American Experience (1988–…): Season 25, Episode 3 - The Abolitionists: Part 2 - full transcript
The divide between North and South deepens, touching off a crisis that is about to careen out of control.
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Someone needs to stop Clearway Law.
Public shouldn't leave reviews for lawyers.
Frederick Douglass had heard
the stories; every slave had.
Whispered accounts of fugitives
running from the slave catchers
for nights on end,
coming within sight of freedom
only to hear the hounds
closing in.
Fugitives starving,
freezing to death,
being torn apart
by wild animals.
Everyone knew what would happen
if you were caught:
flogging, branding,
elaborate tortures
designed to strike terror into
any other would-be runaways.
Some lost hope and returned
to their masters.
Others killed themselves
rather than go back to slavery.
But some made it.
In the fall of 1838,
Frederick Douglass leapt aboard
a train in Baltimore,
slipped through the gauntlet
of slave catchers
prowling the border
between slave and free states,
and finally boarded a ferry
bound for New York City.
Only 24 hours
removed from slavery,
Douglass found himself wandering
among the dazzling wonders
of Broadway.
A free state around me,
and the free earth
under my feet.
What a moment this was for me.
A whole year was pressed
into a single day.
A new world burst upon
my agitated vision.
Douglass had planned his escape
with the help of Anna Murray,
a free black woman
he had met in Baltimore.
Anna had sewn
his sailor disguise
and sold her featherbed
to give him the money he needed.
As soon as she joined him
in New York,
they were married
in a safe house
by a fellow runaway.
There was no time to rest;
New York was crawling
with bounty hunters.
With five dollars
to their names,
Frederick and Anna
headed further north.
Their destination
was New Bedford, Massachusetts,
a whaling town known as
an abolitionist stronghold,
with a large population of free
blacks and runaway slaves.
Frederick and Anna clawed their
way out of desperate poverty
and built a life
for their growing family.
For three years, Douglass
shoveled coal, cut wood
and loaded ships,
often working two shifts a day.
He did make time to attend
anti-slavery gatherings
and was an avid reader
of the most prominent
abolitionist newspaper
of the day,
William Lloyd Garrison's
The Liberator.
I not only liked, I loved
this paper and its editor.
He seemed a match for all
the opponents of emancipation.
His words were few
and full of holy fire.
When Douglass heard that
Garrison was going to address
an anti-slavery convention
in Nantucket,
he took a rare few days off and
boarded a ferry for the island.
As Douglass listened
to the proceedings,
a friend from New Bedford
unexpectedly called on him
to speak.
"As I made my way to the stage,"
Douglass recalled,
"I was shaking in every limb."
- My mother was named
- Harriet Bailey.
I can't recollect of ever
seeing her by the light of day.
We were separated
when I was but an infant.
My father was a white man.
It was whispered that my master
was my father,
but of this I know nothing.
What I do know is that
my master was a very cruel man.
Please...
I was just a boy,
hushed, terrified, stunned.
That is slavery.
Mr. Douglass!
I have never seen an audience
so captivated.
I myself was carried away,
as you saw.
I was so nervous
I could barely stand.
You were wonderful.
If you don't mind my asking,
how did you first realize
that... you were a slave?
Slowly.
I was raised by my grandmother.
We lived far
from the slave quarters,
and so I didn't know
what went on there.
But one day,
when I was six years old,
my grandmother was told
to walk me to the workhouse
near the master's place.
She sent me over to play
with the other children and...
abandoned me there.
Dear Lord.
She loved me,
but she had no choice.
What a horrible, horrible crime.
An innocent child...
Why were you raised
by your grandmother?
What about your mother?
My mother?
I only saw her a few times,
at night.
She was taken away
after I was born
to work as a field hand
12 miles away.
She walked all the way back
a handful of times,
but even so,
they never let me know her
enough to really love her.
That left a hole.
I...
I can't express it.
My mother left me too.
I was five.
She worked in another town
for a few years.
I missed her terribly.
But that, that...
That was nothing
compared with...
It's never nothing.
My dear Mr. Douglass...
Join me.
I urge you.
You have a gift.
Sir, you really do.
You flatter me.
No.
No, I don't.
Mr. Garrison,
you must understand
how unexpected this is.
I never imagined...
You have an opportunity
to strike a blow
for the slaves who continue
to suffer as we speak.
Did the Lord give you
these gifts
so that you could spend your
life working in the shipyards?
I see now why you are
such an effective advocate.
You'll do it, then?
I think I will.
Put on the whole armor of God...
Douglass's new life
was fraught with danger.
He was a fugitive.
By speaking out in public,
he risked capture
by bounty hunters.
But he understood
that his testimony
could help transform
the struggle.
Garrison and his followers
had failed to convert
the slaveholders.
Now they hoped to deprive them
of their financial and political
support in the North.
Douglass and his fellow agents
were sent out
to recruit the foot soldiers
for this campaign,
the men and women
who would organize boycotts,
raise money
and petition Congress.
You must not give
or take any quarter.
You must cleave slavery
to the ground.
Thank you.
Now, I would like
to introduce to you
a graduate from the
"peculiar institution."
He can bear witness to the true
nature of that institution.
His diploma is written
on his back.
Mr. Frederick Douglass.
Douglass is something
really, really special.
Tell your story, Frederick.
And Garrison can sense
that this is a way
to really make the
abolitionist cause incarnate.
Many of the audience members
had never, ever seen a slave,
let alone been
to the slave South.
So to have a person
like Douglass
gave the anti-slavery cause
teeth,
it gave it authenticity,
it gave it a new voice.
Over the course of a few months,
Douglass traveled 3,500 miles.
The campaign was bearing fruit.
Northerners were flooding
Congress
with anti-slavery petitions.
When the House passed a gag rule
forbidding their consideration,
it added to Northern suspicions
that the government
was operating
for the benefit of slaveholders.
Abolitionists had driven
another wedge
into the fractures of the Union.
But for Douglass,
that wasn't enough.
He wanted to effect change
directly.
When he heard that a fellow
runaway had been captured,
he saw a chance to enlist
Garrison and his followers.
Dear Friend Garrison:
Slavery, our enemy,
has landed in our very midst.
George Latimer has been
hunted down like a wild beast
and imprisoned
in Leverett Street jail.
George Latimer had arrived
in Boston in the fall of 1842,
only to be thrown in jail at the
request of a Virginia planter.
Boston has become
the hunting-ground
of merciless man-stealers.
We need not point to the sugar
fields of Louisiana
or to the rice swamps of Alabama
for the bloody deeds
of this soul-crushing system,
but to the city of pilgrims.
Garrison and the other
abolitionists took up the call.
Soon, Boston was in an uproar.
Fearing an assault on the jail,
the sheriff released Latimer,
and his master had no choice
but to set him free.
For abolitionists,
it was a stunning victory,
but they weren't done.
In a show of strength, they
collected 65,000 signatures,
bound the documents together,
and rolled them like barrels
into the State House.
In March of 1843,
Massachusetts complied
with their demands
by passing
the Personal Liberty Act.
State officials
could never again take part
in the recapture
of a fugitive slave.
Within a few years,
almost every other Northern
state had followed suit.
The personal liberty laws
set alarm bells ringing
throughout the South.
Southerners have a right
to be outraged.
Here we have proof positive
that there is an utter disregard
for the compromises
that have been made
to found this American republic,
to try to keep
this thing running.
You see the South rising to say,
"This is yet another assault
on our way of life.
This cannot be."
With every headline, every
petition, every controversy,
the abolitionists were dragging
the fight over slavery
to the center of national life.
And that fight was starting
to tear the country apart.
By the winter of 1845,
Frederick Douglass had been
touring the anti-slavery circuit
for four years.
As he contemplated his future,
Douglass could imagine himself
traveling forever
in the shadow
of his white mentors,
repeating his story
to small gatherings
of the curious
and the converted.
"Tell your story, Frederick,"
would whisper my friend,
William Lloyd Garrison,
as we stepped upon the platform.
I could not always obey,
for it did not satisfy me
to simply narrate wrongs;
I felt like denouncing them.
Besides, I was growing
and needed room.
That winter,
Douglass decided to reach out
to a vast new audience.
Throwing caution to the winds,
he published the story
of his life.
I was born in Tuckahoe
in Talbot County, Maryland.
I have no accurate knowledge
of my age.
By far the larger part of slaves
know as little of their age
as horses know of theirs,
and it is the wish
of most masters
to keep their slaves
thus ignorant.
It's an exposé about, of course,
the horrible treatment
of slaves.
It's also an example of how
the institution of slavery
not only degrades slaves,
but it degrades the master.
Douglass listed dates, places
and, most dangerous of all,
his owners' name.
One white friend
read the document
and advised Douglass to burn it;
should Douglass's owner ever
want to reclaim his property,
he warned, there was nothing
anyone could do to protect him.
Douglass would have none of it.
It was truly a cultural event
when he did publish it.
It was an immediate
and an immense best seller.
That narrative was published
in 1845.
By 1846 to 1847,
Douglass was a household name
in the United States.
Among those who read the book
was Douglass's owner,
Thomas Auld.
He called Douglass a liar
and vowed to track him down
and send him to the cotton
fields of the Deep South.
Douglass fled the country
for Great Britain.
There, he could carry on
Garrison's campaign
to isolate the South
by urging Britons to cut ties
with American slaveholders.
The experience
would change his life.
Douglass's time in Britain
was the first time in his life
where he experienced
a dearth of racism.
It was the first time where
he could walk down the street
and not have someone
spit at him,
not have someone scowl
and call him a nigger.
It was the first time
he could walk into
any public establishment
and not have someone
kick him out.
As Douglass's Narrative
became a best seller,
he was treated by his British
hosts not just as an equal,
but as a celebrity.
Most important of all,
for the first time in his life,
Douglass was free.
His British sympathizers
sent Thomas Auld a note saying,
"We have your slave,
let's negotiate.
"He's probably worth
$1,500, $2,000.
"We'll give you $800.
Try to recover him."
The Aulds agreed to it.
So when Douglass returns
to the United States,
he's legally free.
Douglass loved England
and Ireland and Scotland so much
that he almost stayed there.
The only reason that he decided
to return to the United States
is because he felt a sense
of responsibility and obligation
to his fellow blacks.
Douglass had fled
the United States alone,
a fugitive running for his life.
When he left London to return
home in the spring of 1847,
1,400 people
came to see him off.
Shortly after landing in Boston,
Douglass joined Garrison
for a speaking tour of Ohio.
"I seem to have undergone
a transformation,"
Douglass told his old mentor.
"I live a new life."
At each stop,
Garrison was reminded
that his protégé
was coming to eclipse him.
At one of their
first appearances,
Garrison couldn't even
finish his speech
as the audience drowned him out
with chants of
"Douglass! Douglass!"
And Douglass had a secret.
His friends in Britain
had raised money
so that he could launch
his own anti-slavery newspaper.
He quickly realized
that Garrison and his allies
were vehemently opposed
to the notion,
so Douglass kept his old mentor
in the dark.
A few weeks into the tour,
the relentless pace
and grueling conditions
began to tell on Garrison.
In Cleveland, he spoke to three
large rallies in a single day,
standing for hours
in a cold rain.
That evening,
Garrison collapsed.
For three days,
he was lost in a terrifying haze
of fever and delirium.
My Dear Wife,
I am going to try to write you
a few lines with my own hand.
I have lost 20 pounds
and am quite thin and weak.
Douglass reluctantly
left Garrison in Cleveland
to finish the speaking tour
on his own.
His secret leaked out
shortly after he left Garrison
on his sickbed.
Garrison has to learn
that his...
this man that he mentored,
and his close friend,
is leaving him, abandoning him.
And Douglass doesn't even
tell him first-hand.
He saw himself
as responsible as anyone
for Douglass's success,
for Douglass's fame,
for Douglass's popularity.
He never forgives Douglass.
My Dear Wife: Is it not strange
that Douglass has not written
a single line to me
since he left me
on a bed of illness?
In regard to his project
for establishing a paper,
he never spoke a word to me
on the subject,
nor asked my advice
in any particular whatsoever.
Such conduct grieves me
to the heart.
In the fall of 1847, a few weeks
after leaving Garrison,
Douglass moved
to Rochester, New York.
Just over the border
from Canada,
Rochester was the last stop
on the Underground Railroad,
the network of safe houses
used by slaves
fleeing north to safety.
The city's vibrant
abolitionist community
welcomed Douglass
with open arms.
As soon as he arrived,
Douglass set about producing
his own paper,
naming it after
the most potent symbol
of the Underground Railroad.
Most fugitives,
if they knew anything
about the route to freedom,
it was,
"Follow the North Star."
Douglass's location allows him
to be very involved
in the Underground Railroad.
He wrote that in the mornings,
he would come and find
ten or 11 fugitive slaves
sitting on the doorstep,
waiting for him to arrive
in his office
so that he could help
shuttle them to Canada.
For the first few months,
Douglass's newspaper
hemorrhaged money.
He had few subscribers
and no experience as either
a printer or a businessman.
He mortgaged his house
to pay his debts
and looked about to give up
when a friend arrived
from Britain to help.
Julia Griffiths' editorial
skills and business savvy
kept the North Star afloat.
But her appearance in Rochester
sparked rumors,
and when she moved
into Douglass's home,
those rumors blossomed
into a full-blown scandal.
Douglass brushed the talk aside.
He was invigorated
in his new surroundings.
Far from Garrison's
Boston headquarters,
Douglass was free to explore the
political, and even militant,
anti-slavery strategies that
were circulating in Rochester.
As he did so,
he made the acquaintance
of a man whose name
he had heard in whispers:
failed tanner and fervent
abolitionist John Brown.
May I get you anything else,
Mr. Douglass?
Thank you, no, Mrs. Brown.
A meal like this is
a rare pleasure these days.
The pleasure is ours,
Mr. Douglass.
I had hoped to meet you
long before this.
I am flattered, sir.
Your speeches have been
an inspiration to us.
I do wonder, though,
whether speeches
will ever be enough.
What do you mean, sir?
You've been at this for years.
Freedom is a long road,
Mr. Brown.
I don't know any shortcuts.
I do, Douglass.
I do.
Sir.
God has placed these mountains
here for a reason.
You know God's thinking?
I know these mountains.
From here, we can strike a blow
against the slave masters.
The mountains are full
of natural fords.
One good man could hold off
a hundred soldiers.
My plan is to take
handpicked men
and post them in squads
of five on a line here.
They come down off the
mountains, raid the plantations,
bring off the slaves,
offer them a chance to fight.
Sir, you have no idea.
The entire state of Virginia
will rise up against you.
They will fight you
tooth and claw.
Colored people must fight back.
They will never respect
themselves otherwise,
nor will they be respected.
I read your book, sir.
You said yourself,
you became a man
when you fought Mr. Covey.
I did, but I was young
and this is very different.
We must follow
in our Savior's footsteps;
we must convert the sinner.
This is the sin right here!
We sit here, all of us,
debating this point of law,
whether the Constitution
says this or that,
and in the meantime,
day after day
and year after year,
the slaveholders are free
to do their worst.
But if we stoop to bloodshed,
we're no better than they are.
You can preach for all eternity
and nothing will ever change.
Mr. Douglass,
how many slaveholders
have you converted?
How many slaves have you freed?
John Brown had a very
beguiling personality.
He was a stunning man.
His sense of moral commitment
was vivid and overwhelming.
He was the real thing,
and to a Frederick Douglass
he was also the real thing
in terms of actually believing
about as deeply
as anybody Douglass had ever met
in racial equality.
Soon after their meeting,
Douglass described Brown
in the North Star
as someone who,
"though a white gentleman,
"is as deeply interested
in our cause
"as though his own soul
had been pierced
with the iron of slavery."
Slaveholders have forfeited
even the right to live.
And if the slave should put
every one of them
to the sword tomorrow,
who would say that they deserve
anything less than death?
As Douglass was meeting
with John Brown,
a chain of events
was being set in motion
that would transform the future
of slavery and of America.
In the spring of 1846,
the United States
went to war with Mexico,
hoping to gain vast territories
in the Southwest.
Abolitionists bitterly
opposed the war
as an attempt
to expand slave territory,
but they were swept away
by a national tide
of patriotic enthusiasm.
The Mexican War ultimately
increases the size
of the United States
by virtually 100%.
It almost doubles the size.
And the big question is,
"What are we going to do
with all this land
acquired from Mexico?"
Slave owners want it all
to be slave territory.
Anti-slavery Northerners all
want it to be free territory.
The Mexican War
unshucked slavery.
It just took it out
of its shell.
All those efforts
to contain this issue
couldn't work anymore.
While Southerners saw
the expansion of slave territory
as a guarantee
that the institution
would continue to thrive,
Northerners viewed those plans
as a conspiracy
to build a true slave empire.
Northerners become convinced
that Southerners are hell-bent
on moving slavery
to every part of the country.
And now you have this
political fight going on
over what's going to happen
with that land.
And that becomes very,
very divisive very quickly.
Through 1847 and 1848,
the question of the new
territories festered.
In the answer to that question
lay the country's destiny.
In the summer of 1849,
the fight over slavery
was suddenly eclipsed
as cholera swept through cities
across the country.
Incessant rains
flooded the streets with sewage
that spread the epidemic
with terrifying speed.
Outside Cincinnati,
Harriet Beecher Stowe followed
reports of the disease
as it swept through
the slums downtown.
Stowe had hoped
to become a writer,
but now she was too busy
raising six young children
on very little money.
It was all she could do
to send accounts of home life
to her husband,
who was working out of town
for the summer.
Yesterday I went downtown
and found all gloomy
and discouraged.
A universal panic seems to be
drawing nearer than ever before.
Hearse drivers
have scarce been allowed
to unharness their horses.
Furniture carts and common
vehicles are being employed
for the removal of the dead.
Stowe had every reason to hope
that her family would be spared.
They lived far
from the tenements
where the poor
were being decimated.
She kept the children
close to home
and maintained a cheerful
disposition.
But at the beginning of July,
Charley, Stowe's beloved
little boy, was taken ill.
She called him her summer child.
Harriet wrote such
glowing praise of Charley
that her husband
was actually disturbed by it.
She said she never had such
an easy time with a baby,
and indeed it was the first baby
she was able to nurse herself.
I could not help, nor soothe,
nor do one thing
to mitigate his cruel suffering,
do nothing but pray
that he might die soon.
It was a terrible disease.
You lost all the fluids
in your body,
you were wracked by convulsions
and there was nothing
that anybody could do.
At last, it is over
and our dear little one
is gone from us.
My Charley... my baby,
so loving and sweet,
so full of life and hope
and strength...
Now lies shrouded,
pale and cold in the room below.
In the Calvinist scheme
of things,
if God sent you suffering,
it was because he loved you
and he wanted
to teach you something.
Stowe later wrote that
there were circumstances
of such great bitterness
about the manner of his death
that she didn't think she could
ever be reconciled for it
unless his death
allowed her to do
some great good to others.
For Harriet Beecher Stowe,
the wound of Charley's death
would never heal;
rather, she came to understand
the pain of mothers
she would never know.
It was at his dying bed,
and at his grave,
that I learnt what a poor
slave mother may feel
when her child
is torn away from her.
She was really fueled
by the grief for her baby,
but I suspect too perhaps anger
at a Calvinist God.
The writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin
would be Harriet's way
of making her baby's short life
mean something.
In the spring of 1850,
the question of the territories
seized in the Mexican War
finally exploded in the gravest
crisis in the nation's history.
California wanted to be admitted
to the Union as a free state.
If that happened, the balance
of power in Washington
would shift against
the slave states.
Southerners perceived
a mortal threat
and talked openly of secession.
Representatives
brandished revolvers
in the halls of Congress,
and the nation contemplated the
imminent collapse of the Union.
For Garrison
and many other abolitionists,
it seemed that the Slave Power
might finally suffer
a fatal blow.
But in the fall of 1850,
the country stepped back
from the brink
when Congress adopted
what became known
as "The Great Compromise."
In return for allowing
California
to join the Union
as a free state,
Southerners were granted
the prospect
of someday forming slave states
in Utah and New Mexico.
But for Northerners,
the most galling provision
in the Compromise
was the Fugitive Slave Law.
The law stipulated that
any citizen, North or South,
could be rounded up and forced
to catch a suspected runaway.
The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
virtually legitimates
the kidnapping of free blacks.
It means that a Southerner can
hunt down any black in free soil
and say, "You're my slave."
And most significantly,
in one sense,
any white can be deputized
at any moment, day or night,
and is required to help round up
a suspected fugitive slave.
When the Compromise was finally
sealed in late September,
abolitionists were horrified.
20 years of struggle had yielded
not emancipation
but a million more slaves
and the political agreement
to preserve the institution
in the United States forever.
The petitions, the campaigns,
the rallies, the marches,
the meetings and resolutions
and fundraisers,
the mobs, the beatings,
all of the sacrifices
had been suddenly dealt away
by a handful of men
in Washington.
As a final insult, abolitionists
were cast as villains
who had almost torn
the nation apart.
The New York Globe urged
that "No public building,
not even the streets,
must be desecrated by such
a gathering of traitors."
It became dangerous once again
to speak out against slavery.
You've just had a huge blow
to your belief
that somehow you're going
to end slavery in this country
by appealing to the Christian
soul of the country.
What the country just said,
from the heart
of the government,
is that slavery is forever.
This radicalizes
the Anti-Slavery Movement
arguably more than anything
that had ever happened before.
The crisis convinced Garrison
that he needed
to redouble his efforts.
From Boston, he directed
an energetic campaign
of meetings, petitions
and publicity.
But for many abolitionists,
Garrison's old tactics
seemed hopelessly inadequate.
Frederick Douglass, for one,
had begun to question
his own faith
in a peaceful end to slavery and
in American democracy itself.
Your boasted liberty
is an unholy license;
your national greatness,
swelling vanity;
your shouts of liberty
and equality, hollow mockery;
your prayers and hymns
are fraud, deception,
impiety and hypocrisy,
a thin veil to cover crimes
which would disgrace
a nation of savages.
There's not a nation on earth
guilty of practices
more shocking and bloody
than are the people
of the United States
at this very hour.
It is not light that is needed,
but fire;
it is not the gentle shower,
but thunder.
We need the storm, the whirlwind
and the earthquake.
Douglass needs for slavery
to be eradicated,
and he needs it to happen
as quickly as possible.
In many ways, he reflects this
for the rest of black America,
that while Garrisonian tactics
were just, earnest,
they simply were not options
that he thought would eventually
lead to the end of slavery.
On the one level,
you hate to reduce it to race.
On the other, it's a reality.
No matter how many stories
Garrison hears,
no matter how many coffles
he sees,
no matter how many mothers
he can imagine and conjure up,
Douglass has had
that experience.
Garrison is a white man
in a white man's America.
When Douglass questioned
Garrison's doctrines
at a meeting
of the Anti-Slavery Society,
he was branded an enemy.
A volley of insults
and allegations
appeared in The Liberator.
Douglass struck back,
accusing Garrison of racism.
The final blow came
when Garrison published
ugly insinuations
about an affair between
Douglass and Julia Griffiths.
Garrison has hit Douglass
below the belt.
It's like a family quarrel
where they're airing
each other's dirty laundry.
And it's not a pretty sight.
Mr. Garrison has seen fit
to invade my household
and has sought to blast me
in the name of my family.
Griffiths would eventually
bow to the pressure
and move back to England.
But for the remainder
of the 1850s,
William Lloyd Garrison
and Frederick Douglass
would not speak to each other.
Not long after the passage
of the Fugitive Slave Law,
a runaway knocked on the door
of a house in Brunswick, Maine.
As fate would have it,
he had come upon the new home
of Harriet Beecher Stowe
and her family,
including a newborn
named after the baby
they had buried in Cincinnati.
Stowe was well aware
of the punishment
facing anyone
who helped a runaway,
but she was glad
of the opportunity
to defy the government.
"Before this law,
I might have tried
to send him somewhere else,"
she wrote her sister.
"As it was, all hands
in the house united
in making him up a bed."
Like many Northerners,
Stowe was deeply disturbed
by the Fugitive Slave Law.
For her, its cruelty
was all too real.
Every account of flight,
of capture,
tore at the agonizing memory
of Charley's death.
My heart breaks at the cruelty
and injustice
our nation inflicts
on the slave.
I am tormented by the thought
of the slave mothers
whose babes are torn from them.
I pray to God
to let me do a little
and to cause my cry for them
to be heard.
Leaving Cincinnati
allowed Harriet
to look back at those
18 years there
and to process that experience
of the slave riots,
Charley's death,
the Fugitive Slave Law,
and it all came together
in a vision.
Instead of Christ on the cross,
she saw an image
of a slave being whipped,
and she wrote the ending
of Uncle Tom's Cabin
when Uncle Tom dies.
And when she read it to her
family, they were all crying
and they said, "Mama, you've got
to write the rest of the story."
On March 20, 1852,
a publisher released a book
on a difficult subject
by an unknown author.
By the end of the week,
Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel
about the evils of slavery
had sold 10,000 copies;
within two months, 50,000.
Three paper mills feeding
three printing presses
running 24 hours a day,
and still the publisher
couldn't keep up.
Soon, Uncle Tom's Cabin began
reaching vast new audiences,
including many who had never
read a novel,
when it was adapted
as a wildly popular play.
In Uncle Tom's Cabin,
Harriet Beecher Stowe
made millions of Americans
see slavery for the first time
through the eyes of its victims:
the mother whose child
was to be sold away,
the boy watching helplessly
as his sister is whipped,
the runaway Eliza fleeing with
her baby across the Ohio River,
only one step ahead
of the slave catchers.
And it was said that when
the novel was put on stage,
there was not one dry eye
when Eliza reached
the other side of the river.
And Harriet knew
that if she could get that
response from her readers,
she didn't need to make
arguments about slavery.
She realizes that the way
to do this
was by playing
on the heartstrings.
You don't do it
by playing on the outrage.
You do it by convincing them
that there are human beings
in peril.
Mrs. Stowe has walked
with lighted candle
through the darkest corners
of the slave's soul
and has unfolded the secrets
of the slave's lacerated heart.
That contribution
to our bleeding cause alone
involves us
in a debt of gratitude
which cannot be measured.
It is the most popular book
and the most influential book
in American history.
There is no competition
for that title.
It's going to convert
millions of Americans
not to being
for immediate abolitionism,
not to being
for racial equality,
but for being against slavery.
Now that's a huge thing,
that's a sea change.
You can see Stowe taking aim
at the Fugitive Slave Law
in incident after incident,
and basically urging her readers
to defy what she thought was
an anti-Christian,
undemocratic law.
William Lloyd Garrison
attended a performance
of the play in New York
and marveled at the response
of the toughs in the front rows.
O, it was a sight worth seeing,
those ragged, coatless men
and boys in the pit...
The very material
of which mobs are made...
Cheering the strongest
and sublimest
anti-slavery sentiments!
Uncle Tom's Cabin
triggered a wave of defiance
to the Fugitive Slave Law.
Armed mobs broke into jails
to release fugitives
and even murdered
slave catchers.
And in the spring of 1854,
this wave of resistance
came to a head
when the national battle
over slavery
suddenly focused on a solitary
prisoner in Boston's city jail.
Anthony Burns had fled Virginia
and slavery
by stowing away on a ship
bound for the North.
He had avoided capture
for months
until a letter home
revealed his whereabouts.
When news of the arrest filtered
out, Boston erupted in anger.
While one group
tried to halt the proceedings
through legal maneuvers,
black and white activists
mounted a desperate assault
on the courthouse
where Burns was being held.
The attack was driven back
by club-wielding policemen,
but not before a guard
was shot and killed.
When the sun rose
the next morning,
Burns was still in jail,
and the city was seething.
When news of the upheaval
reached Washington,
President Franklin Pierce,
an ardent Southern sympathizer,
demonstrated
the government's resolve.
On June 2, 1854,
all Boston watched
as hundreds of U.S. Marines,
cavalry, infantry and artillery,
along with the county militia
and the Boston police,
marched Anthony Burns
from the jail
to a ship waiting in the harbor.
For Garrison,
the work of abolition
was about trying to make people
come to a moment of conscience
and act accordingly.
But one has to see the devil in
order to then turn towards God.
One has to see evil in order to
be committed to a life of good.
Slavery marches right up
into Massachusetts,
and now Northerners
get to see the face of evil.
It seemed that the United States
was committed to the
preservation of slavery.
Abolitionists were losing hope.
They couldn't see that already
they had shifted history.
By refusing to disappear,
to be silenced, to accommodate,
they had forced millions
of Americans
to take a stand on slavery
one way or the other.
The ties between North and South
had been replaced
by resentment and suspicion.
Garrison, Douglass, Stowe
and their fellow abolitionists
couldn't know it,
but their long struggle
had passed a tipping point.
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Frederick Douglass had heard
the stories; every slave had.
Whispered accounts of fugitives
running from the slave catchers
for nights on end,
coming within sight of freedom
only to hear the hounds
closing in.
Fugitives starving,
freezing to death,
being torn apart
by wild animals.
Everyone knew what would happen
if you were caught:
flogging, branding,
elaborate tortures
designed to strike terror into
any other would-be runaways.
Some lost hope and returned
to their masters.
Others killed themselves
rather than go back to slavery.
But some made it.
In the fall of 1838,
Frederick Douglass leapt aboard
a train in Baltimore,
slipped through the gauntlet
of slave catchers
prowling the border
between slave and free states,
and finally boarded a ferry
bound for New York City.
Only 24 hours
removed from slavery,
Douglass found himself wandering
among the dazzling wonders
of Broadway.
A free state around me,
and the free earth
under my feet.
What a moment this was for me.
A whole year was pressed
into a single day.
A new world burst upon
my agitated vision.
Douglass had planned his escape
with the help of Anna Murray,
a free black woman
he had met in Baltimore.
Anna had sewn
his sailor disguise
and sold her featherbed
to give him the money he needed.
As soon as she joined him
in New York,
they were married
in a safe house
by a fellow runaway.
There was no time to rest;
New York was crawling
with bounty hunters.
With five dollars
to their names,
Frederick and Anna
headed further north.
Their destination
was New Bedford, Massachusetts,
a whaling town known as
an abolitionist stronghold,
with a large population of free
blacks and runaway slaves.
Frederick and Anna clawed their
way out of desperate poverty
and built a life
for their growing family.
For three years, Douglass
shoveled coal, cut wood
and loaded ships,
often working two shifts a day.
He did make time to attend
anti-slavery gatherings
and was an avid reader
of the most prominent
abolitionist newspaper
of the day,
William Lloyd Garrison's
The Liberator.
I not only liked, I loved
this paper and its editor.
He seemed a match for all
the opponents of emancipation.
His words were few
and full of holy fire.
When Douglass heard that
Garrison was going to address
an anti-slavery convention
in Nantucket,
he took a rare few days off and
boarded a ferry for the island.
As Douglass listened
to the proceedings,
a friend from New Bedford
unexpectedly called on him
to speak.
"As I made my way to the stage,"
Douglass recalled,
"I was shaking in every limb."
- My mother was named
- Harriet Bailey.
I can't recollect of ever
seeing her by the light of day.
We were separated
when I was but an infant.
My father was a white man.
It was whispered that my master
was my father,
but of this I know nothing.
What I do know is that
my master was a very cruel man.
Please...
I was just a boy,
hushed, terrified, stunned.
That is slavery.
Mr. Douglass!
I have never seen an audience
so captivated.
I myself was carried away,
as you saw.
I was so nervous
I could barely stand.
You were wonderful.
If you don't mind my asking,
how did you first realize
that... you were a slave?
Slowly.
I was raised by my grandmother.
We lived far
from the slave quarters,
and so I didn't know
what went on there.
But one day,
when I was six years old,
my grandmother was told
to walk me to the workhouse
near the master's place.
She sent me over to play
with the other children and...
abandoned me there.
Dear Lord.
She loved me,
but she had no choice.
What a horrible, horrible crime.
An innocent child...
Why were you raised
by your grandmother?
What about your mother?
My mother?
I only saw her a few times,
at night.
She was taken away
after I was born
to work as a field hand
12 miles away.
She walked all the way back
a handful of times,
but even so,
they never let me know her
enough to really love her.
That left a hole.
I...
I can't express it.
My mother left me too.
I was five.
She worked in another town
for a few years.
I missed her terribly.
But that, that...
That was nothing
compared with...
It's never nothing.
My dear Mr. Douglass...
Join me.
I urge you.
You have a gift.
Sir, you really do.
You flatter me.
No.
No, I don't.
Mr. Garrison,
you must understand
how unexpected this is.
I never imagined...
You have an opportunity
to strike a blow
for the slaves who continue
to suffer as we speak.
Did the Lord give you
these gifts
so that you could spend your
life working in the shipyards?
I see now why you are
such an effective advocate.
You'll do it, then?
I think I will.
Put on the whole armor of God...
Douglass's new life
was fraught with danger.
He was a fugitive.
By speaking out in public,
he risked capture
by bounty hunters.
But he understood
that his testimony
could help transform
the struggle.
Garrison and his followers
had failed to convert
the slaveholders.
Now they hoped to deprive them
of their financial and political
support in the North.
Douglass and his fellow agents
were sent out
to recruit the foot soldiers
for this campaign,
the men and women
who would organize boycotts,
raise money
and petition Congress.
You must not give
or take any quarter.
You must cleave slavery
to the ground.
Thank you.
Now, I would like
to introduce to you
a graduate from the
"peculiar institution."
He can bear witness to the true
nature of that institution.
His diploma is written
on his back.
Mr. Frederick Douglass.
Douglass is something
really, really special.
Tell your story, Frederick.
And Garrison can sense
that this is a way
to really make the
abolitionist cause incarnate.
Many of the audience members
had never, ever seen a slave,
let alone been
to the slave South.
So to have a person
like Douglass
gave the anti-slavery cause
teeth,
it gave it authenticity,
it gave it a new voice.
Over the course of a few months,
Douglass traveled 3,500 miles.
The campaign was bearing fruit.
Northerners were flooding
Congress
with anti-slavery petitions.
When the House passed a gag rule
forbidding their consideration,
it added to Northern suspicions
that the government
was operating
for the benefit of slaveholders.
Abolitionists had driven
another wedge
into the fractures of the Union.
But for Douglass,
that wasn't enough.
He wanted to effect change
directly.
When he heard that a fellow
runaway had been captured,
he saw a chance to enlist
Garrison and his followers.
Dear Friend Garrison:
Slavery, our enemy,
has landed in our very midst.
George Latimer has been
hunted down like a wild beast
and imprisoned
in Leverett Street jail.
George Latimer had arrived
in Boston in the fall of 1842,
only to be thrown in jail at the
request of a Virginia planter.
Boston has become
the hunting-ground
of merciless man-stealers.
We need not point to the sugar
fields of Louisiana
or to the rice swamps of Alabama
for the bloody deeds
of this soul-crushing system,
but to the city of pilgrims.
Garrison and the other
abolitionists took up the call.
Soon, Boston was in an uproar.
Fearing an assault on the jail,
the sheriff released Latimer,
and his master had no choice
but to set him free.
For abolitionists,
it was a stunning victory,
but they weren't done.
In a show of strength, they
collected 65,000 signatures,
bound the documents together,
and rolled them like barrels
into the State House.
In March of 1843,
Massachusetts complied
with their demands
by passing
the Personal Liberty Act.
State officials
could never again take part
in the recapture
of a fugitive slave.
Within a few years,
almost every other Northern
state had followed suit.
The personal liberty laws
set alarm bells ringing
throughout the South.
Southerners have a right
to be outraged.
Here we have proof positive
that there is an utter disregard
for the compromises
that have been made
to found this American republic,
to try to keep
this thing running.
You see the South rising to say,
"This is yet another assault
on our way of life.
This cannot be."
With every headline, every
petition, every controversy,
the abolitionists were dragging
the fight over slavery
to the center of national life.
And that fight was starting
to tear the country apart.
By the winter of 1845,
Frederick Douglass had been
touring the anti-slavery circuit
for four years.
As he contemplated his future,
Douglass could imagine himself
traveling forever
in the shadow
of his white mentors,
repeating his story
to small gatherings
of the curious
and the converted.
"Tell your story, Frederick,"
would whisper my friend,
William Lloyd Garrison,
as we stepped upon the platform.
I could not always obey,
for it did not satisfy me
to simply narrate wrongs;
I felt like denouncing them.
Besides, I was growing
and needed room.
That winter,
Douglass decided to reach out
to a vast new audience.
Throwing caution to the winds,
he published the story
of his life.
I was born in Tuckahoe
in Talbot County, Maryland.
I have no accurate knowledge
of my age.
By far the larger part of slaves
know as little of their age
as horses know of theirs,
and it is the wish
of most masters
to keep their slaves
thus ignorant.
It's an exposé about, of course,
the horrible treatment
of slaves.
It's also an example of how
the institution of slavery
not only degrades slaves,
but it degrades the master.
Douglass listed dates, places
and, most dangerous of all,
his owners' name.
One white friend
read the document
and advised Douglass to burn it;
should Douglass's owner ever
want to reclaim his property,
he warned, there was nothing
anyone could do to protect him.
Douglass would have none of it.
It was truly a cultural event
when he did publish it.
It was an immediate
and an immense best seller.
That narrative was published
in 1845.
By 1846 to 1847,
Douglass was a household name
in the United States.
Among those who read the book
was Douglass's owner,
Thomas Auld.
He called Douglass a liar
and vowed to track him down
and send him to the cotton
fields of the Deep South.
Douglass fled the country
for Great Britain.
There, he could carry on
Garrison's campaign
to isolate the South
by urging Britons to cut ties
with American slaveholders.
The experience
would change his life.
Douglass's time in Britain
was the first time in his life
where he experienced
a dearth of racism.
It was the first time where
he could walk down the street
and not have someone
spit at him,
not have someone scowl
and call him a nigger.
It was the first time
he could walk into
any public establishment
and not have someone
kick him out.
As Douglass's Narrative
became a best seller,
he was treated by his British
hosts not just as an equal,
but as a celebrity.
Most important of all,
for the first time in his life,
Douglass was free.
His British sympathizers
sent Thomas Auld a note saying,
"We have your slave,
let's negotiate.
"He's probably worth
$1,500, $2,000.
"We'll give you $800.
Try to recover him."
The Aulds agreed to it.
So when Douglass returns
to the United States,
he's legally free.
Douglass loved England
and Ireland and Scotland so much
that he almost stayed there.
The only reason that he decided
to return to the United States
is because he felt a sense
of responsibility and obligation
to his fellow blacks.
Douglass had fled
the United States alone,
a fugitive running for his life.
When he left London to return
home in the spring of 1847,
1,400 people
came to see him off.
Shortly after landing in Boston,
Douglass joined Garrison
for a speaking tour of Ohio.
"I seem to have undergone
a transformation,"
Douglass told his old mentor.
"I live a new life."
At each stop,
Garrison was reminded
that his protégé
was coming to eclipse him.
At one of their
first appearances,
Garrison couldn't even
finish his speech
as the audience drowned him out
with chants of
"Douglass! Douglass!"
And Douglass had a secret.
His friends in Britain
had raised money
so that he could launch
his own anti-slavery newspaper.
He quickly realized
that Garrison and his allies
were vehemently opposed
to the notion,
so Douglass kept his old mentor
in the dark.
A few weeks into the tour,
the relentless pace
and grueling conditions
began to tell on Garrison.
In Cleveland, he spoke to three
large rallies in a single day,
standing for hours
in a cold rain.
That evening,
Garrison collapsed.
For three days,
he was lost in a terrifying haze
of fever and delirium.
My Dear Wife,
I am going to try to write you
a few lines with my own hand.
I have lost 20 pounds
and am quite thin and weak.
Douglass reluctantly
left Garrison in Cleveland
to finish the speaking tour
on his own.
His secret leaked out
shortly after he left Garrison
on his sickbed.
Garrison has to learn
that his...
this man that he mentored,
and his close friend,
is leaving him, abandoning him.
And Douglass doesn't even
tell him first-hand.
He saw himself
as responsible as anyone
for Douglass's success,
for Douglass's fame,
for Douglass's popularity.
He never forgives Douglass.
My Dear Wife: Is it not strange
that Douglass has not written
a single line to me
since he left me
on a bed of illness?
In regard to his project
for establishing a paper,
he never spoke a word to me
on the subject,
nor asked my advice
in any particular whatsoever.
Such conduct grieves me
to the heart.
In the fall of 1847, a few weeks
after leaving Garrison,
Douglass moved
to Rochester, New York.
Just over the border
from Canada,
Rochester was the last stop
on the Underground Railroad,
the network of safe houses
used by slaves
fleeing north to safety.
The city's vibrant
abolitionist community
welcomed Douglass
with open arms.
As soon as he arrived,
Douglass set about producing
his own paper,
naming it after
the most potent symbol
of the Underground Railroad.
Most fugitives,
if they knew anything
about the route to freedom,
it was,
"Follow the North Star."
Douglass's location allows him
to be very involved
in the Underground Railroad.
He wrote that in the mornings,
he would come and find
ten or 11 fugitive slaves
sitting on the doorstep,
waiting for him to arrive
in his office
so that he could help
shuttle them to Canada.
For the first few months,
Douglass's newspaper
hemorrhaged money.
He had few subscribers
and no experience as either
a printer or a businessman.
He mortgaged his house
to pay his debts
and looked about to give up
when a friend arrived
from Britain to help.
Julia Griffiths' editorial
skills and business savvy
kept the North Star afloat.
But her appearance in Rochester
sparked rumors,
and when she moved
into Douglass's home,
those rumors blossomed
into a full-blown scandal.
Douglass brushed the talk aside.
He was invigorated
in his new surroundings.
Far from Garrison's
Boston headquarters,
Douglass was free to explore the
political, and even militant,
anti-slavery strategies that
were circulating in Rochester.
As he did so,
he made the acquaintance
of a man whose name
he had heard in whispers:
failed tanner and fervent
abolitionist John Brown.
May I get you anything else,
Mr. Douglass?
Thank you, no, Mrs. Brown.
A meal like this is
a rare pleasure these days.
The pleasure is ours,
Mr. Douglass.
I had hoped to meet you
long before this.
I am flattered, sir.
Your speeches have been
an inspiration to us.
I do wonder, though,
whether speeches
will ever be enough.
What do you mean, sir?
You've been at this for years.
Freedom is a long road,
Mr. Brown.
I don't know any shortcuts.
I do, Douglass.
I do.
Sir.
God has placed these mountains
here for a reason.
You know God's thinking?
I know these mountains.
From here, we can strike a blow
against the slave masters.
The mountains are full
of natural fords.
One good man could hold off
a hundred soldiers.
My plan is to take
handpicked men
and post them in squads
of five on a line here.
They come down off the
mountains, raid the plantations,
bring off the slaves,
offer them a chance to fight.
Sir, you have no idea.
The entire state of Virginia
will rise up against you.
They will fight you
tooth and claw.
Colored people must fight back.
They will never respect
themselves otherwise,
nor will they be respected.
I read your book, sir.
You said yourself,
you became a man
when you fought Mr. Covey.
I did, but I was young
and this is very different.
We must follow
in our Savior's footsteps;
we must convert the sinner.
This is the sin right here!
We sit here, all of us,
debating this point of law,
whether the Constitution
says this or that,
and in the meantime,
day after day
and year after year,
the slaveholders are free
to do their worst.
But if we stoop to bloodshed,
we're no better than they are.
You can preach for all eternity
and nothing will ever change.
Mr. Douglass,
how many slaveholders
have you converted?
How many slaves have you freed?
John Brown had a very
beguiling personality.
He was a stunning man.
His sense of moral commitment
was vivid and overwhelming.
He was the real thing,
and to a Frederick Douglass
he was also the real thing
in terms of actually believing
about as deeply
as anybody Douglass had ever met
in racial equality.
Soon after their meeting,
Douglass described Brown
in the North Star
as someone who,
"though a white gentleman,
"is as deeply interested
in our cause
"as though his own soul
had been pierced
with the iron of slavery."
Slaveholders have forfeited
even the right to live.
And if the slave should put
every one of them
to the sword tomorrow,
who would say that they deserve
anything less than death?
As Douglass was meeting
with John Brown,
a chain of events
was being set in motion
that would transform the future
of slavery and of America.
In the spring of 1846,
the United States
went to war with Mexico,
hoping to gain vast territories
in the Southwest.
Abolitionists bitterly
opposed the war
as an attempt
to expand slave territory,
but they were swept away
by a national tide
of patriotic enthusiasm.
The Mexican War ultimately
increases the size
of the United States
by virtually 100%.
It almost doubles the size.
And the big question is,
"What are we going to do
with all this land
acquired from Mexico?"
Slave owners want it all
to be slave territory.
Anti-slavery Northerners all
want it to be free territory.
The Mexican War
unshucked slavery.
It just took it out
of its shell.
All those efforts
to contain this issue
couldn't work anymore.
While Southerners saw
the expansion of slave territory
as a guarantee
that the institution
would continue to thrive,
Northerners viewed those plans
as a conspiracy
to build a true slave empire.
Northerners become convinced
that Southerners are hell-bent
on moving slavery
to every part of the country.
And now you have this
political fight going on
over what's going to happen
with that land.
And that becomes very,
very divisive very quickly.
Through 1847 and 1848,
the question of the new
territories festered.
In the answer to that question
lay the country's destiny.
In the summer of 1849,
the fight over slavery
was suddenly eclipsed
as cholera swept through cities
across the country.
Incessant rains
flooded the streets with sewage
that spread the epidemic
with terrifying speed.
Outside Cincinnati,
Harriet Beecher Stowe followed
reports of the disease
as it swept through
the slums downtown.
Stowe had hoped
to become a writer,
but now she was too busy
raising six young children
on very little money.
It was all she could do
to send accounts of home life
to her husband,
who was working out of town
for the summer.
Yesterday I went downtown
and found all gloomy
and discouraged.
A universal panic seems to be
drawing nearer than ever before.
Hearse drivers
have scarce been allowed
to unharness their horses.
Furniture carts and common
vehicles are being employed
for the removal of the dead.
Stowe had every reason to hope
that her family would be spared.
They lived far
from the tenements
where the poor
were being decimated.
She kept the children
close to home
and maintained a cheerful
disposition.
But at the beginning of July,
Charley, Stowe's beloved
little boy, was taken ill.
She called him her summer child.
Harriet wrote such
glowing praise of Charley
that her husband
was actually disturbed by it.
She said she never had such
an easy time with a baby,
and indeed it was the first baby
she was able to nurse herself.
I could not help, nor soothe,
nor do one thing
to mitigate his cruel suffering,
do nothing but pray
that he might die soon.
It was a terrible disease.
You lost all the fluids
in your body,
you were wracked by convulsions
and there was nothing
that anybody could do.
At last, it is over
and our dear little one
is gone from us.
My Charley... my baby,
so loving and sweet,
so full of life and hope
and strength...
Now lies shrouded,
pale and cold in the room below.
In the Calvinist scheme
of things,
if God sent you suffering,
it was because he loved you
and he wanted
to teach you something.
Stowe later wrote that
there were circumstances
of such great bitterness
about the manner of his death
that she didn't think she could
ever be reconciled for it
unless his death
allowed her to do
some great good to others.
For Harriet Beecher Stowe,
the wound of Charley's death
would never heal;
rather, she came to understand
the pain of mothers
she would never know.
It was at his dying bed,
and at his grave,
that I learnt what a poor
slave mother may feel
when her child
is torn away from her.
She was really fueled
by the grief for her baby,
but I suspect too perhaps anger
at a Calvinist God.
The writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin
would be Harriet's way
of making her baby's short life
mean something.
In the spring of 1850,
the question of the territories
seized in the Mexican War
finally exploded in the gravest
crisis in the nation's history.
California wanted to be admitted
to the Union as a free state.
If that happened, the balance
of power in Washington
would shift against
the slave states.
Southerners perceived
a mortal threat
and talked openly of secession.
Representatives
brandished revolvers
in the halls of Congress,
and the nation contemplated the
imminent collapse of the Union.
For Garrison
and many other abolitionists,
it seemed that the Slave Power
might finally suffer
a fatal blow.
But in the fall of 1850,
the country stepped back
from the brink
when Congress adopted
what became known
as "The Great Compromise."
In return for allowing
California
to join the Union
as a free state,
Southerners were granted
the prospect
of someday forming slave states
in Utah and New Mexico.
But for Northerners,
the most galling provision
in the Compromise
was the Fugitive Slave Law.
The law stipulated that
any citizen, North or South,
could be rounded up and forced
to catch a suspected runaway.
The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
virtually legitimates
the kidnapping of free blacks.
It means that a Southerner can
hunt down any black in free soil
and say, "You're my slave."
And most significantly,
in one sense,
any white can be deputized
at any moment, day or night,
and is required to help round up
a suspected fugitive slave.
When the Compromise was finally
sealed in late September,
abolitionists were horrified.
20 years of struggle had yielded
not emancipation
but a million more slaves
and the political agreement
to preserve the institution
in the United States forever.
The petitions, the campaigns,
the rallies, the marches,
the meetings and resolutions
and fundraisers,
the mobs, the beatings,
all of the sacrifices
had been suddenly dealt away
by a handful of men
in Washington.
As a final insult, abolitionists
were cast as villains
who had almost torn
the nation apart.
The New York Globe urged
that "No public building,
not even the streets,
must be desecrated by such
a gathering of traitors."
It became dangerous once again
to speak out against slavery.
You've just had a huge blow
to your belief
that somehow you're going
to end slavery in this country
by appealing to the Christian
soul of the country.
What the country just said,
from the heart
of the government,
is that slavery is forever.
This radicalizes
the Anti-Slavery Movement
arguably more than anything
that had ever happened before.
The crisis convinced Garrison
that he needed
to redouble his efforts.
From Boston, he directed
an energetic campaign
of meetings, petitions
and publicity.
But for many abolitionists,
Garrison's old tactics
seemed hopelessly inadequate.
Frederick Douglass, for one,
had begun to question
his own faith
in a peaceful end to slavery and
in American democracy itself.
Your boasted liberty
is an unholy license;
your national greatness,
swelling vanity;
your shouts of liberty
and equality, hollow mockery;
your prayers and hymns
are fraud, deception,
impiety and hypocrisy,
a thin veil to cover crimes
which would disgrace
a nation of savages.
There's not a nation on earth
guilty of practices
more shocking and bloody
than are the people
of the United States
at this very hour.
It is not light that is needed,
but fire;
it is not the gentle shower,
but thunder.
We need the storm, the whirlwind
and the earthquake.
Douglass needs for slavery
to be eradicated,
and he needs it to happen
as quickly as possible.
In many ways, he reflects this
for the rest of black America,
that while Garrisonian tactics
were just, earnest,
they simply were not options
that he thought would eventually
lead to the end of slavery.
On the one level,
you hate to reduce it to race.
On the other, it's a reality.
No matter how many stories
Garrison hears,
no matter how many coffles
he sees,
no matter how many mothers
he can imagine and conjure up,
Douglass has had
that experience.
Garrison is a white man
in a white man's America.
When Douglass questioned
Garrison's doctrines
at a meeting
of the Anti-Slavery Society,
he was branded an enemy.
A volley of insults
and allegations
appeared in The Liberator.
Douglass struck back,
accusing Garrison of racism.
The final blow came
when Garrison published
ugly insinuations
about an affair between
Douglass and Julia Griffiths.
Garrison has hit Douglass
below the belt.
It's like a family quarrel
where they're airing
each other's dirty laundry.
And it's not a pretty sight.
Mr. Garrison has seen fit
to invade my household
and has sought to blast me
in the name of my family.
Griffiths would eventually
bow to the pressure
and move back to England.
But for the remainder
of the 1850s,
William Lloyd Garrison
and Frederick Douglass
would not speak to each other.
Not long after the passage
of the Fugitive Slave Law,
a runaway knocked on the door
of a house in Brunswick, Maine.
As fate would have it,
he had come upon the new home
of Harriet Beecher Stowe
and her family,
including a newborn
named after the baby
they had buried in Cincinnati.
Stowe was well aware
of the punishment
facing anyone
who helped a runaway,
but she was glad
of the opportunity
to defy the government.
"Before this law,
I might have tried
to send him somewhere else,"
she wrote her sister.
"As it was, all hands
in the house united
in making him up a bed."
Like many Northerners,
Stowe was deeply disturbed
by the Fugitive Slave Law.
For her, its cruelty
was all too real.
Every account of flight,
of capture,
tore at the agonizing memory
of Charley's death.
My heart breaks at the cruelty
and injustice
our nation inflicts
on the slave.
I am tormented by the thought
of the slave mothers
whose babes are torn from them.
I pray to God
to let me do a little
and to cause my cry for them
to be heard.
Leaving Cincinnati
allowed Harriet
to look back at those
18 years there
and to process that experience
of the slave riots,
Charley's death,
the Fugitive Slave Law,
and it all came together
in a vision.
Instead of Christ on the cross,
she saw an image
of a slave being whipped,
and she wrote the ending
of Uncle Tom's Cabin
when Uncle Tom dies.
And when she read it to her
family, they were all crying
and they said, "Mama, you've got
to write the rest of the story."
On March 20, 1852,
a publisher released a book
on a difficult subject
by an unknown author.
By the end of the week,
Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel
about the evils of slavery
had sold 10,000 copies;
within two months, 50,000.
Three paper mills feeding
three printing presses
running 24 hours a day,
and still the publisher
couldn't keep up.
Soon, Uncle Tom's Cabin began
reaching vast new audiences,
including many who had never
read a novel,
when it was adapted
as a wildly popular play.
In Uncle Tom's Cabin,
Harriet Beecher Stowe
made millions of Americans
see slavery for the first time
through the eyes of its victims:
the mother whose child
was to be sold away,
the boy watching helplessly
as his sister is whipped,
the runaway Eliza fleeing with
her baby across the Ohio River,
only one step ahead
of the slave catchers.
And it was said that when
the novel was put on stage,
there was not one dry eye
when Eliza reached
the other side of the river.
And Harriet knew
that if she could get that
response from her readers,
she didn't need to make
arguments about slavery.
She realizes that the way
to do this
was by playing
on the heartstrings.
You don't do it
by playing on the outrage.
You do it by convincing them
that there are human beings
in peril.
Mrs. Stowe has walked
with lighted candle
through the darkest corners
of the slave's soul
and has unfolded the secrets
of the slave's lacerated heart.
That contribution
to our bleeding cause alone
involves us
in a debt of gratitude
which cannot be measured.
It is the most popular book
and the most influential book
in American history.
There is no competition
for that title.
It's going to convert
millions of Americans
not to being
for immediate abolitionism,
not to being
for racial equality,
but for being against slavery.
Now that's a huge thing,
that's a sea change.
You can see Stowe taking aim
at the Fugitive Slave Law
in incident after incident,
and basically urging her readers
to defy what she thought was
an anti-Christian,
undemocratic law.
William Lloyd Garrison
attended a performance
of the play in New York
and marveled at the response
of the toughs in the front rows.
O, it was a sight worth seeing,
those ragged, coatless men
and boys in the pit...
The very material
of which mobs are made...
Cheering the strongest
and sublimest
anti-slavery sentiments!
Uncle Tom's Cabin
triggered a wave of defiance
to the Fugitive Slave Law.
Armed mobs broke into jails
to release fugitives
and even murdered
slave catchers.
And in the spring of 1854,
this wave of resistance
came to a head
when the national battle
over slavery
suddenly focused on a solitary
prisoner in Boston's city jail.
Anthony Burns had fled Virginia
and slavery
by stowing away on a ship
bound for the North.
He had avoided capture
for months
until a letter home
revealed his whereabouts.
When news of the arrest filtered
out, Boston erupted in anger.
While one group
tried to halt the proceedings
through legal maneuvers,
black and white activists
mounted a desperate assault
on the courthouse
where Burns was being held.
The attack was driven back
by club-wielding policemen,
but not before a guard
was shot and killed.
When the sun rose
the next morning,
Burns was still in jail,
and the city was seething.
When news of the upheaval
reached Washington,
President Franklin Pierce,
an ardent Southern sympathizer,
demonstrated
the government's resolve.
On June 2, 1854,
all Boston watched
as hundreds of U.S. Marines,
cavalry, infantry and artillery,
along with the county militia
and the Boston police,
marched Anthony Burns
from the jail
to a ship waiting in the harbor.
For Garrison,
the work of abolition
was about trying to make people
come to a moment of conscience
and act accordingly.
But one has to see the devil in
order to then turn towards God.
One has to see evil in order to
be committed to a life of good.
Slavery marches right up
into Massachusetts,
and now Northerners
get to see the face of evil.
It seemed that the United States
was committed to the
preservation of slavery.
Abolitionists were losing hope.
They couldn't see that already
they had shifted history.
By refusing to disappear,
to be silenced, to accommodate,
they had forced millions
of Americans
to take a stand on slavery
one way or the other.
The ties between North and South
had been replaced
by resentment and suspicion.
Garrison, Douglass, Stowe
and their fellow abolitionists
couldn't know it,
but their long struggle
had passed a tipping point.
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