The Anti-Slavery Crusade | Page 9

gave to the system a solidarity of interest which was new. All
slave-owners became partakers of a common responsibility for the
system as a whole. It was the newly developed trade quite as much as
the system of slavery itself which furnished the ground for the later
anti-slavery appeal. The consciousness of a common guilt for the sin of
slavery grew with the increase of actual interstate relations.

The abolition of the African slave-trade was an act of the general
Government. Congress passed the prohibitory statute in 1807, to go
into effect January, 1808. At no time, however, was the prohibition
entirely effective, and a limited illegal trade continued until slavery was
eventually abolished. This inefficiency of restraint furnished another
point of attack for the abolitionists. Through efforts to suppress the
African slave-trade, the entire country became conscious of a common
responsibility. Before the Revolutionary War, Great Britain had been
censured for forcing cheap slaves from Africa upon her unwilling
colonies. After the Revolution, New England was blamed for the
activity of her citizens in this nefarious trade both before and after it
was made illegal. All of this tended to increase the sense of
responsibility in every section of the country. Congress had made the
foreign slave-trade illegal; and citizens in all sections gradually became
aware of the possibility that Congress might likewise restrict or forbid
interstate commerce in slaves.
The West Indies and Mexico were also closely associated with the
United States in the matter of slavery. When Jamestown was founded,
negro slavery was already an old institution in the islands of the
Caribbean Sea, and thence came the first slaves to Virginia. The
abolition of slavery in the island of Hayti, or San Domingo, was
accomplished during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.
As incidental to the process of emancipation, the Caucasian inhabitants
were massacred or banished, and a republican government was
established, composed exclusively of negroes and mulattoes. From the
date of the Missouri Compromise to that of the Mexican War, this
island was united under a single republic, though it was afterwards
divided into the two republics of Hayti and San Domingo.
The "horrors of San Domingo" were never absent from the minds of
those in the United States who lived in communities composed chiefly
of slaves. What had happened on the island was accepted by Southern
planters as proof that the two races could live together in peace only
under the relation of master and slave, and that emancipation boded the
extermination of one race or the other. Abolitionists, however,
interpreted the facts differently: they emphasized the tyranny of the
white rulers as a primary cause of the massacres; they endowed some
of the negro leaders with the highest qualities of statesmanship and

self-sacrificing generosity; and Wendell Phillips, in an impassioned
address which he delivered in 1861, placed on the honor roll above the
chief worthies of history--including Cromwell and Washington
Toussaint L'Ouverture, the liberator of Hayti, whom France had
betrayed and murdered.
Abolitionists found support for their position in the contention that
other communities had abolished slavery without such accompanying
horrors as occurred in Hayti and without serious race conflict. Slavery
had run its course in Spanish America, and emancipation accompanied
or followed the formation of independent republics. In 1833 all slaves
in the British Empire were liberated, including those in the important
island of Jamaica. So it happened that, just at the time when Southern
leaders were making up their minds to defend their peculiar institution
at all hazards, they were beset on every side by the spirit of
emancipation. Abolitionists, on the other hand, were fully convinced
that the attainment of some form of emancipation in the United States
was certain, and that, either peaceably or through violence, the slaves
would ultimately be liberated.



CHAPTER III
. EARLY CRUSADERS
At the time when the new cotton industry was enhancing the value of
slave labor, there arose from the ranks of the people those who freely
consecrated their all to the freeing of the slave. Among these, Benjamin
Lundy, a New Jersey Quaker, holds a significant place.
Though the Society of Friends fills a large place in the anti-slavery
movement, its contribution to the growth of the conception of equality
is even more significant. This impetus to the idea arises from a
fundamental Quaker doctrine, announced at the middle of the
seventeenth century, to the erect that God reveals Himself to mankind,
not through any priesthood or specially chosen agents; not through any
ordinance, form, or ceremony; not through any church or institution;

not through any book or written record of any sort; but directly,
through His Spirit, to each person. This direct enlightening agency they
deemed coextensive with humanity; no race and no individual is left
without the ever-present illuminating