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This article was reproduced in The Liberator on September 9, 1864. The report from Richmond sheds light on the feelings of many Southern supporters of the Confederacy to how to handle black combatants and prisoners of war.

Richmond Dispatch, Aug. 5th, 1864:

Among the eleven hundred prisoners taken by our forces last Saturday, before Petersburg, two hundred were negroes, many of them, perhaps all of them, stolen or runaway slaves. If any advertisement has yet been published in the papers, calling upon persons who have lost slaves to come forward and identify their property and take it away, we have not observed such advertisement.

Lately, there were many negroes recovered from the raiding party of Kautz and Wilson;, their names were very properly published, and their owners informed where they could come and take them. The two hundred black rascals taken alive in the Petersburg trenches, (most improperly taken alive, as they proclaimed “No quarter,”) now that they are in our hands, are worth half a million. It may be hoped that, strict examination will be made among them, and due notice given to such as have lately, been robbed of such property, with a view of making restitution of such of them as are slaves.

The right of the Yankee Government is undoubted to enlist, or to draft , or to procure how they can, free negroes whose residence is at the North.

They would have a perfect right to make war upon us with elephants, or to stampede us with wild cattle, or to set dogs upon us—and our men an equal right to kill them; a perfect right, therefore, to employ negroes as soldiers.  (more…)

This piece on the positions held by abolitionists first appeared in the Hudson Observer & Telegraph and was reprinted to a national audience in William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator, on December 1, 1832.

Garrison was a journalistic crusader who advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves and gained a national reputation for being one of the most radical of American abolitionists. The Liberator denounced the Compromise of 1850, condemned the Kansas-Nebraska Act, damned the Dred Scott decision and hailed John Brown’s raid as “God’s method of dealing retribution upon the head of the tyrant.”

The slaveholders in the South demanded the end of the incendiary paper and the state of Georgia offered a $5,000 reward for Garrison’s capture. The Liberator was a mighty force from the beginning and became the most influential newspaper in the antebellum antislavery crusade.

After the end of the Civil War in December 1865, Garrison published his last issue of The Liberator, announcing “my vocation as an abolitionist is ended.”

Sentiments of Abolitionists

Abolitionism utters none of that foolishness which its opponents put in its mouth. It does not talk about ‘turning loose,’ ‘intermarrying,’ and all that sort of stuff. It is no such thing that the slaves ask. If they were fond of whitening, they have enough of it now, in all conscience. (more…)

This editorial from the American Sentinel appeared in the October 20, 1865, issue of The Liberator.

Negro Suffrage

One objection which is urged against permitting the negroes of the South to vote is that they are not prepared for the proper exercise of that right. Well,perhaps they are not as fully prepared as the Yankees,born among free institutions nurtured in our educational institutions, who read the papers and engage in public affairs. They may not be as intelligent as these, but when will they become such?Will keeping than in a degraded state do it? Will depriving them of all opportunity for improvement for gaining self-respect, do it? Not at all! They must have opportunities for culture; they must be made to feel they are somebody, and this can be done by placing them in a higher situation and presenting to them something to contend for. This, the right of suffrage will do, it will stimulate them to the effort by showing them they are somebody; it will incite in them a desire to attain knowledge, distinction,  position.

If they need education to it, them for the appreciation of this right, which we grant, then educate them, “A boy cannot learn to swim on dry land. He must try the water, and run the risk of being drowned. So the use of the ballot is the best training for the responsibilities of the citizen, although lenders may for a while result. Put the Bible, the Spelling book, and the ballot in the field together, and they will win the victory.”

TO THE EDITOR OF THE LIBERATOR:

SIR: Having in my native land, during your late war, taken a deep interest in everything relating to your country, I became strongly impressed with a desire to pay a visit, in order that by personal observation the views I had previously entertained might be confirmed or corrected. While in England, I was repeatedly told that in your churches you had “nigger”-pews; negro carriages, like lumber boxes, on your railways; no seats for negroes in your horse-cars; and that in every possible way, even in the enlightened North, the negro was punished and trampled upon for no other reason than that he belonged to what was supposed to be an outcast race. Even in our large public meetings held for the purpose of discussing the great American struggle, the advocates of freedom were repeatedly told that, in the North, the hatred of the whites to the blacks was shown by hanging the negroes at the lamp-posts in the streets. Of course, we know that the terrible New York riot was not the work of the freedom-loving North, but was entirely to be attributed to the sympathizers with the South; yet in England, to a very large extent,the fiction was believed to be true, and the darker the falsehood, the more readily it was received. I have seen your churches, your railroads, and your cars, and have seen nothing which indicates to me that you regard the negroes as a proscribed race, over whom Providence has placed you to rule and punish with a rigorous hand. It is true, there is some prejudice against the negro on account of his color, but this prejudice is not general, nor is it anymore bitter than I have seen evidenced in England against the Irish. I have often seen in the news-papers where vacant situations are advertised, that the concluding sentence has been, “No Irish need apply. ”

Then again, it was said that the North, in endeavoring to put down the rebellion, was engaged in an impossible task. and the South must ultimately triumph. Mr. JOSEPH BARKER, who formerly lived in America, and whom many of your readers know, proclaimed most positively, time after time, on the English platforms, that this was a moral certainty. Before I left England, not only Mr. Barker, but every member of the “Southern Independence Association,” and every newspaper editor who sympathized with Southern despotism, were compelled to see how egregiously they had blundered, and how ridiculously foolish they had made themselves appear, by the dogmatical and dictatorial course which they had pursued.

The Liberator (1831-1865) was an abolitionist newspaper founded by William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp in 1831. They published weekly issues of The Liberator from Boston continuously for 35 years, from January 1, 1831, to the final issue of December 29, 1865. Although its circulation was only about 3,000, the newspaper earned nationwide notoriety for its uncompromising advocacy of “immediate and complete emancipation of all slaves” in the United States.

The Liberator also became an avowed woman’s rights newspaper when the prospectus for its 1838 issue declared that as the paper’s object was “to redeem woman as well as man from a servile to an equal condition,” it would support “the rights of woman to their utmost extent.”

The paper carried announcements for Women’s Rights Conventions around the North East and often carried detailed reports on the meetings like the one here from September 28, 1855.

1855 Boston Woman’s Rights Convention

Harriot Kezia Hunt, First Woman to Apply to Harvard Medical School

This convention met in September and the attendance was large, and to those present. Miss Harriot Kezia Hunt read an address on the progress of women in this country, to the women present.

The meeting appointed Paulina W. Davis, of Providence, as President. Miss Harriot K. Hunt, Mrs. Carolina H. Call, Mrs. Sean Harris, Mrs. Harris Carolina, Mrs. Richard Hildreth, and Rev. T.W. Higginson, as Vice-presidents, and Miss Cariton of Dorchester and William H. Fish, of Hopedale, as Secretarians.

Mrs. Davis took the chair with as address on the hopes and purposes of the Woman’s Rights government and incidentally advised that memorials be made to every State Legislature in the loud, asking for woman the right of citizenship, and that petitions must be everywhere circulated for same – urging zeal in the work.

Mrs. Caroline H. Dall read a report relating to the laws of Massachusetts regarding married women, stating their objectionable features which were as follows:

A Harriot Kezia Hunt Quote

Addresses were made, before dinner, by Mrs. Lucy Stone Blackwell, who was in favor of woman voting and by T.W. Higginson, of Worcester, who believed the time would come when it would be a disgrace not to be a Woman’s Rights man.

That evening, Dr. Harriot K. Hunt of Boston presented the following regulations:

Resolved, That the present position assumed by Medical schools, precluding Woman from the educational advantages enjoyed by Man, on the ground of delicacy, virtually acknowledges the impropriety of man over being her medical attendant. [Applause and laughter.]

Resolved, That we will do all in our power the sustain those women , who, from a conviction of duty, enter the medical profession, in their efforts to overcome the evils which have accumulated in their path, and in their attacks upon the strongholds of vice, in which women are so effectual.

Resolved, That the present army of snack nostrums and the utter incompetency of physicians to stay them, and the reception of some of them into the Pharmacopeias, together with the varied pathless and of the day, are suggestive of a need of that higher element in medical life, which can only be supplied by the admission of woman.

William Lloyd Garrison and his daughter, January 1875

Miss Hunt mode a few remarks, chiefly in compliment to Dr. Buchanan’s Eclectic Medical School of Cincinnati, the Starling Medical College of Columbus, and the Cleveland College, all of Ohio, and to all of which woman are admitted. “Think of Massachusetts in this contract!” added Miss Hunt.

On Thursday, Mr. William Lloyd Garrison spoke, he began the evening pledging himself to the advancement of women. It was, he said, a reformation that was destined succeed here and over the world. No good argument can be brought against it.

The objections so it are similar to these made against the freeing of the slave. But this rights of a human being does not depend on sex. Wherever the rights of one human being is defended, there are the rights defended for every other human being on the face of the earth.

Mr. Garrison went on to show that all the Objectives, made to the women’s cause are identical with against the cause of the slave; and belong in the community of oppression. Whoever is not for women’s Rights is not for Human Rights. He is not a Republican.

Source: The Liberator, September 28, 1855
Top Image: Statue of Lucy Stone in the Boston Women’s Memorial