Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [442]
That evening at least fifteen hundred New Yorkers arrived at Clinton Hall, yelling for the blood of Tappan and Garrison, only to find the building locked. The trustees of Clinton Hall, having learned of the proposed onslaught, had withdrawn permission to use it, and Tappan’s troops had surreptitiously shifted uptown to Finney’s Chatham Street Chapel. By the time the crowd of “highly respectable citizens” (in the words of a later newspaper report) learned of the new venue and arrived to storm the building, the New York Anti-Slavery Society had whipped through its organizational meeting, elected Arthur Tappan president, and slipped out the back door. The abolitionists were in business.
Indeed New Yorkers now seized the mantle of national antislavery leadership from the Garrisonians in Boston. On December 4, 1833, sixty black and white delegates founded the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), establishing its national headquarters at 143 Nassau Street and requiring all members of the Executive Committee to be residents of New York City. Arthur Tappan was named president. His brother, Lewis, joined the Executive Committee, along with some white merchants and the black ministerial trio of Cornish, Wright and Williams.
The worst fears of negrophobes had been realized. New York had become a center of antislavery agitation—at who knew what cost to the city’s business links with the South. Worse, the integrated organization had put blacks in positions of responsibility and signaled an assault on local segregation by inviting blacks into white evangelical churches (though continuing to seat them separately). Tappan and team—having told New York it had problems with drink and sex—now informed the city it had a racial problem, which it would not be allowed to ignore.
WHITE SLAVES AND “SMOKED IRISH”
Abolitionists hoped to win support from New York’s white working class. Most radical leaders were disciples of Tom Paine and Robert Owen, both of whom were ardent enemies of servitude. Fanny Wright was antislavery. So was George Henry Evans, editor of the Workingman’s Advocate. Evans, indeed, specifically opposed colonization, defended free speech for abolitionists, and urged workers to support their project, insisting that “EQUAL RIGHTS can never be enjoyed, even by those who are free, in a nation which contains slaveites enough to hold in bondage two millions of human beings.”
Many white workers agreed with Evans that slavery was unjust: republican artisans considered chattel slavery the antipode of liberty. Many artisans and shopkeepers were among the three thousand who signed an abolitionist petition submitted to Congress in 1830, calling for an end to slavery in the District of Columbia. The plebeian-oriented Sun occasionally printed antislavery material, and the Transcript defended abolitionists’ right to speak.
Nevertheless, most New York laborers hated the men in command of the abolitionist apparatus and refused to separate the message from the messengers. Abolitionism was inextricably linked to other evangelical initiatives that many workers found objectionable. Evans, a freethinker, rejected Tappan’s revivalism and Sabbatarianism and wondered if the abolitionists weren’t “actuated by a species of theological fanaticism” in hoping “to free the slaves more for the purpose of adding them to their religious sect, than for love of liberty and justice.”
Worse, many of the wealthy merchants who championed black slaves were in the front ranks of those condemning workers who rallied to defend their rights (the Tappan-initiated Journal of Commerce had led the assault on Workie-ism). Tappan and his colleagues drew a sharp line between slavery and capitalism. Under slavery, the misery and poverty of working people was clearly attributable to the slaveocrats who owned them. Under capitalism—given the evangelical premise that ascribed success or failure wholly to individual character—a working person’s poverty could not be laid at his employer’s door.
The absolute clarity