Henry Stanton.
A “Reign of Terror” Against Free Speech in Maine
Weeks after the fiery newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison was nearly lynched by an anti-abolitionist mob in the streets of Boston on Oct. 21, 1835, he penned an editorial decrying the condition of democracy in the United States:
“When the reign of law passed away, the reign of terror begins, whether we are under the despotism of one or of many heads. Legislation is idle, and courts but mockery, when the public virtue is too feeble to sustain the laws, and the terror cast upon the community becomes the protection of violence, and a license for farther injustice. We may boast of our free institutions; but better were we the serfs of the soil of Poland or Russia, than the footballs and sport of brutal mobs in a land falsely called free.”
As an outspoken opponent of slavery, Garrison had become the face of the national abolitionist movement and one of the most hated men in America by the summer of 1835. In an effort to persuade slaveowners of the error of their ways, Northern abolitionists took advantage of cheap postal rates to flood the South with anti-slavery literature. But their attempts to appeal to the moral conscience of the South backfired. The campaign outraged Southern whites who saw it as an attack on their rights and feared it would foment a slave rebellion like the revolutionary Nat Turner’s deadly insurrection four years earlier.
On July 29, 1835, a pro-slavery mob calling themselves the “Lynch Men” broke into a post office in South Carolina, seized bundles of abolitionist newspapers and burned them with the help of the city postmaster. About 3,000 people gathered to watch the bonfire as Garrison, New York philanthropist Lewis Tappan and British anti-slavery orator George Thompson were also burned in effigy.
That summer, in Nashville, Tenn., Massachusetts native Amos Dresser was arrested and publicly whipped by a group of 60 prominent citizens for allegedly being a member of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society and possessing anti-slavery literature. At a meeting at Gloucester Courthouse, in Virginia, future president John Tyler, then a U.S. Senator, held up a copy of the Anti-Slavery Record he had received in the mail and took aim at Garrison, Tappan and Thompson for “patting the greasy little fellows on their cheeks, and giving them most lovely kisses.”
“They are the exclusive philanthropists,” Tyler mockingly proclaimed, “the only lovers of the human race — the only legitimate defenders of the religion of Christ.”
Up in Boston, rage at Garrison and Thompson was reaching a boiling point. Anti-abolitionists called for “the infamous foreign scoundrel Thompson” to be thrown into Boston Harbor like British tea. Immediately after Thompson’s lecture at Julian Hall, a group of abolitionist women had to act as a buffer to protect him from an angry mob.
Death threats constantly followed Garrison, and on Sept. 10, a makeshift gallows was erected in his front yard on Brighton Street. Then, on Oct. 21, all hell broke loose. A mob of “fifteen hundred or two thousand highly respectable gentlemen” stormed the annual meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society looking for Thompson. While the mob allowed a group of Black and white abolitionist women to exit through the throng arm in arm, the men pursued Garrison and seized him after he escaped out of a back window and tried to hide in a neighboring workshop.
“Lynch him!” shouted the mob. “Turn him a right nigger color with tar!”
But as he was being lowered from a shop window, two burly working-class Irish brothers, Daniel and Buff Cooley, rescued Garrison and brought him safely to the mayor’s office on State Street. Garrison was placed in a jail cell for the night for his own safety. On the wall, he wrote:
“William Lloyd Garrison was put into this cell on Wednesday afternoon, October 21, 1835, to save him from the violence of a ‘respectable and influential’ mob, who sought to destroy him for preaching the abominable and dangerous doctrine that ‘all men are created equal’ and that all oppression is odious in the sight of God.”
Up in Portland, a two-day carriage ride north, anti-abolitionists were ready to take action against a tiny group of rabble-rousers in the city. On August 13, Gen. John Chandler, Collector of Customs for the Port of Portland, presented a resolution during a meeting at City Hall declaring that abolitionism was “the officious intermeddling of unauthorized individuals and self-erected societies in the non-slaveholding states… hazarding the dissolution of the Union.” Chandler’s resolution further declared that it should be up to slaveholding states to decide whether to give up their slaves, and condemned Thompson as a “foreigner” interfering with the “domestic relations” of the states.
The following month, Portland’s Christian Mirror remarked that Maine had thus far “kept herself almost entirely free from the disgrace and sin of mobbery” — that is, until an anti-abolitionist mob drove Rev. David Thurston out of Bloomfield (present-day Skowhegan).
Portland Mayor Levi Cutter initially granted use of City Hall for an anti-slavery meeting featuring the orator Henry B. Stanton, husband of famed women’s rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, on Oct. 26, 1835. But local attorney Randolph Augustus Lawrence Codman, who was later elected to the Maine Legislature, vowed to “put Abolitionists down, peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.”
At a gathering the night before the event, Codman, eminent writer John Neal and others called on the mayor to reverse his decision. Mayor Cutter relented, and after unsuccessfully trying to convince the anti-slavery society to voluntarily give up the hall, he revoked their permission to use it. Scrambling to find a new venue, the organizers ended up holding the meeting at the Friends (Quaker) Meeting House on the corner of Federal and Pearl streets in Portland. No other church in the city would allow them use of their building.
That evening, several men and boys gathered outside the meeting house to jeer the abolitionists and peg them with eggs. As an eyewitness reported in the Liberator, as soon as Stanton began his speech, he was interrupted by “the sound of a tin horn ‘braying horrible discord’ and a shout loud enough to drown his voice.”
“The house was immediately surrounded with a host of miscreants, who commenced pelting the windows with stones, throwing some very heavy ones into the house, and in various ways trying to break up the assembly,” according to the witness’ account.
Amid menacing shouts and smashing glass, Stanton patiently finished his speech and the rioters dispersed. The abolitionists knew the hooting “demon mobs” would be back in greater numbers for another meeting the following evening, so they pleaded with Mayor Cutter to provide a security detail.
The next night, meeting attendees were met by hundreds of men blocking the Quaker Meeting House. Mayor Cutter, a group of peace officers, and Neal worked to keep the mob under control.
“Though the mob had assembled, and were organized, with leaders and a watchword, with the avowed intention of breaking up the meeting and dragging Stanton from the desk, yet the calmness of the speaker and audience, and the resoluteness of the Mayor completely confounded them,” the witness reported.
“When Stanton left the house, the mob followed him, shouting,” the account continued, “but, though unprotected, not one of them dared to lay the weight of his finger. By the advice of the City officers, they soon after dispersed; and so ended the first Anti-Abolition mob in Portland. It is pleasing to add, that there was not among them a single ‘gentleman of property and standing’; not one, who can lay any claim to respectability.”
Stanton lectured five times in Portland, and by the last afternoon meeting, none of the mobbers bothered to show up. The Liberator correspondent called it a “glorious triumph of freedom of speech” that the abolitionists were “protected by those most opposed to their principles.”
“Let men who are opposed to Lynch law follow the example of Portland, and unite themselves with the constituted authorities for the preservation of the public peace, whenever a riot is contemplated, and mobs will soon be unknown at the North,” the writer concluded.
Stanton reported that a little light mobbing was actually good for fundraising. One gentleman told him he had originally intended to donate five dollars but, after seeing the mob, he gave fifteen. Another man was planning to give $10, but after the fracas he handed Stanton $100.
The disruption of abolitionist meetings in Maine was mild compared to the violence in other states. For example, a mob burned down the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society headquarters in Philadelphia on May 17, 1838, but the most excitement in Maine that year happened when an abolitionist meeting in Bridgton was broken up by a pro-slavery brass band.
In 1839, Black abolitionist Charles Lennox was pelted with eggs in Hampden and had his carriage vandalized by a gang of white men in blackface. At his next stop, in Calais, he was repeatedly interrupted by a drunk during his lecture, and an elderly man was hit in the face with a large rock, causing his nose to “bleed very freely.”
Maine Abolitionists liked to mock the local mobbers as a bunch of numb country wannabes trying to emulate the big-city bullies — and failing miserably.
Andy O’Brien is a writer and communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO. You can reach him at andy@maineworkingclasshistory.com.
