A Disease in the Public Mind (17 page)

Garrison travelled to Philadelphia and New York to address black organizations, many of them created to oppose the American Colonization Society. By the end of his first year, Garrison had acquired another five hundred black subscribers, and he published a pamphlet based on his speeches,
An Address to the Free People of Color.
He urged them to continue to speak against the inequality being inflicted on them in the northern states, and assured them that
The Liberator
would welcome protest statements and articles from them.

Garrison did not rely completely on his subscription list to spread
The Liberator
's message. It was customary for newspapers to send free copies to other papers around the nation and receive complimentary copies in return. By the end of his first year, Garrison was exchanging
The Liberator
with over a hundred papers, many of them in the South. The editors of the latter papers did not take kindly to
The Liberator
's demand for immediate abolition or to Garrison's frequent comparison of slavery to rape. They reprinted excerpts with furious refutations. Garrison gleefully reprinted these attacks and countered them with reprises of his own. This atmosphere of crisis and confrontation was exactly what he was hoping to achieve.
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•      •      •

In late August of 1831, a Virginia slave named Nat Turner gave Garrison's obscure publication an outburst of publicity that he could never have otherwise obtained. Stirred by an eclipse of the sun in February, Turner, a self-appointed black preacher, became convinced God had ordained him to free Virginia's slaves. On the night of August 22, he summoned several followers and approached the house of his owner, Joseph Travis. Later, Turner would admit that Travis was “a kind master.” But his kindness did not prevent Turner or one of his followers from burying a hatchet in Travis's skull. Nor did the master's benevolence rescue Mrs. Travis and four other members of his family, including an infant, from a similar fate.

It was as if a chapter out of Santo Domingo's final slaughter under General Dessalines had somehow been reincarnated in Southampton County, a thinly populated rural region not far from Virginia's seacoast. Blacks outnumbered whites by more than a thousand, but most whites owned only two or three slaves and many owned none. Seizing horses from nearby farms, Nat Turner and his swelling band, soon numbering more than fifty men, rode from farmhouse to farmhouse, killing everyone with white skin.

Turner told his followers that by exterminating the whites, “they would achieve the happy effects of their brethren in St. Domingo . . . and establish a government of their own.” The next day, whites who had managed to flee Turner's rampage sounded the alarm and Virginia called out hundreds of militiamen.

A reporter on a Richmond newspaper, who belonged to one of the militia units, described what he saw: “Whole families, father, mother, daughters, sons, sucking babes and school children butchered, thrown into heaps and left to be devoured by hogs and dogs or to putrefy on the spot.” Especially horrendous was the discovery of a schoolteacher, Mrs. Levi Waller, and ten of her pupils “piled in one bleeding heap on the [classroom] floor.” One quick-thinking child had ducked into the fireplace and survived.

Saddest of all was the story of one of the last families killed. At noon Turner and his followers approached the Vaughan farmhouse. By now most of the rebels had guns seized from pillaged houses. The hoofbeats of their
horses alerted Rebecca Vaughan, who was in her garden selecting vegetables for dinner. She fled into the house. What could she do? Her husband was not at home. She rushed to a window and cried out that there was no one in the house but her and her children. A volley of shots killed her instantly.

Her fifteen-year-old son, Arthur, heard—and perhaps saw—his mother's murder and instinctively rushed to save her. He was riddled while climbing a nearby fence. Mrs. Vaughan's niece, fifteen-year-old Eliza Vaughan, ran out of the house, perhaps hoping that if she reached nearby woods, she might survive. Another volley ended her life, too.
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•      •      •

Forty miles away in Fortress Monroe, a U.S. Army bastion on the seacoast, Captain Robert E. Lee and his bride, Mary Custis Lee, considered themselves on an extended honeymoon. He had graduated second in his class from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1829. The couple had been married on June 30, 1831, at Arlington. Mary's father, George Washington Parke Custis, had been delighted to welcome into the family the son of a soldier who had served with distinction under his step-grandfather. The wedding celebration had lasted a week, and they had spent much of the following month visiting relatives, enjoying more parties and showers of gifts and congratulations.

Arlington was crowded with Washington relics—portraits, his bookcase, the bed in which he had died. One of the house slaves, Caroline Branham, had been in the bedroom when the founder breathed his last. She had been one of Martha Washington's slaves, who had not been freed in the President's will. Lee's marriage, wrote a kinsman, “made Robert Lee the representative of the founder of American liberty.”

It is not hard to imagine the shock and horror that swept through Fortress Monroe when the news of Nat Turner's insurrection reached its officers and men. For Mary Custis Lee, it must have seemed a ghastly intrusion on her happiness. The fort's commander immediately ordered the gates locked, barring the admittance of several dozen slave workmen who had been helping to rebuild part of the walls.

Three companies of regulars—perhaps 350 men—were ordered to march immediately to reinforce the militia sent to suppress Turner's revolt. Five additional companies were rushed to the fort. By the time the regulars reached Southampton County, Virginia militia had dispersed, killed, or captured Nat Turner's men. Only Turner himself escaped, remaining at large for another seven weeks.

As an engineering officer, Captain Lee did not accompany the dispatched regulars. But the stories that the Lees read in the newspapers or heard from fellow officers over the next several days must have left grisly memories. Rumor and terror swelled the insurrection's numbers into the hundreds and even the thousands.
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•      •      •

In Boston and elsewhere throughout the nation, newspaper headlines bellowed the story of Nat Turner: “
INSURRECTION IN VIRGINIA
!” William Lloyd Garrison pronounced himself “horror-struck.” Looking back to the poem about coming violence he had published in his first issue, he wrote: “What was poetry—imagination—in January is now a bloody reality.” Garrison invoked his professed pacifism to condemn the massacre, but he reminded his readers of the reason for it. “In his fury against the revolters, who will remember the wrongs?” he asked.

The answer to that question soon became evident: almost no one. Many of Turner's followers were beheaded on the spot when captured. Any slave suspected of collusion with them was likely to suffer a painful death. Over a hundred blacks died in the next month in a reaction marred by hysteria and cruelty in many ways worse than the insurrectionists had displayed. Garrison privately welcomed this retaliation. On October 19, 1831, he told one correspondent that he was pleased the “disturbances at the South still continue. The slaveholders are given over to destruction. They are determined to shut out the light.”

Here was a signal revelation of the fundamental flaw in William Lloyd Garrison's character, a flaw that permeated the New England view of the rest of America: an almost total lack of empathy. Fellow Americans had just
been exposed to an awful experience—a tragedy that dramatized in horrendous terms the problem of Southern slavery. Did Garrison express even a hint of sympathy or pity for these stunned, grieving families and their terrified neighbors? Did he confess that his immediate emancipation slogan was wrong, or at least in need of amendment? The only emotion Garrison permitted himself was thinly disguised gloating—and a call for sympathy for the slaves. No matter how much they deserved this emotion, was this the time to demand it?

•      •      •

Garrison soon found that slaveholders and many other people were determined to shut out
his
light. The
National Intelligencer
of Washington, DC, the closest thing the federal government had to a journalistic voice, accused him of “poisoning the waters of life” everywhere. The
Intelligencer
urged Boston authorities to shut down
The Liberator
. Garrison called this proof of “southern mendacity and folly.”

Silencing Garrison was soon endorsed by other newspapers and politicians. The Georgia legislature offered $5,000 to anyone who delivered him to the state for trial on a charge of seditious libel. Garrison raged it was a “bribe to kidnappers” and cited the Bill of Rights as his protection. One South Carolinian warned Boston that toleration of “seditious” journalism would inflict serious damage on the pocketbooks of her merchants.

Ironically, the mayor of Boston happened to be Garrison's Federalist hero, Harrison Grey Otis. He soon received a letter from Nelly Custis, George Washington's step-granddaughter, telling him how upset she was by
The Liberator
, which she blamed for Nat Turner's eruption. She thought Garrison deserved to be hanged for his crimes. He had made her feel as if she were “living on the edge of a volcano.”

Mayor Otis also received a letter from Senator Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina, with whom he had served in Congress. The senator asked if Otis could or would suppress
The Liberator
. The mayor sent policemen to the paper's one-room office, in which Garrison and Knapp slept, ate, and worked. The police wanted to know if they were bothering Senator Hayne
by sending him copies of their paper. Mayor Otis reported back to Senator Hayne that
The Liberator
was not worth suppressing. Garrison was a penniless malcontent who would never make the slightest impression on respectable people in Boston or anywhere else.
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•      •      •

Garrison began blaming most of his woes on the American Colonization Society. While its appeal to free American blacks remained minimal, the ACS's agents got a great deal of publicity in the newspapers, and they raised dismaying amounts of money. Even more irritating was the way they had won the backing of the established churches. The ACS's doctrine of gradual abolition gave thousands of vaguely antislavery whites the feeling that there was a way to end slavery with little or no pain or effort. Cash and patience were all that was needed.

Garrison decided to demolish this enemy of immediate abolition. By April 1832 he completed
Thoughts on African Colonization
, a book-length blast in his best denunciatory style. The American Colonization Society ignored the book, which sold little more than two thousand copies. Garrison learned that an ACS agent, Elliot Cresson, was in Britain raising money. The frustrated editor yearned to go there and challenge him—and win the blessing of his hero, William Wilberforce. He appealed for help from free blacks in Philadelphia and other communities, and soon had six hundred dollars in his bank account—more than enough to pay for a round trip.
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•      •      •

The editor of
The Liberator
arrived in England at an historic moment. The British abolitionists were on the brink of winning their forty-year struggle for the abolition of slavery in their West Indian colonies. Garrison's London host was a wealthy Quaker merchant, James Cropper, who escorted him to the crowded offices of the British Anti-slavery Society, where most of the leaders had gathered to receive hourly reports of the debate in Parliament.

Garrison visited the gallery of the House of Commons to hear the debates. Next he was invited to breakfast by Thomas Folwell Buxton, who had
succeeded the aging William Wilberforce as abolition's chief spokesman in Parliament. The big burly politician stared at the editor in amazement for a full minute, leaving Garrison nonplused. Finally Buxton exclaimed, “My dear sir, I thought you were a black man!” It was an inadvertent commentary on how few white Americans spoke out against slavery. Garrison put Buxton at ease by replying that his words were a compliment he would never forget.

•      •      •

Garrison was in England when Parliament passed the final version of the bill that abolished slavery in the West Indies. The key provision that had broken the long deadlock was the decision to pay twenty million pounds to the slave owners as compensation for the value of their 850,000 slaves. That was a hundred million 1830s American dollars—the equivalent of perhaps $2 billion today. Garrison disapproved of this compromise, although he did not undertake to lecture the British abolitionists about it. He remarked that it did not give much satisfaction to either the winners or the losers. Like most idealists before and since, compromise was a dirty word to Garrison. In his report to
The Liberator
, he focused instead in the tremendous wave of antislavery petitions that had engulfed Parliament. One was signed by 800,000 women.
¹⁰

Here was a moment when a different man—or a different reaction from Garrison—might have altered the course of American history. If Garrison had become a supporter of compensated emancipation, he might have found thousands of reasonable men agreeing with him. Instead he remained locked in his religious fervor, unaware that his New England–induced hatred of the South was distorting his crusade.