1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [71]
Within a year, the Society had changed its name: it would henceforth be known as the Western Anti-Slavery Society, in keeping with the geographical broadening of its ambitions. It moved its base northward, to the prosperous town of Salem in the heart of the Western Reserve. Kelley would return again and again in the years that followed, raising funds and—in the words of one unsympathetic newspaper editor—“ministering to the depraved appetites of her fanatical followers.” In 1854, two Southerners were imprudent enough to pass through Salem on their way home to Tennessee with a recently purchased slave, a girl about twelve years old. Local abolitionists—led by a free black man—stormed the train and carried the little girl off in triumph. That night, at an impromptu rally in the town hall, they brought their liberated captive to the stage and bestowed on her a new name: Abby Kelley Salem.72
The girl’s foolish owners should have known: Ohio meant freedom. Harriet Beecher Stowe had told all America as much—had told all the world, in fact—in her great novel. There was now scarcely a man, woman, or child who did not know the story of Eliza’s flight from Kentucky, the most famous scene of the most famous book of the century. In the space of barely two paragraphs, the young slave woman crossed the frozen river, leaping from floe to floe, her bleeding feet staining the ice, “but she saw nothing, felt nothing, till dimly, as in a dream, she saw the Ohio side, and a man helping her up the bank.”73
The truth was much more complicated than Stowe’s fiction. The Ohio River was not a bright line between freedom and slavery but a muddy and disputed no-man’s-land. The farmers and merchants of southern Ohio made their fortunes shipping corn, wheat, and salt pork downstream to feed the plantations’ black field hands—whose sweat and toil, in the form of stacked cotton bales, came back up the river to feed the textile mills of the North. Many of these Ohioans would have been more than happy to return Eliza and her baby, or any other fugitive slaves for that matter, to their master. Few of Stowe’s admirers cared to notice that she had made her villain, the sadistic slave master Simon Legree, a transplanted Yankee. Likewise, few heard Kelley when she said that North and South shared equally in the guilt of slavery.74
In fact, only a tiny portion of the millions of Northerners who read Stowe’s novel even called themselves abolitionists. The term was still an ugly epithet for most people, connoting dubious patriotism and, perhaps worse, a most un-American tendency to trespass upon the affairs of one’s fellow citizens. Abolitionists were attacked by mobs not just in the slave states but also in Boston and Philadelphia. The eminent Yankee intellectual Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., condemned them as traitors to the white race—as he sneeringly put it, “ultra melanophiles.” Even the Western Reserve’s congressman, Joshua Giddings, the most extreme antislavery politician in the national legislature, refused to wear the badge of outright abolitionism until after the war began.75
Among those few Americans who did fully embrace the cause, almost none accepted the idea that blacks and whites were equal intellectually, much less that they ought to be equal politically. At the antislavery meeting in New Lisbon, Kelley nearly lost her audience when she declared that black men and women were no different from whites under the skin. (Even James Garfield, despite eventually becoming an outspoken advocate of full civil rights for blacks, was never able to overcome an inward distaste for them as people.)76 Indeed, many antislavery Republicans prided themselves on belonging to the true “white man’s party,” since the Democrats planned to “flood Kansas and the other territories with Negro slaves.” Keeping blacks out of white Northerners’ midst was a good reason for opposing slavery’s expansion.77
What did gain wide currency among Northerners—even many who detested blacks and abolitionists in equal measure—was