An Abolitionist’s New Year’s Resolutions

Amos A. Phelps was a young Congregational minister who was about to embark on a career as a noted aboli­tionist. In 1833, he was still a year away from that adven­ture, but as the new year came in, he wrote down his resolu­tions like a million other serious young men. His hand­writ­ten diary can be seen in the Internet Archive; here some of his less common abbrevi­ations have been expanded, but the text is other­wise as he wrote it. We do not know which Mr. Seixas was Phelps’ Hebrew instruc­tor, but it could have been one of the fifteen children of the famous Gershom Mendes Seixas.

Jan 1st 1833. Tuesday Eve. Commenced the study of Hebrew with Mr Seixas to day. Preached this evening on the subject of Fasting. Gave my people strong meat. Dont know how it will set. Tuesday Eve ✝ meetings gen­erally not fully attended. Wife still sick. As this is the begin­ning of another year I would record the solemn pur­poses of my soul.

Resolved—1. that as a whole I will strive contin­ually to be more devoted & to carry more of a savor of piety into the var­ious duties of my office.

Resolved—2. that I will make it a point to rise as early as 6 the year round.

Resolved—3. that I will make it a point to econ­omize my time to the best pos­sible advan­tage & to this end will aim to do every thing at its proper time & in the shortest time possible.

Resolved—4. that I will, when circum­stances admit, pray 3 times each day—morning, noon, & night.

Resolved—5. that I will make it a point to con­verse with some impen­itent sinner each day in the year.

——Manuscript journal of Amos A. Phelps, vol. 2.

The Real Motives of the American Colonization Society

In the early 1800s, opposition to slavery in the North was con­stantly growing, and the fear of aboli­tionism mixed with the fear of slave revolt, perhaps encouraged by free black citizens, to make Southern slave­holders more than a little worried. Could they reach some agree­ment with the opponents of slavery? To some it seemed as though an obvious solution offered itself: send the free blacks back to Africa. The American Coloni­zation Society embraced both slave­holders and some aboli­tionists in an effort whose most obvious result was the founding of Liberia. But not all aboli­tionists believed that removing free blacks was a practical or righteous answer to the question. C. Stuart, an aboli­tionist of the less amenable sort, finds the real moti­vation in the American Colonization Society: it soothes the conscience of the slave-owners with the minimum possible reform.

The broad facts of the case are these:

The whole population of the United States is about 13,000,000. Out of this upwards of 2,000,000 are held in a most degrading and brutal state of per­sonal slavery, under laws worse than even those of the wretched slave colonies of Great Britain.

Out of the whole, 330,000, though free, are in most cases only partially so; and are exposed to an ex­ceedingly malig­nant and destruc­tive perse­cution, merely because they have a skin dif­ferently colored from the remaining eleven and a half millions of their fellow subjects.

Both those two perse­cuted classes arc rapidly increasing. Their increase terrifies the slave party, and fills them with anxious musings of danger.

The glaring contra­diction of a free people being a slave-holding people; of eleven or twelve millions of men, calling them­selves the most free in the world keeping upwards of 2,000,000 of their unof­fending fellow sub­jects in the most abject and degrading slavery, affects many, and urges them to seek a remedy. The word of God stands out before others, and bids them blush and tremble at the guilt and danger of their country, while the smothered cry of the oppressed and unof­fending poor rises incessantly to God against her.

From this state of things it was that the American Coloni­zation Society arose; by this state of things it is that the American Coloni­zation Society subsists. It is agreeable to the slave-master, for it calms his fears. It offers a remedy to the man who mourns over the dishonor and inconsistency of his country; and to the man who fears God, it commends itself by pretending to do all that it can for the unoffending poor.

The views of its advo­cates are frankly expressed in its own consti­tution as above quoted, and in its own reports. I refer to them all, particularly to the three last, 13th, 14th, and 13th, and submit from them the following quotations:

13th Report, page 44:—“The present number of this unfortunate, degraded, and anomalous class of inhabitants cannot be much short of half a million, and the number is fast increasing. They are emphatically a mildew upon our fields, a scourge to our backs, and a stain upon our escutcheon. To remove them is mercy to ourselves, and justice (!!!) to them.” 15th Report, page 24:—“The race in question were known, as a class, to be destitute, depraved, the victims of all forms of social misery. The peculi­arity of their fate was, that this was not their condition lay accident or transi­ently, but inevitably and immutably, whilst they remained in their present place, by a law as infal­lible in its operation as any of a physical nature.” In same 15th Report, page 25:—“What is the free black to the slave? A standing, per­petual excite­ment to discontent.… The slave would have then little excite­ment to dis­content, but for the free black; he would have as little to habits of depredation, his next strongest tendency, but from the same source of de­teriora­tion!!!… In getting rid, then, of the free blacks, the slave will be saved from the chief occasions for suffering, and the owner from inflicting severity.”…

How far may the remedies thus proposed be fairly expected to remove the evils in question?…

1. What kind of a remedy will it be to the brutal enslavement of two millions, increasing at the rate of 50,000 annually, that annually a few hundreds (or thousands if it should ever be) have their slavery commuted into trans­porta­tion. The few who are benefited not being righted, but only suffering a lesser instead of a greater wrong; while the two millions who remain are still increasing in number and sinking in degradation.

2. What kind of a remedy is it to the dreadful perse­cution which the 3 or 4 or 500,000 free colored people are suffering in the United States, that a fragment of them are removed annually to a foreign land, with their own consent, while the multi­tude who remain are subjected to aggravated persecution?

3. How can the African slave trade be effectually prevented, while negro slavery, its only source, remains? Or what power can the Americans have in attempting to abolish the slave trade in Africa, excepting that of mere brute force, while they have a slave trade at home, more criminal than that of Africa, and almost as cruel?

4. How can the moral wretchedness of Africa be remedied by an influx of degraded and untutored minds? And what will the Africans think, when informed that these Americans, who are so busy about freedom on the African coast, are slave-masters, or encouragers of slave-masters at home?

5. How can the ruinous condition of the slave states be remedied by trans­porting almost the whole of their laboring strength to a distant country?

6. And what good will it be doing the slave-holder to give him peace in his sins? To make it as pleasant and as safe for him as you can, to continue to plunder and to oppress the unof­fending poor? Will that be loving him? Will his soul bless you for such love, when his whiter skin no more elates him with pride, and when he meets his slave, no longer a slave or a negro, but like himself, a deathless soul, to be judged, without respect of persons, by the impartial law of unalterable righteousness?

——Prejudice Vincible, &c., 1833.

Language of Postage Stamps

Victorians delighted in piling significance on the most insignificant things. The “language of flowers” still keeps a tenuous currency among certain young women of the more ethereal sort, but the language of postage stamps has been mostly forgotten. If you have old cards and letters with stamps affixed at odd angles in odd places, now you know why.

The language of a postage stamp is not always the same. It depends how it is placed on an envelope as to its significance. When a postage stamp has been placed upside down on the left corner of the letter, it means, “I love you;” on the same crosswise, “My heart is another’s;” straight up and down, “Good-bye, sweetheart, goodbye;” upside down in the right-hand corner, “Write no more;” in the centre at the top, “Yes;” opposite at the bottom, “No;” on the right-hand corner at a right angle, “Do you love me?” in the left-hand corner, “1 hate you;” top corner on the right, “I wish your friendship;” bottom corner on the left, “I seek your acquaintance;” on a line with the surname, “Accept my love;” the same upside down, “I am engaged;” at a right angle in the same place, “I long to see you;” in the middle of the right-hand edge, “Write immediately.”

——Our Lady’s Book, from the R. H. McDonald Drug Company, 1891.

Europe Must Balance the Power of the United States

As news from the Mexican War came in, Europeans wondered what the dominance of the United States portended. A French writer in a Belgian magazine argues that, left to themselves, the nations around the Union are likely to disappear, with serious damage to European interests. It will be necessary for Europe to throw its power into the balance to keep the relentlessly acquisitive “Anglo-Saxon race” in the United States in check. This is a new translation, scribbled in haste.

Today we cannot follow the incessant progress of North America without anxiety. If the Union’s neighbor nations must disappear, will not our interests receive, by that very fact, a grave and regrettable injury? For more than a year, the figure of our exports to Mexico has already been diminished by three-quarters, and the moment when a line of transatlantic steamers has just been organized is not the time when it is proper for France to show herself indifferent to the future destinies of the new world. We know the invading spirit that characterizes the American race. The influence of an enervating climate has respected that privileged race, while it struck all around up to the Canadians and stripped from them, with the energy and vivacity of the Norman spirit, all trace of their origin. At this very moment, the military upsets of the United States’ campaign in Mexico show how little the Spanish race, left to itself, is capable of opposing a serious resistance to the Anglo-Saxon race. It is to correct this fault in the equilibrium of the races of the new world that the solicitude of Europe, we believe, could be usefully applied. To encourage the young nations of America, to aid them in their efforts to grow stronger and elevate themselves to an independent existence—this is a role that the powers of the old continent have already been able to fill brilliantly, and which it behooves them to take up again today. The more the audacious activity of the United States merits our admiration, the more it likewise demands of us care and preparation. Less than ever, in the presence of the Mexican war, is it permitted to Europe to forget that in the new world, between a State whose bounds increase every day and unfortunate societies left to a growing anarchy without end, she has interests to protect, principles to defend, and a precious influence to maintain.

——Gabriel Ferry in the Revue des deux mondes, 1847.

Telegraphy Before Morse

From a Dictionnaire raisonné de bibliologie by Gabriel Peignot, published in 1802, comes an article about telegraphy, before the electrical system of Morse began our communications revolution. At that time the most-used system was the one invented by Claude Chappe, which was used with great success by the French. It would be difficult to gain an accurate understanding of the Chappe system of telegraphy from this article; a more lucid description is at the Wikipedia article on “Optical telegraph.” But what this article does convey is the sense of wonder at the distance a message can cover in mere minutes. What an age of marvels we live in!

The present article is liberally pillaged by the article on télégraphie in a Dictionnaire des inventions from 1837, and we have used that article to correct some typographical errors in this one.

TELEGRAPHY. The art of corresponding at great distances and with rapidity by using signs that represent letters and words. The establishment may be called a telegraph, an aerial post, or a verbal post. The ancients made use of lighthouses, fires, smoke, torches, flags, standards, sentry posts, drums, and trumpets to communicate promptly and at a distance news or events foreseen in advance. Polybius and Julius Africanus mention in particular the use of Telegraphy among the Greeks and Romans. But the methods of those peoples, though simple, were imperfect, and could not express the letters and the modulations of discourse. Moreover, in those days, the lack of spyglasses must have made the distances between stations very short, and most of the signals were visible only by night. After the Greeks, the first telegraphic attempts were those of Athanasius Kircher, Kesler, Amontons, Rob-Hoock [probably Robert Hooke], someone of the name of Gautkey, Guyot, and Paulian. But their different methods, of varying ingenuity, could never have produced all the advantages of true telegraphy. It was left for Citizen Chappe to bring them together in the telegraph he invented. This telegraph is composed of a long frame furnished with blades after the Persian manner, turning on an axis and attached to a mast, which itself turns on a pivot, and is held up at the height of ten feet by strong legs, in such a manner as to render every movement of the machine visible. At the two ends of the frame are two moving wings half its length, which can be made to move in various ways. By the analysis of different inclinations of these three branches against the horizon or the vertical mast, and the positions they take relative to each other, one hundred perfect signals are available to represent figures or letters of determinate values. And we owe to Citizen Chappe’s careful efforts and meditations a method of tachygraphia [speed-writing] whose characters greatly resemble runic writing. The mechanism of the telegraph is such that the handling of it is done effortlessly and swiftly, by means of a double crank placed at a convenient height. With the help of good telescopes and pendulum clocks measuring seconds, observations can be made and news communicated from one extremity to the other, often without intermediate observers being able to penetrate the meaning of the message.

This discovery, which does honor to the French nation, dates from 1793; it was not merely an ingenious speculation; its results allowed no doubt of the literal transmission of news. It was clearly of the greatest utility in a host of circumstances, and especially in time of war, when prompt communications may have much influence on success. Thus the National Convention hastened to hail this discovery. It was on July 12, 1793, that the Convention’s Committee on Public Instruction, charged with examining the telegraph of Citizen Chappe, tested the invention. Success was complete; and it was recognized that in 13 minutes and 40 seconds, a dispatch could be transmitted a distance of 48 leagues. The first important piece of news transmitted to Paris by the telegraph was the surrender of Condé. At the session of the Convention of 13 Fructidor, Year 2, a telegraphic dispatch in these words was read: Condé is in the power of the Republic, and the garrison made prisoners of war. Thenceforth the telegraph always announced the most interesting events. It was placed along various lines that linked Paris with different points on the frontiers of the Republic. It is calculated that the establishment of one telegraph, including the apparatus for night use, costs 6000 pounds.

The fortunate invention of the telegraph has passed into the different nations of Europe, notably in Sweden, Ireland, and England: this last nation, which at first made a joke of its use, has ended up adopting it. M. Edecrantz, a Swede, has written a treatise on the telegraph; after having given the history of that discovery, he proposes a new establishment of this sort, for which he suggests various methods as simple as they are ingenious: his work is enriched with plates. Others have further sought to extend and perfect these establishments. We find in the British Library, January, 1796, details of a telegraph invented by two Irish gentlemen; and in the Bulletin of the Philomatic Society, No. 16, Year 6, the description and figure of the telegraph of Citizen Chappe, and those of the new telegraph presented, in the year 6, to the Institute by Citizens Breguet and Betancourt. It is for scientists, and still more for experience, to decide the superiority of this telegraph over that. Citizen Peytes-Montcambrier has imagined a marine telegraph or vigigraph, which is of simple construction and inexpensive; it could be set up in twenty-four hours and send a great number of signals with accuracy and celerity. A test was made with success at Rochefort. Telegraphy comes from two Greek words meaning far and writing. Vigigraphy comes from vigie, a marine term, meaning sentinel, and graphen, writing. To be en vigie is to be a sentinel.