The Crusade against Slavery, 1830-1860,
By Louis Filler

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Preface
IN THE 1830's and after the winds of reform shook the United States more furiously than ever they had since the Revolution. Not only were there more causes than before, but, in an era of "the rise of the common man," they affected more people. In such an atmosphere of unrest, the status of the Negro, both enslaved and free, became an increasingly urgent and pre-eminent issue, and, in the end, divided the nation.

The abolition and reform movements were complex by nature, carrying emotional overtones, and associated with spectacular events. It was not possible to present disinterested analyses of their content and direction, either in their time or for a long time thereafter. The growth of free soil and the struggle to preserve the Union made reform seem less important, and confused the definition of abolition. In the post-Civil War period the reformers, once bound together by concern for the slave, by free speech, temperance, education, woman's rights, and other causes, tended to separate, each to pursue his own specialty. This growing emphasis on "specialists" made it increasingly difficult to accept the fact that one could agitate for woman's rights, and education, and the rights of the individual all at once--that many Americans had once done so. Hence, although there have been numerous biographies of pre-Civil War reformers, and monumental histories of woman's rights, temperance, education, and other crusades, their relevance to each other has been less persistently sought. The central hub of reform--abolition--has received fragmented consideration, for the most part, in the interest of one or another major figure.

It has been too readily assumed that the "moral struggle" against slavery in the 1830's became transformed, from 1840 to 1860, into a "political struggle" which diminished the value of the abolitionists. Whether true or false, the thesis requires re-examination. The present volume traces the relationship of antislavery to abolition, and probes their connection with the several reforms which dominated the period. It attempts to avoid merely mentioning names, to say nothing of name-calling. It seeks, rather, to discriminate among individuals and inquire into their purposes and worth. It endeavors to recapture a sense of the contemporary consequence which reformers enjoyed; and it may well be that such an attempt affects our judgment of their relevance to our own times.

The available materials are as numerous, as complex as our "densepack'd cities," as broad as our "myriad fields." The investigator who seeks to rise above the level of partisanship has a delicate task in seeking out representative materials intended to open inquiry, rather than to close it, while at the same time satisfying the reader's right to know how the author feels about his own findings.

My appreciation is due Antioch College, the American Philosophical Society, and the Social Science Research Council, which, at strategic points, provided grants in aid of research and for related expenses. Antioch College's fine library staff helped keep materials coming during the long preparation of the manuscript, and its excellent sabbatical policy enabled me to complete the work. Many more people than can be conveniently mentioned have given aid and comfort, suggestions and advice. Thanks are due, first, to my editors, Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, who gave this work the benefit of their long experience and understanding. Numerous persons read the manuscript in part, and many more influenced the formulation of passages and ideas. It is a pleasure to note, among my colleagues, Professors Bernard A. Weisberger of the University of Chicago, the late Robert S. Fletcher of Oberlin College, Harry R. Stevens of Ohio University, Wesley M. Gewehr, emeritus professor of history at the University of Maryland, Lawrence A. Cremin of Teachers College, Columbia University, C. Stanley Urban of Park College, Mary E. Young of Ohio State University, Dean Lloyd E. Worner of The Colorado College, and Bernard Mandel of Cleveland. Mr. Boyd B. Stutler of Charleston, West Virginia, not only gave freely from his great store of information about John Brown and related topics, but contributed a warm interest which was welcome during stonier stages of investigation. Librarians are friendly folks, and one is grateful to them as a class. Helpful beyond the strict call of duty were Mrs. Alene Lowe White of the Western Reserve Historical Society, Miss Lelia F. Holloway of the Oberlin College Library, and Miss Louise F. Kampf of The Colorado College, as well as Dr. Henry J. Caren, Associate Editor of the Ohio Historical Quarterly.

CHAPTER 1
The Challenge of Slavery
THROUGHOUT the colonial period and after the American Revolution, slavery was accepted by most Americans as a normal and inevitable aspect of their affairs. True, it became more and more confined, as a working institution, to the southern states. True, also, relatively few Americans had a direct economic stake in its perpetuation. These few, however, included some of the most respected elements of society. They bought and sold slaves, rented them as laborers, and otherwise lived by money gained from their use. To no small degree, they involved in their fortunes non-slaveholding Northerners from whom they purchased goods and services and for whom they felt friendship. They enjoyed the good will of humbler classes of Southerners and Northerners who despised the Negro for his color or feared him as a possible competitor.

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Yet curiously enough, during the decades which preceded the reform era, slavery inspired not one notable literary or legal defense. Many influential leaders of society assumed that it must ultimately give way to a more democratic order. Others deplored its workings and sought to hasten its end. Their compassion sometimes extended to the Indian, as well, who had also been marked for enslavement, though he was less tractable than the black man. In New England, back in the seventeenth century, John Eliot, "apostle to the Indians," had been stirred to his saintly labors of Indian conversion. In the South, the following century, Christian Priber, from Saxony, adopted the Cherokees in western Carolina; he died a prisoner of Oglethorpe, English reformer and founder of Georgia. 1 Among others, Samuel Sew. all, notable Massachusetts diarist and penitent judge of the Salem witchcraft hysteria, had been concerned over the right and wrong of slavery, and had undertaken to pay his own slave for services rendered. Theirs were literally voices crying in the wilderness.

It would later become a major assumption in American history that the frontier had fostered freedom. There is, indeed, persuasive evidence that the frontier encouraged the creation of democratic ideas and attitudes and helped push democratic leaders to the fore, but it did not, on the other hand, help to undermine slavery. The frontier tended to reflect the prejudices and expectations of those who settled it. It permitted them almost unbounded opportunity, so that practical and experimental, progressive and patently reactionary, modes of behavior flourished according to the strength of their sponsors. Cosmopolitan Cincinnati in Ohio and Mormon Nauvoo in Illinois, Natchez with its Old South ways and atheistic New Harmony in Indiana--all were made possible by the open terrain. 2 It was part of the tragedy of the South that its rapidly tightening social system should have so dominated its own frontier as not to have permitted a leavening process between the new areas being developed in the South and the original states. Western Virginia--hilly, with few slaves, with large numbers of poor whites and individualists--was not able to modify Old Virginia's ways. Ultimately, they separated. 3

The American Revolution and the years following excited new expectations that slavery must soon dwindle in strength and prestige. Such actual plans for ending it as maintaining high tariffs on the slave trade, or permitting slaves to buy their own freedom, were impractical. 4 But the spirit of the times seemed to favor an expansion of civil and other liberties. Leading Southerners freely expressed abhorrence of the foreign slave trade and domestic slavery. Not a few rewarded loyal slaves with manumissions for services during the Revolutionary War. Dr. Samuel Hopkins, noted theologian and a disciple of the great Jonathan Edwards, expressed himself in behalf of the slave, and contributed a vital Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans ( 1776) to the Revolutionary debate. After the Revolution had been fought and won, it continued to influence the American imagination; identification with it would strengthen a demand for a specific reform. The Negro's cause was seen as aided by his association with the Revolutionary effort, which was regarded as the most favorable era in Negro-white relations. In due course, antislavery views of the Revolutionary Fathers would be carefully collected and widely quoted. 5

But with the war over, popular interest in the slave declined. Abolitionist petitions to the first Federal Congress were, according to one caustic observer, received "with a sneer" by John Adams, presiding, and with hostility by distinguished senators. Such acts as Virginia's, officially manumitting Negroes who had served the Revolution, did not contribute to a landslide of manumissions, although well into the nineties it was customary for slaveowners to manumit some of their faithful Negroes by will. 6

The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 made slavery profitable in cotton cultivation; thereafter, the southern leadship became more assertive in defense of its rights. Representative Northerners unequivocally expressed their antislavery sentiments, but they did not speak for a section united on the issue, nor were they themselves clear about what should be done. Sensibilities on the subject took time to form in the North. William Jay, soon to be one of the most distinguished of abolitionists, was proud of the career of his father, John Jay, and of the latter's services as president of the pioneer Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves. His biography of the first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court placed Jay's ownership of slaves in a special category:

In the year 1798, being called upon by the United States marshal for an account of his taxable property, [ John Jay] accompanied a list of his slaves with the following observations:

"I purchase slaves, and manumit them at proper ages, and when their faithful services shall have afforded a reasonable retribution."

As free servants became more common, he was gradually relieved from the necessity of purchasing slaves; and the last two which he manumitted he retained for many years in his family, at the customary wages. 7

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Thus, in this early period, antislavery leaders resorted to slaveowning for "humane" ends.

By 1825, North and South were clearly distinguishable in their attitude toward slavery, but not in their attitude toward the Negro. The celebrated visit of the Marquis de Lafayette, in that year, helped underscore how far the new nation had fallen from earlier expectations. The eminent Frenchman received an appeal from a publicspirited citizen to speak out against slavery, the latter having "a recollection of the notices in my early youth of thy generous efforts in the Cause of American liberty," and being convinced that the General's views would be received with enthusiasm. 8 But Lafayette himself was dismayed by the amount of anti-Negro prejudice he observed, in the North as well as in the South, and remarked that during the Revolution "black and white soldiers messed together without hesitation." 9

Theodore Dwight and John Sergeant were typical of many Northerners who were sincerely antislavery in sentiment, but who inadvertently fell into the posture of mere sectionalists. Theodore Dwight, editor of the New York Daily Advertiser, not only favored the abolition of slavery; he denounced the flogging of soldiers, and cruelty toward Negroes, Indians, Eskimos, mental patients, and even lobsters. But besides being a reformer he was also an ardent Federalist, whose strictures on the virtues and vices of Thomas Jefferson were far from dispassionate. 10 John Sergeant was an outstanding Philadelphia lawyer and congressman who earned the denunciation of Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina as being "a distinguished advocate of the Missouri restriction, an acknowledged abolitionist." There is no evidence, however, that Sergeant had any regard for Negroes as individuals or as a people. 11 Having little firsthand knowledge of slavery's workings, such partisans failed to acquire the information which would have added sinews to their arguments opposing it. Of different mettle was Benjamin Lundy, greatest of the pioneer abolitionists, who noted in 1826 that the governor of South Carolina had recommended that the custom of burning slaves in capital cases be stopped. "Is it possible that this has not been done long ago?" Lundy asked. "Will the cruelties of slaveholders hence be denied, as they have, by slaveite editors?" 12

The majority of Lundy's fellow Northerners remained indifferent to such practices; in fact, not a few of them were actively proslavery. The line between anti-Negro sentiment and proslavery feeling was sometimes shadowy, but Major Mordecai Manuel Noah, picturesque and popular Jacksonian, did not beat about the bush. Noah preached the rights of man, but also defended enslavement for the Negro. His point of view was shared by numerous elements throughout the North. 13

Daniel Webster, in his greatest peroration, pleading in 1830 for "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable," observed that suspicion had been fostered in the South against the North for political reasons. The North was represented as "disposed to interfere with them in their own exclusive and peculiar concerns." The charge was untrue, Webster averred: "Such interference has never been supposed to be within the power of government; nor has it been, in any way, attempted." Many other Northerners adopted an equally virtuous stand regarding their willingness to live with slavery as a system. 14 Their insensitivity was a major challenge, not only to abolitionists, but to other antislavery partisans now coming to be frustrated in their hopes that southern spokesmen would support programs for freeing slaves. But as Theodore Parker was to point out in sermon after sermon, the supporter of the slave system would not let the North alone. Horace Greeley was one day to sum up the problem brilliantly:

"Why can't you let Slavery alone?" was imperiously or querulously demanded at the North, throughout the long struggle preceding [the bombardment of Fort Sumter], by men who should have seen, but would not, that Slavery never left the North alone, nor thought of so doing. "Buy Louisiana for us!" said the slaveholders. "With pleasure." "Now Florida!" "Certainly." Next: "Violate your treaties with the Creeks and Cherokees; expel those tribes from the lands they have held from time immemorial, so as to let us expand our plantations." "So said, so done." "Now for Texas!" "You have it." "Next, a third more of Mexico!" "Yours it is." "Now, break the Missouri Compact, and let Slavery wrestle with Free Labor for the vast region consecrated by that Compact to Freedom!" "Very good. What next?" "Buy us Cuba, for One Hundred and Fifty Millions." "We have tried; but Spain refuses to sell it." "Then wrest it from her at all hazards!" And all this time, while Slavery was using the Union as her catspaw--dragging the Republic into iniquitous wars and enormous expenditures, and grasping empire after empire thereby--Northern men (or, more accurately, men at the North) were constantly asking why people living in the Free States could not let Slavery alone, mind their own business, and expend their surplus philanthropy on the poor at their own doors, rather than on the happy and contented slaves! 15

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J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-Earth,
By George Clark, Daniel Timmons

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1
Tolkien the Bard: His Tale Grew in the Telling
C. W. Sullivan III

"There is something about Tolkien's art which eludes the conventional strategies of contemporary criticism, even when these are deployed with sympathy and patience." This view from Brian Rosebury in Tolkien: A Critical Assessment (4) is insightful. The key words are, of course, "conventional" and "contemporary," for what Tolkien was doing, for all his contemporary popularity, was anything but writing a contemporary--or modern--novel. Given that he was not writing a modern novel, it is quite typical that conventional criticism can make little of Hobbit and LR other than reduce them to World War II allegories or mere escapist yearnings for a passing rural England (the sort of criticism continually aimed at The Wind in the Willows, among others). What was Tolkien doing, then? As a student of traditional narrative, I have returned to Tolkien's two most famous books from time to time and have begun an argument that I would like to continue here. 1 I believe that Tolkien committed a traditionally patterned oral narrative to paper, and that we can understand Hobbit and LR better if we look at them not through the lenses of modern critical methods but through lenses developed for the study of earlier works. 2

Clearly, Tolkien drew his inspiration from the older literatures of the north and west of Europe and from other writers, such as (and especially, perhaps) William Morris, who made fiction based on those ancient narratives. Many critics, myself among them, have commented on the traditional Märchen plot that structures both of Tolkien's novels. 3 Other primary evidence for traditionality includes the dwarf names taken from the Elder Edda, a dragon kin to the one described in Beowulf a wizard from the Merlin/Druidic tradition, a dragon slayer with the requisite magic arrow, elves and dwarves and trolls from northern European lore in general, a ring of invisibility, a band of sleeping warriors, a mirror of seeing, a throne of power, a greedy town mayor, a magical healing draught, plant seeds of exceptional fertility, a dragon's missing breastplate, and a host of other familiar motifs--and not all of them fantastic--from myth, legend and folktale. 4

Tolkien did not "borrow" these materials from ancient prose and poetry any more than any traditional artist borrows his or her material, be it a ballad or a quilt pattern. Like traditionally recognized folk performers, Tolkien was using material that he had been conversant with, quite literally, from childhood. He may have learned much of it in more formal circumstances than a ballad singer or a quilter does, but those were the only places--that is, classrooms and books--where that material was available to him. Thus, when he came to write Hobbit and LR, it was after many years' apprenticeship in the halls of academe; and when he wrote about the dwarves, he knew their names and the pattern of their story from a lifetime of experience, just as a ballad singer knows the verses or the quilt maker knows the pattern. He made this traditional story his own by creating the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, and by splitting the heroics, almost at the last minute, between two characters: Bilbo, who finds the answers, and Bard, of the Royal Line of Dale, who slays the dragon. The same split, this time between Frodo and Aragorn, occurs much earlier and is developed more fully in LR. And even that split may have been influenced by tradition.

I am not about to assert that Tolkien was a folk performer and that Hobbit and LR are folktale and legend, respectively--although Katharyn Crabbe 1981 J.R.R. Tolkien does analyze them quite profitably as fairy tale and legend (the literary forms of the traditional folktale and legend). What I can provide is some evidence that Tolkien was exposed early to the dragon slayer tale, a tale that figures as a central motif in most of his later fiction, and that he was influenced by other authors, perhaps most especially William Morris, who were also attempting to write fiction patterned after older oral forms. In addition, I can offer some comments about ancient northern European literature in general and the Icelandic family sagas in particular, which will be clearly applicable to Tolkien's writing--much more applicable, in fact, than Aristotelian poetics or the theory of the properly structured novel.

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Humphrey Carpenter remarks that Tolkien found that William Morris's view of literature was very like his own, and that in the prose-verse romance The House of the Wolfings "Morris had tried to recreate the excitement he himself had found in the pages of early English and Icelandic narratives" ( 70 ). And that is exactly what Tolkien would later do in his narratives. As T. A. Shippey suggests, "[l]ike Walter Scott or William Morris before him, [ Tolkien] felt the perilous charm of the archaic world of the North, recovered from bits and scraps by generations of inquiry. He wanted to tell a story about it simply, one feels, because there were hardly any complete ones left" ( 54 ). Indeed, Tolkien himself remarked that the "prime motive [for writing LR] was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them" ( FR11).

Shippey and Tolkien both use the word "story," and this term is yet another stumbling block to which critics have yet to pay enough attention. 5 C. S. Lewis warned us about that problem some time ago:

Those'hose forms of literature in which Story exists merely as a means to something else--for example, the novel of manners where the story is there for the sake of the characters, or the criticism of social conditions--have had full justice done to them; but those forms in which everything else is there for the sake of the story have been given little serious attention. ( 3 )

Lewis points in a direction in which mythology-in-literature scholar John Vickery continues when Vickery argues that most mythology-in-literature critics would agree that "myth forms the matrix out of which literature emerges both historically and psychologically" (ix). That is, the Story came first, even though all of the uses to which it has been put and all of the critical means by which it has been interpreted have overshadowed story of late ( Sullivan 18 ).

Furthermore, understanding the nature of traditional narrative, of story, can also put us on the road to understanding rather more complex issues in contemporary fiction: issues of story that have been overlooked in the critical rush to deconstruct the modern forest into its component postmodern trees; issues of story that have been lost in the critical study of the novel (an essentially reality-based narrative, ultimately Aristotelian in its structure and well-made according to its nineteenth-century aesthetic); issues of story that have been ignored as literature was separated into elite and popular (primarily by the New York establishment and university English departments); issues of story that have become confused as realism was championed over fantasy and then the designation "magic realism" was coined so that no one would have to admit that Borges is writing a kind of fantasy and Theroux is stealing ideas, and old ones at that, from science fiction; issues of story that have been pushed aside as literary criticism has privileged novel over narrative, privileged writer over teller, and (most recently) privileged criticism over fiction.

The inadequacy of contemporary criticism to deal with Tolkien's novels was reinforced, as I researched for this essay, by Icelandic scholar Theodore M. Andersson, who commented on the same critical situation in regard to the Icelandic family sagas.

[T]he sagas stand outside of the ironic or intellectual tradition to which the reader of prose narrative has been accustomed since the advent of modern fiction. The saga is plane [sic] narrative with no vertical dimensions; the sagateller does not manipulate the complicated set of mirrors used by the modern author to catch and bind together himself, his subject, and his reader. ( 1967, 31 - 32 )

Andersson concludes that section of his book with a very telling comment: "In short, the saga comes very close to pure narrative" ( 32 ). In other words, what the saga is about is the story.

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Andersson study The Icelandic Family Saga contains a great deal that might illuminate Tolkien's art. The structure of the plots of Tolkien's novels corresponds quite nicely to the structural pattern Andersson articulates for the Icelandic family saga, with the obvious exception of the revenge element; however, the second section of his book, "The Rhetoric of the Saga," is particularly interesting. In that section, Andersson argues that the "arrangement of the material and the progress of the narrative are governed by certain principles and techniques, which may almost be formulated as saga laws and which combine to give the saga its peculiar complexion" ( 32 - 33 ). The rhetorical structure that Andersson advances for the saga applies to Tolkien's novels as well. 6

The first principal Andersson advances is one of unity: "The saga has a brand of unity not unlike the classical injunction against the proliferation of plot in drama. . . . The story is seen only in terms of the climax. Everything that precedes the climax is conceived as preparation for it and everything that follows is conceived as a logical consequence" ( 33 ). Quite clearly the unilinear plot of Hobbit can be described this way, but so also can the multilinear plot of LR. Even after the Nine Walkers become sundered and various hobbits, men, dwarves, and elves follow several plotlines to the climax, all are headed inexorably in that direction, each following his own path. "What is unique," Andersson says of the saga, "is the deliberate and single-minded way in which the story is related to the high point and the peak of the pyramid is achieved" ( 35 ).

Andersson describes the progress of individual and sequential narrative events as scaffolding: "The episodes leading to the climax necessarily all tend in that direction, but they can be unrelated to each other" ( 35 ), and each episode "is an independent drama" ( 38 ). This is less true of Hobbit, as its plot is basically sequential, but it is certainly descriptive of the several plots in LR after the breakup of the Fellowship. The three main plots--Frodo and Sam, Merry and Pippin, and Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli--are not dependent upon one another; each set of characters succeeds on its own, and the only thing the three sets of characters have in common is that they are all headed toward the same end, the narrative's climax. "Although . . . these episodes are related," Andersson concludes, "each is an independent action" ( 38 ).

Within the scaffolding structure, Andersson delineates several techniques by which the saga author "guides the action toward a conclusion." One such is escalation, "the technique of staggering the episodes. . . . in order of jeopardy; each succeeding adventure is more provocative or perilous than its predecessor" ( 38 ). This is certainly the case in both of Tolkien's novels. In Hobbit, the confrontations escalate from the almost-Cockney trolls to that most fearsome of beasts, the dragon; along the way, Bilbo develops to match the increasingly formidable challenges. In LR, even the secondary characters take on increasingly difficult challenges as Frodo moves from a vague fear of the Black Riders to the final confrontation with Sauron. Andersson suggests that escalation can be achieved by "an increase of danger, a multiplying of portents, a deterioration of behavior, [or] a quickening of the pace" ( 40 ).

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Balancing the escalation of episodes in the saga, Andersson sees something he calls retardation, "a meaningful slackening of the pace" ( 40 ). This retardation "arrests the pace and leads to the anticipated climax obliquely and slowly" ( 42 ). Such breaks in the action occur in both novels. There are two major respites in Hobbit: the stay at the Last Homely House, a pause before heading off into the "real" wilderness, and the refuge with Beorn, a pause before beginning the last stage of the journey. There are more such respites in LR, but the major ones are the passage through Bombadil's enchanted wood, a stop at the Last Homely House, where the Fellowship is assembled, and the stay in Lothlórien--all three incidents in which the pace of the story is dramatically slowed and the characters are able to rest. This retardation, Andersson comments, functions "to delay the climax and concentrate interest" ( 42 ). And in Tolkien, it often serves, as does the stay in Lothlórien, to concentrate interest on the climax by showing what may be lost if Sauron triumphs.

The balance between escalation and retardation is one indication of what Andersson calls the symmetry of the saga. Further, he notes that the "saga authors have a fondness for the use of pairs and series in their plot structures" ( 43 ). This element of structuring is very common in traditional narratives of all kinds; for example, the number three--three sisters, three wishes, and so on--appears in a variety of legends and folktales. Tolkien's narratives are full of pairs: Bilbo and Frodo, for example, the latter enacting a plot similar to the former's adventures. The Frodo/Sam duality is set off by the Frodo/Gollum and the Gollum/Sméagol dualities, forming a triangle of dualities or series of pairs. Strider becomes Aragorn, Gandalf the Grey becomes Gandalf the White, Saruman is a small Sauron, the smaller spiders in Hobbit prefigure Shelob in LR, and so on. Even the humorous series that Andersson finds characteristic of saga symmetry ( 48 - 49 ) is reflected in Tolkien's books, most obviously in the arrival of the dwarves at Bilbo's hobbit-hole and later in its parallel at Beorn's home.

Andersson suggests that the "most obvious and ubiquitous rhetorical device in the sagas is foreshadowing" ( 49 ; my italics). Foreshadowing is certainly prevalent in both of Tolkien's novels; early in each, Gandalf sits with the main character, and, in Hobbit, some others, and outlines the general course of the action to follow and the challenge to be confronted. This initial foreshadowing is followed, in each work, by a more complete explication of the problem and a more detailed discussion of each quest at the Last Homely House. In addition, there are various signs, portents, maps, prophecies, and other elements that indicate, in Andersson's words, "the goal of the story" ( 49 ). By setting out the story, and prefiguring the climax, foreshadowing helps distribute "interest over the whole text and prevents the otherwise heavily stressed climax from eclipsing the rest of the story" ( 49 ).

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