The Anti-Slavery Crusade | Page 6

maintain their privileges in the State.
If the sense of active responsibility was wanting within the separate
States, much more was this true of the citizens of different States.
Slavery was regarded as strictly a domestic institution. Families bought
and owned slaves as a matter of individual preference. None of the
original colonies or States adopted slavery by law. The citizens of the
various colonies became slaveholders simply because there was no law
against it.* The abolition of slavery was at first an individual matter or
a church or a state policy. When the Constitution was formulated, the
separate States had been accustomed to regard themselves as possessed
of sovereign powers; hence there was no occasion for the citizens of
one State to have a sense of responsibility on account of the domestic
institutions of other States. The consciousness of national responsibility
was of slow growth, and the conditions did not then exist which

favored a general crusade against slavery or a prolonged acrimonious
debate on the subject, such as arose forty years later.
* In the case of Georgia there was a prohibitory law, which was
disregarded.
In many of the States, however, there were organized abolition
societies, whose object was to promote the cause of emancipation
already in progress and to protect the rights of free negroes. The
Friends, or Quakers, were especially active in the promotion of a
propaganda for universal emancipation. A petition which was presented
to the first Congress in February, 1790, with the signature of Benjamin
Franklin as President of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, contained
this concluding paragraph
"From a persuasion that equal liberty was originally, and is still, the
birthright of all men, and influenced by the strong ties of humanity and
the principles of their institutions, your memorialists conceive
themselves bound to use all justifiable endeavors to loosen the bonds of
slavery, and to promote the general enjoyment of the blessings of
freedom. Under these impressions they earnestly entreat your attention
to the subject of slavery; that you will be pleased to countenance the
restoration to liberty of those unhappy men, who, alone, in this land of
freemen, are groaning in servile subjection; that you will devise means
for removing this inconsistency of character from the American people;
that you will promote mercy and justice towards this distressed race;
and that you will step to the very verge of the power vested in you for
discouraging every species of traffic in the persons of our fellowmen."*
* William Goodell, "Slavery and Anti-Slavery," p. 99.
The memorialists were treated with profound respect. Cordial support
and encouragement came from representatives from Virginia and other
slave States. Opposition was expressed by members from South
Carolina and Georgia. These for the most part relied upon their
constitutional guaranties. But for these guaranties, said Smith, of South
Carolina, his State would not have entered the Union. In the extreme
utterances in opposition to the petition there is a suggestion of the
revolution which was to occur forty years later.
Active abolitionists who gave time and money to the promotion of the
cause were always few in numbers. Previous to 1830 abolition societies
resembled associations for the prevention of cruelty to animals--in fact,

in one instance at least this was made one of the professed objects.
These societies labored to induce men to act in harmony with generally
acknowledged obligations, and they had no occasion for violence or
persecution. Abolitionists were distinguished for their benevolence and
their unselfish devotion to the interests of the needy and the unfortunate.
It was only when the ruling classes resorted to mob violence and began
to defend slavery as a divinely ordained institution that there was a
radical change in the spirit of the controversy. The irrepressible conflict
between liberty and despotism which has persisted in all ages became
manifest when slave-masters substituted the Greek doctrine of
inequality and slavery for the previously accepted Christian doctrine of
equality and universal brotherhood.



CHAPTER II
. THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE CRUSADE
It was a mere accident that the line drawn by Mason and Dixon
between Pennsylvania and Maryland became known in later years as
the dividing line between slavery and freedom. The six States south of
that line ultimately neglected or refused to abolish slavery, while the
seven Northern States became free. Vermont became a State in 1791
and Kentucky in 1792. The third State to be added to the original
thirteen was Tennessee in 1796. At that time, counting the States as
they were finally classified, eight were destined to be slave and eight
free. Ohio entered the Union as a State in 1802, thus giving to the free
States a majority of one. The balance, however, was restored in 1812
by the admission of Louisiana as a slave State. The admission