White Moderates in Maine Seek a “Middle Course” on the Slavery Question
When the Congregational ministers of Cumberland County caught wind that abolitionists were planning to form a Maine auxiliary of the American Anti-Slavery Society in the fall of 1834, they called a meeting to decide how to approach the sticky issue. Portland was heavily dependent on trade with Southern slave-holders, so they had no intention of joining the movement, but they also didn’t want to cede the moral high ground to a bunch of fanatical rabble-rousers. On Aug. 10, 1834, nearly all the pastors in the county gathered for a week-long meeting of the Cumberland Association of Congregational Ministers.
The clergy were especially critical of the abolitionists for opposing the American Colonization Society’s more conservative solution to the problem, which was to send free and enslaved African Americans across the ocean to colonize West Africa. Many attendees were members or supporters of the ACS and they voted unanimously to condemn any criticism of it.
As Calvin Montague Clark wrote in his History of the Congregational Churches in Maine, those gathered also criticized abolitionists for their tactics — their agitation within churches, in particular, which they argued was “likely to do mischief without promising much, if any good.” The ministers firmly opposed anti-slavery activists’ demands to introduce the topic of slavery into pulpits on Sundays. In the end, they voted 30-to-none that it was “not expedient” to attend the anti-slavery convention in Augusta. But as a reporter noted, the pastors still acknowledged that anti-slavery sentiment was growing among their congregants, who favored more “vigorous action against the evil of slavery” than what the ACS prescribed.
There were also a few prominent Congregational ministers who supported both the aims of the colonizationists and the abolitionists. The Rev. Benjamin Tappan, pastor of the South Parish Church in Augusta, was a leading abolitionist and ACS member who signed a letter opposing discussion of colonization at the Maine Anti-Slavery Society convention. On the floor of the convention that October, Rev. George Adams, pastor of the First Parish Congregationalist Church in Brunswick, tried to remove an anti-colonization clause in the society’s constitution and was supported by Rev. Stephen Thurston of Prospect (now Searsport). But the ACS’ adherents, led by prominent Whig attorney and activist Samuel Fessenden of Portland and Rev. Swan Pomeroy of Bangor, killed the motion.
Rev. Adams also attempted to prevent the state society from affiliating with the American Anti-Slavery Society, but failed to garner enough votes for passage. However, he did manage to pass a few resolutions to disassociate the society from the more radical elements of the movement. One rejected “all feelings of hostility towards our fellow citizens and brethren who hold slaves.” Rev. Pomeroy introduced and passed a resolution condemning “any unkind or uncharitable language” used by anti-slavery activists — likely a jab at the incendiary abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison. Another “moderate” resolution affirmed that the society opposed race mixing.
After the convention, Adams wrote to Rev. Asa Cummings, the conservative editor of the Christian Mirror. He praised the “truly Christian sentiment” of the society’s constitution, which declared that “slave-holding is a heinous crime against God and man” and called for immediate emancipation, without expatriation, as the “duty of the master and the right of the slave.”
“Had you been present,” he wrote Cummings, “I think your hand would have been the first to go up, in almost every case.” Even Cummings, an avowed anti-abolitionist, wrote that “the spirit manifested [at the convention] represented as excellent and conciliatory. Such a spirit we wish to encourage.”
The following January, several moderate pastors decided they needed to temper growing abolitionist fervor and joined a new organization founded by pacifist farmer William Ladd of Minot (the subject of last month’s Radical Mainers). The Society for the Relief and Improvement of the Colored Race sought, in the words of Rev. Cummings, “to steer the middle course between the abolition societies on the one hand and the Colonization Society on the other.”
On the morning of Jan. 14, 1835, a group of men, nearly all of them white, met at the Swedenborg Chapel on Beacon Hill in Boston to write the new group’s constitution. Among the delegates from 10 states were Ladd, Rev. George Beckwith of Portland, and Phineas Barnes of Waterville, who later served five terms in Congress and as editor of the Whig-leaning Portland Advertiser.
The new society’s mission was to promote “the intellectual and moral elevation of the colored race” and to use its members’ “moral influence… to convince all American citizens” that slavery is “wrong” and ought to be “universally abandoned (with the least practicable delay).” That parenthetical qualifier was later removed, lest it give the impression that the society supported immediate emancipation, which it certainly did not. While its members believed slavery was “bad,” they opposed any government effort to end it. Instead, as the Mirror correspondent wrote, the aim of the society was to “use kind language to our southern brethren” and show them that Northerners “sympathize with the real friends of emancipation at the south.”
On the first day of the moderates’ convention, abolitionists in the room rose to oppose the very formation of the society, causing an uproar. They were quickly shut down and warned against speaking further. Nevertheless, they continued to loudly object and insisted on making their voices heard. While these “anti-slavery friends” were “rather unpleasant,” the Mirror correspondent regretted that they were met with “a very prompt” and “rather uncourteous repulse.” He wished “a little more courtesy had been shown” to the detractors, since they had plenty of time for debate.
When a draft of the society’s constitution was presented that afternoon, some of the delegates thought it “too high toned” while others thought it “too low,” but most decided it struck just the right note. When all the votes were cast, it was adopted 100 yeas to four or five nays, three of whom were Black men.
“No instrument can be penned, so as to suit everybody, and as the American Constitution was penned on the principle of mutual concession, I hope this constitution will be generally acceptable to the friends of the colored race, throughout the country,” the correspondent wrote. He predicted abolitionists “of the old school” would withdraw their opposition to the society and embrace it as a collaborator.
The next step, the correspondent wrote, was to establish Society auxiliaries in every state to change public sentiment on slavery and “at no very distant day, declare to the world that America is free.” Despite the lack of support from Black delegates, another Maine attendee wrote in the Mirror that he could not see “how any friend of the blacks and his country can complain of a principle and an object so reasonable and practicable.”
On Sept. 12, white Congregationalists from all over Maine met for the first state convention of the Society for the Relief and Improvement of the Colored Race. The president of both the Maine and national societies was Ladd, the peace-promoting farmer from Minot. Most attendees were against immediate emancipation, and moderate abolitionists like Rev. Tappan, Rev. Pomeroy and Rev. Silas McKeen, of the North Church in Belfast, held leadership roles in the organization.
The group’s constitution was relatively mild in tone, nuanced, and a bit wishy-washy. Although it declared slavery was “inconsistent with the spirit of the gospel,” the authors opposed any interference “with the legal relation of master and slave,” except by using “moral influence” in the “spirit of kindness” to persuade slaveholders to willingly relinquish their human property. The convention made it clear that members “strongly” disapproved of “‘an angry, supercilious, and censorious manner’ of enforcing the truth,” because they considered those tactics “unchristian” and bound “not to convince or persuade.”
Instead, attendees argued that education and spiritual guidance of enslaved people would be the most effective means to achieve emancipation. The Mainers declared their willingness to commit financial resources to help slaveholders hire missionaries and teachers, of the slaver’s choosing, to preach the Gospel to their slaves. They also said it was the duty of a slave “to be obedient to his master, to seek his interest, and quietly to submit to his condition” — not because his master demanded it, but because God did.
Society members acknowledged that New Englanders shared in the guilt of participating in the slave trade, and they supported using public funds to purchase the freedom of enslaved workers. But the Maine moderates also worried that freeing African Americans could result in their “abandonment” to beggary, wretchedness and crime. That’s why they suggested slaveholders provide “guardianship like that of a wise and affectionate father, or master, over his child or apprentice” for their slaves’ well-being.
“We have full confidence,” they wrote, “that the wisdom of the South would now devise and accomplish a system of emancipation, far more advantageous both to the master and the slave, than is the present system of oppression.”
The upstart society’s watered-down abolitionism, its obsequiousness to the slave power and its paternalist attitude toward Black Americans did not catch on with the broader public. Within a year, the organization dissolved.
That year, 1835, became known as the “reign of terror,” as Southerners and their Northern allies incited violent mobs to forcibly silence anti-slavery activists. No matter how polite and accommodating the Northern moderates tried to be, slave-owning aristocrats were not about to give up the economic engine of the plantation South.
Southern elites increasingly turned to the Bible and racist pseudoscience to justify the enslavement of African people. The shrill Southern defense of slavery was immortalized in the words of South Carolina Governor George McDuffie, who argued in his 1835 message to the Legislature that the Black “race” was incapable of living as a free people because they were intellectually, physically, morally and politically inferior to the rest of the world’s population. He invoked the Bible to spin what Northerners broadly perceived as an immoral institution into a righteous and holy practice.
“In a word,” McDuffie concluded, “our slaves are cheerful, contented and happy, much beyond the general condition of the human race, except where those foreign intruders and fatal ministers of mischief, the emancipationists, like their arch-prototype in the Garden of Eden, and actuated by no less envy, have tempted them to aspire above the condition to which they have been assigned in the order of Providence.”
Andy O’Brien is a writer and communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO. You can reach him at andy@maineworkingclasshistory.com.
