Slavery
(1833-70), promoter, with its state and local auxiliaries, of the cause of immediate abolition of slavery in the United States.
As the main activist arm of the Abolition Movement (see abolitionism), the society was founded in 1833 under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison. By 1840 its auxiliary societies numbered 2,000, with a total membership ranging from 150,000 to 200,000. The societies sponsored meetings, adopted resolutions, signed antislavery petitions to be sent to Congress, published journals and enlisted subscriptions, printed and distributed propaganda in vast quantities, and sent out agents and lecturers (70 in 1836 alone) to carry the impassioned antislavery message to Northern audiences.
Participants in the societies were drawn mainly from religious circles (e.g., Theodore Dwight Weld) and philanthropic backgrounds (e.g., businessmen Arthur and Lewis Tappan and lawyer Wendell Phillips), as well as from the free black community, with six blacks serving on the first Board of Managers. The society’s public meetings were most effective when featuring the eloquent testimony of former slaves like Frederick Douglass or William Wells Brown. The society’s antislavery activities frequently met with violent public opposition, with mobs invading meetings, attacking speakers, and burning presses.
In 1839 the national organization split over basic differences of approach: Garrison and his followers were more radical than other members; they denounced the U.S. Constitution as supportive of slavery and insisted on sharing organizational responsibility with women. The less radical wing, led by the Tappan brothers, formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which advocated moral suasion and political action and led directly to the birth of the Liberty Party (q.v.) in 1840. Because of this cleavage in national leadership, the bulk of the activity in the 1840s and ’50s was carried on by state and local societies. The antislavery issue entered the mainstream of American politics through the Free-Soil Party (1848-54) and subsequently the Republican Party (founded in 1854). The American Anti-Slavery Society was formally dissolved in 1870, after the Civil War and Emancipation.
Slavery
1760?-1830. An African American slave in Virginia, Armistead sought and received permission from his master, William Armistead, to enlist under Gen. Marquis de Lafayette, a French officer who joined George Washington’s army during the American Revolution. Lafayette was seeking men to spy on British general Cornwallis and his army at Yorktown, Va. Impressed with Armistead’s intelligence, Lafayette had Armistead pose as a laborer looking for work. He was hired at Cornwallis’s camp and was able to relay information about Cornwallis’s plans to Lafayette. Armistead also earned the trust of Cornwallis, who asked him to spy on the Americans. As a double agent, Armistead was able to move freely between both camps. He provided Lafayette with critical information that enabled the general to intercept Cornwallis’s much-needed naval support and ultimately defeat Cornwallis at Yorktown in Oct. 1781, the decisive battle that ended the Revolution.
After the war, Armistead returned to the Armistead plantation as a slave. He met with Lafayette in 1784, when the general visited the United States. He wrote a glowing recommendation for his former spy, which Armistead used when he petitioned the Virginia House of Delegates for freedom. He was finally freed on New Year’s Day 1787. He assumed Lafayette as his surname and spent the rest of his life as a farmer in Virginia.
Slavery
Robert Harper, a Philadelphia builder, gave the community its name. He settled there sometime between 1734 and 1747. In 1761, Harper established a ferry across the Potomac, making this community a major jumping off point for settlers seeking new lands in the Shenandoah Valley and points west.
In the years to come, the Harpers Ferry Arsenal made high quality, rifled muskets and engaged in what we now call research and development. The location of the arsenal eventually attracted other industrial development.
Situated on the Maryland side of the river, the canal connected the ferry with markets in Washington, D.C. A year later, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad arrived and with it the final piece in a political-economic network that made Harpers Ferry and the recently founded community of Bolivar important to the nation’s future. How important became very clear when on October 16, 1859, notorious Kansas Free-State man and abolitionist, John Ossawatomie Brown and his “Provisional Army of the United States,” entered the village of Harper’s Ferry, Va., taken possession of the United States armory, shot two or three whites, placed guards on the railroad bridge, and stopped the passenger trains of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. John Brown saw the ferry as the place to capture arms with which to equip an army and free the slaves of the Deep South.
The President promptly dispatched a detachment of marines to the spot. On the morning of October 18, a storming party of 12 Marines, led by future Confederate States General Robert E. Lee joined with the local army broke down the door of the Armory’s fire engine house, and forced Brown’s terrorist militia into a surrender. They were found to number over twenty white men and negroes. Ten of Brown’s guerrilla’s were killed, two of which were his own sons. Brown, who had received a number of severe wounds, was arrested and charged with treason.
He confessed that his object was to liberate and run all the slaves in the adjoining counties of Virginia and Maryland. At a farm house which Brown had hired a few miles from Harper’s Ferry, were found ammunition and arms, consisting of a large number of Sharpe’s rifles, revolvers, pikes and other implements of war, together with a great amount of correspondence, consisting of letters of Gerrit Smith and Fred Douglas.
While begging for his life, John Brown’s family stated that he was insane. To prove their point they gave the following information on his lineage and the people that surrounded him throughout his life.
Nine relatives on Brown’s mother’s side were insane.
Six of Brown’s cousins were insane.
Two of his own children were insane.
He was also given the chance to testify on his own behalf and proclaimed that his life had been a constant fight to stop the institution of slavery, that from his past deeds his life should be spared.
Brown was found guilty of treason and conspiracy against the United States, on the 2d of November, was sentenced to be hung, which sentence was carried into effect on the 2d of December, 1859. Before the sentence was carried out, however, Brown issued a prophetic warning from his jail cell:
“I wish to say furthermore, that you had better, all you people at the South, prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared the better. You may dispose of me very easily; I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled, this Negro question I mean, the end of that is not yet.”
Afterwards, John Brown’s wife died, insane.
It has since been discovered that the following is a portion of the plans of abolitionists, matured in Kansas by Brown and others, and which he attempted in part to carry out:
“1. To make war (openly or secretly, as circumstances may dictate) upon the property of the slave holders and their abettor, not for its destruction, if that can be easily avoided, but to convert it to the use of the slaves. If it cannot be thus converted, then we advise its destruction. Teach the slaves to burn their master’s buildings, to kill their cattle and horses, to conceal or destroy farming utensils, to abandon labor in seed time and harvest, and let crops perish. Make slavery unprofitable in this way, if it can be done in no other.
“2. To make slave holders objects of derision and contempt, by flogging them whenever they shall be guilty of flogging their slaves.
“3. To risk no general insurrection until we of the North go to your assistance, or you are sure of success without our aid.
“4. To cultivate the friendship and confidence of the slaves; to consult with them as to their rights and interests, and the means of promoting them; to show your interests in their welfare, and your readiness to assist them; let them know that they have your sympathy, and it will give them courage, self respect and ambition, and make men of them, infinitely better men to live by, as neighbors and friends, than the indolent, arrogant, selfish, heartless, domineering robbers and tyrants who now keep both yourselves and the slaves in subjection, and look with contempt upon all who live by honest labor.
“5. To change your political institutions as soon as possible, and, in the meantime, give never a vote to a slave holder; pay no taxes to their government, if you can either resist or evade them; as witnesses and jurors, give no testimony and no verdicts in support of any slave holding claims; perform no military, patrol or police service; mob slave holding courts, jails and sheriffs; do nothing, in short, for sustaining slavery, but everything you safely can, publicly and privately, for its overthrow.”
Brown’s raid was a failure, but it set the country in motion toward civil war.
In the years that followed, Harpers Ferry was devastated by warring parties. The armory and arsenal were destroyed, its railroad bridges over the Potomac burned and later rebuilt. Usually occupied by Federal troops, it also became a refugee camp for thousands of runaway slaves making their way North. Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson captured the federal garrison there on September 15, 1862, following a lightning 51-mile march. He bagged thousands of troops and tons of supplies, not to mention hundreds of Black people who were marched South back into slavery.
After the war, the ferry was little more than a ghost town. The federal government sold what was left of the armory and arsenal and other property. Efforts to rebuild its commercial base were frequently devastated by record-breaking floods. But out of the ashes came two occurrences that impacted the country’s future. The first was a small, church-owned school for African-Americans, Storer College. In the 1890s, civil rights leaders convened there in their effort to create a new, national organization that would fight for the rights of blacks. That movement eventually led to the creation of the NAACP.
Slavery
Led by his father George Garnett, Henry Highland Garnett escaped from Maryland slavery in 1825 to New York. Henry attended the New York African Free school. Among his classmates were Alexander Crummell, Ira Aldridge and Thomas Ringgold Ward. His goal was to continue his education in New Hampshire but a group of whites decided to eliminate the school for educating blacks and dragged the building into the swamp. Under his leadership, Garnett and the other black students (including Alexander Crummell) prepared for an attempt on their lives which would come one night before they could leave town. They successfully defended themselves against the nighttime attack.
Garnett’s ideas about black liberation came to a national audience. He was convinced that in spite of the admirable efforts of the white abolitionist, that the battle for black liberation belonged in the hands of blacks. Garnett would say that, “They are our allies – Ours is the battle.” He took revolutionary stands about slavery. Inspired by David Walker, he wrote to slaves: “you had better all die – die immediately than live lives as slaves and entail wretchedness upon your posterity. . . Where is the blood of your fathers? Has it run out of your veins? . . . Awake, awake, millions of voices are calling you. Your dead fathers speak to you from their graves.”
Garnett traveled to England to try to encourage a worldwide boycott of cotton. He knew that if the market for cotton collapses, slavery would not survive. Garnett would live his life with many ideas that opposed those of Frederick Douglass. Eventually however, his ideas about liberation, politics and economics would be embraced by many black leaders of his day.
