relates of John
Quincy Adams, who became the very head and front of the anti-slavery
element in Congress,[305] that while discussing with her at a Boston
dinner-party the Shaksperean heroine Desdemona, he asserted "with a
most serious expression of sincere disgust, that he considered all her
misfortunes as a very just judgment upon her for having married a
'nigger.'"[306] About the time when Garrisonian abolition was at its
high tide, when Wendell Phillips was placing Toussaint l'Ouverture
above Caesar and Napoleon on the roll of fame, when Whittier,
Longfellow, and Lowell were lending their talents to the cause of
unalterable and inalienable rights of mankind, Jesse Chickering
published a "Statistical View of the Population of Massachusetts from
1765 to 1840," at the end of which he appended some very interesting
facts and conclusions as to the colored population of this State. He
stated that, owing partly to their race traits and partly to fixed and
immovable prejudices of the whites against them, the blacks are
deprived of sympathy and social enjoyments and reduced to a servile
and degraded condition of poverty and dependence (p. 137). Because of
this widespread prejudice against their color, "they cannot obtain
employment on equal terms with the whites, and wherever they go a
sneer is passed upon them, as if this sportive inhumanity were an act
of merit.... Thus, though their legal rights are the same as those of
the whites, their condition is one of degradation and dependence." In
spite of the vigorous agitation for the rights of the Negro which
stirred New England and the entire nation at this time, the writer
says "the prejudices which are now felt in this Commonwealth against
the people of color and the disadvantages under which they labor ...
we can hardly expect will soon be removed," though he is persuaded
that "this want of true sympathy, and this sense of degradation, must
operate on their sensibility and unfavorably affect their physical,
moral, and social condition, and shorten to them the duration of life"
(pp. 156, 157).

The anti-slavery movement in Pennsylvania never went to the
rhapsodical extremes we find in Massachusetts. It was from beginning
to end sane and reasonable and yet vigorous and unremittent.
Nevertheless, we find the same enthusiasm for the rights of the Negro
in the abstract combined with racial antipathy, social and political
discriminations, and even on more than one occasion mob vi