Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/277

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SLAVERY. 231 SLAVERY. in the CoDstitutional Convention, wais increas- ingly committed, respectively, to an auti-slavery ami a pro-slavery programme. A movement ^o^varJ united sentiment and national organiza- tion to solve the slavery and free negro questions by emancipation and colonization took, tangible shape in the American Colonization Society, 1810, and its affiliated State societies. (See CoLONiz.TiON SociETV. ) Though patronized by statesmen and divines, such as Madison, Harper, and Breekenridge, by many slaveholders, and by the Federal Government, this movement, which resulted in the establishment of a negro colony in Liberia, was viewed by extreme anti-slavery men as a pro-slavery reaction. From 1818 to 1820 political anti-slavery senti- ment became more prominent, opposing particu- larly slavery extension. Dissatisfaction in the North with the Missouri Compromise (q.v.) laid the basis of abolitionism. William Goodell with his Invesi.ir/ator in Khode Island, and Benjamin Lundy (q.v.) with his Genius of Universal Emancipation, established in 1821, began an anti-slavery press, while Lundy went on lecture tours, and endeavored to find a slave asylum in Texas and Mexico. .John Rankin formed an abolition society in Kentucky, and William Lloyd Garrison (q.v,), supported by Arthur and Lewis Tappan, established the Liberator at Boston in 1831. The era of expansion and reformation, mechanical, moral, and political, then beginning, favored the in- creasing anti-slaverj' societies and press, such as Griswold and Leavitt's New York Erangcli.st and Goodell's Genius of Temperance (1830) and Emancipator (1833), the New England Anti- Slavery Society, founded in 1832, and the New York City and the American anti-slavery societies, founded in 1833, The last resulted from a Na- tional Anti-Slavery Convention in Philadelphia representing every Northern State, These agen- cies distributed broadcast traets,books, pamphlets, and bvisiness labels denouncing slavery. The abo- litionists denounced slavery and slaveholding as crimes, demanded innncdiate and unconditional abolition without compensation, encouraged breach of slave laws and unconstitutional meas- ures, and affirmed natural equality of persons. Garrison, Lovejoy, Phillips, Gerrit Smith. John Brown, Hutchinson, Storrs, and Birney became leaders. Channing. Emerson. Bryant, Whittier, Lowell, and Longfellow gave literary and moral support to reasonable anti-slavery methods, but less conservative men in border free States ma- nipulated an 'underground railway' to Canada for fugitive slaves. (See Underground Rail- way.) John Quincy Adams and others fought for the right of petition concerning slavery and constitutional abolition. Southern apolo- gists, such as Dew, Dabney. Smith, and Fitzhugh, answered the polemics culminating in Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852, a protest against the Fugitive Slave Law; and the paper war raged till Lincoln's election assured the anti- slavery victory and made actual war inevitable. President Lincoln issued his famous emancipa- tion proclamations on September 22, lSf)2, and January 1, 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment (180.5) practically and legally secured the suc- cess of the abolitionists by Federal abolition. Great Britain, where Clarkson and Wilber- force had been the most prominent leaders in the anti-slavery movement, pursued a less radical method of abolition, providing by law in 1833 for future and progressive emancipation in her West Indian colonies and compensating slave- holders l)y purchase and an apprenticeship sub- sequently limited to 1839. In 1843 she abol- ished slavery in India. Sweden followed with colonial abolition in 1840; France in 1848; Hol- land in 1859; Brazil with progressive emancipa- tion in 1871, and total emancipation in 1888; Spain in Porto Rico in 1873, and in Cuba in 1880; Great Britain and Ciermany in their African protectorates in 1897 and 1901 ; the United States in the Philippines in 1902; and Egypt in the Sudan. The South American re- publics abolished slavery when they emancipated themselves from the yoke of Spain. Mohammedan countries have been the last to feel this inlluence, and slavery exists in Turkey, Persia, Egypt, Zanzibar, Pemba, Tripoli, Moroc- co, and Central Africa, but in almost all steps favoring liberty or mitigation of status have been taken. Of 100,000 slaves in Zanzibar and Pemba in 1897 half that number were freed by 1903. Slavery was chiefly a moral and economic ques- tion in the American colonies, but it appeared as a political one during the Confederation, particu- larly in the debates of the constitutional and ratif.ying conventions, when the question of sub- mitting it and other States' rights to Federal initiative arose. The dictum of natural equality and inalienable rights in the Declaration of In- dependence, even when reappearing in bills of rights, could not be practically applied except in limited cases, as by George Wythe in Virginia, to the liberation of slaves. Bvit Northern eman- cipation provisions showed that the economic and social basis in the North was to be increasingly laid in free labor and a farm system contrasting with the slaverj' and plantation system of the South. Economic and .social sectionalism in the colonial period rapidly became political in the federal. From 1787 Mason and Dixon's Line (q.v.) had political significance; slavery as one of the basal elements of the difi'erenee of sec- tional interests and sentiment rose from a local State question into the most important and permanent in national politics. Controlling con- ditions were: (1) Increasing sectionalism from localization of industrialism in the North; (2) constitutional compromise provisions granting Federal legislation in regard to the slave trade and fugitive slaves, and representation for slaves on the three-fifths basis; (3) a Federal domain increasing by cession, purchase, treaty, and conquest and subject to Federal organiza- tion and representation in Congress; (4) the growth of political parties 0])posed as to con- stitutional construction; (5) sectionalized anti- slavery sentiment, and (0) development and ex- pansion of Southern staples adapted to slave labor, especially cotton after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. The Constitution purposely avoided the use of the terms 'slave' and 'slavery,' yet the bargain of South Carolina and Georgia with commercial New England riveted upon it recognition of the imstitution. Slavery had thus two connected phases : ( 1 ) As to its existence in the States, a State right, a local question, in- volved in national politics in the general States' rights struggle; (2) as to its exi.stence and ex- tension in Federal territory, a national question,