Page 314 - American Stories, A History of the United States

whom the colonization movement influenced represented only a tiny percentage of the
natural increase of the southern slave population. Northern blacks denounced the enter- 12.1
prise because it denied the prospect of racial equality in America. Black opposition to
colonizationism helped persuade William Lloyd Garrison and other white abolitionists
to repudiate the Colonization Society and support immediate emancipation without 12.2
emigration. Garrison launched a more radical antislavery movement in 1831 in Boston,
when he began to publish a journal called The Liberator. Besides calling for immediate
and unconditional emancipation, Garrison denounced colonization as a slaveholder’s 12.3
plot to remove troublesome free blacks and an ignoble surrender to un-Christian preju-
dices. His rhetoric was as severe as his proposals were radical. As he wrote in the first
issue of The Liberator, “I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. . . .
I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single
inch—And I WILL BE HEARD!” Heard he was. In 1833, Garrison and other abolition-
ists founded the American Anti-Slavery Society. “We shall send forth agents to lift up
the voice of remonstrance, of warning, of entreaty, and of rebuke,” its Declaration of
Sentiments proclaimed. The colonization movement was placed on the defensive, and
many of its most active northern supporters became abolitionists.
The abolitionist movement, like the temperance crusade, was a direct outgrowth abolitionist movement Reform
of the Second Great Awakening. Leading abolitionists had undergone conversion expe- movement dedicated to the
riences in the 1820s and were already committed to Christian activism before they immediate and unconditional end
dedicated themselves to freeing the slaves. Several were ministers or divinity students of slavery in the United states.
seeking a mission that would fulfill spiritual and professional ambitions.
Theodore Dwight Weld personified the connection between revivalism and abolition-
ism. Weld came from a long line of New England ministers. After dropping out of divinity
school because of physical and spiritual ailments, he migrated to western New York. There
he fell under the influence of Charles G. Finney and, after a long struggle, underwent a
conversion experience in 1826. He then became an itinerant lecturer for reform causes.
By the early 1830s, he focused his attention on the moral issues raised by the institution of
slavery. After a flirtation with colonization, Weld was converted to abolitionism in 1832,
recognizing that colonizationists did not accept blacks as equals or “brothers-in-Christ.”
In 1834, he instigated what amounted to abolitionist revivals at Lane Theological Seminary
in Cincinnati. When the seminary’s trustees attempted to suppress discussion of immedi-
ate emancipation, Weld led most students in a walkout. The “Lane rebels” subsequently
founded Oberlin College as a center for abolitionist activity.
In 1835 and 1836, Weld toured Ohio and western New York preaching abolition-
ism. He also supervised and trained other agents and orators to convert the region to
immediate emancipation. The tried-and-true methods of the revival—fervent preach-
ing, protracted meetings, and the call for individuals to come forth and announce their
redemption—were put at the service of the antislavery movement. Weld and his associ-
ates often had to face angry mobs, but they left behind them tens of thousands of new
abolitionists and hundreds of antislavery societies. Northern Ohio and western New
York became hotbeds of abolitionist sentiment.
Antislavery orators and organizers tended to have their greatest successes in the
small- to medium-sized towns of the upper North. The typical convert came from an
upwardly mobile family engaged in small business, the skilled trades, or market farm-
ing. In larger towns and cities, or when they ventured close to the Mason–Dixon Line,
abolitionists were more likely to encounter fierce and effective opposition. In 1835,
Garrison was almost lynched in Boston. In New York City, the Tappan brothers—
Lewis and Arthur—were frequently threatened and attacked. These two success-
ful merchants used their wealth to finance antislavery activities. In 1835–1836, they
supported a massive effort to distribute antislavery pamphlets through the U.S. mails.
But most New Yorkers regarded them as dangerous radicals.
Abolitionists who thought of taking their message to the fringes of the South had
reason to pause, given the fate of the antislavery editor Elijah Lovejoy. In 1837, while
defending himself and his printing press from a mob in Alton, Illinois, just across the
Mississippi River from slaveholding Missouri, Lovejoy was shot and killed.
281