7. EXPANSION ... AND DIVISION

THE GROWING CONFLICT OVER SLAVERY

In the meantime, American culture was splitting ever more deeply over this persistent question about Americans holding slaves.  There was no way that the problem was going to simply go away on its own or just be avoided, as many Americans had earlier held the hope that this might be possible.  But high-sounding principle was easier to achieve than actual plans of action.¹

Unfortunately, such a large part of American culture (especially in the South and parts of the West) was built on ideals requiring the labor services, voluntary or involuntary, of other people.  To undo such a social system was to destroy the cultural ideals of economic and social success themselves.

But there also was no way that the spirit of Puritan Protestantism widespread in the North could ever come to tolerate intellectually and emotionally this behavior in the land of freedom.  Slavery violated every Christian sensibility of the Northerners, to a point that some in the North grew increasingly impatient at the willingness of even their own Northern politicians to tolerate or ignore this stain, this sin corrupting the soul of the great American nation.  Americans were understood to be a Covenant people called to display to the world the glories of living as Christ's people, to be a light spreading hope into the darkness of the surrounding world. Surely slavery made a mockery of this Covenant. Some felt very strongly that God would curse the nation for breaking this Covenant that their forefathers had agreed to two centuries earlier.  And the Republic that had been put into place only a few generations back, a Republic dedicated to the high calling of being a light to the nations, would fail ... fail miserably.  Thus the institution of slavery had to be abolished immediately. And so it was that those who advocated such action came to be called Abolitionists.

In fact, many Abolitionists saw in slavery the seeds of certain destruction of the American people and society, by the hand of God no less. Indeed, the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening, which continued to burn forward through the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s, had made slavery its main hot-button issue. Preachers, newspapermen, self-appointed social reformers and even a small handful of congressmen saw this issue intimately tied up with how God was looking in judgment at his Covenant people.  America could not afford to lose its soul over this issue.

In general however, aggressive Abolitionists were not widely popular, not even in the North at first.  They were viewed as being dangerously disruptive of the good order of the Republic.  Those who viewed themselves as being of a wiser nature tended to presume that the good moral sense of Americans would eventually work this problem out.  Thus it was in 1836 that Congress had placed its gag rule on any further discussion of the slavery issue.  Nonetheless, the issue was a big part of what would go on to divide the New School and Old School Presbyterians in the late 1830s, the division tending to follow North-South lines.  Likewise, in 1845, the Baptists also split quite permanently along North-South lines over the matter.

Then also there was the fact that the English had already set the noble example in 1807 by abolishing slavery within England and then in 1833 by extending abolition to the entire British Empire.  France had outlawed slavery as far back as 1794 during the French Republican Revolution (though Napoleon had reintroduced the practice somewhat after 1804) and in 1848 France made the move to abolish slavery throughout all of its colonies.  Thus also to the American Humanists, America's failure to follow the moral example of England and France brought unbearable shame to America as the supposed model of Enlightened Republicanism.

Most American supporters of freedom for the slaves advocated a gradual process of emancipation.  They considered this to be the more responsible solution to the problem. Others supported the idea of sending Blacks, both free or slave, back to Africa where it was supposed there would be a more natural fit for them.  Thus Liberia had been established in 1820 by President Monroe (and thus Liberia's capital Monrovia) as a resettlement colony on the West coast of Africa.

Abolitionist voices. However, the Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society and publisher of the newspaper, The Liberator, wanted abolition to occur immediately and fully.  He even went so far as to accuse the U.S. Constitution of being a pact with slavery. This ranked him among the most radical of the Abolitionists.

A number of other newspapermen, such as Horace Greeley, editor of The New York Tribune, were also constant in their verbal assault on the vile practice of slavery.  But this could be a very dangerous issue for newspapermen to pursue. In 1837 an angry pro-slavery mob attacked the newspaper office of the Alton (Illinois) Observer run by the Abolitionist and Presbyterian preacher Elijah Parish Lovejoy, the fourth such attack on him and his press.  But this time they murdered him, making him a martyr to the Abolitionist cause and pushing his brother Owen into the leadership of the Illinois Abolitionists.