Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [441]
This extremely unusual degree of association—in some cases outright friendship—between middle-class blacks and whites in New York City helped galvanize an antislavery movement. Tappan reversed course on colonization, as did Garrison up in Boston, where he started the Liberator, an antislavery paper, in 1831. Soon Garrison came out with a sharp attack on the American Colonization Society, a polemic that received wide circulation with the help of financial assistance from Arthur Tappan.
Before long the silk merchant essayed bolder interventions, urged on by Charles Finney, who declared slavery one of the evils America had to shed if it were to attain the millennium. Tappan set out to form an integrated antislavery organization. He secured the collaboration of black ministers Williams, Wright, and Cornish, and he also recruited youthful white evangelicals from the Third Presbytery, seat of Yankeedom in New York. William Goodell, editor of the Genius of Temperance, signed on. Joshua Leavitt, editor of the New York Evangelist (and, like Garrison and Tappan, a sometime resident at the Grahamite Boardinghouse), also saw the abolitionist light. So did the Rev. George Bourne, editor of the anti-Catholic Protestant Vindicator, and Presbyterian minister Samuel H. Cox, a close friend of Cornish and Wright and, like Bourne, a religious bigot, though he focused his ire on Quakerism (“infidelity in drab”).
In the spring of 1833 Tappan launched the Emancipator, a newspaper devoted solely to abolition, and underwrote its distribution to clergymen across the North. Next, he and his associates set about organizing a New York Anti-Slavery Society. They decided they would formally inaugurate it whenever English abolitionists succeeded in their campaign to end slavery in the British West Indies. Such a transatlantic linkage would underscore the fact that the abolitionists’ views, rather than those of slaveholders and their apologists, were becoming the norm of the “civilized” world. When news reached New York in September 1833 that Parliament had voted for emancipation, Tappan announced an organizational meeting for 7:30 Wednesday evening, October 2, at Clinton Hall.
On October 1 a worried group of colonizationists met in the office of James Watson Webb, editor of the Courier and Enquirer. The American Colonization Society was in deep financial trouble. Its Liberian colony was faring poorly. It was smarting from rebukes (by Arthur Tappan and other temperancites) about its importation of liquor. And now abolitionist rivals were poised to take the field.
For Webb, the abolitionists presented a clear and present danger not just to the ACS but to New York City itself. Though he proudly traced his lineage to Puritan Massachusetts, Webb was an ardent Episcopalian and a member (by marriage) of New York’s wealthy mercantile class. A staunch traditionalist, he had appointed himself the journalistic defender of the city’s patriciate. Webb was particularly concerned to guard against any dilution of old American bloodlines by inferior breeds—above all, blacks—and to his way of thinking, Tappan’s newest venture threatened just such miscegenation. If slaves were emancipated but not exiled, they would have to be assimilated. Given that many freed slaves would move north, the abolitionist enterprise might mulattoize New York society.
On the morning of Tappan’s planned meeting, Webb’s Courier and Enquirer fulminated: “Are we tamely to look on, and see this most dangerous species of fanaticism extending itself through society? . . . Or shall we, by promptly and fearlessly crushing this many-headed hydra in the bud, expose the weakness as well as the folly, madness, and mischief of these bold and dangerous men?” He urged “patriots” to assemble at Clinton Hall a half hour before meeting time to take remedial action. During the day placards went up around town, addressed (ostensibly) TO ALL PERSONS FROM THE SOUTH(and signed “Many Southerners”), summoning people to Clinton Hall to show their displeasure. Tempers flared yet higher