Sin and Slavery in the Northern States

We generally think of American slavery as something defended by, and practiced by, the states that eventually formed the Confederacy. And it is true that most slaves worked on southern plantations. We also think that the northern states were morally superior because they did not have slaves. Actually, as I now explain, that was not at all true. The North tolerated slavery, but simply had not much economic reason to have slaves. In fact, many northerners were openly hostile toward abolitionists, who wanted the United States to abolish slavery.

One example is an editorial written by William Cullen Bryant in the August 8, 1836 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, an American magazine, of which he was the long-time editor. He wrote about a public meeting of abolitionists in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was solidly on the northern side of the slavery controversy. It was apparently an orderly meeting until the anti-abolitionists came in and disrupted it by force. Bryant, well known as an abolitionist, said that the anti-abolitionists “will stir up mobs against it, inflame them to madness, and turn their brutal rage against the dwellings, the property, the persons, and the lives” of the abolitionists. “There is no extreme of cruelty and destruction to which, in the drunkenness and delirium of its fury, it may not proceed…the whirlwind and the lightning might as well be expected to pause and turn aside to spare the helpless and innocent as an infuriated multitude.” Bryant speculated that the anti-abolitionists could persuade state legislatures to prohibit abolitionist meetings and publications; but “there is not a single free State the people of which would sustain a legislature in so doing. These are the facts, and the advocates of mob law know them to be so…There is no tyranny or oppression exercised in any part of the world more absolute or more frightful than that which they would establish.”

Remember, this referred to the anti-abolitionists of Ohio, not of a southern state. It took bravery to come out against slavery even in the North.

What Bryant was calling for was the freedom of the press, so that newspapers and people could proclaim their beliefs for or against abolitionism. “We are resolved that the subject of slavery shall be as it has ever been—as free a subject of discussion and argument…as the difference between…the Armenians and the Calvinists. If the press chooses to be silent on the subject, it shall be the silence of perfect free will, and not the silence of fear. Bryant called for citizens to fight to the death not for abolitionism itself, but for the right to debate it without fear of reprisal.

Today, we can hardly imagine that it might be dangerous to openly condemn slavery. But, apparently, even in northern states, denouncing slavery put a person at risk of mob violence.