[16]

[17]

Meanwhile the sections were being arrayed against each other. The first fugitive slave law had been passed in 1793. The period 1820-60 was marked by five great aggressive steps on the part of the slave power: the Missouri Compromise (1820), the annexation of Texas (1845), the Fugitive Slave Law (1850), the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (1854), and the Dred Scott Decision (1857). One after another appeared Lundy and Garrison, Parker and Birney, Whittier and Lovejoy, Phillips and Sumner, Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe; the South replied to the Underground Railroad with a virtual reopening of the slave-trade; John Brown made a raid on Harper's Ferry; and then came the appeal to arms.

And what of the Negro himself in all this period of turmoil and tumult? The inner life of the race was one of furious ferment. Already were there sharp cries for vengeance, for economic freedom, and for the immediate granting of the full privileges of citizenship; and on the other [18]hand there were those who tried to look far into the future with an air of conservatism and philosophy. Naturally there was the appeal to force; the only wonder is that there was not more of this. As early as 1687 a conspiracy among the Negroes in the Northern Neck in Virginia was detected just in time to prevent slaughter. In Surry County in 1710 there was a similar plot, betrayed by one of the conspirators. An attempt in New York in 1712 resulted in the execution of many Negroes. In 1740 some slaves on the coast of South Carolina, under the lead of one of their number named Cato, began an indiscriminate slaughter of the white people in which many lives were lost. Somewhat more ambitious was the effort made in Richmond in 1800 and known as Gabriel's Insurrection. In 1822 an unusually intelligent Negro, Denmark Vesey, the deepest thinker of all Negro insurrectionists, conceived a plan that contemplated nothing less than the total annihilation of the people of Charleston. His plot was divulged, and as a result thirty-five men were executed and thirty-seven banished. For the magnitude of its plan, the care with which it was matured, and the faithfulness of the leaders to one another, Vesey's insurrection was never [19]equaled by a similar attempt for freedom in the United States. Nine years later, however, Nat Turner, the type of the emotional insurrectionist, with the assistance of five other men, actually killed fifty-seven white people before he was stopped. The effect of this revolt upon legislation was immediate. Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and other states at once passed harshly repressive measures.

 Prev. P 13/59 next