The Martyrdom of Abolitionist Charles Torrey

10. Assessment

 ASSESSMENT What can be said regarding the life and abolitionist career of Charles Torrey? When he died at age thirty-two, he had been an abolitionist for eleven years, from  to , with one of those years having been spent recuperating from tuberculosis and two years spent in prison. By contrast, the careers of such abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Joshua Leavitt, and Henry Stanton lasted forty years or longer. Charles Torrey’s most important contribution was in helping to establish political and then aggressive and radical abolitionism as alternative strategies for achieving emancipation. These were tactical alternatives to Garrison’s moral suasion, and many abolitionists favored different options at different times. Nor were they mutually exclusive; as John Stauffer made clear in The Black Hearts of Men, although the radical abolitionists “never abandoned moral suasion— the principle on which abolitionism had originally been based—they insisted on coupling it with ‘efficient action’ to give it teeth.” In the view of the aggressive and radical abolitionists, Garrison’s moral suasion by itself was not sufficient to get the job done. Garrison had set a goal but had provided his followers with no realistic means for achieving that goal; as historian Bruce Laurie described it, Garrison had “led his followers into something of a moral dead end.” Charles Torrey, along with Amos Phelps and Alanson St. Clair in Massachusetts and Henry Stanton, Joshua Leavitt, and Elizur Wright in New York, challenged Garrison, leading to the schism of the antislavery organization and the emergence of these tactical options. The new organization that emerged focused on political means for ending slavery. One year later the Liberty Party, which incorporated the new organization, was born. Charles Torrey played a role in its birth, along with Alvan Stewart, Myron Holley, James Birney, Joshua Leavitt, Elizur Wright, Gerrit Smith, and others. Torrey then 183 184 | the martyrdom of abolitionist charles torrey labored for almost two years to establish the Liberty Party as a political force in Massachusetts. According to Reinhard Johnson’s history, the Liberty Party “became the major vehicle for abolition sentiment in the state by the mid-s,” and its votes forced the gubernatorial elections of , , and  “to be decided in the state legislature.” Not satisfied with the pace of change, Charles Torrey moved on to aggressive abolitionism by going into the slave states and persuading slaves to run away. A few men had done so previously, such as John Mahan in Kentucky; Alanson Work, James Burr, and George Thompson in Missouri; and Leonard Grimes, a free black, in Virginia . Torrey, however, set up a system with the intent of liberating hundreds of slaves from the District of Columbia, focusing especially on slaves owned by southern members of Congress and other important officials. Torrey’s ultimate goal was to make slaveholding unstable in Washington and thus hasten its abolition in the nation’s capital. In these efforts, Torrey received much support from free blacks such as Thomas Smallwood and James Bias as well as from white colleagues such as Abel Brown, Charles Cleveland, Joshua Leavitt, Joshua Giddings, and Gerrit Smith. In the later months of these efforts, Torrey elevated his level of aggression still further by publicly naming the slaves being taken and by ridiculing their masters . When he was finally arrested, the two pistols being carried by Torrey suggest the radical direction in which his aggressive abolitionism was headed. In demonstrating such aggressive methods, Charles Torrey presaged John Brown by almost two decades. As noted by Stanley Harrold : “As Torrey and Smallwood engaged in clandestine subversive activities, they both embraced an aggressive masculinity foreshadowing that of John Brown.” Thus, it is not surprising that John Brown regarded Torrey as one of his models. In this regard, Torrey’s martyrdom lies temporally midway between those of Elijah Lovejoy and John Brown. In On Freedom’s Altar, Hazel Wolf contended that “after Elijah Lovejoy’s death abolitionism had moved toward a new climax,” and “Torrey’s death brought that climax to the second decade of the militant antislavery crusade.” In assessing Charles Torrey’s contribution to the increasingly assessment | 185 aggressive abolitionist movement, his motivation was also historically noteworthy. Torrey freely acknowledged that he was breaking state, and even federal, laws by enticing slaves to run away from their masters. At his trial and elsewhere, Torrey argued that state and federal laws should be transcended by the law of God. As historian...