The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (34 page)
Read The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Online
Authors: David Brion Davis
Tags: #History, #United States, #19th Century, #Social History, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies, #Slavery
As we have seen, John
Russwurm became convinced that since no such “conversion” could possibly end or even mitigate America’s profound racism and discrimination against blacks, colonization became the only solution. In contrast, Garrison
documented
the racial discrimination and blamed it on the ACS—as part of their efforts “to render the situation of the free blacks intolerable” and thus coerce people like Russwurm into leaving. Determined to create and nourish “the bitterest animosity against the free blacks,” the ACS kept warning the free states, “Your colored population can never be rendered serviceable, intelligent or loyal; they will only, and always, serve to increase your taxes, crowd your poor-houses and penitentiaries, and corrupt and impoverish society!” At the end of
Thoughts on Colonization,
Garrison took the risk of printing colonization documents claiming that in Connecticut blacks comprised only a thirty-fourth of the population, and yet furnished one-third of all convicts, and that in
Vermont 24 of the 918 blacks were in the penitentiary.
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Yet Garrison thought he could convince his readers that with the defeat and removal of colonization, the way would be open for the uplift and improvement of the free black population, for an all-out campaign against racial prejudice and discrimination, and for the crusade to convince slaveholders of their sins. It is significant that in his survey of racism, Garrison concentrates on discriminatory state laws and says little about the public opinion he is confident he can help transform. And with respect to that goal, given the public’s generally
negative views of slavery, he again and again highlights the proslavery aspects of the ACS, arguing that their main and ultimate objective is to strengthen and perpetuate the slave system by removing from the South the great bulk of the country’s free black population, which, he and the colonizationists agree, presents an increasingly corruptive and dangerous influence on the slaves.
Since people supported colonization for quite diverse and even conflicting reasons, it was not difficult to dismiss many criticisms as applying to others and not oneself. But that was not easy when it came to a central contradiction. As Garrison put it:
In one breath, colonization orators tell us that the free blacks are pests in the community; that they are an intemperate, ignorant, lazy, thievish class; that their condition is worse than that of the slaves; and that no efforts to improve them in this country can be successful, owing to the prejudices of society. In the next breath we are told what mighty works these miserable outcasts are to achieve—that they are the missionaries of salvation, who are to illumine all Africa—that they will build up a second American republic—and that our conceptions cannot grasp the result of their labors. Now I, for one, have no faith in this instantaneous metamorphosis. I believe that neither a sea voyage nor an African climate has any miraculous influence on the brain.
76
This passage, while devastating as criticism of the ACS, raises the crucial issue, to be explored in the next chapter, of how to “improve and uplift” the free black population. Even though Garrison and the abolitionists rejected the portrayal of an “intemperate, ignorant, lazy, thievish class,” and especially the argument that free blacks in the North were worse off than slaves in the South, they recognized the dismal and depressing effects of generations of profound discrimination. Garrison stressed the intellectual and social deprivations of slavery and accused the ACS of thwarting the education of free blacks.
Yet there were some significant differences between white and black abolitionists. As
David Blight has observed, “For blacks especially, many of whom were former slaves who wore the scars of bondage on their backs and in their psyches, the emergencies of freedom, security, and basic rights did not permit them the luxury of debate over ideological or strategic purity that sometimes occupied white abolitionists.”
77
Garrison’s free black supporters were even more focused on the issues of
education and improvement and much more concerned with social equality and civil rights. They were also far more pragmatic in their approach to reform and would become impatient and sometimes mystified by the white abolitionists’ ideological debates and divisions. But these differences would become more apparent in the 1840s and 1850s, after the division of the
American Anti-Slavery Society and the emergence of political activism.
Blacks as the Key to
Slave Emancipation
RECOGNITION OF THE ISSUE
On March 8, 1853, Frederick
Douglass wrote a long and highly detailed response to
Harriet Beecher Stowe, now world famous as the author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
who had requested information that “would permanently contribute to the improvement and elevation of the free coloured people in the Unites States.” Nearly twenty years after the founding of the
American Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass emphasized a point that had dominated early relations between black and white American abolitionists but had then declined as a priority: “The most telling, the most killing refutation of slavery, is the presentation of an industrious, enterprising, thrifty, and intelligent free black population.” He also stressed that “the most powerful arguments now used by the Southern slaveholder, and the one most soothing to his conscience, is that derived from the low condition of the free coloured people in the North.”
1
As already implied in our discussions of the
Haitian Revolution and the option of colonizing freed American slaves, the ongoing status of blacks who had
already
been emancipated, whether in Haiti, the Northern American states, or the British
West Indies, had a crucial bearing on debates over the
immediate or gradual liberation of millions of African American slaves whose future place in society was difficult to predict. Indeed, it is worth underscoring the obvious
but often neglected point that for the general public, especially in America, the key issue raised by abolitionism was the status and condition of freed slaves.
Stowe’s and
Douglass’s interest in the “permanent … improvement and elevation” of the
free black population also ties in with our earlier central theme of dehumanization and animalization as part of the process of reducing a human to the status of chattel property, an instrument to serve the needs of an owner. Ideally, for the master or mistress, a slave is a person who has internalized a consuming desire to please and flatter the owner, like a loving pet. As we have seen, according to Northerners like the eminent and procolonizationist New England clergyman Leonard
Bacon, writing in 1823, slavery had so completely dehumanized the African American that he could never safely be raised “from the abyss of his degradation” without being colonized in a much less racist environment.
Unfortunately, in 1853, seventy-three years after Pennsylvania first led the Northern states toward
gradual emancipation, twenty-six years after New York State celebrated the liberation of its last slaves, reformers like Douglass and Stowe realized that the plight of free
blacks in the North had in some ways continued to deteriorate, a point dramatized by the African Americans’ own testimony, by proslavery arguments and statistics on black incarceration in the North, and especially by the dangers imposed by the
Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Even in 1846 Douglass had acknowledged, after a Philadelphia mob had attacked a black
temperance society parade of 1,200 marchers and then rampaged against blacks and their homes for two days:
The colored man in the United States has great difficulties in the way of moral, social, and religious advancement. Almost every step he takes towards mental, moral, or social improvement is repulsed by the cold indifference or the active mob of the white. He is compelled to live an outcast from society … and the very fact of his degradation is given as a reason why he should be continued in the condition of a slave.
2
Yet, as we shall see, many free blacks had overcome formidable barriers to great achievement, and countless black and white abolitionists had struggled to educate and elevate the free black community in ways that would counteract the parasitical abuse of institutional
racism, by which whites gained pride and a sense of superiority from the blacks’ alleged “incapacity” and loss of self-respect—a form of psychological exploitation that depended on “keeping Negroes in their place.”
The complexities of this struggle, especially involving such issues as black gratitude and reaction to white paternalism, demand special imaginative efforts on the part of both author and reader. We must try at the start to imagine what it would have been like to have been both a free black abolitionist and a white abolitionist in the antebellum North.
As free “Negroes” in the mid-1840s, we abolitionists and most other blacks are always conscious that most of our brethren are chattel slaves in the South and that we can easily be kidnapped, or officially arrested, and sold in the South, suddenly deprived of our family members and our very names. But in some ways free blacks are better off in the Deep South. New laws have been passed to keep us from entering or settling in states north of the Ohio River, and many towns in the North have passed ordinances requiring us to register or even post bond for good behavior. Most states deny us the right to vote, sit on juries, or even testify against whites in court. Most free blacks are illiterate and even our children have little chance of attaining a grade school education. Perhaps most important, we are surrounded by white supremacy and are constantly viewed as inferior people in our daily interactions with whites—who sometimes verbally curse or ridicule us or even spit on us on the street, and whose egos climb when we bow or step off the walk to let them pass. No matter how close we might become to a white friend, we cannot accompany him or her to most restaurants, hotels, stores, libraries, lectures, concerts, and public places (except in a few radical communities).
It is true, there have been many breakthroughs since 1830, when the vast majority of our brethren regarded all whites as our enemies. Black and white abolitionists changed this stereotype. Now, we “can witness the labors and sacrifices of white men and women in a cause inseparably linked with our own.” At abolitionist meetings, we speak to racially mixed audiences of both men and women. In short, white abolitionists have heightened our optimism and our quest for self-improvement and self-respect, though most of us feel that despite their hatred of slavery, they care far too little about the true social equality of the two races.
3
Beginning in the 1830s, with the rise of “
immediatism” or “modern” abolitionism, we worked closely with white abolitionists, convincing them to
repudiate the American Colonization Society. Gradually we saw the need for some independence as they focused on abstractions and became embroiled in needless and distractive conflicts. We are of course immensely grateful to those very few who speak out on our behalf, but we are no less conscious of the traces of condescension and superiority conveyed, often unconsciously, even by most of our ardent white supporters.
No one has exposed the meaning of that prejudice more eloquently than our brother
Theodore S. Wright (1797–1847), minister of New York’s black
Presbyterian Church, who in 1837 declared that while we
free colored people are spared many of the evils of slavery, “But sir, still we are slaves—everywhere we feel the chain galling us”:
This spirit is withering all our hopes, and ofttimes causes the colored parent as he looks upon his child, to wish he had never been born.… This influence cuts us off from everything; it follows us from childhood to manhood; it excludes us from all stations of profit, usefulness and honor; takes away from us all motive for pressing forward in enterprises, useful and important to the world and to ourselves.… A colored man can hardly learn a trade, and if he does it is difficult for him to find any one who will employ him to work at that trade.… In most of our large cities there are associations of mechanics who legislate out of their society colored men. And in many cases where our young men have learned trades, they have had to come to low employments for want of encouragement in those trades.
4
As
white
abolitionists, we are committed in principle to racial equality and believe that slaves, like captives illegally held by force, have an “immediate” right to be freed. We may even pride ourselves on having close personal ties with a few black coworkers, with whom we have faced hostile white mobs. Yet, as devout Christian reformers intent on ideals of moral improvement, we are appalled when we view the state of urban black society.
Most whites wrongly believe that the black urban population keeps increasing, in part because lowly black workers are so visible from the earliest morning, when street sweepers kick up clouds of disagreeable dust. Then in New York the streets are filled with black vendors noisily peddling their goods. Unemployed blacks crowd the docks searching for work, black performers appear on the roofs, many black men drink through the day at local dram shops, and under cover of darkness, criminal gangs assemble in back alleys. After midnight, black “tubmen” empty the privies and move about the city dumping the city’s personal waste into the Hudson River. Even our fellow
black abolitionists are deeply disturbed by the number of young blacks in the city, including tradesmen, domestics, artists, and performers, who are indifferent to efforts for the kind of community uplift and moral improvement that is essential for overcoming racial prejudice.
5
Like most of the radical
white abolitionists of the
1830
s, we earlier supported the American Colonization Society as the only hope of overcoming deeply entrenched white racism and securing some realistic solution to the problem of slave emancipation. We then learned, mainly from blacks themselves, that the ACS actually promoted and reinforced racism. While we are committed to racial equality in the long run, some colleagues stress that promoting that cause will antagonize many potential supporters and greatly delay slave emancipation, a measure that will depend on converting public opinion. But, while the challenges are momentous (and this will be difficult for our descendants to grasp), we fervently believe that God is dedicated to humanity’s historical progress as well as to the retributive punishment of nations that reject all chances to reform.