The absence of ardent or prolonged debate upon this issue in the early history of the United States is easily accounted for.No principle of importance was drawn into the controversy; few presumed to defend slavery as a just or righteous institution.As to conduct, each individual, each neighborhood enjoyed the freedom of a large, roomy country.Even within state lines there was liberty enough.No keen sense of responsibility for a uniform state policy existed.It was therefore not difficult for those who were growing wealthy by the use of imported negroes to maintain their privileges in the State.
If the sense of active responsibility was wanting within the separate States, much more was this true of the citizens of different States.Slavery was regarded as strictly a domestic institution.Families bought and owned slaves as a matter of individual preference.None of the original colonies or States adopted slavery by law.The citizens of the various colonies became slaveholders simply because there was no law against it.*The abolition of slavery was at first an individual matter or a church or a state policy.When the Constitution was formulated, the separate States had been accustomed to regard themselves as possessed of sovereign powers; hence there was no occasion for the citizens of one State to have a sense of responsibility on account of the domestic institutions of other States.The consciousness of national responsibility was of slow growth, and the conditions did not then exist which favored a general crusade against slavery or a prolonged acrimonious debate on the subject, such as arose forty years later.
* In the case of Georgia there was a prohibitory law, which was disregarded.
In many of the States, however, there were organized abolition societies, whose object was to promote the cause of emancipation already in progress and to protect the rights of free negroes.
The Friends, or Quakers, were especially active in the promotion of a propaganda for universal emancipation.A petition which was presented to the first Congress in February, 1790, with the signature of Benjamin Franklin as President of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, contained this concluding paragraph "From a persuasion that equal liberty was originally, and is still, the birthright of all men, and influenced by the strong ties of humanity and the principles of their institutions, your memorialists conceive themselves bound to use all justifiable endeavors to loosen the bonds of slavery, and to promote the general enjoyment of the blessings of freedom.Under these impressions they earnestly entreat your attention to the subject of slavery; that you will be pleased to countenance the restoration to liberty of those unhappy men, who, alone, in this land of freemen, are groaning in servile subjection; that you will devise means for removing this inconsistency of character from the American people; that you will promote mercy and justice towards this distressed race; and that you will step to the very verge of the power vested in you for discouraging every species of traffic in the persons of our fellowmen."** William Goodell, "Slavery and Anti-Slavery," p.99.
The memorialists were treated with profound respect.Cordial support and encouragement came from representatives from Virginia and other slave States.Opposition was expressed by members from South Carolina and Georgia.These for the most part relied upon their constitutional guaranties.But for these guaranties, said Smith, of South Carolina, his State would not have entered the Union.In the extreme utterances in opposition to the petition there is a suggestion of the revolution which was to occur forty years later.
Active abolitionists who gave time and money to the promotion of the cause were always few in numbers.Previous to 1830 abolition societies resembled associations for the prevention of cruelty to animals--in fact, in one instance at least this was made one of the professed objects.These societies labored to induce men to act in harmony with generally acknowledged obligations, and they had no occasion for violence or persecution.Abolitionists were distinguished for their benevolence and their unselfish devotion to the interests of the needy and the unfortunate.It was only when the ruling classes resorted to mob violence and began to defend slavery as a divinely ordained institution that there was a radical change in the spirit of the controversy.The irrepressible conflict between liberty and despotism which has persisted in all ages became manifest when slave-masters substituted the Greek doctrine of inequality and slavery for the previously accepted Christian doctrine of equality and universal brotherhood.
