The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (69 page)

33.
David J. Garrow,
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(New York: William Morrow, 1986), 428.

34.
For the searing and at times liberating experience of black soldiers in the Civil War, see Ira Berlin et al., eds.,
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867
, The Black Military Experience, 2nd series (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

35.
Andrew Hacker, “Black Crime, White Racism,”
New York Review of Books
(March 3, 1988): 36–41. Puerto Ricans are the only designated ethnic group whose family income falls below that of blacks.

36.
There were occasional exceptions to this generalization. In the mid-1840s, when the ACS had virtually given up hope of winning government support and sought to persuade the clergy to raise funds for selective emigration,
Ralph Randolph Gurley sounded the theme of moral obligation: “Let us reflect for a moment how much we are indebted to the colored race. How much have they toiled for us? How many of our blessings have come to us through their daily labors? How much of our wealth have they poured into our coffers? How many of our children have been nursed by them? How much of our present prosperity is the result of their joyless and untiring industry!…They have a claim upon us from which we never can shrink, without violating some of our most solemn and imperative obligations!”
African Repository
21 (June 1845): 163–64.

37.
See, for example, Mechal Sobel,
The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).

38.
“Annual Message to Congress,” Dec. 1, 1862, in
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln,
ed. Roy P. Basler, vol. 5 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 520–21; Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, “Lincoln and Colonization: Navigating
the Evidences,”
http://www.hnn.us/articles/137542.html
; Eric Foner,
The Fiery Trial:
Abraham
Lincoln and American Slavery
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 257–63.

39.
Henry Highland Garnet,
A Memorial Discourse; by Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, Delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives, Washington Ciy, D.C. on Sabbath, February 12
,
1865
, with an introduction by James McCune Smith, M.D. (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1865).

40.
Ibid., 69–74, 86–87. In a sermon in December 1862, anticipating the forthcoming
Emancipation Proclamation, Garnet pictured Lincoln as a new Saul: “But God be praised, one has been chosen, and anointed by the people, who is greater than Saul, and to him, it would seem is committed the work of destroying the power that has occasioned our national wrong.” However, Garnet warned, “if after the First of next January, the lowing and bleating of the enemy’s herds and flocks are heard in our camps, we shall meet the displeasure of the Almighty, and our gallant leader, whose name has hitherto been a tower of strength, may fall on the hights [
sic
] of some Gilboa, a victim of his forbearance.”
National Principia,
December 11, 1862,
BAP,
reel 14, 611.

41.
Garnet,
Memorial Discourse,
89–91.

1.
Theodore Weld to William Lloyd Garrison, January 2, 1833, in
Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké, 1822–1844
, ed. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond (1934; repr., Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), 1:98.

2.
Leonard Bacon,
Slavery Discussed in Occasional Essays, from 1833 to 1846
(New York, 1846), p. iii; [Bacon], “Report of the Committee appointed February 18, 1823, to inquire respecting the black population of the United States,” in
Memoirs of American Missionaries, Formerly Connected with the Society of Inquiry Respecting Missions, in the Andover Theological Seminary
…(Boston, 1823), 303. Copies of Bacon’s “Report” were widely distributed in New England; a slightly revised version was also incorporated into a review essay in the
Christian Spectator,
which was then reprinted in the
Seventh Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States
(Washington, D. C., 1824), 87–104 (hereafter ACS). See “Review of the Reports of the American Colonization Society,”
Christian Spectator
5 (Sept. 1, 1823): 485–94; (October 1, 1823): 540–51; Leonard Bacon to Alice Bacon, May 27, 1823, series 1, box 1, folder 14; Thomas F. Davies to Leonard Bacon, July 28, 1823, ibid., folder 15, Bacon Family Papers, Yale University Library.

3.
[Bacon], “Report of the Committee,” 302–04. Even Bacon was surprised by the effectiveness of his formula; as he wrote his mother, when the “Report” was first read, “a very great and unexpected degree of interest was excited in the members of the Society. They accepted the Report unanimously and adopted the measures recommended by the Committee with a view to keep the subject permanently before them.… [Some professors] recommended that we should first consult with the managers of the Colonization Society at Washington on the best means of producing an excitement at the North, and therefore were of the opinion that during the vacation we ought not only to write to them on the subject, but if possible to send an agent to see them and talk with them and lay before them our own views and feelings.” Bacon was chosen as the principal agent, and he wrote the above lines in Philadelphia, on his way to Washington. Leonard Bacon to Alice Bacon, May 27, 1823.

4.
Joel Bernard, “Between Religion and Reform: American Moral Societies, 1812–1821” (unpublished paper). I am much indebted to Joel Bernard, who years ago drew my attention to Bacon’s 1823 “Report” and who provided a critique of the paper from which this chapter is adapted.

5.
My discussion of New England theology and benevolent societies draws on
George M. Marsden,
The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970); H. Shelton Smith,
Changing Conceptions of Original Sin
(New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1955); Joseph A. Conforti,
Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism, the Congregational Ministry, and Reform in New England Between the Great Awakenings
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Christian University Press, 1981); Oliver W. Elsbree,
The Rise of the Missionary Spirit in America, 1790–1815
(Williamsport, Pa.: The Williamsport Printing and Binding Co., 1928); Charles I. Foster,
An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960); Sidney Earl Mead,
Nathaniel William Taylor, 1786–1858
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942); Mark A. Noll,
America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Earl A. Pope,
New England Calvinism and the Disruption of the Presbyterian Church
(New York: Garland, 1987); Douglas A. Sweeney and Allen C. Guelzo, eds.,
The New England Theology: From Jonathan Edwards to Edwards Amasa Park
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2006); Douglas A. Sweeney,
Nathaniel Taylor, New Haven Theology, and the Legacy of Jonathan Edwards
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Claude Welch,
Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century,
vol. 1,
1799–1870
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972); William K. B. Stoever, “The Calvinist Theological Tradition,” in
Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience,
ed. Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams, 3 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1988), 2:1039–56.

6.
[Bacon], “Report of the Committee,” 298. A number of historians have drawn a similar distinction between the relatively good material conditions and the moral evils of American slavery. See especially Robert William Fogel,
Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).

7.
[Bacon], “Report of the Committee,” 298–99. Congregationalist ministers and New England Federalists had long pointed to slavery as an explanation for the South’s supposedly backward economy and low state of morals. See James D. Essig,
The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals against Slavery, 1770–1808
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 98–103; David Brion
Davis,
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 336–42. Yet as Alison Goodyear Freehling has shown, the views Bacon expressed were also widely shared in Virginia.
Drift Toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831–1832
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).

8.
[Bacon], “Report of the Committee,” 300–301.

9.
Ibid., 299, 301–2. Curiously, Bacon omitted the following passage from Jefferson’s Query XVIII in
Notes on the State of Virginia:
“… that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation [between whites and blacks] is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!” Paul Leicester Ford, ed.,
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,
10 vols. (New York: 1892–99), 3:267.

10.
[Bacon], “Report of the Committee,” 302, 305.
Theodore Dwight, for example, when addressing the
Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom in 1794, affirmed that when slave rebellions erupted in the South and whites appealed for military support, “Surely, no friend to freedom and justice will dare to lend them his aid,” and quoted the prophet Jeremiah on the Lord’s proclamation of liberty and bloody destruction of transgressors.
An Oration Spoken before The Connecticut Society, for the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage
(Hartford, Conn. 1794), 19–20.

11.
[Bacon], “Report of the Committee,” 299–300.

12.
“Review of New Publications,”
Christian Spectator
5 (Oct. 1, 1823): 544; ACS,
Seventh Annual Report
(Washington, D.C.: R. Rapine, 1818), 94. There is no way of knowing whether Bacon wrote the inserted passage, but the editor of the
Christian Spectator,
Thomas F. Davies, seemed eager to print whatever Bacon submitted, even though Davies expressed skepticism “with respect to the possibility of materially diminishing
the black population of our country by means of the Colonization Society,” and stressed instead “the great benefit” that would result from “the civilization of knowledge which the colony may impart to the [African] tribes surrounding it.” Davies to Bacon, July 28, 1823, Bacon Family Papers. I suspect that Bacon had been impressed by the need for greater caution after his visit in 1823 to the ACS headquarters in Washington. None of the versions of the “Report” lists Bacon as the author.

13.
[Bacon], “Report of the Committee,” 300.

14.
Leonard Bacon, A
Plea for Africa, Delivered in New Haven, July Fourth, 1825
(New Haven, Conn., 1825), 13–14.

15.
Ibid.

16.
Davis,
Problem of Slavery in Age of Revolution,
285–99; Essig,
Bonds of Wickedness,
14–52, 106–08, 113; David Brion Davis,
Slavery and Human Progress
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 116–29.

17.
Orlando Patterson,
Freedom,
vol. 1,
Freedom in the Making of Western Culture
(New York: Basic Books, 1991), 316–44, 376–80. See also Dale B. Martin,
Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).

18.
David Brion Davis,
The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 75–90.

19.
Patterson,
Freedom,
1:326, 329–34.

20.
In addition to sources cited in note 5, I have drawn on Paul Ramsey, introduction to Jonathan Edwards,
The Works of Jonathan Edwards,
vol, 1,
Freedom of the Will,
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), 11–47, and passim, Nathaniel Niles,
Two Discourses on Liberty, Delivered in the North Church, in Newburyport
(Newburyport, Mass., 1774); Perry Miller,
Jonathan Edwards
(New York: W. Sloane, 1949), 235–63; George M. Marsden,
Jonathan Edwards: A Life
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003) 255–58, 465–71, 498–501.

21.
Noll,
America’s God,
271–77.

22.
Theodore Bacon,
Leonard Bacon,
31–80, 100–43; Marsden,
Evangelical Mind,
43–52; Mead,
Nathaniel William Taylor,
24–53, 62–63, 101–27, 225–26; Welch,
Protestant Thought,
127–37; Stoever, “The Calvinist Theological Tradition,” 1048–50.

23.
[Bacon], “Report of the Committee,” 301.

24.
“Committee on Colonization,” in
Memoirs of
American Missionaries,
29–34; [Bacon], “Report of the Committee,” 296–97.

25.
[Bacon], “Report of the Committee,” 296–97, 303, 311.

26.
See especially Donald L. Horowitz,
Ethnic Groups in Conflict
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

27.
Robert Austin Warner,
New Haven Negroes: A Social History
(1940; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1969), 3–4, 11, 19–25, 27, 46–47.

28.
[Bacon], “Report of the Committee,” 301, 311.

29.
Ibid., 296–97; Warner,
New Haven Negroes
; Theodore Bacon,
Leonard Bacon,
81, 164, 182; Bacon,
Plea for Africa,
10.

30.
John M. Merriman,
The Margins of City Life: Explorations on the French Urban Frontier, 1815–1851
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3–23, 27–29.