Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [448]
When it came time to apportion blame, some denounced scaremongers Webb and Stone for whipping up the crowds. Some denounced the rioters and declared civil disorder intolerable, no matter what its cause. But the bulk of respectable and popular opinion alike argued that the abolitionists had brought it on themselves.
In this repressive atmosphere, abolitionists made some tactical retreats. The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) plastered handbills around the city, denying it encouraged intermarriage. It sent an official disavowal of amalgamationist proclivities to the mayor. Lewis Tappan, who left his house on Rose Street unrepaired as “a silent Anti-Slavery preacher,” was criticized by fellow abolitionists for allowing black and white choirs to sing in the same church, even though seated separately. And when Tappan later requested that a black minister address an antislavery gathering, nervous colleagues insisted that “the time has not come to mix with people of color in public.”
Abolitionists also suffered some defections. Under strong pressure from Bishop Onderdonk, Peter Williams Jr., pastor of the ruined St. Philip’s, resigned from the AASS—though he refused to recant his principles and declared the abolitionists “good men, and good Christians, and true lovers of their country, and of all mankind.” Charles Grandison Finney, shocked at New York Christian businessmen’s approval of racist outrages, resigned the country’s leading pulpit and retired to Oberlin College, a Tappan-backed institution in northern Ohio.
After a year of lying low, however, the abolitionists aggressively expanded their operations—albeit outside the city itself. In May 1835, employing the skills and resources they had used in fashioning the benevolent empire, the Tappans set out to inundate the entire United States—South as well as North—with antislavery propaganda. In 1834 the AASS had distributed 122,000 pieces of literature. In 1835 its highspeed presses pumped out over a million tracts—graphically illustrated exposés of slavery’s horrors. The AASS also circulated newspapers, plaster statuettes of slaves in chains, handkerchiefs, medals, emblems, and blue chocolate wrappers. Mixing business and politics, Lewis also advertised the sale of silk prints depicting “The Poor Slave.”
This amazing mass communication machine provoked anxiety throughout the North and outrage throughout the South. Mainstream northern opinion had not been overly worried about the impact on the Union of ravings by a few fiery Bostonians. But now the abolitionist movement was being directed from New York City by masters of the new media, possessed of awesome organizational skills. Within four years the AASS would boast 1,350 auxiliaries and a million members nationwide. Conservative regional elites in Illinois or Ohio could handle local radicals: gentry-directed riots to suppress home-grown abolitionists multiplied throughout the North. But competing with New Yorkers presented a more formidable challenge. Indeed Manhattanites’ newfound ability to disseminate a political gospel, coupled with their command over capital and credit, was positively alarming.
White Southerners were infuriated. Inflamed by the torrent of tracts that began reaching their ports, by mid-August of 1835 they were hysterical. Vigilantes stopped, boarded, and searched ships and stages, hunting for subversive literature; they patrolled slave quarters to make sure none had gotten through. They denounced the New Yorkers in blazing speeches at torchlit parades. A band of men broke into the Charleston post office, carried off mailbags newly arrived from the Hudson, and used the intercepted abolitionist tracts and magazines to kindle a huge bonfire. In it they burned effigies of Arthur Tappan and Samuel Cox, as thousands cheered.
Some southerners were not satisfied with symbolic gestures. East Feliciana, Louisiana, posted a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for the delivery of Arthur Tappan, dead or alive. Some demanded the Tappans be extradited. This, however, got New Yorkers’ backs up, angering