The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (35 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
(A white abolitionist’s last note, looking ahead to the twenty-first century:
Belief in divine intervention and collective punishment was absolutely central to abolitionism in
Britain as well as America. Unfortunately, a later modern and secular failure to understand the radical potentialities of
evangelical religion has distorted interpretations of our commitment to racial equality. Some students and even a few historians have been inclined to view the entire white abolitionist approach to free blacks as condescending, patriarchal, and even racist.)
ADDRESSES TO FREE AFRICAN AMERICANS
Two official
Addresses
—letters to the free people of color from abolitionist leaders reveal a great deal about the campaign for racial uplift as an instrument for slave emancipation. Since whites dominated the biracial antislavery organizations, there is good reason to read the words as expressions of a white mentality. But, except for some passages that convey a special white identity, the main arguments, values, and assumptions resemble those in an address to the free black population from a black convention held in Philadelphia in June 1832, as well as those in numerous other black publications.
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The first
Address,
directed to some twenty thousand blacks of New
York City, in October 1834, by the Executive Committee of the newly formed American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), was signed by the white abolitionists Arthur and
Lewis
Tappan,
Joshua Leavitt,
Simeon Jocelyn,
John Rankin,
Elizur Wright Jr., and
A. L. Cox. It begins with much praise for the blacks’ “wonderful forbearance, and peaceful endurance” in responding to a recent race riot in which “an infuriated mob” attacked people of color, destroyed their property, and reduced their churches to “scenes of sacrilege, pillage, and ruin.” According to the abolitionists, the blacks’ behavior aroused the sympathy and respect of the public and now presents a favorable opportunity for blacks to unite with the AASS, which is officially pledged to “the improvement and civil elevation of the Free People of Color” in overcoming racial prejudice; to secure the “rights and immunities” to which blacks are entitled “as men and citizens”; and to remove obstacles “to the emancipation of two millions of our countrymen in bondage at the south.”
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Note that the blacks’ peaceful response to the racist mobs seemed to remove the fear of revenge and Haitian-like
violence that
Bacon had associated with the rehumanization of freed slaves. And the abolitionist authors’ later examples of black achievement—such as the acceptance “on terms of perfect equality” of two black delegates at a convention called for the nomination of a new governor for the state of
Maine—challenged the belief in black incapacity. The goal of the
Address
was to urge people of color to work with the new biracial
Phoenix Society, founded by black reformers and dedicated to “your improvement in morals, literature, and the mechanic arts, and thereby to secure to you all other important privileges.” But the success of this enterprise—which planned to register every colored person in the city, to enroll their children in schools, “to induce the adults also to attend school and church on the Sabbath,” to establish circulating libraries and lyceums for lectures, and in every way to encourage blacks “to improve their minds and abstain from every vicious and demoralizing practice”—depended most of all on “personal effort.”
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After stressing that the white abolitionists would never underrate the virtues of the colored people, the authors wrote that “it would be folly in us to deny that there are numbers of colored persons, who are helping to swell the amount of degradation, infamy and ruin, which so fearfully abounds in this great city.” It was therefore in the
spirit of “real friendship” that the abolitionists turned to some specific causes and remedies of “human wretchedness.” Surprisingly, nothing is said of crime. Even
unemployment is dismissed as a “rare” problem that can be solved by having urban blacks seek work on farms in the countryside and by training youth in the “mechanic arts.”
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The crucial issues involved Christian piety, responsibility, and respectability, which were above all threatened by
intemperance, gambling, and Sabbath-breaking:
We perceive … with great pain, several Porter Houses and dram shops, not a few of which are open on the Sabbath, and are kept by colored persons, which are resorted to by many of the youth and other persons of color. The number of these places appears to increase with the population of the city. The awful consequences attending such establishments, to youth, to families, and to the community, cannot be described. It is lamentable that any persons who profess any respect for themselves, should enter these gates of destruction.
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Hence, the black man who could pull himself away from the dram shops, refuse to sell or buy lottery tickets, and then regularly attend church and whatever school or lectures were available, would cast a crucial vote for the emancipation of “your and our enslaved brethren.”
It should be noted that according to one study, the total per capita consumption in 1830 of distilled liquor in what was then our “alcoholic republic” came to 4.7 gallons, or 2.6 times the amount drunk in the 1970s. The striking increase in drinking in the early nineteenth century helped to fuel in the 1820s a massive and vibrant
temperance movement that preceded and then overlapped with the abolition movement. By 1840, the consumption of hard liquor had fallen to an estimated 3.1 gallons per capita, and by the 1850s to 2.2.
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In his 1846 lecture on temperance and antislavery, given in Scotland, Frederick Douglass affirmed that “The [American] blacks are to a considerable extent intemperate, and if intemperate, of course vicious in other respects, and this is counted against them as a reason why their emancipation should not take place.” Yet, by the 1830s, Northern free blacks had become deeply involved in the temperance crusade, and since they were barred from membership in most of the white organizations, they founded numerous and thriving colored
temperance societies. Virtually all of the major black leaders, including Douglass, became ardent proponents of Prohibition.
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The second letter,
An Address to Free Colored Americans,
published in New York in 1837 by the newly formed and biracial
Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, carefully avoided paternalistic admonitions and complaints. Despite the fact that the organization included such notable figures as
Lucretia Mott, the
Grimké sisters, and
Lydia Maria Child, the thirty-two-page
Address
has been neglected by historians even though it is one of the most eloquent and sophisticated
abolitionist calls for racial equality. It also bears directly on both the dehumanization of slaves and the issue raised by Stowe and Douglass. But many modern readers would be troubled by the fact that the wording is saturated with Christian passion and based on the widely shared abolitionist conviction that racial slavery and emancipation were all part of God’s master plan for human redemption.
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The four-day convention opened in New York City on May 9, 1837, and included some two hundred women, perhaps twenty of them black, from nine states. Since men were excluded, it was the first major public political meeting of women in American history and provided an opportunity to discuss and debate “almost every major theme concerning women’s rights that would be explored a full decade later at the 1848
Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention.”
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This is a matter of some importance, given the fact that the move for gender equality has become the greatest social revolution in modern history.
But the purpose of the organizers was to enable women to participate in a national campaign to collect 1 million signatures on petitions to Congress calling for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and in
Florida Territory (it was assumed that the Constitution prohibited direct federal intervention against slavery in the existing states). This was a time when American abolitionists hoped to follow the remarkably successful British model of bombarding government with antislavery petitions. Congressman
John Quincy Adams, for example, to whom the Convention addressed a special letter of gratitude, was challenging a “
gag rule” preventing any consideration or discussion of any antislavery petitions.
The Convention succeeded in raising funds, coordinating the petition campaign, and preparing six pamphlets and “open letters” including a “
Letter to the Women of Great Britain,” “An
Appeal to the Women of the
Nominally
Free States,” drafted by
Angelina Grimké,
and the “Address to the Free Colored Americans,” drafted by Angelina’s sister,
Sarah Grimké. The last two important documents were each prepared by a committee of three and then referred to a committee of nine for revision and publication. Nevertheless, they brought much fame to the Grimké sisters and it is more convenient to refer to the sisters as the authors.
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The Grimké sisters were born and reared in South Carolina, the daughters of a rich plantation owner who as an attorney and judge ardently supported the slave regime as well as the subordination of women. Sarah, twelve years older than Angelina, resented the inferiority of her own education as well as her father’s fury over her attempts to teach her personal slave to read. Having accompanied her ill father to Philadelphia for medical care, Sarah moved there upon his death and became a
Quaker convert. She persuaded Angelina to become a Quaker and move to Philadelphia in 1829. While the antislavery traditions of the Society of Friends encouraged the sisters to develop and express their own radical abolitionism, they soon clashed with the Quaker establishment over issues of slavery, racism, and especially women’s rights, which the Grimkés saw as essential, since it would free women to help achieve slave emancipation. According to the sisters’ friend
Catherine H. Birney, the pamphlets they wrote at the Convention led the way to their becoming the most famous women speakers of the abolitionist movement and among the first women to speak publicly to mixed (then termed “promiscuous”) audiences of women and men.
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The Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women evoked much public criticism and ridicule concerning the proper role of women and the standards governing the relationship between blacks and whites. Some white delegates, like the Grimkés, who were acutely sensitive to racial prejudice among abolitionists, recognized that the black women delegates always confronted
both
racism and sexism wherever they turned. While the the Convention was engaged in “animated discussion” of “the province of women,” Angelina Grimké decried the indifference with which American churches had regarded the sin of
slavery and implored every woman to reject
the circumscribed limits with which corrupt custom and a perverted application of Scripture have encircled her; therefore that it is the duty of woman, and the province of woman, to plead the
cause of the oppressed in our land, and to do all that she can by her voice, and her pen, and her purse, and the influence of her example, to overthrow the horrible system of American slavery.
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This challenge to institutional religion, implying that individual women could wholly reinterpret Scripture, shocked many delegates and of course invited clerical denunciation, which would persist as the Grimkés launched their fairly brief campaign as abolitionist speakers. The delegates were also divided over whether women should continue to pursue a separate course, as antislavery activists, or demand equality and join men in integrated societies. By 1840, this issue would lead to the major division and split in the national antislavery societies.
While
Lydia Maria Child opposed the emphasis on women’s rights, she joined the Grimkés in denouncing racism and proposed specific measures to encourage whites to hire more blacks and to avoid segregation by sitting next to blacks in churches and other gatherings. Angelina viewed racism as a kind of “demon” that whites must struggle to “root out.” She told the Convention that “it is a solemn duty for every woman to pray to be delivered from such an unholy feeling and to act out the principles of Christian equality by associating with them [blacks] as if the color of the skin was of no more consequence than that of the hair, or the eyes.” Only such dedicated personal efforts could remove “one of the chief pillars of American slavery.”
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Turning now to the
Address to Free Colored Americans,
toward the end of the document
Sarah Grimké pays passionate tribute to their beloved colored “Brethren and Sisters” for exposing the racism and criminality of the American Colonization Society and for probably preventing America from adding
to her manifold transgressions against the descendants of Africa, the transcendent crime of banishing from her shores those whom she has deeply injured … You saw that the root of the evil was in our own land, and that expatriation of the best part of our colored population, so far from abolishing slavery, would render the condition of the enslaved tenfold more hopeless.…
After quoting the eloquent resolutions proclaimed by Philadelphia’s blacks soon after the ACS was founded, Grimké makes clear that future generations should honor America’s free blacks for initiating
and making possible an abolitionist movement “on which heaven has smiled (for it could have success only from the great Master).”
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Endorsing the blacks’ view that “the Colonization Society originated in hatred to the free people of color,”
Grimké then turns to the issue of white “supercilious prejudice” and “arrogant pretensions of unfounded superiority.” She acknowledges that many whites who have “a kind of sentimental desire for your welfare” are nevertheless “anxious to keep you as they term it, in your proper place.” Grimké even admits that the women can understand this denial to blacks of full social equality, since “most, if not all of us have had to combat these feelings, and such of us as have overcome them, have abundant cause to sing hallelujah to our God, and bless his holy name for our abolition principles; they have opened a source of heavenly joy in our bosoms, which we would not exchange for all the gold of Ophir.”
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