The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (36 page)

This extraordinary candor, based on a millennial faith in “that blessed and glorious era, when the brother of low degree will rejoice in that he is exalted, and the brother of high degree in that he is made low,” encouraged Grimké to persuade black readers that the women were true friends and sisters who understood the dilemmas of race in antebellum America. In particular, they had learned that racism—“the unfounded calumny that the people of color are unfit for freedom”—had been “designed, on the part of slaveholders, as a salve for their consciences, and a plea for the continuation of slavery, and is used … for the diabolical purpose of shielding from merited infamy the system of American slavery.”
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Christian empathy also offered a possible solution to the great problem of reconciling slave dehumanization with black capability. The
Address
begins with an effort to persuade black readers that abolitionists grasp the very worst aspects of human bondage. “ ‘THE WORST IS NOT GENERALLY KNOWN,’ ” one Southerner is quoted as saying, after describing the institution’s well-known
physical cruelties: “the nakedness of some [slaves], the hungry yearnings of others, the wailings and wo[e], the bloody cut of the keen lash, and the frightful scream that rends the very skies—and all this to gratify lust, pride, avarice, and other depraved feelings of the human heart.” Grimké then stresses that it is much easier for all people, who are “alive to bodily pain,” to apprehend the slaves’
physical
sufferings. Only a comparative few appreciate the slaves’ “mental and spiritual degradation”—that is, the effects of dehumanization:

The
Address
then quotes Southerner
Samuel McDowell Moore, who delivered a blistering attack on slavery during the debate over
emancipation and deportation in Virginia’s
House of Delegates, in January 1832, in response to
Nat Turner’s revolt:

So depicting slavery “at its worst” creates a huge dilemma. Grimké is now calling for the emancipation of dehumanized humans whose supposed ignorance and lack of foresight would seem to preclude any capability of becoming responsible free citizens or participants in the social compact. Grimké clearly recognized the danger of slipping into a racist conclusion, a circular, self-perpetuating argument in which the dehumanization of slavery leads to an Aristotelian view of the docile “natural slave,” of men
born
to be bondsmen.

It was doubtless Sarah Grimké’s stroke of brilliance to add the citation, “(Speech of Mr. Moore, House of Delegates, Va., 1832),” following the passage above that “such a state of ignorance is wholly incompatible with the existence of any moral principles or exalted
feeling in the breast of the slave.” Nat Turner’s bloody insurrection was still a vivid memory, especially in the minds of many free blacks and white Southerners such as Grimké.
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If the Executive Committee of the AASS had earlier seen the wisdom of praising the “peaceful endurance” of
New York City blacks when confronting a racist mob, this was now an occasion, for Grimké, to refer very obliquely to the
slaves’ desire for freedom and capacity for armed resistance—to the slaveholders’ failure at achieving full dehumanization.

Later on there is another significant reference to the Nat Turner–inspired Virginia legislative debate, following an appeal to Northern free blacks to consider abstaining, “as far as practicable,” from the products of slave labor. After stressing that friends of emancipation were increasingly interested in such a boycott and in finding free labor substitutes, Grimké affirms that the Southern slave will rejoice at the news that his Northern friends “feel a sympathy so deep for his sufferings, that they cannot partake of the proceeds of his unrequited toil.” But how could supposedly ignorant, dehumanized chattel be aware of Northern abolitionists? One answer came from “
Mr. Goode,” whose resolution produced “the celebrated debate” in the Virginia legislature, and who reminded planters who were in a state of near panic over Turner’s rebellion that many slaves were “ ‘wise and intelligent men, constantly engaged in reflection, informed of all that was occurring, and having their attention fixed upon the Legislature.’ ” Grimké also cites evidence of slaves who “spent many a midnight hour in discussing the probable results of the abolition movements,” to say nothing of the fact that every Northern fugitive slave “who is carried back, bears to his unhappy countrymen an account of all that is doing.”
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But how can one reconcile the view that slavery transforms a human into “a thing, a chattel personal, a machine to be used … for the benefit of another” with the image of recaptured fugitives secretly conveying the latest news about Northern abolitionists to highly alert slaves who also converse about Nat Turner and the Virginia legislative debates? Of course we now know that the desires and goals of slaveholders were considerably limited by the slaves’ resistance, negotiation, subcultures, and by the realities of human nature. The slave community also included a broad spectrum, ranging from lowly field workers to a few highly privileged bondspeople who sometimes had extraordinary power and responsibilities. And we discussed earlier the historians’ debates inspired in part by
Stanley Elkins’s 1959
“
Sambo” stereotype, and examined the complexities of slave
dehumanization, white psychological parasitism, and the effects of such racism on black self-esteem.

For Grimké and the women abolitionists, however, the crucial and overriding premise came with their declaration that “the people of color are not in any respect inferior to the white man, and that under favorable circumstances they would rise again to
the rank they formerly held.
” If the minds of the American slaves, “who are writhing under the lash of worse than
Egyptian taskmasters … are beclouded by ignorance and enfeebled by suffering,” we are assured that they “need only to have the same advantages which Europeans and their descendants have enjoyed, [in order] triumphantly to refute the unfounded calumny that they are inferior in powers of intellect, and less susceptible of mental improvement.”
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Given these assumptions, one can imagine a “modern” reformer proposing a massive
Freedman’s Bureau rehabilitation program, working to convey equal “advantages,” to accompany slave emancipation. In very limited ways, the British plan of “
apprenticeship,” inaugurated in 1834 with slave emancipation, was
advertised
as a step in this direction of “preparation” for freedom. But, given America’s tradition of mistrusting government power (and before the era of Social Security or even support for high-school education), any widespread agreement that slave emancipation
required
an expensive program of rehabilitation would have been seen as a fatal barrier to emancipation. As it happened, Congress had to override President
Andrew Johnson’s veto in order to permit the unpopular Freedman’s Bureau to continue its valuable work for three more years. It is true that after the
Civil War the federal government spent over $4 million in launching a huge grassroots campaign to reinter the bodies of some 303,536 Union soldiers who were left in the South and vulnerable to vengeful former Confederates. However, historian
Drew Gilpin Faust stresses that this
reburial program “would have been unimaginable before the war” and, significantly, that the
U.S. Colored Troops were especially targeted and segregated in death as well as in life.
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Like Frederick
Douglass, Sarah Grimké saw that the best answer to the dilemma of slave dehumanization and black capability lay in what Douglass termed “the presentation of an industrious, enterprising, thrifty, and intelligent
free black population,” though Grimké put far greater emphasis on religious values like piety and humility.
Religion reinforced the women abolitionists’ faith that local and private efforts could be effective and that the Northern free blacks could become a model for a grassroots campaign led by literate, knowledgeable, and educated blacks aided by white abolitionists and religious or charitable organizations.

As the
Address
puts it, speaking to the women’s black “brethren and sisters”:

To convince readers of the possibility of such
restoration,
Grimké then presents many pages of evidence of black achievement and capability, starting with ancient
Africa (especially
Egypt) and including the current testimony of teachers regarding the intellectual progress of black students. The
Address
even underscores the attainments of black “Generals, Physicians, Philosophers, Linguists, Poets, Mathematicians, and Merchants.” Noted for their kindness and generosity, most free blacks were even in some ways in a more favorable situation for “the growth of piety,” since being in “the furnace of adversity” they were less corrupted by prosperity and “the love of money, which is the root of all evil.”

The
Address
finally turns to the sensitive issue of offering some advice before making a final appeal. Nothing is said of the supposed “vices” traditionally associated with black degradation. Invoking the model of Christ’s humility, Grimké recommends simplicity and frugality with regard to clothing and physical appearance and warns against attending the theater, a “sink of vice” that made use of the racist stereotypes of the blacks’ oppressors. Since many of the presumed readers worked as servants for white families, “who have been educated with deep-rooted prejudices against you,” the blacks had the opportunity “of proving that these prejudices are as unfounded
as they are unjust—of exhibiting in your deportment, that moral loveliness which will constrain those who regard themselves as your superiors, to acknowledge that worth can neither be determined by the color of the skin, nor by the station occupied.” Along with this optimism, the blacks are warned to carefully avoid “families which pay little or no respect to the Sabbath, that you may escape the contamination arising from such intercourse.”
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Even house servants are exhorted to save money for the
education of their children, and “every exertion” is urged for the establishment of good schools to aid “in the great work of moral and intellectual elevation”:

The ultimate and crucial goal of such education is to prepare the rising black generation to participate in “the great moral conflict between light and darkness, which now agitates our guilty country.” While enthusiastically praising African Americans for launching a true abolition movement by repudiating the ACS, Grimké now calls on blacks to unite, “whenever you can,” with such white organizations (and she is well aware of racist exclusion) as antislavery societies,
peace societies (“based on the principle that all war is inconsistent with the gospel”),
temperance societies,
moral reform societies,
maternal associations, and other groups dedicated to “the great work of Reformation.” Such racial integration will have “reciprocal benefit,” because it will tend to remove that unchristian prejudice which “bites like a serpent, and stings like an adder.” Yet Grimké, as a member of the somewhat racially integrated Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, was well aware that blacks “may have to suffer much in thus commingling, but we entreat you to bear hardness as good soldiers of
Jesus Christ that your children, and your children’s children, may be spared the anguish you are compelled to endure on this account.”
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In a final call for cooperation in abolishing slavery, racial prejudice, and inequality, Grimké proclaims that the women