Crusade Against Slavery: Edward Coles, Pioneer of Freedom

“Dust in the Balance”: An Introduction

1 “Dust in the Balance”: An Introduction E dward Coles was fifty-eight years of age when he recalled the day he emancipated his slaves: “The morning after we left Pittsburg, a mild, calm and lovely April day, the sun shining bright, and the heavens without a cloud, our boats floating gently down the beautiful Ohio, the verdant foliage of Spring just budding out on its picturesque banks, all around presenting a scene both conducive to and in harmony with the finest feelings of our nature, was selected as one well suited to make known to my negroes the glad tidings of their freedom.”1 Coles had wrestled for more than ten years with the complex moral and practical difficulties of emancipating his chattel slaves. Giving freedom was, he had discovered, far more than putting pen to paper to make a deed of gift. It had taken a decade to assemble the resources to emancipate and to shake not only his own doubts and hesitations but also the resistance and criticisms of his family and friends. The moment of freedom had arrived and now, recalling it twenty-five years later, his emotions spilled across the page as he penned the words. Coles viewed the emancipation of his slaves as an experiment. For “his” slaves, he wished the pleasures of self-determination, and he firmly believed in liberty as their natural birthright. He intended this experiment as a demonstration that slaves could be freed to good effect and that they were capable of living free in the republic. He was curious to see for himself what the moment of emancipation would produce. What would be their reaction to it? A breathless quality fills this scene: the quiet waters of the Ohio seem to acknowledge the majesty of the unfolding moments just before the arrival of freedom. Coles is almost giddy with expectation. The reader knows, in general, what is coming and the emotion of a simple, dramatic “DUST IN THE BALANCE” 2 and heartfelt gesture is on the rise. The scene’s unfolding may be reckoned a panorama, the expectation of lives forever changed, now captured in a river setting. Some lives will blossom; others will cease. Illness and loss, marriage and preaching and love—these are the things that flowed from the freedom given by Coles to his slaves. His “experiment” will unwind over the decades. The emancipation will affect his own future and the futures of those he freed in ways he could never have imagined. This biography concerns the life and times of Edward Coles, but it also follows the lives of those he freed. Three elements argue for including their stories with his. First, the close interest that Coles preserved in those he freed and the ongoing support he provided to them necessarily weaves his story with theirs. Second, anyone interested in the remarkable course of Coles’s commitments to end slavery in America might well ask: What were the effects of his own “experiment” in freedom upon his freedmen? Third, the history of slavery in America is not only the story of Africans and later African Americans in servitude, and it is not only the story of the white master-race. This biography attempts to join a black history with a white history and help to build an American history as a story of black and white people together. The intent is to acknowledge that American history, in part, is a racial dialog. Coles’s life spanned a time of transition. The deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in 1826 (when Coles was forty years old) and of James Madison ten years later signified the passing of what has been called the founding era. In its place emerged a powerful new motif variously called the era of the common man, the age of Jackson, the market revolution. Coles was wed to the earlier era. He denied many of the racial compromises made by the founding fathers, but he was tethered to other founding-era views on race, economy, and republican governance. Coles was eclipsed as the nation moved away from the republican ideal, inventing itself anew during a contentious era of change leading to the clash of North and South. This transitive time in American history is lit up in new ways, we believe, by knowing something of the life of Edward Coles. Frank O. Lowden (Illinois governor from 1917 to 1921) introduced the reissue of the first published biography of Coles with a personal...