“The People of Ohio Don’t Send Cowards Here!”

Few opponents of slavery prior to the Civil War in Congress were more outspoken or more courageous than Joshua Giddings.  Born on October 6, 1795. Giddings moved with his family to Ashtabula County, Ohio in 1806, part of the Western Reserve in Northeastern Ohio.  Living in a sparsely settled pioneer region, Giddings had little formal education, but spent a great deal of time as he grew reading and studying.  In 1821 he was admitted to the Ohio bar.  From 1838-1859 he served in the House of Representatives.

He quickly became known as a fierce opponent of slavery, taking every opportunity to attack it.  He came to national notice in 1842 when he defended in Congress the slaves who had mutinied aboard the brig Creole.  Sailing to Nassau, the slaves were freed by the British.  The American government demanded the return of the slaves on the grounds that they were property.  The British refused to return the slaves.  Giddings proposed resolutions in Congress defending the right of the slaves to rebel and regain their God-given right to liberty.  This aroused a furor among pro-slavery members of Congress and Giddings was censured by the House. Nothing daunted, he resigned from the House, and was re-elected by his constituents with a large majority.

Unlike most abolitionists, Giddings had no problem calling for violence to be used to free the slaves.  He constantly called for slave insurrections, and stated that the people of the North had a moral duty to assist such insurrections.

Naturally this made him a marked man.  In the House in 1846 he was threatened by a representative from Georgia with a pistol and a sword cane.  Giddings yelled out to him, Come on! The People of Ohio don’t send cowards here!

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March 13, 1862: Congress Approves Article of War Forbidding the Return of Slaves

 

One hundred and fifty-eight years ago today, the war for the Union began broadening to a war against slavery with the passage by Congress of a new Article of War:

An Act to make an additional Article of War.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That hereafter the following shall be promulgated as an additional article of war for the government of the army of the United States, and shall be obeyed and observed as such:

Article —. All officers or persons in the military or naval service of the United States are prohibited from employing any of the forces under their respective commands for the purpose of returning fugitives from service or labor, who may have escaped from any persons to whom such service or labor is claimed to be due, and any officer who shall be found guilty by a court-martial of violating this article shall be dismissed from the service.

SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That this act shall take effect from and after its passage.

February 28, 1861: Jefferson Davis and the Slave Trade

Prior to the Civil War, the radical fringe of the pro-slavery movement was pushing for re-opening of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, banned under federal law since 1808.  Davis, and most pro-slavery leaders opposed this effort.  When Davis was attacked by Southern firebrands prior to the War for his opposition to a renewed international slave trade, Davis stated that his concern was for the well-being of Mississippi, a state with a large slave population, rather than abolitionist concern over the well-being of slaves.

The Confederate Constitution banned the international slave trade, except with the United States:

(1) The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same.

The issue came up quite early in the term of Davis as President of the CSA, when he vetoed a measure in regard to the international slave trade.

May 18, 1652: Rhode Island Bans Slavery

 

 

More than two centuries before slavery was abolished in the United States, Rhode Island passed the first anti-slavery statute in the English speaking colonies on May 18, 1652:

 

 

Whereas, it is a common course practiced amongst English men to buy

negers, to that end they have them for service or slave forever: let it be

ordered, no blacke mankind or white being forced by covenant bond, or

otherwise, to serve any man or his assighnes longer than ten years or until

they come to bee twentie four yearsof age, if they be taken in under

fourteen, from the time of their cominge with the liberties of this

Collonie.

The Act limited the time to ten years for whites and blacks being held as indentured servants.  Unfortunately, the Act quickly became a dead letter, and by the middle of the Eighteenth Century slaves constituted eleven percent of the population of Rhode Island.  The permanent abolition of slavery did not begin until the Rhode Island legislature passed a plan for gradual emancipation in February 1784.  All slaves born after March 1, 1784 were to be freed, girls at age 18 and boys at age 21.  By 1800 there were 384 slaves remaining in Rhode Island.  In 1840 these numbers were down to 5 quite elderly slaves, twelve years prior to the 200th anniversary of the first attempt to abolish slavery in Rhode Island.

 

Cassius Marcellus Clay

If he is remembered at all today, Cassius Marcellus Clay is recalled solely because that was the name of Muhammad Ali, the boxer, before he converted to the Nation of Islam and changed his name.  Ali had been named after his father who was also named Cassius Marcellus Clay in honor of the man who freed his great-grandfather.

Cassius Marcellus Clay, called Cash by his intimates, was a Kentucky abolitionist.  A cousin of Henry Clay, Cassius Marcellus Clay was born on March 19, 1810 to Green Clay, one of the wealthiest plantation owners and slave masters in the Blue Grass state.  His father’s wealth ensured that he was well educated, first at Transylvania University and then Yale.  While at Yale in 1832 he heard the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison speak and was converted to the anti-slavery cause.  Going back to Kentucky he served three terms in the Kentucky House of Representatives, his political career being cut short, due to the unpopularity of his anti-slavery views.

November 9, 1851: Kidnapping of Calvin Fairbank

 

Some abolitionists were criticized for engaging in no-risk criticism from a long distance of slavery.  Such a charge could never have been lodged against abolitionist Calvin Fairbank.  Born in 1816 in New York state, he was converted to the cause of abolitionism in hearing two former slaves testify at a Methodist meeting.  He was licensed by the Methodist Episcopalian Church in 1840 to preach and in 1842 he was ordained by that denomination.  Between 1837 and 1851 he aided some 47 slaves in escaping to freedom.  In 1844 he was arrested in Kentucky for aiding escaping slaves and served time in prison until 1849.  After his release, from southern Indiana, he continued to aid slaves escaping from Kentucky.

On November 9, 1851, with the connivance of the local Indiana sheriff and the Indiana governor, he was kidnapped by Kentucky marshals.  Sentenced in 1852 to fifteen years, he remained in prison until 1864 when he was pardoned by the Union governor of Kentucky.  (He was lucky.  Amazingly, the last man in Kentucky prisons for aiding escaping slaves was not released until 1870, five years after the conclusion of the Civil War.)  His treatment during his two imprisonments had been brutal, and he estimated that over the years he had received 35,000 lashes from his jailers.  In this frequently unjust world, those who suffer for a good cause often do not receive an earthly reward.  Fairbank’s health broken by his imprisonment, he died in poverty in 1898.

August 27, 1787: George Mason: The Judgment of Heaven

The more I study the Founding Fathers, the greater my respect for their wisdom.  Such an example was on full display at the Constitutional Convention on August 27, 1787, when George Mason of Virginia got up to speak.  Although a slave owner himself, Mason had long recognized what a pernicious evil it was:

This infernal traffic originated in the avarice of British Merchants. The British Govt. constantly checked the attempts of Virginia to put a stop to it. The present question concerns not the importing States alone but the whole Union. The evil of having slaves was experienced during the late war. had slaves been treated as they might have been by the Enemy, they would have proved dangerous instruments in their hands. But their folly dealt by the slaves, as it did by the Tories. He mentioned the dangerous insurrections of the slaves in Greece and Sicily; and the instructions given by Cromwell to the Commissioners sent to Virginia, to arm the servants & slaves, in case other means of obtaining its submission should fail. Maryland & Virginia he said had already prohibited the importation of slaves expressly. North Carolina had done the same in substance. All this would be in vain if South Carolina & Georgia be at liberty to import. The Western people are already calling out for slaves for their new lands, and will fill that Country with slaves if they can be got through South Carolina & Georgia. Slavery discourages arts & manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the immigration of Whites, who really enrich & strengthen a Country. They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgement of heaven upon a country. As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities. He lamented that some of our Eastern brethren had from a lust of gain embarked in this nefarious traffic. As to the States being in possession of the Right to import, this was the case with many other rights, now to be properly given up. He held it essential in every point of view that the Genl. Govt. should have power to prevent the increase of slavery.

August 20, 1862: The Prayer of Twenty Millions

Half sage and half quack, Horace Greeley, who in 1841 founded the New York Tribune, was a power to be reckoned with in the United States one hundred and fifty years ago.  On August 20, 1862 he published in his paper an open letter, entitled The Prayer of Twenty Millions,  to President Lincoln demanding the abolition of slavery within the Union.

To ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States

DEAR SIR: I do not intrude to tell you–for you must know already–that a great proportion of those who triumphed in you election, and of all who desire the unqualified suppression of the Rebellion now desolating our country, are sorely disappointed and deeply pained by the policy you seem to be pursuing with regard to the slaves of the Rebels. I write only to set succinctly and unmistakably before you what we require, what we think we have a right to expect, and of what we complain.

I. We require of you, as the first servant of the Republic, charged especially and preeminently with this duty, that you EXECUTE THE LAWS. Most emphatically do we demand that such laws as have been recently enacted, which therefore may fairly be presumed to embody the present will and to be dictated by the present needs of the Republic, and which, after due consideration have received your personal sanction, shall by you be carried into full effect, and that you publicly and decisively instruct your subordinates that such laws exist, that they are binding on all functionaries and citizens, and that they are to be obeyed to the letter.

II. We think you are strangely and disastrously remiss in the discharge of your official and imperative duty with regard to the emancipating provisions of the new Confiscation Act. Those provisions were designed to fight Slavery with Liberty. They prescribe that men loyal to the Union, and willing to shed their blood in her behalf, shall no longer be held, with the Nations consent, in bondage to persistent, malignant traitors, who for twenty years have been plotting and for sixteen months have been fighting to divide and destroy our country. Why these traitors should be treated with tenderness by you, to the prejudice of the dearest rights of loyal men, We cannot conceive.

III. We think you are unduly influenced by the counsels, the representations, the menaces, of certain fossil politicians hailing from the Border Slave States. Knowing well that the heartily, unconditionally loyal portion of the White citizens of those States do not expect nor desire chat Slavery shall be upheld to the prejudice of the Union–(for the truth of which we appeal not only to every Republican residing in those States, but to such eminent loyalists as H. Winter Davis, Parson Brownlow, the Union Central Committee of Baltimore, and to The Nashville Union)–we ask you to consider that Slavery is everywhere the inciting cause and sustaining base of treason: the most slaveholding sections of Maryland and Delaware being this day, though under the Union flag, in full sympathy with the Rebellion, while the Free-Labor portions of Tennessee and of Texas, though writhing under the bloody heel of Treason, are unconquerably loyal to the Union. So emphatically is this the case, that a most intelligent Union banker of Baltimore recently avowed his confident belief that a majority of the present Legislature of Maryland, though elected as and still professing to be Unionists, are at heart desirous of the triumph of the Jeff. Davis conspiracy; and when asked how they could be won back to loyalty, replied “only by the complete Abolition of Slavery.” It seems to us the most obvious truth, that whatever strengthens or fortifies Slavery in the Border States strengthens also Treason, and drives home the wedge intended to divide the Union. Had you from the first refused to recognize in those States, as here, any other than unconditional loyalty–that which stands for the Union, whatever may become of Slavery, those States would have been, and would be, far more helpful and less troublesome to the defenders of the Union than they have been, or now are.

Lincoln and the Logic of Slavery

One of the many interesting aspects of Abraham Lincoln is how often he wrote down notes that he had no intention of using in public but that he prepared to aid in clarifying his own thinking.  One such note on the logic of slavery was written around April 1, 1854:

Was Lincoln a Reluctant Abolitionist?

 

Lincoln was first and foremost a politician, and the sincerity of politicians is always subject to question, but it is impossible after examining his speeches and private letters not to be convinced of his deep and abiding hatred of slavery.

His attitude towards slavery was well set forth in the following letter to A.G. Hodges on April 4, 1864: