Antiabolitionist Attacks Reformers’ Efforts

CALVIN COLTON, Abolition a Sedition (1839)

Calvin Colton (1789–1857) was a minister active in Whig political circles. He spent the early part of his career in New York, then Kentucky, where he wrote a biography of leading Whig politician Henry Clay. In his 1839 book Abolition a Sedition, which he published anonymously, Colton attacked those he described as antislavery radicals for using religion as a political weapon and for engaging in violent actions. He feared that abolitionists were playing on Americans’ Christian sympathies to gain control of the political machinery, which could only antagonize southerners and lead them to the breaking point. In the selection excerpted here, Colton frames the threat abolitionists pose as a political attack on America’s republican system.

So long as the American Anti-slavery Society is permitted to exist, and to carry on its operations under its present form, it is not the reason of their cause that prevails, but the power of their machinery in its action on the public mind. All opposing influences, so long as the Government is inactive, are like the scattering, random, and over-shoulder shot of a routed and retreating host that is flying in the field before the well-formed, steady, and disciplined march of a triumphant army — triumphant, because there is no corresponding agency to oppose them, not because they have the right. Such, precisely, is the effect of all the newspaper squibs that are fired off on the Abolitionists, and such the effect of the unorganized remonstrances of the public. The Abolitionists are in the field with a disciplined army, officered, paid, with a full staff, and an adequate Commissariat. In other words, they are a regularly organized and permanent political body, acting under a complete State machinery in all that their exigences require, adding to it at pleasure, with ever active and industrious agents, with money at command and the power of the press, and as independent of the Government of this country as the throne of the Sultan at Constantinople — and yet doing the business of the country!

There are most obvious reasons, why such a power, once recognized as suitable and proper, will carry all before it, till it shall have dissolved the Government of this country. The Abolitionists have all the native and long cherished feeling of the North on their side, as being opposed to slavery in principle; they have all the advantage of the sympathies of our nature, when we consider the manner in which they represent the case; they have the common and prevailing popular ignorance of the nature of our political fabric to aid them — for it is not to be supposed, that the people generally will have clear and uniform views on a question upon which Statesmen differ; and to the effect of all these natural and social auxiliaries, they superadd the power of their immense, combined, and variously ramified machinery, which steals every where upon the public, catching every man, woman, and child, whose benevolent sympathies are naturally open to their appeals, and when once they are indoctrinated after the manner and in the school of the Abolitionists, and become possessed of their spirit, there is little chance for the sway of those principles on which our political society is based. It is not the fair argument of the cause, but the power of this political combination, that bears such sway. There is no chance for a candid hearing before the public, and for the due influence of all the considerations which appertain to this momentous and complicated question, because the constitutional balance of power, designed for such exigences, has been prostrated by an usurpation, and every thing is made to give way to isolated and abstract opinions, and to the dictations of political quackery. Fanaticism rules, and not reason; and the natural and inevitable consequence will be, that the gradual accumulation of this moral power, thus acquired, will swell to a magnitude, and urge on a momentum, before the pressure of which the Union will be compelled to yield and break down. The people of the South will be annoyed and vexed, till they can be annoyed and vexed no longer. Then will be the beginning of the end.

Are we understood? Is it not clear, that it is this political usurpation of an unlawful power, that puts the country in peril? Let this irregularity, this transcending of law, be reduced again to the Constitutional basis, and all this excitement, alarm, and danger, will die away, because the healthful Constitutional balance of influence would be restored. Opinion would then encounter opinion on common ground, with no undue advantage of one party over another.

Calvin Colton, Abolition a Sedition, By a Northern Man (Philadelphia: Geo. W. Donohue, 1839), 180–182.

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