of 1820-21, during which that great struggle which resulted in what is called the Missouri Compromise was most active and came to its conclusion, the States of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee were earnestly engaged in practical movements for the gradual emancipation of their slaves. This movement continued until it was arrested by the aggressions of the Abolitionists upon their voluntary action." Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, of Boston, writing in 1883, after describing the discussions in the General Assembly of Virginia in 1831-32, and stating that Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the leader of the movement for the abolition of slavery, was re-elected in 1833 from Albemarle, one of the largest slaveholding counties in the state, because of his position, declares: "But in the meantime came suddenly the intelligence of what was doing at the North. It came in an alarming aspect for the peace and security for the whole South; since it could not be possible that strangers should combine together to assail the slaveholder as a sinner and to demand his instant admission of guilt, without arousing fears of VIEWS OF ROOSEVELT AND SMITH As representative of a later generation and voicing sentiments of one more removed from the period of controversy, the views of Theodore Roosevelt are of value. Writing in 1898, he says: "In 1833 the abolition societies of the North came into prominence; they had been started a couple of years previously. Black slavery was such a grossly anachronistic and un-American form of evil that it is difficult to discuss calmly the efforts to abolish it and to remember that many of these efforts were calculated to do and actually did more harm than good.... The cause of the Abolitionists has had such a halo shed around it by the course of events, which they themselves in reality did very little to shape, that it has been usual to speak of them with absurdly exaggerated praise. Their courage and, for the most part, their sincerity, cannot be too highly spoken of, but their share in abolishing slavery was far less than has commonly been represented; any single, non-abolitionist politician, like Lincoln or Seward, did more than all the professional Abolitionists combined really to bring about its destruction." Writing still later, Mr. William Henry Smith, of Ohio, in his book, A Political History of Slavery, alluding to the work of the Abolitionists, says: "What befell is what has always been the experience, which must needs be ever the experience of society when men 'encounter with such bitter tongues,' when full play EMANCIPATION AND COLONIZATION Despite, however, the growing embarrassments of the situation, there remained with the people of Virginia the conviction that in the dispersion or colonization beyond her borders, of a substantial part of her negro population, lay the surest road to ultimate emancipation and relief from the racial problems incident to slavery. The practice, therefore, of emancipation by deeds and wills continued, and individually and by concerted action, the various schemes for colonization were fostered and encouraged. The Legislature at its session, 1833, passed a bill appropriating $18,000.00 per annum, for a period of five years to assist in transporting and subsisting "free persons of color who may desire to migrate from Virginia to Liberia." This appropriation, as we shall see, was followed by others of larger amounts to further colonization; and, in no state of the Union, with the possible exception of Maryland, did the cause receive greater assistance, in money and sympathy, than in Virginia.
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