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5. Aggressive Abolitionism
- Louisiana State University Press
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AGGRESSIVE ABOLITIONISM It is unclear when Charles Torrey first formulated his plans to assist slaves to escape their bondage, but he had been considering it for many months. His experience with John Torrance, who failed in his attempt to free himself, showed Torrey that slaves often needed assistance if they were to be successful. The mutinies of slaves aboard the Amistad and, more recently, the Creole, also demonstrated the success of self-liberation, but in both cases abolitionists had been instrumental in preserving the slaves’ liberty. Torrey’s four days in the Annapolis jail, in company with thirteen men, women, and children being sold back into slavery, also affected him profoundly. For Torrey, aggressive abolitionism must have seemed like an idea whose time had come. Two days after he was released from the Annapolis jail, at an antislavery convention in upstate New York attended by fifteen hundred people, Gerrit Smith had given a historic speech “To the Slaves of the U. States of America,” the first time any white abolitionist had publicly issued a call to the slaves. According to historian Stanley Harrold, Smith’s speech “stirred furious debate among abolitionists and between abolitionists and nonabolitionists ” and “gained an immediate and sustained notoriety.” Smith opened his speech with references to the successful slave uprisings on the Amistad and Creole, uprisings that, according to Harrold, “were central to the sense of crisis among abolitionists” at that time. Smith cited these uprisings as bold moves but urged slaves and abolitionists to be even bolder, “continually rising higher and higher in their bold and righteous claims.” The abolitionist, said Smith, not only must “enter into and maintain all practicable communications with the slave” but also “has a perfect moral right to go into the South, and use his intelligence to promote the escape of ignorant and imbruted slaves from their prison-house.” Such action was precisely what Torrey had in mind. 89 90 | the martyrdom of abolitionist charles torrey Smith urged the slaves not to rise up in violent and bloody revolt. Rather, he called “on every slave, who has the reasonable prospect of being able to run away from slavery, to make the experiment.” In doing so, Smith said it was legitimate for the slaves to take with them “the horse, the boat, the food, the clothing, which you require . . . so far as is essential to your escape” Slaves should do this “and feel no more compunction for the justifiable appropriation than does the drowning man for possessing himself of the plank, that floats in his way.” Slave escapes were to be the trend of the future. “We rejoice with all our hearts, in the rapid multiplication of escapes from the house of bondage—there are now a thousand a year; a rate more than five times as great, as that before the anti-slavery effort. . . . The principles of abolition have already struck their root deep in the genial soil of the free states of our Union; and even at the South, abolitionists are multiplying rapidly.” Word of Gerrit Smith’s speech reached Washington shortly after Charles Torrey had returned from Annapolis. South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, who had argued that slaveholding was “a positive good,” denounced Smith’s speech on the Senate floor. Theodore Weld said that the speech was causing “a mighty stir,” and Joshua Leavitt praised Smith for addressing the slaves directly: “It is a shame that we have never done it before.” Torrey’s paper, the New York Evangelist, exulted that the “boldness and explicitness” of Smith’s words “has already excited considerable remark.” Even as Smith’s speech was circulating in Washington, Charles Torrey was being visited at his boardinghouse by a free black named Thomas Smallwood. Smallwood was twelve years Torrey’s senior and had grown up as a slave in Prince George’s County, Maryland. As a young man, he had been sold to a minister who had taught him to read and write. At age thirty, Smallwood had purchased his freedom, become a shoemaker, married, and settled in Washington with a job at the Navy Yard. Smallwood’s wife did the washing at Ms. Padgett’s boarding house, where Torrey was living. Hearing about Torrey’s incarceration in Annapolis for attempting to report on the antislavery convention, Smallwood recalled that “immediately after his acquittal and return to Washington . . . through the agency of my wife . . . I sought and obtained an interview with him.” “At our first [35.169.107.177] Project MUSE (2024-03...