Edmund Booth: Deaf Pioneer

9 The Civil War Years

NINE The Civil War Years O} EDMUND’S views on slavery had many roots. He first became sensitive to the slavery issue while a young student at the Hartford school. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, the first director of the school, and Laurent Clerc, the head teacher, were outspoken and active opponents of slavery. Gallaudet had assisted in securing the freedom of a Moorish prince who had been sold into slavery. Both Gallaudet and Clerc were involved in the pretrial proceedings of the Africans who had rebelled on the slave ship Amistad. Edmund’s first teachers likely inculcated strong beliefs in the rights of blacks to be free. Several of Mary Ann’s brothers had long been abolitionists. William Harrison (“Harry”) Walworth was known for his fiery advocacy. In 1837, George helped to defend Elijah Lovejoy, the Presbyterian minister from Maine, who had condemned the lynching of a black man. George was with Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois, when a proslavery mob took Lovejoy’s life and dumped his printing press into the river. Mary Ann herself was with her family in Alton when the tragic murder happened, only a short time before the Walworths moved to Buffalo Forks. John E. Lovejoy, the founder of the Eureka, was Elijah’s brother, and Edmund knew him well. Edmund’s own intensive reading on the subject of slavery gave him a deep understanding of the issues. He admired Wendell Phillips, a Boston abolitionist who argued brilliantly for both emancipation and freedom of the press. Phillips had thanked the “little band at Alton for resisting those who threatened their rights to freedom of speech and insulted the law that many had fought so hard for during the Revolution.”1 120 121 The Civil War Years Edmund had read of the Fugitive Slave Act and the expanding Underground Railroad while he was in California. He discussed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in his letters to Mary Ann and Thomas in 1852. In 1856, he was back home in Anamosa when John Brown and his followers murdered five southern settlers at Pottowatomie Creek in the Kansas Territory. Shortly after this, Edmund began writing for the Eureka, and with Crockwell he published spirited antislavery editorials. His 1858 “Carrier’s Address” (see pp. 118–19) epitomized his sentiments as the tensions divided the country. When South Carolina seceded from the United States in late-December 1860, following Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the November election, Edmund’s loyalty to the Union surfaced immediately. In the Eureka, he called President Buchanan a “consummate coward . . . in full complicity with the conspirators.” He wrote, “We have elected Lincoln ‘according to the Constitution of the United States,’ and we stand and will stand by that until the 4th of March, when the new President will be inaugurated and the plotters of treason will be overthrown . The Union will live on and South Carolina will be in it.”2 Edmund also saw the economic motivation to the unrest in the South. When South Carolina declared herself out of the Union, he published an editorial in the Eureka and in which he asked, “What is the real cause of all this uproar in the South?” He believed that the answer was the southerners desire to reopen the slave trade. “Cotton culture is profitable business , but a slave, bought in a border state, costs $800 to $1200, and the same could be obtained from Africa for $200. This is the chief ransom and the main spring of all their action.”3 In February 1861, Edmund wrote an editorial lambasting the Southern states for their secession. No man can play such tom-foolery in a household, as our slave masters have played for forty years, without the other members asking the question: “What is that noisy, thieving fellow worth?” So it has been and when South Carolina and another and another went out, we could hardly believe them such utter blockheads, so thoroughly and hopelessly blind, as to go in earnest . . . . The slaveholders are, as is often the case with knaves, shrewd and sharp but shortsighted. They ignore utterly the fact that the generality of 122 Edmund Booth: Deaf Pioneer mankind have some degree of conscience, honor and common sense. In going out they go as robbers. They seize the common property wherever they can do so with safety, and on the Mississippi they place cannon and say to passing boats...