Nonviolence (13 page)

By 1828, when she married David Child, she already had a blooming literary career. But her husband was a dreamy idealist, given to lost causes and the accumulation of debt. In order to raise money she wrote a guide to her own cost-cutting household methods,
The Frugal Housewife,
an enduring success and a regular source of income despite the fact that personally she loathed running a household.

When she was twenty-nine, Garrison began publishing
The Liberator.
Describing the effect Garrison had on her, she wrote: “Old dreams vanished, old associates departed, and all things became new.” She became a militant leader in the nonviolent abolitionist movement, working closely with both Garrison and the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society.

In 1833 she published
An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans.
In the best traditions of nonviolence she did more than condemn slave owners; she wrote of the physical and moral harm that slavery caused both slaves and owners, and she placed blame equally on Northerners and Southerners. She also discussed that most taboo subject, interracial sex. In the introduction to the book, she noted: “I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken, but though I
expect
ridicule and censure, I cannot
fear
them.”

An Appeal
destroyed her literary career. She was fired from her position with a literary magazine, her book sales dramatically declined, and her publisher dropped her. “O for a large heap of money to throw it into your laps!” wrote Garrison to David Child in 1836, bemoaning his inability to help them. She became editor of a New York–based weekly, the
National Anti-Slavery Standard.
Like Garrison and many other abolitionists, she believed their cause went hand in hand with that of the nonviolence movement. In an 1841 letter, she wrote: “It seems strange to me that any comprehensive mind can embrace one and not the other.”

During the Civil War she helped get supplies to slaves fleeing the South and wrote a reading primer for them. After the war she published another novel,
A Romance of the Republic,
which advocated interracial marriage as a way of healing the race-torn society. She also took up the causes of woman suffrage and Indian rights, especially opposing the displacement of the Cherokee.

When Lydia Maria Child died in 1880, Wendell Phillips, who delivered her eulogy, described her as someone “ready to die for a principle and starve for an idea.” Her literary career, destroyed by her political courage, was never resurrected, and today she is remembered for two things,
The Frugal Housewife,
and for penning the children's Thanksgiving jingle “Over the River and Through the Woods.”

Another abolitionist inspired by Garrison was Elijah Lovejoy, a minister from Maine who moved to Illinois, where mobs destroyed his printing press four times to keep him from publishing an antislavery newspaper and finally killed him with five gunshots. Lincoln called the 1837 killing “the most important event that ever happened in the new world.” But Garrison noted that Lovejoy had killed someone while trying to defend himself and was concerned about the direction abolitionism would take in the face of such violence.

Most abolitionists did not believe violence could be used in a good cause. From the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, there were few years in which at least one slave insurrection
did not occur. Slaves tried anything they could conceive of to resist, including not only armed uprisings and plots to poison food supplies but mass suicide and traditional nonviolent approaches such as work stoppages and agricultural sabotage. The great majority of uprisings were violent and designed to spread fear. In most of history, people motivated by fear have not acted well. It is true that insurrections made the white establishment reconsider slavery. But, as in the Nat Turner incident, the slave owners generally rejected that solution and opted for a more ferocious brand of repression in order to instill fear in the slaves, which in turn also failed.

In Haiti a violent revolution overthrew slavery, defeated Napoleon, and established the first black republic. The war, which lasted from 1791 to 1803, was characterized by the most vicious, unrestrained, violent racial hatred. The French declared a “war of extermination” in which ships were employed as gas chambers for mass killing. The revolting slaves, for their part, tried to exterminate the whites. In the end Napoleon lost 50,000 troops—two entire armies. The new nation, product of the only successful slave rebellion, was so poisoned by hatred and fear that two centuries later it has still not recovered. It is also true that the fear engendered by the Haitian revolution caused many in Europe and the United States to rethink slavery. It caused the United States government, fearing the growth of its African population, to ban the import of new African slaves, but this led to increasing the slave population by such outrages as breeding farms. It is also true that the Haitian revolution, along with countless other uprisings, spurred the French and the British to end slavery, which is why it is not true, as is often claimed, that Europeans ended slavery without violence. But what finally put an end to British and French slavery was the development of the European sugar beet, an alternative to the Caribbean cane sugar for whose production that slave system had been created. This was why Lydia Maria Child's dreamy husband squandered their meager income trying to grow sugar beets in New England, but he failed to recognize the fact that cotton, not sugar, was the principal slave crop in the United States.

While slaves tried to terrify slave owners, the slave owners tried
to make the slaves even more afraid than they themselves were. This led to an exchange of brutalities in which the slave owners were the inevitable victors, having used their imaginations to devise ever more hideous ways to kill and torture. Those lynched after the Nat Turner uprising were skinned. If slave uprisings had been nonviolent, would slave owners have acted better? It is impossible to say. All that can be said is, as in the case of the American Indians, it could not have been worse.

John Brown, born in 1800, was one of the rare white abolitionists who believed in the power of violence and the persuasive force of fear. Brown had operated a station on the Underground Railroad, violating U.S. law by helping escaped slaves flee to Canada. In 1855 he moved to Kansas to join five of his sons (from the twenty children he had fathered) hoping to win the emerging territory as an antislave state. In response to an attack by proslavers on the antislavery town of Lawrence, four of Brown's sons and two sons-inlaw hacked five proslavery men to death with swords, slowly chopping them down while Brown watched. Brown, who was convinced that the slave insurrections were the key to ending slavery, said he wanted to “cause a restraining fear.”

Brown never concealed his belief in violence. When he met former slave Frederick Douglass in 1847, he told the abolitionist leader that it was his intention to provoke and lead a war to end slavery. He told numerous abolition leaders about his plan to raid the army arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and lead an insurrection of liberated slaves with the captured weapons. He tried to persuade Frederick Douglass to join him, but Douglass refused. Shields Green, a fugitive slave who had accompanied Douglass on his last meeting with Brown, did join in.

As the atmosphere of the nation became more and more poisoned with violence, it became harder to hold to a stance of nonviolence. Wendell Phillips and many of the other nonviolent abolitionists approved of violence in the defense of fugitive slaves. Some gave up on nonviolence after the fighting began in Kansas. In 1855 a letter was published in the
Anti-Slavery Standard
by Charles
Stearns, a conscientious objector who had gone to prison for refusing to serve in the Connecticut militia. Now he was in Kansas and, according to his letter, he had armed himself after ten days. His justification was the most common justification for war. He said that his adversaries were not human beings. They were, he said, tigers. “I always believed it was right to kill a tiger,” he argued. Stearns pointed out that Jesus specified turning the other cheek “if a
man
smite thee.” Stearns wrote: “When I live with men made in God's image, I will never shoot them; but these pro-slavery Missourians are demons from the bottomless pit, and may be shot with impunity.”

“The Southern slave holder is a man,” Garrison desperately insisted in the
Liberator,
where he attacked the sending of arms to Kansas, a step taken by congregationalist preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Brown never discussed his plans with Garrison, the one abolitionist he was certain would not approve. They did meet in 1857. Garrison kept quoting the New Testament and Brown the Old Testament and they found little common ground.

Brown carried out the raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859 with a force of twenty-one men, of which only five were black. He took the arsenal and in fact the town but then failed to take further action, and a detachment of marines led by Robert E. Lee arrived and overtook them the next morning. The first of Brown's men killed in the battle was Dangerfield Newby, a large and powerful ex-slave who had been freed by his white father. On Newby's body were found letters from his wife, still a slave some thirty miles from Harpers Ferry, who wrote that he had to free her soon because her owner was in financial difficulty and might sell her. “If I thought I should never see you, this earth would have no charms for me,” she wrote and then pleaded, “Do all you can for me, which I have no doubt you will. I want to see you so much.” After the raid Newby's wife was sold to an owner deep in the South. Shields Green, who had met Brown with Frederick Douglass, was captured later and hanged, at the age of twenty-three.

Brown was convicted of treason and hanged. After the initial cry
of alarm, a surprising number of Northerners supported his actions, including some nonviolent abolitionists. Henry David Thoreau spoke of how Brown defended “the dignity of human nature” and Emerson compared him to Jesus Christ. Lydia Maria Child wrote that the Harpers Ferry incident “stirred me up to consecrate myself with renewed earnestness to the righteous cause for which he died so bravely.” Even Garrison was supportive, though he took exception to the violence. In a speech in Boston on the evening of Brown's execution, Garrison said that although he had “labored unremittingly to effect the peaceful abolition of slavery … I cannot but wish success to all slave insurrections…. Rather than see men wearing their chains in a cowardly and servile spirit, I would, as an advocate of peace, much rather see them breaking the head of the tyrant with their chains.”

C. K. Whipple defined the abolitionist stance in a pamphlet called
The Nonresistance Principle: With Particular Application to the Help of Slaves by Abolitionists.
This work praises Brown but departs from his approach by saying that while slavery must be resisted, no one has the right to take another life. Whipple called for a nonviolent slave rebellion, arguing that slaves had a moral obligation to “utterly refuse to any longer be a slave.” He admonished: “Quiet, continuous submission to enslavement is complicity with the slave holder.”

The nonviolent abolitionist movement faced the same problem that the Quakers had faced with regard to the Indians. While it is perfectly feasible to convince a people faced with the most brutal repression to rise up in a suicidal attack on their oppressor, it is almost impossible to convince them to meet deadly violence with nonviolent resistance. The crushing of a violent uprising is far easier to justify than the slaughter of unarmed people, and therefore nonviolence has more power. But most people, if they are going to die to fight oppression, feel better if they can take down a few oppressors first. Then if it all fails, they will at least have struck a blow. Enslaved African-Americans still felt this way after centuries of seeing violence fail.

Soon Brown's vision, a bloodbath without precedent, would be unleashed, and thousands of men would march south singing of
“John Brown's body.” The problem was, they were not marching to free slaves.

The outbreak of a shooting war once again successfully silenced the nonviolence movement. They still raised their voices for abolition, but most no longer spoke out against war. Joshua Octogenarian, one of the few who never gave the war his support, attended a meeting of the American Peace Society in 1861 and complained that the group appeared to stand “for the vindication of war, rather than that of peace.” Pacifists found all sorts of reasons to make an exception for this war: because it was really a police action against secession, because of the moral imperative, because the Southerner was not human. Lydia Maria Child wrote in an 1862 letter: “I abhor war and have the greatest dread of military supremacy; yet I have become so desperate with hope deferred, that a hurrah goes up from my heart, when the army rises to carry out God's laws.”

Garrison, who had cared little about preserving the Union, became a Lincoln supporter. He said that although nonviolence would have been a better way to free slaves, once the shooting started, advocating nonviolence had become “impracticable.” And this was true. History has shown, over and over again, that the activist who insists on nonviolence in times of war becomes hopelessly marginalized. Garrison had another cause, abolition, and he wanted to be heard.

While other abolitionists like Wendell Phillips were distrustful of the president's halfhearted approach to emancipation, Garrison, who had distrusted all government and urged people not to vote, suddenly was arguing for patience and understanding. He now characterized the war, Lincoln, and the Republican Party as “instruments in the hands of God.” He predicted in 1861: “There will be desolation and death on a frightful scale, weeping and mourning, and lamentations for the slain and wounded in thousands of families—but if it shall end in the total abolition of slavery … it will bring with it inconceivable blessings.”