Down the Rabbit Hole. With Sheep.
- Alisa Kline
- Oct 25, 2024
- 8 min read
Wallace’s History of Canaan was written after the Civil War. Wallace was writing in the glow of having been part of something truly amazing. He was part of the generation and the movement that ended slavery in the United States.
When Wallace wrote about the mobocratic destruction of Noyes Academy, he detailed a moment in the life of New England when people knew they had a moral responsibility to end slavery but had no possible way of doing so. The best among them tried whatever they could. Noyes Academy was one of those tries.
This week, I intended to discuss the September 11, 1834 rally that followed the first formal meeting of the Noyes trustees. The rally was held at the Old North Church, which was then quite new, having been built a mere six years before. Famous abolitionists came to speak. David L. Child, Samuel Sewall, and Nathanial Peabody Rogers all addressed the rally. The diarist Wallace relied upon didn’t provide much detail about what they said. So I went in search of it in the The Liberator, the nation’s leading abolitionist newspaper. I didn’t find it. Instead I fell down a rabbit hole.
The September 20, 1834 issue of The Liberator contains an essay by an anonymous author who, at the moment Noyes Academy was being created, wrote about how ending slavery would be impossible because human nature was what it was.
Even writing that made me sad. Because it seems true. I don't know how humanity ever accomplishes anything good. But we seem to! Paying attention to those moments seems worthwhile.
The abolitionists had one very basic idea. Slavery was morally wrong and had to end. Right now. They proposed no economic agenda to replace the southern labor force. They had no plan to how to integrate formerly enslaved into society. All they had was the absolute certainty that slavery was wrong. Their agenda consisted simply of explaining over and over until everyone understood that slavery was a wrong and Black people weren’t dangerous.
How did these moralistic idealists summon the power to destroy a powerful economic engine? The answer isn’t to be found in Wallace. This wasn’t his concern. A book I am reading now, Wide Awake by Smithsonian historian John Grinspan is a better place to look for some answers. But back to the question at hand.
The article I found in The Liberator contains something else that’s not to be found in Wallace: the sense of helplessness that goodness always feels in the face of evil.
Wallace wrote after slavery had been ended. He wrote after the good guys won. The anonymous writer didn’t know this would happen. He was writing about how impossible it was to end slavery because the beneficiaries of the system were made too powerful both by the money that rained upon them from the great god cotton and by the corrupted habits of thought that having slaves engenders.
Instead of Wallace’s gentle social comedy, I came face to face with evil. This is what the abolitionists contended with in 1834, not the secure notion that slavery was going to end, but the horrible realization that nothing they could do would make a single difference because evil is real and it is powerful.
I take comfort in Wallace’s History because I like to imagine that the problems we face today, as insurmountable as they appear, might one day seem as far off as slavery did to Wallace in 1880.
While I spent the week down a rabbit hole, Gary spent the week adding sheep back into the New Hampshire landscape. How did he know I needed something to comfort me in the presence of such despair?
When photography was new and very technical, people didn’t go to all that trouble to create photos of farm animals. Photographs were way too important for that. But the world was full of animals. So Gary decided to reintroduce them to the photographed landscape to create a more realistic image of the past.
Our anonymous author also created for me a more realistic image of the past, but one tinged with misery. At least the sheep made me smile. The following is what I found in the September 20, 1834 edition of The Liberator. As usual, paragraph breaks added.
Slavery and Selfishness
All who examine the subject of slavery will confess that it is a great and difficult one. We believe this evil, this curse upon our country will have an end at some distant period, but we do not see how or when it is to terminate. At present, clouds and darkness rest upon the prospect.
The subject should be discussed; Colonialism and Abolition Societies and individuals should endeavor to enlist public sympathy in behalf of those in bondage, and should use reason and argument with the slaveholder and make appeal to his conscience.
The author wants abolitionists and colonialists to work together because they have a common purpose: the end of slavery. Technically that was true. The abolitionists wanted slavery to end by freeing the enslaved. The colonialists wanted slavery to end by literally shipping all nine million Black people to Africa. Notice I did not say back to Africa. The slave trade had been abolished in 1807. Most Black people in the US in 1834 were born here.
Colonialism was the overwhelmingly popular solution for how to end slavery. It was a magical solution that had no chance of succeeding. What it did was give people moral cover. They were in favor of ending slavery, eventually. But not now. Our author will go on to point out (I omitted that part) that even mathematically, colonialism was absurd. There were millions of Black people in the US. There weren’t enough ships yet built to send them all to Liberia, the colonialists intended destination.
Abolitionism is now seen as the obvious solution, but even on the eve of the Civil War, freeing the enslaved seemed a distant, nearly unimaginable prospect. The abolitionists were even then considered fanatics, way too extreme to include in government. No one wanted to join with them because no one wanted to be seen as that crazy.
But we fear none of these things will prove efficacious; that slavery will continue in the southern states until self-interest prompts the holders to emancipate their slaves; until the slaves become a burden to their masters.
There are doubtless many pious, conscientious men in the slave states, that would rejoice to see the end of slavery, but we are constrained to believe that the mass of slaveholders love the system and intend to have it perpetual. Slavery is so deeply connected with their wealth their power, their pride, their pleasures, that there is little hope of their ever voluntarily abolishing it.
That bit above about slavery being “so deeply connected with their wealth their power, their pride, their pleasures …” is entirely the same as Upton Sinclair’s famous 1934 quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” In other words, it's universal. It should also be noted that the reference to “their pleasures,” likely is a reference to enslavers routinely raping their more attractive possessions. New England was truly aghast at this.
Human Nature is too selfish, too depraved, to sacrifice such advantages as they possess, or imagine they possess, in the system of negro slavery, to considerations of humanity, liberty or religion. When have men possessing wealth, power and privileges above their fellow men voluntarily surrendered these advantages and consented to stand on a level?
Where have reason and argument gained a victory, if opposed by the interests, passions, and prejudices of men? Go to the King of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Duke of Wellington, and others of the privileged orders, and ask them to give up their income, their privileges and their gratifications, for the benefit of the suffering people and will they comply?
No. Never.
The author referring to the King of England, Archbishop of Canterbury and the Duke of Wellington sounds fanciful to our ears. But in his day those men would have been the equivalent of calling out the heads of finance, Elon Musk, and Beyoncé to give up not just some of their money but their actual privilege to advance the causes they support. He knows the answer as well as we do. This is not to condemn those individuals. We are all human and humans do not part easily with privilege.
The nature of man is not changed under a republican government. The slaveholder is as tenacious of his privilege as the European noble or monarch.
In 1834, the anonymous writer is less than 60 years distant from the Revolutionary War that was fought for the proposition that “all men (category subject to expansion) are created equal.” He is noting that this new republican form of government did not sweep all evil away. As the author notes, the nature of man is not changed under a republican government. We still aspire to our founding documents. We have not yet achieved that more perfect union.
Some propose that the nation should purchase the two millions of slaves of their owners, and thus abolish slavery. There are in our opinion insuperable obstacles to this course. The slave holders would not listen to any such proposition for a moment; and the people of the free states would not be willing to incur a national debt of 500 millions, or half that sum, to free the country from slavery. Selfishness prevails at the north as well as the south.
It was very hard for me to really understand that the great mass of New England, morally opposed as they were to slavery, were unwilling to do anything substantial to end it. Partly this is because the North was not financially strong enough to stand against the South. The South was always the locus of early American wealth, but that got put on steroids once cotton entered the equation. Money flowed upon the South.
Our author goes on to lament that it was much easier for the abolitionist North to take a principled stand before their own wealth became dependent on trade with the South. Even the heroes of Noyes Academy were financially dependent on trade with the South as this earlier blog post details.
[…]We have an impression, perhaps an erroneous one, that abhorrence of slavery is less now in the northern states than it was 40 or 50 years ago. [Those would have been the years just after the Revolutionary War.] This indifference, may be ascribed in part to the influence of the merchants, manufacturers, and others who carry on an extensive and profitable business with the people of the south.
Abolition societies excite far more opposition now than formerly. Nobody thought of mobbing the ‘fanatics’ who advocated the total, immediate abolition of slavery in the days of our fathers.
The mob that attacked Noyes Academy wasn’t unique to Canaan. Violent pro-slavery mobs were a fact of political life. Abolitionists were considered dangerous fanatics. Dangerous because they sought to unleash millions of Blacks who would immediately set to murdering the white population. Dangerous because challenging the South on slavery would tear the country in two. The author reminds his readers that when his father’s generation was alive, being opposed to slavery on moral grounds was considered normal, not fanatical.
Benjamin Franklin was one of the fanatics who propagated opinions that are now called offensive and dangerous. An opposer of abolition says in a New Haven paper: – ‘Benjamin Franklin was as wild an abolitionist as Dr. Cox or Lewis Tappan. The abolition society of which he was president, went so far in their constitution as to declare that the obligations of Christianity required of every person to do all he could for abolition; and further that these principles ought to be diffused wherever the crimes and miseries exist.’ The same writer says that Morris, Jay and many other distinguished men were entangled by this ‘fanaticism.’ — Hampshire Gazette
The abolitionists of New England were on firm ground with their moralistic fanaticism and never budged. They also seem never to have lowered themselves to engage in the kind of horse-trading politics that build the coalitions that accomplish great change. They simply kept insisting and kept educating and kept talking until reality finally bent in their direction. I’d like to believe they had more than a little to do with that, but I'm honestly not sure.
OMG, Wallace's writing about Canaan's early years is about nothing else! Taxes and religion. The whole town tried to become part of Vermont in the late 1700s because Vermont promised that there would be no taxes. 16 New Hampshire towns along the Connecticut, Canaan included, immediately said that they were no longer New Hampshire, they were Vermont! Wallace covers it on pages 58 and 59, but it's another of the pieces of Wallace that seem eerily of our time.
Just the other day, I was grumbling about a local tendency to think we each have the right to decide how every penny of our individual tax dollars is spent. I had no idea there was historical precedent!