Confronting Slavery: Edward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nineteenth-Century America

7. Antislavery Nationalism Resurrected

7 / Antislavery Nationalism Resurrected In early September 1848, Edward Coles received an interesting letter from Philadelphia’s ex-mayor Benjamin W. Richards. “You cannot fail to observe with lively interest,” declared the Free-Soil Democrat, “the rapid progress . . . of the Free Soil party, who have come forward to resist the extension of slavery.” Richards’s observation was timely; for the nation was embroiled in a bitter presidential contest that pitted three candidates against one another in a fractured political climate. Disagreements over slavery and westward expansion in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War threatened to divide the nation along sectional lines, and in a month Americans would be choosing between Whig Zachary Taylor, Democrat Lewis Cass, and Free-Soil candidate Martin Van Buren. Richards wrote to Coles with the intention of luring him into the presidential contest. Coles had known Richards for many years and had developed a close friendship with him, cultivated during the public and private gatherings that populated Philadelphia’s crowded social calendar. Emboldened by this sense of familiarity, Richards asked his friend to provide a record “of the views . . . entertained by those great fathers of the republic ” on the subject of “the extension of slavery” to new territories.1 Coles eagerly crafted a response to Richards’s inquiry and forwarded it to the editors of the National Intelligencer, who published it. He tried to avoid any appearance of taking sides in the contentious presidential election by offering what he thought was an objective assessment of the political situation facing the nation. “Every friend of freedom and lover of his country,” he declared, “must look with pain and mortification on antislavery nationalism resurrected / 197 the present state of parties in the United States.” How could a nation “where all should cherish and prize liberty . . . and wish it extended to all nations and races of the human family,” he asked, be so violently “agitated throughout its whole length and breadth, by the advocates and opponents of slavery!” He could hardly believe that so many of his fellow citizens were “willing to risk, certainly to weaken, the ties of our blessed Union, and to jepordise [sic] their own peace, if not their liberty, for the purposes of extending to the utmost limit . . . the slavery of their fellow beings.”2 Coles blamed this state of affairs on a dramatic shift in the attitude of the nation’s leaders toward slavery, a change he believed threatened to destroy the Union. During America’s early years, he observed, nearly every national leader was “opposed to slavery,” and freely admitted that “it was a great moral, social, and political evil.” Moreover, they all shared the conviction that the institution “would soon cease to exist.” To Coles’s great dismay, this post-revolutionary denunciation of slavery had been replaced by a celebration of the institution. Now, he lamented, the “new partisans of slavery” sought in their speeches and actions to “glorify slavery, declare it ordained of heaven, and more to be patronized and cherished than anything in our political system.” Rather than imagine a future without slavery as their predecessors had, these new leaders insisted on the perpetuation of the institution, arguing that “without [it] . . . they could not exist.” For those who wondered what Jefferson would think of this transformation, Coles had a simple, unequivocal response. No “language would be sufficiently strong,” he declared, “to express the disapprobation of the great apostle of liberty, were he alive to witness” the southern-born movement “to extend and perpetuate human bondage.” He would be astonished by their determination “to claim it as a right, and to deny the existence of any power in Congress or elsewhere, to prevent Slavery from spreading over all the territories of this greatly extended republic.”3 Coles believed that this transformation had emerged because the nation’s leaders “are so blinded by local and partizan zeal” that they advocated the extension of slavery and demanded that the national government protect the institution even though it violates “every principle they profess.” All too often public leaders proved willing to pervert the nation’s ideals to serve their own political interests and to perpetuate their party’s claim to power. Coles turned to the nation’s history to demonstrate the truth of his claim. He reminded his audience that Jefferson and all the founders had always proclaimed equality and freedom to be 198 / antislavery nationalism resurrected “the corner stone of...