Charles D. Cleveland

Mr. Still has asked me to record the part that my father bore in the Anti-slavery enterprise, as it began and grew in this city. I comply, because the history of that struggle would be very incomplete, if from it were omitted the peculiar work which my father’s position here shaped for him. Yet I can only indicate his work, not portray it; tell some of its elements, and then leave them to the moral sympathies of the reader to upbuild. For, first, his labor for the love of man was evenly distributed through the mould and movements of his entire life; and from a perpetual current of nourishing blood, one cannot name those particular atoms that are busiest or richest to sustain vitality. And, further, if I could hear his voice, it would forbid any detailed account of what he accomplished and endured. It was all done unobtrusively in his life; bravely, defiantly, in regard of the evil to be met and mastered, but as unconsciously in regard of himself as every conviction works, when it is as broad as the entire spiritual life of a man and has his entire spiritual force to give it expression. I know, therefore, that while I should be permitted to mention so much of his service as the history of the conflict might demand, I should be forbidden all tale of sacrifice and labor that mere personal narrative would include; and I ask now only this: What peculiar influence did he exert for the furtherance of the cause which so largely absorbed his labor and life? Did he contribute anything to it stamped with the signature of so clear an individuality that no other man could have contributed quite the same? To this I maintain an affirmative answer; and in witness of its truth, I sketch the general course of his life, that through it we may find those elements of his character which intuitively ranged him on the side of the slave.

When my father came to Philadelphia in 1834, his sentiments in regard to Slavery were those held generally in the North—an easy-going wish to avoid direct issue with the South on a question supposed to be peculiarly theirs. But the winds of Heaven owned to no decorous limit in Mason and Dixon’s line; and there were larger winds blowing than these—winds rising in the vast laboratories of the general human heart, and destined to sweep into all the vast spaces of human want and woe. The South was finding, through her blacks’ perpetual defiance of torture and death for freedom, that there was perhaps something, even in a negro, which most vexatiously refused to be counted in with the figures of the auctioneer’s bill of sale; and now the North’s lesson was coming to her—that the soul of a century’s civilization was still less purchasable than the soul of a slave. A growing feeling of humanity was stirring through the northern States. It was not the work, I think, of any man or body of men; it was rather itself a creative force, and made men and bodies of men the results of its awakening influence. To such a power, my father’s nature was quickly responsive. Both his head and his heart recognized the terrible wrongs of the enslaved, and the urgency with which they pressed for remedy; but where was the means? From the first, he felt that the movement which brought Freedom and Slavery fairly into the field and squarely against each other, threw unnecessary obstacles in its own way by the violence with which it was begun and prosecuted. If he were to work at all in the cause, he determined to work within the limits of recognized law. The Colonization Society held out a good hope; at least, he could see no other as close to the true but closer to the feasible; and, after connecting himself with it, he seems to have been content for a while on the score of political matters, and to have devoted himself to what he had adopted as his chief purpose in life. This was, enlarging the sphere of female education, and giving it a more vigorous tone. To this he tasked all his abilities. His convictions on the subject were very earnest; his strength of character sufficient to bear them out; so that, in a short time, he was able to establish his school so firmly in the respect of this community, that, for twenty-five years, all the odium that his activity in the Anti-slavery cause drew upon him did not for a moment abate the public confidence accorded to his professional power.

It was in 1836, in one of his vacations, that his mind was violently turned inwards to re-examine his status upon the Anti-slavery question. He happened to be visiting his old college-friend, Salmon P. Chase, at Cincinnati, and, fortunately for the spiritual life of both men, it was at the time of the terrible riots that broke up the press of John G. Birney. Both being known as already favoring the cause of the slave, they stood in much peril for several days; but when the dark time was passed, the clearness that defined their sentiments was seen to be worth all the personal danger that had bought it. Self-delusion on the subject was no longer possible. The deductions from the facts were as plain as the facts themselves. The two friends took counsel together, and adopted the policy from which thenceforward neither ever swerved. A great cloud was rolled from their eyes. In all this turmoil of riot, they saw on the one side, indeed, a love of man great in its devotion; but on the other, a moral deadness in the North so profound and determined that it threatened thus brutally any voice that would disturb it. Their duty, then, was evident: to fling all the forces of their lives, and by all social and political means, right against this inertness, and shatter it if they could. To Mr. Chase, the course of things gave the larger political work; to my father, the larger social. His diary records how amazed he was, when he returned to Philadelphia, at his former blindness, and how thankful to the spirit of love that had touched and cleansed his eyes that he might see God’s image erect. He knew now that his lot had been cast in the very stronghold of apathy, the home of a lukewarm spirit, which, not containing anything positive to keep it close to the right, let its sullen negativeness gravitate towards the wrong. It will be difficult to make coming generations understand, not the flaming antagonism to humanity, but the more brutal avoidance of it that ruled the political tone in this latitude, from 1836 to 1861. I have thought of the word bitterness, as expressing it; but though that might convey somewhat of its recoil when disturbed, it pictures nothing of its inhuman solicitude against all disturbance. Conservatism, it was called; and certainly it did conserve the devil admirably. At the South, one race of men were so basely wielding a greater physical power over another race of men, as to crush from them the attributes of self-responsible creatures; Philadelphia, the city of the North nearest the wrong, made no plea for humanity’s claims. It went on, this monstrous abrogation of everything that lends sanctity to man’s relations on earth, till slaves were beasts, with instincts annihilated, and masters demons, with instincts reversed; Philadelphia made no plea for the violated rhythm of life on either side. Even the Church betrayed its mission, and practically aided in stamping out from millions the spirit that related them to the Divine; still Philadelphia made no plea for God’s love in his humanity. Utterly insensible to the most piercing appeals that man can make to man, she loved her hardness, clung to it; and if, now and then, a voice from the North blew down, warningly as a trumpet, the great city turned sluggishly in her bed of spiritual and political torpor, and cried: Let be, let be! a little more slumber! a little more folding of the hands to my moral death-sleep!

This souring of faith, this half-paralysis of the heart’s beating, this blurring of the intuitions that make manhood possible, were what my father found here in that year of our Lord’s grace, 1836. It will be worth while to watch him move into the fight and bear his part in its thickest, just to learn how largely history lays her humanitarian advances on a few willing souls.

The means which lay readiest to his use for rousing the dormant spirit of the city was his social position. And yet how hard, one would think, it must have been to make this sacrifice. He came accredited by all the claims of finished culture, a man consecrated to the scholar’s life.^[1] Then, with the sensitiveness that springs from intellectual breeding, one will look to see him shrink from conflict with the callous condition of feeling around him. The glamour of book-lore will spread over it, and hide it from his sight. He has a noble enough mission, at all events: to raise the standard of educational culture in a city that hardly knows the meaning of the term; and if any glimpse should come to him of the lethargic inhumanity around him, he can afford to let it pass as a glimpse—his look being fixed on the sacred heights which the scholar’s feet must tread.

Ah, how his course, so different, proves to us that the true scholar is always a scholar of truth. No matter what element of the public sentiment he met—the listlessness of pampered wealth; the brutal prejudice of some voting savage; the refined sneer of lettered dilettanteism; the purposed aversion of trade or pulpit fearing disturbed markets or pews;—he beat lustily and incessantly at all the parts of the iron image of wrong sitting stolidly here with close-shut eyes. No matter when it was, on holiday or working-day or Sabbath; at home and abroad; in the parlor, the street, the counting-room; in his school and in the Church;—he bore down on this apathy and its brood of scorns like a west wind that sweeps through a city dying under weight of miasma. And the wind might as well cease blowing yet not cease to be wind, as my father’s influence stop and himself live. It scattered the good seed everywhere. How often have I heard him say, “I know nothing of what the harvest will be; I am responsible only for the sowing.” And bravely went the sowing on, with the broadcast largesse of love. There was no breeze of talk that did not carry the seeds;—to the wayside, for from those that even chance upon the truth the fowls of the air cannot take it all; to thin soil and among thorns, for no heart so feeble or choked that will not find in a single day’s growth of truth germination for eternity; to stony places, for no cranny in the rocks that can hold a seed but can be a home for riving roots;—”And other fell on good ground and did bring forth fruit.”

Thus it was primarily to rouse those of his own class that he labored, to gall them into seeing (though they should turn again and rend him) that moral supineness is moral decay, that the soul shrivels into nothingness when wrong is acquiesced in, as surely as it is torn and scattered by the furies let loose within it, when wrong is done. But just there lay the difficulty and pain of his mission: that, from his acknowledged standing in the literary world, and as a leader in the interests of higher education, his path brought him into contact mainly with the cultured, and it was among these that the pro-slavery spirit ruled with its bitterest stringency. Not cultured: let us unsay the word; rather, with the gloss and hard polish which reading and wealth and the finer appointments of living can throw over spiritual arrest or decay. Culture is a holy word, and dare be used of intellectual advance only when the moral sympathies have kept equal step. It includes something beyond an amateur sentiment; in favor of what we favor. If it does not open the ear to every cry of humanity, struggling up or slipping back, it is no culture properly so called, but a sham, a mask of wax, a varnish with cruel glitter; and what a double wrath will be poured on him who cracks the wax and the varnish, not only because of the rude awakening, but because the crack shows the sham.

It is impossible for us now to realize what revenge this class dealt to my father for twenty-five years. Consider their power of revenge. They could not force a loss of property or of life, it is true; they made no open assault in the street; their ‘delicacy’ held itself above common vituperation. But they wielded a greater power than all these over a man whose every accomplishment made him their equal, and they used it without stint. They doomed him to the slow martyrdom of social scorn. They shut their doors against him. They elbowed him from every position to which he had a wish or a right, except public respect, and they could not elbow him from that unless they pushed his character from its poise. They cut him off from every friendly regard which would else have been devotedly his, on that level of educated life, and limited him to ‘solitary confinement’ within himself. They compelled him to walk as if under a ban or an anathema. Had he been a leper in Syrian deserts, or a disciple of Jesus among Pharisees, he could not have been more utterly banished from the region of homes and self-constituted piety. They showered ineffable contempt upon him in every way consistent with their littleness and—refinement. Slight, sneer, insult, all the myriad indignities that only ‘good society’ can devise, these were what my father received in return for his love and his work in love.

How little personal relation all this obloquy bore to him, let this stand as evidence: that he not only continued his work, but daily gave it more caustic energy and wider scope. As I have hinted, he did not, in political matters, give in his adherence to that class of abolitionists who, as he thought, threw away their best chances of success in refusing to work within constitutional provisions. He was prouder that this single community should call him “abolitionist,” though it spat the word at him, than if the whole earth should hail him with the kingliest title; but he loved the name too well not to make it stand for some practical fact, some feasible and organized effort. He believed that our National Constitution did, indeed, hold many compromises with Slavery, but was framed, in the majority of its provisions and certainly in the totality of its spirit, in the interests of freedom; and that it only needed enforcement by the choice of the ballot-box to bring the South either to an amicable or a hostile settlement of the question. Which, he did not ask or care. The duty of the present could not be mis-read; it was written in the vote.

With these views, he gave much time and work to organizing in this State, “The National Liberty Party,” in 1840, and to securing from Pennsylvania some of the seven thousand votes that were cast for John G. Birney in that year throughout the Union. By the time another election came, the party had swelled its numbers to seventy thousand. To contribute his share towards this success, tract after tract, address after address, were written and sent broadcast; meetings were convened, committees formed, resolutions framed, speeches made, petitions and remonstrances sent, public action fearlessly sifted and criticised; in short, because he held a steady faith in men’s humane promptings when ultimately reached, he ‘cried aloud’ to them by every access, and ‘spared not’ to call them from their timidity and time-serving to manly utterance through the ballot-box.

Of such appeals, his address of the “Liberty Party of Pennsylvania, to the people of the State,” issued in 1844, may stand as a sample. It is a vivid portrayal of the slave power’s insidious encroachments, and of its monopolized guidance of the Government. It gathers up the national statistics into groups, shows how new meaning is reflected from them thus related, that all unite to illustrate the single fact of the South’s steady increase of power, her tightening grasp about the throat of government, and her buffets of threat to the North when a weedling palm failed to palsy fast enough. It warns northern voters of the undertow that is drawing them, and adjures them, by every consideration of political common sense, not to cast their ballots for either of the pro-slavery candidates presented. The conclusion of this address is as follows:

Is not the love of God and man ingrained in every line of this writing? Yet let us see how it was received by the most Christian (?) body in this city.

I need hardly say that my father’s mind had been largely impressed, from earliest manhood, with the highest subject human thought can touch. His library records his wide religious reading; but he could not see an honest path towards the profession of any definite views till 1836. The change wrought in him then, can best be gathered from his own simple words (under date, 1842) written in a fly-leaf of “The Unitarian Miscellany:” “Though I humbly trust that God made my trials in 1836 the means of bringing me to true repentance, yet I have kept these books as monuments of what I once was, and to remind me how grateful I should be to Him for having snatched me as a ‘brand from the burning,'” Such a faith as this, born of the spiritual travail of years, what a life it always has for the heart that forms it! It tells not of a persuasion, but of a conviction; a disproof of skepticism through the gathered forces of the soul; a struggle, through epochs of doubt and dismay, into an attitude of positive vital faith. Its process is the only one that gives real right to ultimate peace. In comparison with the method and measure of such a conviction, what matters its specific form? Self-truth is the point,—the fact for starting, the line for guiding; and as for result, this lonely and solemn rally on the deepest within us, as it is continuously unfolded, must lead to a glad and solemn union with the Highest without us. Who can know unfailing inward energy except through this new birth? It proved an ever-fresh spring of vigor to my father, and because of it he was chosen, in 1839, president of “The Philadelphia Bible Society.” What changes were wrought in the policy of the Society, what numerous plans were devised and executed for multiplying its operations, how it was made a cordial alliance of all denominations, will presently appear. This is now to be said: that, after filling his office for five years, he found that his Anti-slavery testimony had engendered in the managers a bitterness that would seize the address of 1844 for pretext, and make retaliation in his sacrifice. Thankful, for the thousandth time, to be a sacrifice for the cause he loved, he sent in his resignation in a letter full of Christian kindness and sorrow. A short extract will show its tone:

“One whose great heart wishes the best for humanity calls to us from the West: ‘When your Society propose to put a Bible into every family, and yet omit all reference to the slaves; and when, giving an account of the destitution of the land, they make no mention of two and a half millions of people perishing in our midst without the Scriptures, can we help feeling that something is dreadfully wrong?’ This, brethren, is a most solemn question. It is a question which I verily believe the American Bible Society, so far as they may have yielded, directly or indirectly, openly or silently, to a corrupt public sentiment on this subject, will have to answer at the bar of Him who has declared, that, ‘If ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin,’ and that ‘Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.’ The spirit of Christianity is a spirit of universal love and philanthropy. She looks down with pity, and, if she could, she would look with scorn upon all the petty distinctions that exist among men. She casts her benignant eye abroad over the earth, and, wherever she sees man, she sees him as man, as a being made in the image of God, whether an Indian, an African, or a Caucasian sun may shine upon him. She stoops from heaven to raise the fallen, to bind up the broken-hearted, to release the oppressed, to give liberty to the captive, and to break the fetters of those that are bound. She is marching onward with accelerated step, and, wherever she leaves the true impress of her heavenly influence, the moral wilderness is changed into the garden of the Lord. May it never be ours to do what may seem to be even the slightest obstacle to her universal sway.

“But I have already written more than I intended. In bringing this communication to a close, allow me to express to you individually, and as a Board, my most sincere Christian attachment. Whatever course any members may have taken in relation to this matter, I must believe that they have acted from what has seemed to them a sense of duty. Far be it from me to impeach their motives. Time, the great test of truth, may show them their course in a very different light from that in which they now view it. I may, as a Christian, lament that their views of duty are not more in unison with my own. I may, as a man, feel heart-sickened at the diseased, the deplorably diseased state of the public mind, in relation to two and a half millions of my fellow-men in bondage. I may, as a citizen of a Free state, blush at the humiliating fact, that not only the tyranny, but the ubiquity of the slave power is everywhere so manifest; that it has insinuated itself into our free domain to such a degree that there seems to be as much mental Slavery in the Free states, as there is personal in the Slave states. I may feel all this, but I must not impeach the motives by which others have been governed.”

There were twenty-one managers present at the reading of this letter, and, at its conclusion, a noble friend of the slave moved that the resignation be not accepted; the motion was lost by a vote of fourteen against seven. It was then moved that it be accepted ‘with regret:’ this was carried by the same vote! But ‘with regret’ was not an empty form for easing this action to its recipient; how much it meant is seen in the resolution that was added by unanimous acceptance: “Resolved,—That this Board are mainly indebted to Professor C.D. Cleveland for the prominent and influential position it has attained in the regards of this Christian community, and that they bear an earnest testimony to the sound judgment and unwearied zeal which have ever characterized the discharge of his duties in his responsible office.” Let this tribute, coming from the bitterest personal opposition that ever man encountered, measure the work that extorted it. Looking at it, it will be difficult for the reader to believe that a sacrifice was made of the man to whom it refers by a representative Christian body, and merely to sate for a time the inhuman slave-greed; yet it is only one fact out of many that might be adduced, and I have brought it forward because it is, in my father’s words, “a fair exponent of the position of the Christian Church at that time upon the subject of Slavery.” Henceforward, he ceased not to rain blows, not only at his own (the Presbyterian) denomination, but at all the organized expressions of Christian purpose,—the Sunday-School Union, the Tract Society, etc.

While working thus by voice and pen, he was incessantly busy in personal rescue of the slave. Especially was this the case when it became the duty of every lover of his kind to defy the Fugitive Slave Law. How eagerly he then sprang to aid the escape of those against whom a law of the land impotently tried to bar the law of our common humanity! During the years that followed the passage of this infamous bill, the position he had attained here was of particular service. Recognized as one, who, being a sort of standing sacrifice, might as well continue to battle in the front; trusted implicitly even by his bitterest foes; with such a broad philanthropy to back his appeals; pushing straight into every breach where work was needed; blind to everything but his one light of moral instinct;—he became an organ for the charities of those whose softer natures longingly whispered the cry, but could not do the cut and thrust work, of deliverance. Dr. Furness held the same position, and others who, like him, refused to be enrolled in the ‘Underground Committee,’ or in any definite Anti-Slavery organization. These men knew that they were of greater service to the cause by being its body-guard, by standing between it and the public, by making the appeals and taking the blows, and by affording access, pecuniary and other, of each to each.

Thus the times moved on—growing hotter, more difficult and dangerous, but always working these two results: redoubling the labors of this noble band, and shaking the city from lethargy into ferment. Men were compelled to take sides, and but one result could follow, (the result which always follows when human nature is stung and quickened to find its highest instincts,) the Party of Right steadily moved to triumph.

*       *       *       *       *

For a lesson to us in courage, it is worth while to ask, how these Apostles of Freedom stood the terrible strain put upon them for so many years. I can answer for the two of whom I write, and do not doubt that the answer is true of the rest: This self-forgetfulness was made easy by a love that filled and overfilled all their moral energies—the simple love of man, as God’s highest creation, and of his natural rights, as God’s best gift. Their work was not a mere result of will, not an outcome of faculty, not an unsupported impulse of heart. It was character living itself out, an utterance of its entire unity, something drawn from the solemn depths of those life-convictions which all the personal and impersonal powers of a man, aglow and welded, unite in producing. Hence, their work was not apart from them, even so far as to be called ahead of them; nor parallel with them; it was one with them by a necessary spiritual inclusion. Will and Duty ceased to be separate powers; they were transfused through the whole breadth of their human sympathies, adding to their warmth a fixity of purpose that bore them without a falter, through thirty years of such bitter obloquy, as, in these latter days, only the early Anti-Slavery disciples have had to endure. These men never said, in reference to the Anti-slavery cause, I ought or I will, because they never needed to say them. The sun shines without them, and life expands without them; and here were souls as unconsciously beneficent as the one, as spontaneous in growth and shaping as the other. Theirs was not a force that moved mechanically in right lines, with limited objects before it. It did, indeed, sweep with arrowy swiftness of assail on every point that offered; but when I remember that it more often pleaded than stormed, that it penetrated into every secret recess that mercy casually opened, and gently stirred into fuller life those roots of human feeling that can be numbed by apathy but not killed even by hate, I know that it was persuasive, diffusive, inbreathing force, an influence vital in others because an effluence vitalized from themselves.

So they stood, self-consecrated, enveloped by the love of God, permeated by the love of man,—twin Perfect Loves that cast out all dream of fear. And so they walked, calm as if a thousand stabs of personal insult never brought them one of personal pain, passing through all as if nothing but the serenest skies were above them. And, as I have said, right there is one explanation of the anomaly; there were the serenest skies above them—heaven’s love perpetually shining. Why should it not shine? all the powers of the men were dedicated to rescuing the image of God on this earth,—not man as he suffered physically, but the moral instinct threatened with annihilation. It was sacred to them, this soul so sacred to redeeming love, but too brutalized to find its way to it. Nor merely the slave. Their love embraced, with yet more pitying fervor, the master compelling his spiritual nature into death, and the northern apologist letting his die; and this overmastering love of saving spiritual integrity, was one power that made them and heart-ease hold unfailing friends through the obloquy of those days; the other must be found in the fact mentioned,—that neither resolve nor impulse was their spur, but personal character moving from its depths.

From such a motive-power as this can come no parade of results. The nature that works, proceeds from the necessary laws and forces of its being, and is as simple and unconscious as any other natural law or force. Hence there are no startling epochs to record in my father’s history, no supreme efforts; in filling the measure of daily opportunity lay his chief work. I cannot measure it by our ten fingers’ counting. I can only show a life unfolding, and, by the essential laws of its growth, embracing the noblest cause of its time. But if action means vivifying public sentiment decaying under insidious poison; if it includes the doing of this amid a storm of odium that would quickly have shattered any soul irresolute for an instant; if it means incessant toil quietly performed, vast sums collected and disbursed, time sacrificed, strength spent; if it means holding up a great iniquity to loathing by a powerful pen, and nailing moral cowardice where-ever it showed; if it be risking livelihood by introducing the cause of the slave into every literary work, and by mingling the school-culture of fifty future mothers, year by year, with hatred of the sin; if it means one’s life in one’s hand, friendships yielded, society defied, and position in it cheerfully renounced; above all, if action means a wealth of goodness overliving all scorns, compelling respect from a community rebuked, fellowship from a Church charged with ungodliness, and acknowledgment of unstained repute from a public eager to blacken with scandal; if to do thus, and bear thus, and live thus, is action, then my father did act to the full purpose of life in the struggle that freed the slave.

S.M.C.