The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (19 page)

Seventeenth-century
Puritans put this utilitarian argument within a wider framework of God’s governance and appointment. Leaders of the Puritan Exodus to America repeatedly compared themselves with the ancient Hebrews: “Let Israel be the evidence of the Doctrine, and our glass to view our Faces in.” As a chosen people, sifted from the chaff of English Protestantism, by the very act of migrating to a wilderness the emigrants took on the obligations of a new covenant with God. If they kept the covenant,
John Winthrop affirmed, “wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among vs.” But when Winthrop’s expedition was about to embark from Southampton in 1630 to settle the colony of Massachusetts Bay,
John Cotton’s farewell sermon, “God’s Promise to His Plantations,” found a theological charter not in Exodus or Deuteronomy but in a proleptic text from the second book of Samuel. Cotton chose the verse in which the Lord, speaking through the prophet
Nathan, promises
King David that “I will appoint a place for my people Israell, and I will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their owne, and move no more.”
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This passage precedes God’s prediction that one of David’s seed (“I will be his father, and he shall be my son”) will establish an everlasting kingdom. Since Christians believe that David was an ancestor of Jesus, Cotton could reinterpret
Canaan as both a material and a spiritual inheritance promised to those who, through rigorous self-examination, discerned that they were “in Christ” and were settling in a place appointed to them by the hand of God. Otherwise, Cotton told the Puritans, “we are but intruders upon God.” Despite
the appealing imagery of a New Jerusalem and a New Canaan, Cotton and other clerical leaders warned that heathen natives could not be killed or driven away, without provocation, unless God had given a nation a special commission, “such as the Israelites had.” The promoters of the earlier
Jamestown venture, who also spoke of crossing the Red Sea, wandering in the wilderness, and finding the Land of Canaan, made the same point. As
William Crashaw put it, “The Israelites had a commandment from God to dwell in Canaan, we have leave to dwell in Virginea: they were commanded to kill the heathen, we are forbidden to kill them, but are commanded to convert them.”
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Cotton made room for the utilitarian argument by emphasizing the universal “charter” given to
Adam and
Noah, who were told to “Multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.” The Old Testament furnished numerous precedents for claiming “vacant” land in sparsely populated territories and establishing a right to the soil by bestowing “culture and husbandry upon it.” When Abraham found that his well at Beersheba had been seized by the natives, Cotton pointed out, he did not tell
King Abimelech that his right derived from a divine calling, “for that would have seemed frivolous amongst the Heathen.” Rather, according to Cotton’s interpretation, Abraham based his successful plea on “his owne industry and culture in digging the well.” To illustrate the point that Canaan contained enough vacant space for the heathen and elect alike, Cotton also referred to
Jacob, who pitched his tents at Shechem and purchased a parcel of land from the children of Hamor: “There was roome enough as Hamor said, Let them sit down amongst us.”
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But, as many of Cotton’s American-bound listeners surely knew (and this immensely influential sermon was reprinted and quoted in New England for more than a century), Hamor made these conciliatory remarks at a time of crisis. Hamor’s son had just raped one of Jacob’s daughters,
Dinah, whom he was determined to marry; Jacob’s sons had then deceitfully agreed to intermarriage between the two groups if the males of Shechem submitted to circumcision. While the obliging
Canaanites were disabled by the pain of this operation, two of Jacob’s sons slaughtered them and the others plundered the town and carried away the women and children as captives. Since Cotton explicitly recognized the right of “lawfull war” against natives who failed to recompense wrongs committed against uninvited settlers, this biblical precedent boded ill for the Indians—even those who
accepted baptism, the Christian equivalent of circumcision. Cotton concluded with a plea to “offend not the poore Natives, but as you partake in their land, so make them partakers of your precious faith.” Seven years earlier,
John Robinson, the nonemigrating minister of the
Pilgrims who founded Plymouth, had already received news in Holland of a bloody retaliation against Indians by the colonists. “Oh, how happy a thing had it been,” he wrote Governor William Bradford, “if you had converted some before you had killed any!”
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The
Virginia Company also expressed benevolent concern for the Native Americans. English settlers would introduce them to the Bible, “cover their naked miserie, with civill use of foode, and cloathing,” teach them how to make productive use of their time and land, and welcome them with “equall priviledges” into the English community. As the historian
Edmund S. Morgan puts it, the promoters of colonization hoped for more than profits: “Theirs was a patriotic enterprise that would bring civility and Christianity to the savages of North America and redemption from idleness and crime to the unemployed masses of England.”
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The failure of all these expectations did not kill the initial dream or deter Virginians and other Americans from applying a very similar formula, more than two centuries later, to the colonization of Africa.

The English settlers’ assurance of divine guidance seldom bred humility. Even
Thomas Morton, the anti-Puritan trader and adventurer who reveled with the Indians at “Marry-mount,” accepted the common belief that “the hand of God” was responsible for the epidemic that killed so many Indians and made Massachusetts “more fitt, for the English Nation to inhabit in, and erect in it Temples to the Glory of God.” Although the first English colonists were saved from starving by Indian generosity and Indian agricultural technology, they credited their survival to God and tended to picture the land as empty and “devoid of all civil inhabitants.” When Indians resisted English paternalism and responded to continuous encroachments on their land with surprise hit-and-run attacks, they were not seen as sovereign peoples repelling an invasion. Infuriated by the
Pequots’ unconventional ways of war, the
Puritans had no compunctions about exterminating members of the tribe, regardless of age or sex. Preachers might interpret the Indians’ destruction of New England villages as a divine punishment for the sins and unfaithfulness of “our Judah”; but they also asserted that heathen tribes who thwarted God’s larger
plan for “the English Israel” could be dispossessed and put to the sword.
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Belief in a divinely guided mission made it easier to combine benevolent paternalism with the kind of brutal slaughter God had sanctioned in the Old Testament. English professions of altruism and goodwill toward the Indians survived Opechancanough’s devastating attack on
Virginia’s settlements and
King Philip’s attempt to wipe out
New England. Benevolent goals seemed perfectly compatible with burning Indian villages, with killing the inhabitants or selling them as slaves in the West Indies, and with signing treaties whose duplicitous intent rivaled that of
Jacob’s sons. Moral scruples could not be allowed to protect barbarians who violently resisted the progress of Christian civilization.

In 1924, when W. E. B. Du Bois proclaimed from Liberia that “
Africa is the
Spiritual Frontier of human kind—oh the wild and beautiful adventures of its taming!,” he described
Monrovia as “a city set upon a
hill.” This was the figure, taken from the
Sermon on the Mount, that
John Winthrop had made synonymous with New England’s and America’s mission to the world (and that
Frederick
Douglass had extended, as we have seen, to Haiti). In 1924, Du Bois’s model of tropical paradise was the antipode to Winthrop’s ideal of a disciplined, enterprising Christian commonwealth, an ideal accepted in large measure by the nineteenth-century black and white founders of Liberia. A native New Englander and the first black to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, Du Bois had long been fascinated by the African roots of American black culture. Late in 1923 he had been sent to Liberia as President
Coolidge’s envoy and minister plenipotentiary for the inauguration of President C. D. B. King. After walking for hours in the bush and visiting a
Kru village, Du Bois made the romantic discovery that “efficiency and happiness do not go together in modern culture,” that “laziness; divine, eternal, languor is right and good and true.” Even as he resisted the compulsions of his own internalized
work ethic, Du Bois’s allusion to the “mud town Plymouth Rock” and to the “city set upon a hill” reinforced the central hope of
Liberia’s history: that African
Americans, having been cruelly excluded from the promise of American life, which they had helped create, could find fulfillment and dignity in a regenerated “America” on the shores of Africa.
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Du Bois’s rhapsodic response to African culture illustrates the complexity of modeling African colonization on the myth of America as the Promised Land. Unlike Du Bois, Liberia’s nineteenth-century settlers had not studied anthropology and failed to share his poetic delight in “the ancient witchery” of Africa’s medicine and his appreciation of the villagers’ “breeding” and “leisure of true aristocracy, leisure for thought and courtesy, leisure for sleep and laughter.” With a few exceptions, the
Americo-Liberians were no less ethnocentric than the white settlers of North America. They too sought to escape an
Egypt or
Babylon and build a
city on a hill that would reap the full material and spiritual rewards of Christian civilization. They too experienced uncertainty and homesickness as they struggled to find a new identity that would help to liberate their brethren from the oppressions of history.

Like the
Puritans, the Liberian settlers and their patrons were alert to the dangers of “counter-conversion”—of colonists assimilating the ways of Canaan.
Ralph Randolph Gurley, the Connecticut-born and Yale-educated secretary and vice president of the ACS, warned that without the “means of Christian improvement,” the Americo-Liberians would quickly become indistinguishable from the African natives “except by the sturdiness and variety of their vices.”
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The location and very meaning of a promised land were complicated by the need to conquer Canaan while looking backward across the sea for standards of justification and
moral assessment. Would New England or Liberia redeem their flawed progenitors, or become dissolute clearings in a distant wilderness?

Among the world’s emigrants and colonists, the Puritans and
Quakers were exceptional in their relative affluence, education, and political experience, a point frequently noted by free black critics of the American Colonization Society who objected to the apparent absurdity of expecting similar feats of nation-building from illiterate former slaves.
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Although English Puritans were despised and persecuted by their High Church countrymen, their errand into the wilderness
was not governed and interpreted by a Puritan Colonization Society that regarded them as a “vile excrescence” and a “foul stain” upon the nation.
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Such epithets, pervasive among white supporters of black colonization, had been applied to Jews, Moriscos, convicts, and other victims of deportation. But the voluntary emigrants to Liberia found themselves in a bizarre and unprecedented position: they were assigned the mission of “saving” America by vindicating their race and
civilizing Africa—as President
John Tyler put it, “
Monrovia will be to Africa what
Jamestown and
Plymouth have been to America”—yet they themselves were the “corruption” whose purgation would supposedly purify the United States.
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A further point should be made about analogies between the colonizers of Liberia and
New England. The Puritans’ errand into the wilderness was oriented to England and Europe. As the New England leaders redefined their mission in the 1640s, in response to the apocalyptic English conflict from which they appeared to have fled, they endeavored to build a model Christian commonwealth that would help purify England of religious corruption and “save” the Protestant
Reformation.
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In similar fashion, the more articulate supporters of African colonization, especially the religious activists, viewed their own errand as a providential opportunity to cleanse the United States of slavery and racial conflict, the twin diseases that imperiled America’s Christian and republican mission. The official journal of the ACS even claimed that colonizationist activity was rapidly dispelling white racial
prejudice, since “it is impossible, in the nature of things, that unkind feelings or prejudice towards a people can long survive benevolent efforts for their improvement.”
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Benevolent actions, in other words, would purify the more negative motives and emotions that might have brought support to those very actions. Spokesmen for the ACS, including some Southern slaveholders, confidently predicted that American blacks would prove their capability for civilization and vindicate their race as soon as they were freed from the degrading and demoralizing effects of racial prejudice. Modern historians, influenced by the misleading accusations of abolitionists, have seldom taken note of George
Fredrickson’s discovery that “one can go through much of the literature of the [colonization] movement from 1817 to the late 1830s without finding a single clear and unambiguous assertion of the Negro’s inherent and unalterable inferiority to whites.”
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Although antebellum America was afflicted with a deep
and profound racism, there was also a widespread belief in what one might term radical environmentalism—the belief that human character changes rapidly and radically as the result of changed environment. As we will see in
chapter 8
, this was the theme of an important essay by the great black antebellum physician
James McCune Smith.