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Select: Introduction: The Abolitionists - Henry Ward Beecher - John C. Calhoun Joseph Alden - Abraham Lincoln - Robert Green Ingersoll |
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The Abolitionists: In U.S. history, the abolitionists were those who sought to end the institution of black slavery. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, groups of abolitionists in Britain and France acted vigorously and effectively, protesting slavery in their nations' colonies and exposing the horrors of the African slave trade. Their example was followed in the United States, where abolitionists first achieved prominence during the American Revolution; the opponents of slaveholding included some illustrious Founding Fathers. Certain that slavery violated the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Rush joined their antislavery efforts with those of the Quakers (Society of Friends) and other religiously inspired Northerners. These abolitionists constituted one of the most controversial movements in American history. They believed that through such agitation it was possible to convince slaveholders to show repentance by releasing their slaves. Abolitionists also called upon each white citizen to cast aside prejudice against blacks and to join the crusade against slavery. In December 1833 the abolitionists formed the American Anti-Slavery Society, hoping to mount a national campaign, and by 1835 they had established networks of state and local societies. By the early 1840s, however, widespread and often violent opposition to the abolitionists' efforts had caused members of the movement to disagree profoundly about strategies and tactics. Abolitionists had also divided over controversial new issues such as women's rights, black separatism, and opposition to organized religion. During the Civil War, as the organized movement dissolved, many individual abolitionists pushed Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (1863). After the war they still lobbied for constitutional amendments and civil rights laws to protect the newly emancipated slaves. Others raised funds to support black education programs in the old slave states and served in the South as teachers, ministers, and political reformers. The intensity of effort ended, however, with the passage in 1865 of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, the goal for which the abolitionists had fought. Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) Henry Ward Beecher (picture) was born in Litchfield, Connecticut on June 24, 1813. He is considered to be one of the outstanding public figures of American life and a brilliantly persuasive preacher. Beecher was noted for his eloquence and ability to reflect the virtues of the common person. Beecher was regarded in his youth as unusually stupid by his parents, teachers, and playmates. He decided to study navigation and become a sailor, for he felt unsuited for other occupations. A great change took place in him during his sojourn at Mount Pleasant Classical Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts; his extraordinary vitality broke through. He became active in sports, read omnivorously, and resolved to become a preacher. He subsequently continued his studies at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. He, he revolted against Calvinism and professed independent Presbyterianism in the name of life and the beauty of nature. After serving two Presbyterian churches in Indiana for a decade, he moved in 1847 to the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, N.Y. Here his appealing messages and sincere moral earnestness made him a national figure. Beecher's popularity continued during a sensational adultery trial in 1875, arising from an alleged affair with Mrs. Theodore Tilton. His congregation backed him throughout the trial, which ended with a hung jury. Beecher was not a man of original thought; he started no new movement, but he succeeded in attracting and educating Church people, and helped them to develop the power to withstand life's tests and conflicts. He used his sermons to advocate social reforms; he was strongly opposed to slavery despite his dislike for radical abolitionists. He taught a disbelief of hell; defended evolution, and advocated that of which he was so terribly fond, the outdoor life. Despite their great success, his sermons did not satisfy him. He carefully scrutinized and adhered to the methods of Jonathan Edwards, the leader of the "Great Awakening" in New England, and those of the Apostles as they are described in the book of Acts. Beecher was minister, from 1847 until his death on March 8, 1887, at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York. Henry Ward Beecher influenced 19th-century life through his ability to articulate the standard values of most middle-class American citizens. Although not an exponent of original ideas, he brilliantly articulated his convictions. As his liberalism grew, he was among the few clergymen to abandon notions about miracles, future punishment, and Christ's divinity and support Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. In The Radical Academy
John C. Calhoun (picture) was a statesman and political philosopher. He was vice-president (1825-32) of the United States and a leading champion of Southern rights. He was born near Abbeville, South Carolina on March 18, 1782. The son of a slave-holding upcountry farmer, Calhoun was educated at Moses Waddell's Log College in Georgia and at Yale University and studied law under Tapping Reeve at Litchfield, Connecticut. Calhoun was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1807 and he served in the state legislature from 1809 to 1811 and in Congress from 1811. As a Congressman, he was a prominent War Hawk, a term designating a group of young nationalists who urged war with England to vindicate American national honor. He was chosen by President James Monroe to serve in his cabinet as Secretary of War. In 1824, he became vice-president under Adams and four years later was reelected to the same post under Jackson. All these honors came to him in quick succession, before he reached the age of fifty. But they were well deserved. For he was a man of great intelligence and many abilities, outspoken in his convictions, thoroughly honest, of kindly disposition, a calm and lucid speaker and tireless worker. His prestige was high in all political parties and his labors for the unity of the nation were generally applauded. He seemed to be destined for the presidency. A man of great ambition, Calhoun sought to succeed Monroe as president in 1824. After losing a bid for support in Pennsylvania to Andrew Jackson, however, he withdrew to run for the vice-presidency with endorsement from Jacksonians in the South and West and from the followers of John Quincy Adams in the Northeast. At the time of his election as vice-president (and Adams' as president) in 1824, Calhoun was not identified with the state rights position advocated by Southern conservatives. During this period of time, a different current of public opinion was forming: the abolitionist movement was on the rise. And Calhoun was a southerner, himself an owner of slaves. This issue alone could have been responsible for the fact that, though repeatedly nominated for the presidency -- for seven terms -- he was defeated every time in elections, and had to be satisfied with remaining a senator from South Carolina. Calhoun, however, never permitted this setback to influence his political conduct; he continued to devote his main efforts to preventing a conflict between North and South. But he must have been sadly disappointed. As a thinker, Calhoun found it advisable to limit himself to problems of political philosophy. He insisted on facing each issue, without being influenced by traditional ideas or current fashions, and trying to reduce complex ideas to their elements and then to place them in a suitable harmonious system. Consequently he was virtually free from the usual misconceptions, preconceptions and prejudices. He rejected such highly popular doctrines of the time as the social contract and natural rights. Nor did he sympathize with the widespread contention of his day that government was an unavoidable evil; in his own opinion, it was a perfectly natural form of social organization in a highly competitive and often inimical world. And men could enjoy only whatever rights were given to them or taken by them. His views on federal power had undergone a transformation inspired in part by the expansion of cotton cultivation, dependent upon slavery, into South Carolina. No longer persuaded that the interests of the South could be served by an active federal government fostering commerce and industry, Calhoun repudiated the American System and broke with the Adams administration. In 1828, he secretly authored the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, which asserted that a state had the power of nullification over any federal law it deemed unconstitutional. Serving (1842-43, 1845-50) in the Senate, Calhoun was a powerful spokesman for slavery and Southern rights until his death. He secured passage of the gag rules that forbade discussion of slavery on the floor of Congress. Serving briefly as secretary of state (1844-45) under John Tyler, he engineered the controversial annexation of Texas. He spent the remainder of his career defending the right of slavery to expand into federal territories and predicting disunion and civil war if that right were not respected. He opposed the Compromise of 1850 on the ground that it did not recognize that right. As a southerner, Calhoun had to pay special attention to the needs and problems of the electorate. He felt that this electorate was becoming one of national minorities; he was afraid, therefore, that the majority, once stabilized, could become neglectful or even tyrannical with regard to minority interests. Hence he maintained that one of the chief functions of democracy must consist in protection of minority rights. For, as he stated, there is no liberty without security. Calhoun died on March 31, 1850. He was a man of great intellectual accomplishments, and his writings in defense of the rights of the South as a minority region within the Union are a significant contribution to American political theory. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On the Internet
Principally known as a pedagogue, Alden began his career at the age of fourteen when he became a teacher in a district school. His skill and ability were soon recognized. He became a professor at Williams College in 1835 and remained there until 1852. He was appointed president of Jefferson College in 1857, and was principal of the State Normal School at Albany, New York from 1867 to 1882. He excelled in directing and developing logical thought in young people and was equally successful as an administrator and author. He published more than seventy books, most of which dealt with philosophy, religion, and government in such a manner that they were popularly acceptable for classroom use. Aware that his talents were chiefly of a didactic nature, Alden refrained from pretentious expression and adopted his aims to his methods. Of his many books, Christian Ethics or the Science of Duty (1866), The Science of Government (1867), and Thoughts on the Religious Life (1879) were the most widely read. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Abraham Lincoln (picture) was born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin in Hardin (now Larue) County, Kentucky. The family was poor, of pioneer, migratory stock; they were accustomed to privations. Indians had killed his grandfather, Lincoln wrote, "when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest" in 1786; this tragedy left his father, Thomas Lincoln, "a wandering laboring boy" who "grew up...without education." Thomas, nevertheless, became a skilled carpenter and purchased three farms in Kentucky before the Lincolns left the state. Little is known about Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Abraham had an older sister, Sarah, and a younger brother, Thomas, who died in infancy. In 1830 the Lincolns left Indiana for Illinois. Abraham made a second flatboat trip to New Orleans, and in 1831 he left home for New Salem, in Sangamon County near Springfield. The separation may have been made easier by Lincoln's estrangement from his father, of whom he spoke little in his mature life. In New Salem, Lincoln tried various occupations and served briefly in the Black Hawk War (1832). This military interlude was uneventful except for the fact that he was elected captain of his volunteer company, a distinction that gave him "much satisfaction." It opened new avenues for his life. Lincoln by this time was a grown man, good-humored, patient and kind, but also serious and ambitious. He was thinking a great deal, eager to make important things clear to himself. To improve his mind he bought books on geometry and logic, and studied them hard. But he also wanted to do things, to be somebody. He liked to talk on the main issues of the day, even to make speeches. He attended court trials trying to learn oratory from others. And he was becoming quite popular among his neighbors. In 1834, after one unsuccessful attempt, he was elected to the Illinois Legislature, and enjoyed his new work. What was even more important, fellow-citizens like and trusted "honest Abe." He was reelected three times in a row. In the meantime he was admitted to the Springfield bar (1837) and was doing rather well in his profession, whenever he was not busy otherwise. Soon after his marriage to Mary Todd in 1842, he began to make more ambitious plans. By this time he had friends throughout the state of Illinois and even in other states, especially after he was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1847. But what transformed him into a national figure was a series of debates on the slavery issue, his opponent being Stephen A. Douglas. After that, people began to think that Abraham Lincoln was not only an excellent speaker and a man to respect and trust, but also a man to watch in politics. And indeed, Lincoln did not deceive these expectations. In 1860 he rose to the top of his ambitions; he was elected to the presidency of the United States. Raised to this high position by popular vote, he changed hardly at all. He remained as simple and kind as before, as honest and straight about his ideas and intentions. Compared with Abraham Lincoln, many great figures in the history of the world, many really great leaders of nations, seem to be actors playing the roles of great men. There was nothing of the actor in Lincoln. His behavior was so simple that not only his adversaries but his political followers and many of his subordinates could not imagine that he was a hero. As Emerson said in his funeral discourse, Lincoln was a plain man of the people, a middle-class president, "yes, in manners and sympathies, but not in powers for his powers were superior." Lincoln never lost the characteristics of a small-town lawyer, indulging often in the jocular talk in which he relished and in which he was a past master. But through the atmosphere of jocularity flashed the brilliance of his hard thinking and tragic earnestness, the flame of his devotion to the nation. To that which Lincoln considered identical with the spirit of the nation -- the cause of popular government -- his name remains inseparably connected. Little by little Lincoln's sagacity, his valor and patience, his sense of justice and his generosity were recognized, at first by the people of the Union, and thereafter by the whole world. Lincoln was recognized as a good and wise man whose wisdom was the result of strenuous life, self-education and appreciation of the apparently unimportant events and accidents in the lives of small people, of enjoyment and resignation. Even his famous Gettysburg Address, from which his expression of confidence in the "government of the people, by the people and for the people" has been and will be quoted again and again, did not immediately work up his audience. It took time before the public was moved by Lincoln's words, but then the deep impression lasted. Lincoln possessed the art of making simple words meaningful and of coining sentences which have become proverbial wisdom in almost all languages. He appealed to the intelligence not to the brute instincts of the public, and he knew how to make difficult decisions and questions understandable to the untrained mind. Uneducated Lincoln may have been, but a thinker he always was. All the issues of life he confronted he invariably tried to understand, and as his horizon widened, his understanding grew in significance. His speeches, his letters are as worth reading today as anything in philosophy, and usually they are much clearer, too. The years of Lincoln's presidency were dark and trying, and the War Between the States was, of course, the main event of his administration. But the president had the people's confidence, as evidenced by his reelection in 1864. The following year General Robert E. Lee's army surrendered, and the hostilities were over. But the feelings generated by them were not. Only five days later, on April 14, Lincoln was shot by an assassin and died the next day. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On the Internet
Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) Robert Green Ingersoll (picture) was born in Dresden, New York on August 11, 1833. He was an American orator known as the "Great Agnostic." The youngest of five children, his mother was a remarkable person, strikingly beautiful, highly intelligent, with a keen sense of humor and the courage of her convictions. Unfortunately, she died when Robert was only two years old, but loving memory and admiration for her persisted in the entire family. His father, a Congregational minister, was an honest and broad-minded man, opposed to slavery, who was never able to get adjusted to the superficiality and fluctuations of public opinion. As a result, he was unsuccessful in his vocation and had to move from parsonage to parsonage until he settled down with his family in Illinois. But the family remained devotedly united and as happy as their poverty and insecure conditions permitted. Young Robert grew to be a man in whom cheerful optimism was combined with sympathy for people in trouble and passion for justice. These humane traits were further blended with a critical attitude toward all knowledge and belief. Apparently, his personality was appealing to most people. Self-educated, he was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1854 and his practice thrived. Yet he found enough time to read philosophical works of ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Indians, as well as of modern thinkers. After serving in the Union army during the Civil War, he was attorney general of Illinois (1867-69) and became a vigorous campaigner for Republican candidates. His most famous political address was the speech in which he nominated James G. Blaine, whom he called a "plumed knight," for president. At the 1876 Republican convention, Ingersoll's own political ambitions were thwarted by public disapproval of his attacks on religion, which he delivered from lecterns all over the country. And it was not as a successful professional man, but rather as a lecturer that Ingersoll became famous throughout the country. The topics he presented to the public were mostly controversial: slavery, capital punishment, suicide, prohibition, sex equality, marriage and divorce, education of children, kindness to animals, world unity. Ingersoll never was an atheist though he did demand that religion be practiced as rationally as any human belief. He never denied immortality, but could only say, "I do not know." He never lacked in patriotism and contended that only "he loves his country best who strives to make it best." He never stopped extolling the merits of married life, but was also known to declare that "the death of love is the end of marriage." He professed in sincere word and helpful deed that life's aim is happiness, yet conceded that under certain conditions a man has the right to kill himself. Naturally enough, Ingersoll himself became a much-discussed person. He made countless bitter enemies whose objections and criticisms, however, only increased the enthusiasm of his admirers. Robert Green Ingersoll symbolized the intellectual ferment that buffeted orthodox religion in late 19th-century America. He died at Dobbs Ferry on July 21, 1899, and was cremated a few days later. His and his wife's ashes now rest together in Arlington Cemetery, near Washington D.C. His writings were published in 12 volumes in 1902. In The Radical Academy
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