[Sidenote: Points at which slavery could be legally attacked.]
Nevertheless, here were legal points of attack for the Abolitionists. They might memorialize Congress for the abolition of slavery in the Territories and in the District, and for the initiation of an amendment which would abolish slavery in the Commonwealths or would give Congress the power to do so, and they might appeal to the legislatures of the Commonwealths to demand of Congress the calling of a constitutional convention of the United States to initiate such an amendment. But Garrison would have nothing to do with the Constitution, or with existing legal methods. He denounced the Constitution, "as a covenant with death and an agreement with hell," and declared that he wanted "no union with slaveholders." His violent language, his repudiation of vested rights and constitutional agreements, and his fanatical disregard of other men's opinions and feelings, led the people both of the North and the South to believe that his methods were incendiary and his morals loose; that he and his co-workers were planning and plotting slave insurrection, and thereby the wholesale massacre of slaveholders; and that he and they were endeavoring to attain, through violence and anarchy, a leadership which they could not otherwise reach.
In August of 1831, a slave insurrection broke out in Southampton County, Va., under the leadership of a { 249} negro named Nat Turner, and more than sixty white persons, most of them women and children, were massacred in cold blood. The Southerners said, no doubt believed, that the insurrection was incited by the Abolitionists in the North. Governor Floyd, of Virginia, declared, in his message to the legislature upon the subject, that there was ample proof of it in the documents accompanying the message. The great mass of the people at the North believed the same thing. The Abolitionist historians assert, on the contrary, that there was no connection between the work of the Abolitionists and this event. We shall probably never know whether there was or not. This much we can say, that the radical character of the Abolition doctrines and the violence of the language in which they were expressed--not so much before as after this event, indeed--produced the universal feeling, both in the North and in the South, that these doctrines and this event were in perfect harmony, and that the latter might very naturally be the outcome of the former. The moral sentiment of the North was not prepared for the destruction of slavery by any such means. It considered these methods as containing ten times more evil and barbarism than slavery itself. It is just to say that what appeared to be the methods of the Abolitionists were revolting to the moral feelings of all the decent people of the North, and to ninety-nine one-hundredths of all the people of the North, while the Southerners saw in them nothing but the destruction of all law and order, the plunder of their property, the burning of their firesides, and the massacre of their families. The pronounced and determined manner in which the people of the North went about the work of suppressing the agitation occasioned by the Abolitionists is ample evidence to any sane mind that the indignation of a { 250} righteous conscience was fully aroused, and not the fury of a guilty conscience.
