The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (18 page)

Despite their humiliation and suffering, exiles and refugees have often found it difficult to view their rejection as permanent. Groups of Spanish Jews, Huguenots,
Acadians, and other expatriates addressed kings with petitions or monetary offers in the hope of securing a right to return.
Moriscos who retained Christian practice and who found themselves despised in
Barbary slipped back into Spain at the risk of being discovered and condemned as galley slaves. Hundreds of the Acadians who had been dispersed among Francophobic and anti-Catholic colonists to the American South welcomed the open boats and supplies provided by the governments of Georgia and South Carolina, and sailed up the Atlantic coast in desperate attempts to reach the
Bay of Fundy.
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For at least two generations after the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes, many Huguenots awaited the providential event that would enable them to return to France and convert their countrymen to Protestantism. Although some groups of refugees, such as the Huguenots, soon lost their distinctive identity, victims of persecution were no less bound than other emigrants to the culture of their former homelands. In northern Africa,
Italy,
Flanders, and
Turkey, Sephardic Jews continued to take pride in their
Spanish language, manners, and culture, which gave them an air of cosmopolitan superiority. When America’s black refugees returned to the United States from
Haiti,
Canada, and Liberia, or preserved American customs and institutions abroad, they were not thereby betraying their distinctive
African American subculture or diluting their resentment toward racist oppression.
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Historical comparisons also provide perspective on the mixture of exuberance and despair felt by many exiles as they sought to explain their loss of homes, property, and community as well as the frightening uncertainty of the future. For faithful Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike, such cataclysms could be comprehended only as the will of God. The
Moriscos, according to
Henry Charles Lea, arrived at the Spanish port of
Alicante “with music and song, as though going to a festival, and thanking Allah for the happiness of returning to the land of their fathers.” Although many Moriscos mistrusted
Philip III’s offer of free transport and chartered their own ships, others interpreted Spain’s sudden reversal of policy as a providential opportunity, as one leader put it, “ ‘to go to the land of our ancestors, under our king the Turk, who will let us live as Moors and not as slaves, as we have been treated by our masters.’ ”
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In 1492, many Jews expressed a similar sense of exaltation and ecstasy as they compared their suffering and banishment to the Mosaic
Exodus or saw it as a “third exile,” confirming their unique relationship with God. According to
Leon Poliakov, it was said that this Exodus would be followed “by a promised land of glory and honor. Others added that it would not be long before Spain recalled her children, so certain exiles, after selling their property, buried their money in the soil of the mother country.” After receiving a warm welcome in Turkey, one Jewish poet proclaimed that God had at last provided a safe asylum in which Jews could cast off corruptions and recover ancient truths:

Some
Huguenot leaders compared their persecution to that of the Spanish and
Portuguese
Jews; they also complained that their followers, “like the
Israelites, noe sooner past the sea but they forget their deliverance and goe a Stray.” For Huguenot exiles, however, the central meaning of the Israelites’
Exodus was that God would not abandon the faithful who remained within His covenant. The punishment He had inflicted upon such persecutors as
Pharaoh and Herod, in the Old and New Testaments, showed that Catholic tyrants would inevitably pay for their crimes; the agonies suffered by Protestants within France would soon cease. While Huguenot leaders, such as
Pierre Jurieu, recommended emigration to America as a way of escaping conversion to Catholicism, they associated deliverance with the return to a purified France, not with a new promised land. Still, it is noteworthy that when
Mademoiselle de Sers wrote to her mother and father, a Huguenot pastor, while sailing to America in 1688, she compared the way God had delivered the Israelites from the hands of Pharaoh to the way He had enabled her faithful compatriots to escape their persecutors and joyfully cross the sea. Mademoiselle de Sers was bound for Saint-Domingue. She could not foresee the chain of events that would arouse hopes similar to hers, 136 years later, among shiploads of American free blacks bound for the same island.
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When exiles and refugees recalled the biblical Exodus, they seldom referred to its darkest side. When the founders and supporters of the American Colonization Society asserted that “this scheme is from God!” and that “to labour in this work is to co-work with God,” they envisioned the salvation of Africa, not the slaughter or displacement of its natives. When
Edward Wilmot Blyden wrote to his fellow African Americans from Liberia, telling them that God had mandated their return to an African homeland, he quoted from Deuteronomy: “Behold, the Lord thy God hath set the land before thee: go up and possess it, as the Lord God of thy fathers had said unto thee; fear not, neither be discouraged.” But Blyden did not point out that this passage precedes God’s angry complaint that the Israelites had been fearful of trying to conquer “a people stronger and taller than we, large cities with walls sky-high.”
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In
Deuteronomy, at the end of the forty years’ preparation in the wilderness, the Lord informs the Israelites that they are about to invade and occupy “seven nations much larger than you.” He promises He “will dislodge those peoples before you little by little; you will not be able to put an end to them at once, else the wild beasts would multiply to your hurt.” After guaranteeing victory over the idolatrous nations that occupy the Promised Land, God issues an unequivocal command: “You shall not let a soul remain alive.” And when
Joshua’s troops eventually capture
Jericho, the Bible reports, “they exterminated everything in the city with the sword: man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and ass.”
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In actuality, archeological evidence indicates that the Israelites slowly infiltrated the Land of
Canaan and did not exterminate their enemies; God’s war sermon probably reflects a post-settlement lament that the Israelites’ adoption of idolatrous customs and intermarriage with
Canaanites could have been prevented by killing off the native inhabitants.
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Talmudic and medieval rabbinic commentators insisted that God’s ruthless commandment could never serve as a precedent for other times and peoples. Even the New England
Puritans, who sometimes referred to Indians as Canaanites and
Amalekites, were extremely reluctant to invoke God’s commandments to annihilate specific pagan tribes. Nevertheless, the conquest of Canaan provided an example of divinely sanctioned colonization and violent displacement that was not lost on the English colonizers of
Ireland and North America.
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Before examining the subject of displacement, it is important to clarify a source of possible confusion when one compares the relations between colonists and natives in North America and West Africa. During the half century following the War of Independence, white Americans subjected Indians and free blacks to increasing
persecution. Demands for the removal of both groups presupposed their replacement by white citizens. There were enormous differences, however, between Indian nations who inhabited land desired by whites and communities of free blacks who tended to seek what refuge and
employment they could find in crowded cities. Historically, whites had often expressed an abstract admiration for Indians that was definitely not extended to blacks. The contrast widened as writers, painters, and poets romanticized the noble savage as the primordial American.
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Yet the blacks, unlike the Indians, were also
portrayed
by the American Colonization Society as latter-day Pilgrims who would carry to Africa the seeds of Christianity and American civilization. Frequently likened to the founders of
Plymouth and
Jamestown colonies, the Liberian settlers occupied their own “
Canaan” and confronted their own natives, whose population had not been depleted in advance by alien diseases such as those that wiped out whole communities of eastern Indians before Plymouth was settled.
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The visionary goals of the American Colonization Society cannot be understood without some discussion of the ideology of colonization that helped create the United States. We can catch a glimpse of this point in
Benjamin Franklin’s extremely influential “
Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” first published in 1755, which contains some of the fundamental premises and prejudices of the later colonization movement, although Franklin’s essay never advocates the removal of emancipated
blacks.

Like many colonizationists, Franklin maintained that the perpetuation of black slavery was contrary to the national interest: slave labor could never be as cheap in America as free labor had proved to be in a densely populated country like England; the presence of slaves impeded the growth of white population and corrupted whites by encouraging pride and idleness. Second, Franklin expressed a desire to make America a white man’s country: “Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red?” Thirdly, Franklin showed that “natural Generation” could quickly replace any loss in population such as those created by the expulsion of Protestants from France, the emigration of English settlers to America, or the sale of African slaves to the New World. Finally, when illustrating the connections between public policy and human progress, Franklin hailed as “Fathers of their Nation” the rulers and legislators who encouraged trade, economic improvements, and the growth of population. Pride of place went to “the Prince that acquires new Territory, if he finds it vacant, or removes the Natives to give his own People Room.”
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As Franklin’s friend
Joseph Banks discovered in 1770, when he and Captain
James Cook landed at a place in
Australia that Cook named
Botany Bay, “new” territories were very seldom vacant.

Colonization began to acquire new meanings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when modern nation states supported the
founding of overseas plantations that went far beyond trading settlements and military outposts.
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In
Ireland, which became the training ground for England’s appropriation of territories in the New World, the English evicted Gaelic natives in order to extend plantations beyond the traditional pale of English settlement. Proposals to exterminate or expel the “wild Irishmen,” whom the English regarded as no more civilized than American Indians, were rejected, according to
T. W. Moody, because “the deputy and council believed in 1540 that it would be impossible to furnish Ireland as a whole with ‘new inhabitants,’ since no prince could spare so many people from his own country.” By the early seventeenth century, however, population growth encouraged the English to promote Scottish emigration to
Ulster. Irish rebellions, leading ultimately to
Oliver Cromwell’s invasion and subjugation of the Irish in 1649, gave a pretext for confiscating millions of acres of land and driving the “wild Irishmen” who were not slaughtered into the bogs and wastelands of Ulster. Like
Franklin’s ideal “Prince,” British rulers from
Henry VIII to Cromwell established a precedent for removing the natives to give room to their own people.
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In 1516, when Europeans were just beginning to reflect on the significance of a New World, Sir
Thomas More sketched out some basic ideas regarding ideal settlement in his fantasy of a “
Utopia.” He found a justification for settling colonies and removing natives that contained the basic ideas Anglo-Americans would embody in Indian policy from the time of Sir
Humphrey Gilbert, a veteran of sixteenth-century Irish conquests who received one of the first charters to found a settlement in North America, to the time of Andrew Jackson. More’s Utopians felt free to establish a colony “wherever the natives have much unoccupied and uncultivated land.” The Utopians gladly assimilated those natives who were willing to live “according to their laws” and to learn agricultural techniques that made “the land sufficient for both [peoples], which previously seemed poor and barren to the natives.” Recalcitrant natives were simply driven from the territory. The Utopians considered it “a most just cause for war when a people which does not use its soil but keeps it idle and waste nevertheless forbids the use and possession of it to others who by the rule of nature ought to be maintained by it.”
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Three centuries later, President
James Monroe elaborated the
same theme as he celebrated the imminent settlement of the southern Mississippi Valley: