1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [70]
The fire of radicalism was burning ever hotter in the Western Reserve. It was no coincidence that the martyred Brown himself had grown up in the town of Hudson, less than twenty miles from Hiram. Ohio’s early settlers from New England (Brown’s family included) had brought with them the moral ardor of their Puritan ancestors, combined with the toughness of pioneers, of men and women who kept rifles at their side to ward off heathen Indians. The second Great Awakening, together with the miraculous blessings that God’s providence conferred upon their flourishing new state, made them confident in their own power to transform circumstances. Northeastern Ohio in the first half of the nineteenth century was a heap of dry kindling ready to be set ablaze.
Some said that the tinder was first lit in June of 1845, when the Ohio American Anti-Slavery Society—then a small and fairly sedate organization—held its annual meeting in a Disciple church in New Lisbon. The spark came in the form of a visitor from New England: Abby Kelley, a young woman on a mission into the West. Her gentle appearance—the blue eyes and rosy cheeks, the demure dress of Quaker gray—was misleading to many who did not know her, for here was an orator who could fling down brimstone from the pulpit for hours on end; a warrior who had been pelted with stones, rum bottles, eggs, and excrement; a politician who freely declared that she put Liberty before Union. She had been called a Jezebel, a nigger bitch, a “man woman,” and worse, and none of it fazed her in the slightest. Her voice—starting low and quiet and then rising, rising, until it rang from every corner of the hall—was a fearsome and mighty weapon.
For three hot days in New Lisbon, Kelley preached to the crowd of sweat-soaked men and women who packed the little church and spilled out into the dusty street. Many had come unprepared for what they would hear. When she declared that “Washington and Jefferson were slave holding thieves, living by the unpaid labor of robbed women and children,” a male delegate rose to his feet, leapt onto the platform, and denounced her for this “slander” on the Founding Fathers, reminding the audience of Jefferson’s famous remark about trembling for his country. “Ah,” Kelley retorted, striding toward the intruder as if to shove him off the stage, “devils fear and tremble when the Almighty is thundering out his wrath upon them, but are they the less devils?” At this blasphemous attack, the hall erupted in gasps, shouts, denunciations. “She is proving it all,” one man cried, “but it will lead to war and bloodshed!” Then a voice rose over the tumult—whether of man or woman has been forgotten—and began singing an abolitionist anthem:
We have a weapon firmer set
And better than the bayonet;
A weapon that comes down as still
As snow-flakes fall upon the sod,
But executes a free-man’s will
As lightning does the will of God.
By the end of the three days in New Lisbon, nearly all of Kelley’s beguiled listeners had been won over to her brand of warlike radicalism. The delegates adopted four resolutions, the last of which held that the federal Union, based on the Constitution, was nothing short of a “great bulwark of slavery, involving the North equally with the South in the guilt of slaveholding; and that it is the duty of every true friend of humanity, to give it no sanction of allegiance, but adopting the motto of ‘no union with slaveholders,’ to use every effort to bring about a peaceful dissolution of the Union.”70 Barely two weeks later—while Kelley was still barnstorming through the towns and villages of Columbiana County, preaching under a makeshift tent when no church would receive her—the Society launched a new weekly paper, the Anti-Slavery Bugle, its masthead bearing a quotation from Edmund