"It may not be known by many young
readers that movement which led to the emancipation of slaves of
America had its beginnings in the South, and that first distinctively
abolition paper ever published in the country was published in East
Tennessee.
The mind of the general reader turns
almost England and to William Lloyd Garrison, and whenever the
question of antislavery is raised. But William Lloyd Garrison or
Wendell Phillips had left their teens, or Boston had her conscience
stirred, there was an incipient ant-slavery warfare raging in east
Tennessee which was destined to spread over the entire country.
At Lost Creek Meetinghouse in
Jefferson Tennessee Feb 25, 1815, there was organized the first
Manumission Society. Just how many composed this historic beginning
is not entirely clear, but the names of eight of come down to us and
have a place in the roll of Tennessee's immortals.
The boldness of this movement and the
character of the men may be judged by the first article of the
constitution they adopted. It reads, "Each member is to have an
advertisement in conspicuous part of his house in the following
words: Freedom is the natural right of all men; I therefore
acknowledge myself a member of the Tennessee Society for promoting
the manumission of slaves.'"
The methods by which they meant to
effect the organization is seen in Article Second, which stipulates
"no member shall vote for a governor or legislator unless him to
be in favor of emancipation."
The formation of other societies
followed rapidly, and on Nov 21, of the same year, they held their
annual convention in Greene County.
By the time of the next convention
which was held in Greeneville, the movement had spread over a large
part of East Tennessee, and many counties were represented in this
annual meeting.
Early in the year 1819 Elihu Embree,
a Quaker, began the publication of a paper in Jonesboro, TN, called
"The Manumission Intelligencer." a copy of which, bearing
the date July 19, 1819, is in the possession of a citizen in
Knoxville. This was the first paper ever published in the United
States devoted exclusively to antislavery principles.
Mr Embree died within a few months
after he started the paper, and his friends later invited Benjamin
Lundy, another Quaker living in Mount Pleasant, Ohio to come to
Tennessee and continue the work. Mr. Lundy had just begun to issue
an abolition paper in Mount Pleasant, called "The Genius of
Universal Emancipation," his first issue being January, 1821.
When the invitation of his brethren in
difficulties under which he labored at Mount promise of support in
Tennessee, led him to regard the call as providential. He had started
his paper some eighteen months before, with only six subscribers, and
the list had not grown fast.
He was not at this time a practical
printer, and their was no printing press in Mount Pleasant. It was
his to carry his copy to Steubenville, some twenty miles away, making
this journey on foot and returning with the printed edition on his
back.
He tells us in his autobiography that
in he traveled eight hundred miles partly by water, but mostly by
foot, reaching Greeneville, the scene of his future labors in
September,1821. Here he continued his "Genius of Universal
Emancipation" until he moved to Baltimore in the fall of 1824.
A few copies of this paper still exist, being in the State Library.
Another was given to Bishop Gilbert Haven when he visited Greeneville
shortly before his death.
Of Benjamin Lundy, Horace Greeley says
in his Great American : "Benjamin Lundy deserves the high renown
of ranking as the pioneer of direct and distincrive antislavery in
America. Many who lived before and are contemporaneous with him were
abolitionists; but he was the first of give his life and all his
powers exclusively to the cause of the slave."
Speaking of Benjamin Lundy, William
Loyd Garrison said: "Now, if I have in any way, however humble,
done anything toward calling attention to slavery, or bringing the
glorious prospect of emancipation at no distant day, I feel that I
owe everything in this matter, instrumentally and under God to
Benjamin Lundy.
It was in 1828 that Lundy having gone
to Boston to enlist the ministers of that city in the cause of
abolition, met Lloyd Garrison at the boarding house where he chanced
to stop. Mr Garrison was at that time a young man but twenty-three
years of age, and interested in the work of temperance. It was but a
step from one reform to the other, and Benjamin Lundy's persuasive
voice won him for the cause which has made him immortal.
Mr Lundy was a great traveler and a man
of wonderful patience and perseverance in his then thankless work.
He nearly always made his journeys on foot, earning his support as he
went, by making or mending saddles and harness, this having been his
trade in his early life.
As he went about over the country he
talked"abolition," distributed his literature, and,
whenever practicable, organized manumission societies. Thus he
traveled to Baltimore from Greeneville in 1824, and from Baltimore to
Boston two years later. He made two voyages to Hayti with the lthe
purpose of securing privfeges and lands for the founding of colonies
for freemen from the United States, and twice he tramped across Texas
to the Rio Grande for the same purpose. It is a matter of historic
note that the area now owned by Texas was "" under the
dominion of Mexico.
But in all of these efforts Lundy was
unsuccessful. He also made a visit to Canada and studied the
condition of the colony there. His greatest work was, perhaps, that
which at the time may have seemed least, namely the enlistment
William Loyd Garrison. Speaking of his labors, one has said: "he
had neither wealth nor eloquence to bring to the cause of
antislavery, but he had courage, perseverance, and devotion.
Connected with the Manumission Society
of East Tennessee were men also who traveled westward and carried the
fires of freedom into those parts. Among these were the Rev David
Nelson, of Washington County, and the Rev John Rankin, of Jefferson,
both of whom were Presbyterian ministers, and were prominent in the
work of abolitionists the state of Kentucky, whence they moved from
East Tennessee.
Mr Rankin had been a member of the
first Manumission Society, which was organized near his home in 1815,
and in 1817 he moved to Paris, Kentucky, and afterward to Ripley
Ohio, where he was a pastor until the Civil War. He was ever active
in the cause of the slave, his house being for a number of years the
first station in the underground railroad.
He sheltered "Eliza Harris,: of
:uncle Toms Cabin" fame, when she , having fled her master,
crossed the Ohio by leaping from one mass of floating ice to another.
Mr Rankin canvassed the State of Ohio in 1836, under the auspices
State Abolition Society, and has testified that in his early life the
majority of the people of east Tennessee were abolitionists: and at
that time it was much safer to make an antislavery speech in the
South than it was to make the same one in the North.
This is emphasized by the fact that in
1826 there hundred and forty-three antislavery societies in the
United States and of these one hundred and three were in the South.
So strong was the antislavery sentiment in east Tennessee in days
that many slaveholders emancipated their own accord. Nor did this
cease until the State Legislature passed laws prohibiting
emancipation, except on condition liberated should be sent out of the
state.
In the State Constitutional Convention,
held in 1834, a petition on emancipation was presented, signed by
more eighteen hundred persons, at least one hundred of whom were
slave owners. The prophetic feature of this petition is significant.
In as much as the provision of the constitutional amendment it prayed
was that a gradual emancipation might ensue, having as its the year
1866, when slavery should cease to exist throughout the state.
On July 23, 1866, President Johnson
signed the Tennessee into the Union, she having a few months before,
by the state legislative and popular vote, ratified an amendment to
the constitution abolishing slavery.
The old house where Benjamin Lundy
published his "Genious of Universal Emancipation" in
Greeneville has rotted aaway, but the very ground on which it stood
seems sacred. The quaint dress of the Quakers and their singular
speech are seen and heard no more among the people of Easr Tennessee,
but the memory of their spirit and labors in the cause of of humanity
lingers in the minds and hearts of the people.
Greeneville, Tenn. (Source: Christian
Advocate, Volume 76. 1901, pp. 851-853)
