The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (39 page)

Throughout his writing McCune Smith seems almost obsessed with the theme that physical and intellectual labor should go hand in hand, an idea embodied in the
manual labor schools that were popular at that time. It was a theme that could counteract the conviction that slaves and freed slaves, like McCune Smith himself, were destined to mindless labor of the lowest sort. That fear, as we have seen, was exemplified in
David Walker’s outrage over the happiness and contentment of the bootblack he confronted on a Boston street: “My objections are, to our glorying and being happy in such low employments.”

McCune Smith may have had Walker’s passage in mind when he chose to include a happy and highly successful bootblack in his ten biographical sketches, “
Heads of the Colored People,” published in
Frederick Douglass’s Paper
from 1852 to 1854.
⁶³
As Professor
Stauffer puts it, these witty and ironic pieces, on such figures as a Washerwoman, Sexton, News-Vender, and Steward, “portray with subtlety and dignity the lives and careers of
New York City’s black working class, and in so doing offer an antidote to the general malaise felt by New York City blacks at the time.”
⁶⁴

Portraying the human achievements and intellectual abilities of mostly illiterate former slaves had a special meaning at a time when,
as Stauffer points out, a severe but “hidden” economic depression impacted skilled urban workers, especially blacks, who also faced rising competition from white immigrant workers, an upsurge of racist theories from eminent scientists, and the acute danger of being seized by Southern “
slave-catchers” as a result of the 1850
Fugitive Slave Law.
⁶⁵

McCune Smith’s unnamed and illiterate bootblack exemplifies the connections between manual and intellectual efforts as he struggles upward from childhood slavery to become a highly successful boot-cleaning entrepreneur. Aided by his wife, who hires out as a washerwoman, and as a result of hard work and religious faith, the bootblack finally acquires fine property and makes sure that his daughters acquire a good education and end up as teachers in their own private school. Though always aware that his calling is “looked down upon,” the happy and vigorous bootblack has nothing but scorn for those who would rather starve than “handle a shoe-brush.” And McCune Smith concludes by affirming that boot blacking “is the calling which has produced the best average colored men, and has made men of
character,
not of
wealth.
”
⁶⁶

Ironically, while Frederick Douglass was willing to publish these portraits illuminating the “heads” of working-class blacks, he echoed David Walker’s sentiments in his criticism of such “faithful pictures of contented degradation” and his wish for examples of far more elevated and “respectable” black achievement that would do more to flatter black pride.
⁶⁷

McCune Smith’s faith in the potentialities of combining physical and intellectual labor as a way of elevating the North’s freed slave population found its grandest promise in a vast project for settling thousands of mainly urban black workers on
land donated by the wealthy land baron
Gerrit Smith in New York’s Adirondacks. We have noted the desire of some white reformers to encourage urban blacks to migrate to the countryside. The ideal of family land ownership later embodied in the federal
Homestead Act of 1862 merged with the hope of enabling inhabitants of black urban ghettos to live and work like white farmers. Such land ownership would presumably provide not only economic independence but political power by meeting New York’s controversial $250 property qualification for black suffrage. This answer to Jefferson’s question on what to do with them would go far, in Smith’s eyes, in changing the hearts of whites and undermining the racism that lay at the core of caste.
⁶⁸

McCune Smith was dumbfounded and believed that God himself must have been the inspiration when Gerrit Smith announced on August 1, 1846, that he was donating 120,000 acres of land in order to provide 40-acre plots to 3,000 poor blacks from New York State, and then asked McCune Smith to serve as the principal trustee and help select and compile a list of recipients. When he returned from Scotland in 1837, McCune Smith had joined
William Lloyd Garrison’s
American Anti-Slavery Society, but by 1840, with the movement sharply divided, he had become disillusioned with white abolitionists and their organizations and had drawn apart. Gerrit Smith’s extraordinary gift, despite its impulsiveness and lack of rational planning, changed everything. As
Stauffer puts it, McCune Smith took on his duties “with the zeal of a recent convert” and the two men established “an intimate and rich friendship.” Indeed, Gerrit Smith’s project of building a black community in
North Elba (also called
Timbucto) led to a crucial alliance between the two Smiths, Frederick Douglass, and
John Brown, in what Stauffer terms a radical “Bible politics” that ultimately endorsed
violence and ended with John Brown’s famous raid at
Harpers Ferry.
⁶⁹

Gerrit Smith’s contributions to the abolitionist movement help illustrate the insuperable obstacles it faced, including the strength and depth of racism and the power of the slaveholding interests. He helped found and finance the
Liberty Party and its more radical successors. But the Liberty Party’s presidential compaign in 1844 may well have led to the defeat of the
moderate Whig
Henry Clay and the election of the Democrat
James K. Polk and thus to the
Mexican War and the further
expansion of slavery. One can of course argue that by moving abolitionism into the political realm and away from Garrison’s nonresistance and disunionism, Gerrit Smith helped prepare the way for the Republican Party, Civil War, and slave emancipation. Yet he, James McCune Smith, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown, whose commitment to racial equality led increasingly to an acceptance of violence, took a path in the 1850s that sharply diverged from that of Lincoln and the other Republicans whose commitment to prohibiting the spread of slavery benefited from the deep and longtime racist fear of a westward migration of blacks. On the other hand, I would argue that Lincoln and the Republicans succeeded by offering a middle path between the radicals and the antipolitical Garrisonians. As we will see in the epilogue, Lincoln and the Republicans created a more
moderate road that countered and withstood the virulent
racism of the Democrats and that remained committed to the ultimate abolition of American slavery.

But
Gerrit Smith’s contributions to the cause—up to or even over a billion dollars in today’s currency—freed many slaves and made possible a harmonious model of interracial community in his home town of Peterboro, New York.
⁷⁰
Nevertheless despite McCune Smith’s attempts to select, advise, and prepare poor blacks for settlement in North Elba, only about one hundred managed to move there and deal with the problems of poor soil, harsh climate, and exploitative whites who posed as surveyors and cheated some of the blacks out of their land. Most of all, Gerrit Smith had been hard hit by the economic depression (in 1842 he owed creditors $600,000 and became delinquent on part of it) and lacked the cash to pay the poor settlers for the needed wagons, horses, oxen, tools, and supplies.
⁷¹

At times Gerrit Smith became disillusioned over the overpowering effects of racism, which led to the loss of self-respect among free blacks and to the internalization of what he termed “self-contempt,” even among whites like himself.
⁷²
Yet a small number of black survivors did create an animated community at North Elba that served as a base for
John Brown, whom the settlers accepted as if he were black. Brown succeeded in getting supplies from Gerrit Smith and planned his revolutionary raid in conjunction with various white conspirators, though he was especially close to the two Smiths and to Frederick Douglass.
⁷³
As Stauffer has brilliantly shown, the radical four developed a new faith in individual and national liberation based on the dissolution of such traditional boundaries as black and white, rich and poor, sacred and profane.

By the 1850s, the achievements of McCune Smith, Frederick Douglass, and numerous other free blacks who were mostly former slaves had at least proved that colored Americans were capable of overcoming the most formidable obstacles and matching whites on professional and entrepreneurial levels. By 1860, according to one historian, blacks had “developed enterprises in virtually every area important to the pre–Civil War business community, including merchandising, manufacturing, real estate speculation and development, the construction trades, transportation, and the extractive industries.” At least twenty-one had acquired assets exceeding $100,000, interpreted as a mark of true wealth. One of those,
James Forten, the
Philadelphia sailmaker whom McCune Smith celebrated for having helped launch the abolitionist movement, had achieved that worth by the 1830s. Ironically, most of the wealthiest blacks lived in the South, especially
Louisiana, as slaveholders. The sole millionaire,
William Leidesdorff, made his fortune in San Francisco.
⁷⁴

Unfortunately, the deprived, degraded status of most African Americans long obscured the remarkable individual successes as well as the vibrancy of black churches and community organizations. Most whites, along with the media, totally ignored or falsified the free blacks’ achievements and focused only on their degradation. Even the 1840 census, as exposed by McCune Smith, presented false and highly exaggerated statistics on black insanity and other forms of institutionalized deformities. The national racist bias had a continuing effect on black self-contempt. Thus, as we have seen, Theodore
Wright noted in 1837 that colored parents often wished their children “had never been born,” and sixty years later, in
Souls of Black Folk,
W. E. B. Du Bois described his feelings of racial gladness when his firstborn son died: “Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow.”
⁷⁵

In 1834, only months after the founding of the
American Anti-Slavery Society, Frederick Bailey, a sixteen-year-old Maryland slave who was aware of Northern abolitionism, repeatedly looked out over what he called the “broad bosom” of Chesapeake Bay, where the sun glinted on the sails of countless ships headed north. As an overworked field hand, subject to almost daily whippings, Bailey felt like a caged animal staring at the free movement of humans who, without carrying a “required pass,” could head for the legendary region of free soil. Frederick—who as a fugitive fearful of recapture changed his name to Frederick Douglass—had recently been “broken in body, soul, and spirit” by “nigger-breaker” Edward Covey, whose techniques of dehumanization had transformed the young slave, as he later claimed, “into a brute!”
¹

As a result, the young Douglass sometimes viewed the white sails, “so delightful to the eye of freemen,” as “shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition.” But as he thought of God and longed to swim or fly to the ships, Douglass also resolved to run away:

Four years later, when he finally achieved his dream of running away, only to become the archetypal fugitive slave, Douglass took a somewhat different course. But his fluctuation between longing to escape and reconciling himself to his lot reflected the extraordinary range and diversity of his experience as a slave. Born in 1818, the son of a slave woman and an unknown white man, Douglass spent his relatively happy first years in his elderly grandmother’s isolated cabin, not really conscious that he was the property of an absentee master,
Aaron Anthony, who served as a steward for one of the largest plantations on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Separated from his mother, Douglass’s life as a child was disrupted by moves that placed him under different authorities, but in many ways he was a highly privileged slave.
³