petitioners have long beheld with grief a considerable number of our fellow-men doomed to perpetual bondage… . The whole system of African slavery is unjust in its nature, impolitic in its principles, and in its consequences ruinous to the industry and enterprise of the citizens of these States.” In conclusion, it requested that Congress should use all constitutional means to prevent “the horrors of the slave-trade … prohibit the citizens of the United States from carrying on the trade … prohibit foreigners from fitting out vessels in the United States for transporting persons from Africa … and alleviate the sufferings of those who are now in slavery, and check the further progress of this inhuman commerce.” The petition met a cool reception in Congress. It was referred to a special committee, where it quietly died.22
Before this same society, later in the year, Jonathan Edwards Jr. unequivocally stated the moral necessity of immediate emancipation. “To hold a man in a state of slavery who has a right to his liberty,” he said, “is to be every day guilty of robbing him of his liberty, or of man-stealing, and is greater sin in the sight of God than concubinage or fornication… . Every man who cannot show that his negro hath by his voluntary conduct forfeited his liberty, is obliged immediately to manumit him.”23 Edwards thus foreshadowed the opinion of Judge Theophilus Harrington of Vermont, who would accept nothing less than “a bill of sale from God Almighty” as valid proof of one man’s ownership of another.24
The next two decades produced other influential spokesmen in the antislavery cause—men like Alexander McLeod, George Bourne, and Thomas Branagan, who saw in the South’s “peculiar institution” nothing but immorality, barbarism, and degradation for master and slave alike. No one of these, it is true, wrote or published in Connecticut, but their works were circulated widely and in some cases for many years.25
However, the time had not yet come when a majority of Connecticut’s ordinary citizens shared such views. Side by side with sympathy for the escaping slave, and overshadowing it in the minds of many, was the feeling that the free Negro was a problem. The number of slaves in the “Land of Steady Habits” had shrunk to insignificance by 1820, but the number of free persons of color had risen to 7844—nearly 3 per cent of the total population—and not a few people were disturbed by the effects this increase might have on the state’s settled ways.26 To some of these, the idea of establishing a colony for free Negroes in western Africa appealed as a practical and not inhumane solution to a perplexing question.
The plan of colonization arose in Washington, D. C., where men from North and South assembled in 1816 to discuss the “growing evil” of the free Negro population. From this meeting came the simple solution: send them back to Africa; and the American Colonization Society was forthwith formed for that purpose.27 In the next year the Society sent two representatives to the west coast of Africa to investigate the possibility of establishing a Negro colony there. Both these emissaries were ministers, the Reverend Samuel J. Mills of Connecticut and the Reverend Ebenezer Burgess of Massachusetts; and both had the honest belief that colonization would encourage emancipation. They completed their mission and recommended a site. It was not, as things turned out, the place where the first American asylum for free Negroes was established, yet Mills and Burgess may be called the pioneers of the Liberian settlement.28
The colonization movement gained ground apace. Beginning in 1820, the Connecticut Colonization Society met annually at Hartford, and auxiliaries of this group sprang up in many sections of the state—among them, a juvenile association formed in Middletown in 1828.29 From the very beginning, however, the genuine friends of colored people saw the colonization scheme as a sort of “gentleman’s agreement” between free and slave states. It was nicely calculated to drain off the insurrectionary free Negroes of the South and to strengthen the bonds of the slave system, thus serving an economic purpose. In the North, however, colonization would reduce the number of Negroes and work against the amalgamation or equalization of races—effects that would be primarily social.30
However good or evil the intentions of the colonizationists, one outcome of their activity was certainly to dampen the growing ardor for abolition. At least partly as a result of their work, the decade 1820–1830 was “a period of general apathy and indifference on the subject of slavery and the wrongs and needs of the colored race.”31 The colonizationists were concerned only with the free Negroes, and by focusing a spotlight in that direction, they distracted attention from the larger matter of slavery itself and from the increasingly unbearable plight of the slaves. Antislavery writings became less frequent and generally milder in tone than they had been in preceding decades.32 The country as a whole—and Connecticut with it— was lulled into a false sense of complacency by the Missouri Compromise and by colonizationist propaganda. As a leading abolitionist said later, it began to take on the appearance of a nation “slumbering in the lap of moral death.”33
CHAPTER 2
THORNY IS THE PATHWAY
IN BOSTON, on the first day of the year 1831, that same abolitionist issued a forthright call to action in the anti-slavery cause. His name was William Lloyd Garrison; and in the initial number of his newspaper The Liberator he stated his position in words that no man could fail to understand:1
I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I WILL BE HEARD !
Garrison was as good as his word. For three decades, in the face of opposition at first nearly overwhelming and always formidable, he led the fight for emancipation—not partial, not gradual, not linked to such disguised forms of discrimination as colonization, but immediate, unconditional, and complete. The band of reformers who gathered about his standard were idealists all, stirred by the same zeal for human betterment that inspired the contemporary movements for temperance and for universal popular education. Among themselves, abolitionists might—and sometimes did—differ over strategy and tactics, but never over the ultimate goal. To these standard-bearers, with their crusading spirit and selfless deeds, the Underground Railroad owed more of its organization and effectiveness than to any other group.
An early result of Garrison’s challenge was the formation of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, established at Boston in 1832. Within a year it had become the American Anti-Slavery Society and had spread over the North, carrying Garrison’s principles wherever it went. Its purpose was dual: “To endeavor, by all means sanctioned by law, to effect the abolition of slavery; and to improve the character and condition of the free people of color.” Its program included the following points:
1. To organize in every city, town, and village.
2. To send forth agents to preach the gospel.
3. To circularize antislavery tracts and periodicals.
4. To encourage the employment of free laborers, rather than of slaves, by giving market preference to their products.2
A fifth purpose, not explicitly stated but evident in the acts of many Society members, was to encourage and assist the escape of fugitives from slavery—the passengers of the Underground Railroad.
Among the earliest antislavery societies
