Gerrit Smith to Samuel Simon Schmucker, 1838

If the Colonization Society had not come out against the doctrine of immediate emancipation, and inferentially against the doctrine of the sinfulness of slavery, I should, in all probability, have continued a member of it down to the present time. But for its opposition to those doctrines, I might very probably have continued to think that it was producing a measure at least, of the good influences and effects which you ascribe to it. It is however, but proper to say that my confidence in the usefulness of the colonization of our colored brethren, or any portion of them on the coast of Africa or any where else,—and even though such colonization were conducted with great benevolence and with no unfriendliness to the great doctrines of the anti-slavery societies, — has undergone a great, exceedingly great diminution. It is not however on the ground of diminution, that I avow myself an anti-colonizationist. It is because it has, to use your own language, taken the “position that the colored race cannot with any propriety be emancipated on the soil, — that expatriation and emancipation must go together.” . . . I would not deny that there are members of the Colonization Society who favor the doctrine of immediate and unconditional emancipation; — though Judge Jay, in his book on colonization, speaks of me as the only one. But certain it is that they are rare; and as certain it is that the society ridicules, denounces and abhors the doctrine. . . In view of the exceedingly wicked and abhorrent sentiments of Rev. R. J. Breckinridge, which I have cited, I cannot but think how grateful you and I should feel that God has led us to quit forever a society which generates and fosters such sentiments. Had we remained in it we might have been left to imbibe those sentiments, to adopt all its cruel and murderous policy and to keep pace with its fast increasing wickedness.

SOURCE: Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Gerrit Smith: A Biography, p. 169-70

Diary of Gerrit Smith: July 8, 1834

Elder John Loyd, a native of the West Indies, drinks tea with us. He this evening presents in our church the claims of Africa. Upwards of ten dollars are contributed. Elder Loyd, his wife and their four children, are to go to Africa this season. He is sent by the Methodist church as a missionary.

SOURCE: Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Gerrit Smith: A Biography, p. 163

Gen. Cameron and the African.

From the Washington Chronicle.

General Cameron, American minister to St. Petersburg, now in this city on official business, is known to be a very agreeable and entertaining talker.  One incident which he relates with great humor, deserves reproduction in the columns of the Daily Chronicle.

Arriving at a small German town on the evening of Whitsuntide – which is a famous and favorite holiday with the Lutherans – he was struck with the descent and comfortable appearance of the people who crowded the streets; but what most interested him was a tall, stout and impressive negro, far blacker than Othello, even before he was represented as a highly colored gentleman.  Supposing him to be an American negro, Mr. Cameron went up to him and said: “How are you, my friend?” using the Pennsylvania German, in which the General is a sort of adept, when to his infinite horror, the colored individual turned upon him and said, in good guttural Dutch, “I am no American; “I am an African; and if you are an American, I do not want to talk to you.  I won’t talk to any man who comes from a country professing to be free, in which human beings are held as slaves.”  And this was said with a magisterial and indignant air that would have been irresistibly comic.  General Cameron made his escape with the best grace possible from his stalwart and sable antagonist, and supposed he had got rid of him, but on passing into an adjoining room with his secretary, Bayard Taylor, to take a glass of lager beer, he was again confronted by the German African, who reopened his vials of wrath, concluded by turning to the general and asking him in broad German, “Sag bin ich recht, or bin ich unrecht?” which means, “Say, am I right or am I wrong, answer me?”  General Cameron made inquiry as to the negro, and ascertained that one of the nobility in the neighborhood who had spent some years in Africa, on a scientific and hunting tour, brought back with him to Germany a very handsome native, who, in the course of time, developed into the individual that sought the opportunity to administer a rebuke to an American who lived in a country professing to be free, yet recognizing the institution of human slavery.

— Published in The Fremont Weekly Journal, Fremont, Ohio, Friday, December 5, 1862, p. 4

Diary of William Howard Russell: May 10, 1861

The cabin of one of these steamers, in the month of May, is not favorable to sleep. The wooden beams of the engines creak and scream “consumedly,” and the great engines themselves throb as if they would break through their  thin, pulse covers of pine, — and the whistle sounds, and the calliope shrieks out “Dixie” incessantly. So, when I was up and dressed, breakfast was over, and I had an opportunity of seeing the slaves on board, male and female, acting as stewards and stewardesses, at their morning meal, which they took with much good spirits and decorum. They were nicely dressed — clean and neat. I was forced to admit to myself that their Ashantee grandsires and grandmothers, or their Kroo and Dahomey progenitors were certainly less comfortable and well clad, and that these slaves had other social advantages, though I could not recognize the force of the Bishop of Georgia's assertion, that from slavery must come the sole hope of, and machinery for, the evangelization of Africa. I confess I would not give much for the influence of the stewards and stewardesses in Christianizing the blacks.

The river, the scenery, and the scenes were just the same as yesterday's — high banks, cotton-slides, wooding stations, cane brakes, —and a very miserable negro population, if the specimens of women and children at the landings fairly represented the mass of the slaves. They were in strong contrast to the comfortable, well-dressed domestic slaves on board, and it can well be imagined there is a wide difference between the classes, and that those condemned to work in the open fields must suffer exceedingly.

A passenger told us the captain's story. A number of planters, the narrator among them, subscribed a thousand dollars each to get up a vessel for the purpose of running a cargo of slaves, with the understanding they were to pay so much for the vessel, and so much per head if she succeeded, and so much if she was taken or lost. The vessel made her voyage to the coast, was laden with native Africans, and in due time made her appearance off Mobile. The collector heard of her, but, oddly enough, the sheriff was not about at the time, the United States Marshal was away, and as the vessel could no[t] be seen next morning, it was fair to suppose she had gone up the river, or somewhere or another. But it so happened that Captain Maher, then commanding a river steamer called the Czar (a name once very appropriate for the work, but since the serf emancipation rather out of place), found himself in the neighborhood of the brig about nightfall; next morning, indeed, the Czar was at her moorings in the river; but Captain Maher began to grow rich, he had fine negroes fresh run on his land, and bought fresh acres, and finally built the “Southern Republic.” The planters asked him for their share of the slaves. Captain Maher laughed pleasantly; he did not understand what they meant. If he had done anything wrong, they had their legal remedy. They wrere completely beaten; for they could not have recourse to the tribunals in a case which rendered them liable to capital punishment. And so Captain Maher, as an act of grace, gave them a few old niggers, and kept the rest of the cargo.

It was worth while to see the leer with which he listened to this story about himself. “Wall now! You think them niggers I’ve abord came, from Africa! I'll show you. Jist come up here, Bully!" A boy of some twelve years of age, stout, fat, nearly naked, came up to us; his color was jet black, his wool close as felt, his cheeks were marked with regular parallel scars, and his teeth very white, looked as if they had been filed to a point, his belly was slightly protuberant, and his chest was marked with tracings of tattoo marks.

“What's your name, sir?”

“My name Bully.”

"Where were you born?"

"Me born Sout Karliner, sar!'

“There, you see he wasn't taken from Africa," exclaimed the Captain, knowingly. "I've a lot of these black South Caroliny niggers abord, haven't I, Bully?”

“Yas, sar.”

“Are you happy, Bully?”

“Yas, sar.”

"Show how you're happy."

Here the boy rubbed his stomach, and grinning with delight, said, “Yummy! yummy! plenty belly full.”

“That's what I call a real happy feelosophical chap,” quoth the Captain. “I guess you've got a lot in your country can't at their stomachs and say, ‘yummy, yummy, plenty belly full!’”

“Where did he get those marks on his face?”

“Oh, them? Wall, it's a way them nigger women has of marking their children to know them; isn't it, Bully?”

“Yas, sar! me 'spose so!”

“And on his chest?”

“Wall, r'ally I do b'l'eve them's marks agin the smallpox.”

“Why are his teeth filed?”

“Ah, there now! You'd never have guessed it; Bully done that himself, for the greater ease of biting his vittels.”

In fact, the lad, and a good many of the hands, were the results of Captain Maher's little sail in the Czar.

“We're obleeged to let 'em in some times to keep up the balance agin the niggers you run into Canaydy.”

From 1848 to 1852 there were no slaves run; but since the migrations to Canada and the personal liberty laws, it has been found profitable to run them. There is a bucolic ferocity about these Southern people which will stand them good stead in the shock of battle. How the Spartans would have fought against any barbarians who came to emancipate their slaves, or the Romans have smitten those who would manumit slave and creditor together!

To-night, on the lower deck, amid wood fagots, and barrels, a dance of negroes was arranged by an enthusiast, who desired to show how “happy they were.” That is the favorite theme of the Southerners; the gallant Captain Maher becomes quite eloquent when he points to Bully's prominent “yummy,” and descants on the misery of his condition if he had been left to the precarious chances of obtaining such developments in his native land; then turns a quid, and, as if uttering some sacred refrain to the universal hymn of the South, says, ‘Yes, sir, they're the happiest people on the face of the airth!”

There was a fiddler, and also a banjo-player, who played uncouth music to the clumsiest of dances, which it would be insulting to compare to the worst Irish jig; and the men with immense gravity and great effusion of sudor, shuffled and cut and heeled and buckled to each other with an overwhelming solemnity, till the rum-bottle warmed them up to the lighter graces of the dance, when they became quite overpowering. “Yes, sir, jist look at them, how they're enjoying it; they're the happiest people on the face of the earth.” When “wooding” and firing up, they don't seem to be in the possession of the same exquisite felicity.

SOURCE: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 186-9

John Jay To The English Anti-slavery Society,* 1788

Gentlemen:

Our society has been favoured with your letter of the 1st of May last, and are happy that efforts so honourable to the nation are making in your country to promote the cause of justice and humanity relative to the Africans. That they who know the value of liberty, and are blessed with the enjoyment of it, ought not to subject others to slavery, is, like most other moral precepts, more generally admitted in theory than observed in practice. This will continue to be too much the case while men are impelled to action by their passions rather than their reason, and while they are more solicitous to acquire wealth than to do as they would be done by. Hence it is that India and Africa experience unmerited oppression from nations which have been long distinguished by their attachment to their civil and religious liberties, but who have expended not much less blood and treasure in violating the rights of others than in defending their own. The United States are far from being irreproachable in this respect. It undoubtedly is very inconsistent with their declarations on the subject of human rights to permit a single slave to be found within their jurisdiction, and we confess the justice of your strictures on that head.

Permit us, however, to observe, that although consequences ought not to deter us from doing what is right, yet that it is not easy to persuade men in general to act on that magnanimous and disinterested principle. It is well known that errors, either in opinion or practice, long entertained or indulged, are difficult to eradicate, and particularly so when they have become, as it were, incorporated in the civil institutions and domestic economy of a whole people.

Prior to the great revolution, the great majority or rather the great body of our people had been so long accustomed to the practice and convenience of having slaves, that very few among them even doubted the propriety and rectitude of it. Some liberal and conscientious men had, indeed, by their conduct and writings, drawn the lawfulness of slavery into question, and they made converts to that opinion ; but the number of those converts compared with the people at large was then very inconsiderable. Their doctrines prevailed by almost insensible degrees, and was like the little lump of leaven which was put into three measures of meal: even at this day, the whole mass is far from being leavened, though we have good reason to hope and to believe that if the natural operations of truth are constantly watched and assisted, but not forced and precipitated, that end we all aim at will finally be attained in this country.

The Convention which formed and recommended the new Constitution had an arduous task to perform, especially as local interests, and in some measure local prejudices, were to be accommodated. Several of the States conceived that restraints on slavery might be too rapid to consist with their particular circumstances; and the importance of union rendered it necessary that their wishes on that head should, in some degree, be gratified.

It gives us pleasure to inform you, that a disposition favourable to our views and wishes prevails more and more, and that it has already had an influence on our laws. When it is considered how many of the legislators in the different States are proprietors of slaves, and what opinions and prejudices they have imbibed on the subject from their infancy, a sudden and total stop to this species of oppression is not to be expected.

We will cheerfully co-operate with you in endeavouring to procure advocates for the same cause in other countries, and perfectly approve and commend your establishing a correspondence in France. It appears to have produced the desired effect; for Mons. De Varville, the secretary of a society for the like benevolent purpose at Paris, is now here, and comes instructed to establish a correspondence with us, and to collect such information as may promote our common views. He delivered to our society an extract from the minutes of your proceedings, dated 8th of April last, recommending him to our attention, and upon that occasion they passed the resolutions of which the enclosed are copies.

We are much obliged by the pamphlets enclosed with your letter, and shall constantly make such communications to you as may appear to us interesting.

By a report of the committee for superintending the school we have established in this city for the education of negro children, we find that proper attention is paid to it, and that scholars are now taught in it. By the laws of this State, masters may now liberate healthy slaves of a proper age without giving security that they shall not become a parish charge; and the exportation as well as importation of them is prohibited. The State has also manumitted such as became its property by confiscation; and we have reason to expect that the maxim, that every man, of whatever colour, is to be presumed to be free until the contrary be shown, will prevail in our courts of justice. Manumissions daily become more common among us; and the treatment which slaves in general meet with in this State is very little different from that of other servants.

I have the honour to be, gentlemen,

Your humble servant,

John Jay,

President of the Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves.

_______________

* In 1788 a society in France, and another in England, formed for promoting the abolition of slavery, opened a correspondence with the New York society through its president. The above letter to the English society was from Jay's pen. See letter from Granville Sharp, May 1, 1788.

SOURCE: Henry P. Johnston, Editor, The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay Volume 3: 1782-1793, p. 340-4