The Underground Railroad
confidence accorded to his professional power.
It was in 1836, in one of his vacations, that his mind was violently
turned inwards to re-examine his status upon the Anti-slavery question.
He happened to be visiting his old college-friend, Salmon P. Chase, at
Cincinnati, and, fortunately for the spiritual life of both men, it was
at the time of the terrible riots that broke up the press of John G.
Birney. Both being known as already favoring the cause of the slave,
they stood in much peril for several days; but when the dark time was
passed, the clearness that defined their sentiments was seen to be worth
all the personal danger that had bought it. Self-delusion on the subject
was no longer possible. The deductions from the facts were as plain as
the facts themselves. The two friends took counsel together, and adopted
the policy from which thenceforward neither ever swerved. A great cloud
was rolled from their eyes. In all this turmoil of riot, they saw on the
one side, indeed, a love of man great in its devotion; but on the other,
a moral deadness in the North so profound and determined that it
threatened thus brutally any voice that would disturb it. Their duty,
then, was evident: to fling all the forces of their lives, and by all
social and political means, right against this inertness, and shatter it
if they could. To Mr. Chase, the course of things gave the larger
political work; to my father, the larger social. His diary records how
amazed he was, when he returned to Philadelphia, at his former
blindness, and how thankful to the spirit of love that had touched and
cleansed his eyes that he might see God's image erect. He knew now that
his lot had been cast in the very stronghold of apathy, the home of a
lukewarm spirit, which, not containing anything positive to keep it
close to the right, let its sullen negativeness gravitate towards the
wrong. It will be difficult to make coming generations understand, not
the flaming antagonism to humanity, but the more brutal avoidance of it
that ruled the political tone in this latitude, from 1836 to 1861. I
have thought of the word _bitterness_, as expressing it; but though that
might convey somewhat of its recoil when disturbed, it pictures nothing
of its inhuman solicitude against all disturbance. Conservatism, it was
called; and certainly it did conserve the devil admirably. At the South,
one race of men were so basely wielding a greater physical power over
another race of men, as to crush from them the attributes of
self-responsible creatures; Philadelphia, the city of the North nearest
the wrong, made no plea for humanity's claims. It went on, this
monstrous abrogation of everything that lends sanctity to man's
relations on earth, till slaves were beasts, with instincts annihilated,
and masters demons, with instincts reversed; Philadelphia made no plea
for the violated rhythm of life on either side. Even the Church betrayed
its mission, and practically aided in stamping out from millions the
spirit that related them to the Divine; still Philadelphia made no plea
for God's love in his humanity. Utterly insensible to the most piercing
appeals that man can make to man, she loved her hardness, clung to it;
and if, now and then, a voice from the North blew down, warningly as a
trumpet, the great city turned sluggishly in her bed of spiritual and
political torpor, and cried: Let be, let be! a little more slumber! a
little more folding of the hands to my moral death-sleep!
This souring of faith, this half-paralysis of the heart's beating, this
blurring of the intuitions that make manhood possible, were what my
father found here in that year of our Lord's grace, 1836. It will be
worth while to watch him move into the fight and bear his part in its
thickest, just to learn how largely history lays her humanitarian
advances on a few willing souls.
The means which lay readiest to his use for rousing the dormant spirit
of the city was his social position. And yet how hard, one would think,
it must have been to make this sacrifice. He came accredited by all the
claims of finished culture, a man consecrated to the scholar's life.[A]
Then, with the sensitiveness that springs from intellectual breeding,
one will look to see him shrink from conflict with the callous condition
of feeling around him. The glamour of book-lore will spread over it, and
hide it from his sight. He has a noble enough mission, at all events: to
raise the standard of educational culture in a city that hardly knows
the meaning of the term; and if any glimpse should come to him of the
lethargic inhumanity around him, he can afford to let it pass as a
glimpse--his look being fixed on the sacred heights which the scholar's
feet must tread.
[Footnote A: All that I here write of my father, I write equally of his
co-laborer in the same sphere of work--Rev. W.H. Furness; and if it is
true of others whom I did not know, then to their memory also I bear
this record of the two whose labors and characters it has been the
deepest privilege of my life to know so well.]
Ah, how his course, so different, proves to us that the true scholar is
always a scholar of truth. No matter what element of the public
sentiment he met--the listlessness of pampered wealth; the brutal
prejudice of some voting savage; the refined sneer of lettered
dilettanteism; the purposed aversion of trade or pulpit fearing
disturbed markets or pews;--he beat lustily and incessantly at all the
parts of the iron image of wrong sitting stolidly here with close-shut
eyes. No matter when it was, on holiday or working-day or Sabbath; at
home and abroad; in the parlor, the street, the counting-room; in his
school and in the Church;--he bore down on this apathy and its brood of
scorns like a west wind that sweeps through a city dying under weight of
miasma. And the wind might as well cease blowing yet not cease to be
wind, as my father's influence stop and himself live. It scattered the
good seed everywhere. How often have I heard him say, "I know nothing of
what the harvest will be; I am responsible only for the sowing." And
bravely went the sowing on, with the broadcast largesse of love. There
was no breeze of talk that did not carry the seeds;--to the wayside, for
from those that even chance upon the truth the fowls of the air cannot
take it all; to thin soil and among thorns, for no heart so feeble or
choked that will not find in a single day's growth of truth germination
for eternity; to stony places, for no cranny in the rocks that can hold
a seed but can be a home for riving roots;--"And other fell on good
ground and did bring forth fruit."
Thus it was primarily to rouse those of his own class that he labored,
to gall them into seeing (though they should turn again and rend him)
that moral supineness is moral decay, that the soul shrivels into
nothingness when wrong is acquiesced in, as surely as it is torn and
scattered by the furies let loose within it, when wrong is done. But
just there lay the difficulty and pain of his mission: that, from his
acknowledged standing in the literary world, and as a leader in the
interests of higher education, his path brought him into contact mainly
with the cultured, and it was among these that the pro-slavery spirit
ruled with its bitterest stringency. Not cultured: let us unsay the
word; rather, with the gloss and hard polish which reading and wealth
and the finer appointments of living can throw over spiritual arrest or
decay. Culture is a holy word, and dare be used of intellectual advance
only when the moral sympathies have kept equal step. It includes
something beyond an amateur sentiment; in favor of what we favor. If it
does not open the ear to every cry of humanity, struggling up or
slipping back, it is no culture properly so called, but a sham, a mask
of wax, a varnish with cruel glitter; and what a double wrath will be
poured on him who cracks the wax and the varnish, not only because of
the rude awakening, but because the crack shows the sham.
It is impossible for us now to realize what revenge this class dealt to
my father for twenty-five years. Consider their power of revenge. They
could not force a loss of property or of life, it is true; they made no
open assault in the street; their 'delicacy' held itself above common
vituperation. But they wielded a greater power than all these over a man
whose every accomplishment made him their equal, and they used it
without stint. They doomed him to the slow martyrdom of social scorn.
They shut their doors against him. They elbowed him from every position
to which he had a wish or a right, except public respect, and they could
not elbow him from that unless they pushed his character from its poise.
They cut him off from every friendly regard which would else have been
devotedly his, on that level of educated life, and limited him to
'solitary confinement' within himself. They compelled him to walk as if
under a ban or an anathema. Had he been a leper in Syrian deserts, or a
disciple of Jesus among Pharisees, he could not have been more utterly
banished from the region of homes and self-constituted piety. They
showered ineffable contempt upon him in every way consistent with their
littleness and--refinement. Slight, sneer, insult, all the myriad
indignities that only 'good society' can devise, these were what my
father received in return for his love and his work in love.
How little personal relation all this obloquy bore to him, let this
stand as evidence: that he not only continued his work, but daily gave
it more caustic energy and wider scope. As I have hinted, he did not, in
political matters, give in his adherence to that class of abolitionists
who, as he thought, threw away their best chances of success in refusing
to work within constitutional provisions. He was prouder that this
single community should call him "abolitionist," though it spat the word
at him, than if the whole earth should hail him with the kingliest
title; but he loved the name too well not to make it stand for some
practical fact, some feasible and organized effort. He believed that our
National Constitution did, indeed, hold many compromises with Slavery,
but was framed, in the majority of its provisions and certainly in the
totality of its spirit, in the interests of freedom; and that it only
needed enforcement by the choice of the ballot-box to bring the South
either to an amicable or a hostile settlement of the question. Which, he
did not ask or care. The duty of the present could not be mis-read; it
was written in _the vote_.
With these views, he gave much time and work to organizing in this
State, "The National Liberty Party," in 1840, and to securing from
Pennsylvania some of the seven thousand votes that were cast for John G.
Birney in that year throughout the Union. By the time another election
came, the party had swelled its numbers to seventy thousand. To
contribute his share towards this success, tract after tract, address
after address, were written and sent broadcast; meetings were convened,
committees formed, resolutions framed, speeches made, petitions and
remonstrances sent, public action fearlessly sifted and criticised; in
short, because he held a steady faith in men's humane promptings when
ultimately reached, he 'cried aloud' to them by every access, and
'spared not' to call them from their timidity and time-serving to manly
utterance through the ballot-box.
Of such appeals, his address of the "Liberty Party of Pennsylvania, to
the people of the State," issued in 1844, may stand as a sample. It is a
vivid portrayal of the slave power's insidious encroachments, and of its
monopolized guidance of the Government. It gathers up the national
statistics into groups, shows how new meaning is reflected from them