Most free African Americans despised the ACS, believing that the country of their birth was their country. A Quaker who interviewed free people of color in North Carolina learned that most were only considering transportation out of their home state because slave traders kept kidnapping their children. Once Lundy settled in Baltimore, African Americans convinced him to move from colonization to advocacy of the immediate and unconditional end of slavery. In the 1820s, Baltimore was the biggest center of the domestic slave trade on the East Coast. African Americans left behind there had much to say about the trade that had taken so many of their kinfolk. Their conversations with Lundy agitated him into confrontation with powerful pro-slave-expansion interests. Soon, Lundy was charging in the pages of The Genius that all slaveholders were “disgraceful whoremongers” who bred human beings for the market. He saved his greatest fury for the Woolfolks, describing the family as a set of lawless “pirates” whose “heart rending cruelty” caused “fatal corruption in the body politic.”36
On January 9, 1827, Austin Woolfolk approached Lundy as the editor was locking up his print shop for the day. Woolfolk threw the Quaker to the ground and beat him severely, then walked away. Lundy pressed assault charges against Woolfolk. But when the case came to trial, the judge declared that the editor deserved “chastisement.” He fined the slave trader one whole dollar and then gave a speech praising the slave trade’s economic benefits to the state of Maryland. He added that Woolfolk also had removed a “great many rogues and vagabonds who were a nuisance in the state.” (The government of Louisiana would have been unhappy to hear that the Maryland justice system encouraged the transportation of dangerous slaves to New Orleans.)37
Lundy had an apprentice, a young man from Newburyport, Massachusetts. His name was William Lloyd Garrison. Every day, as he set the type for the next issue of The Genius, Garrison listened thoughtfully to local African-American men—men such as William Watkins and Jacob Greener, who came to the printing shop to talk with Lundy and each other. What they said “revealed,” as Garrison later put it, “the radical doctrine of immediate, unconditional emancipation.” Lundy began to travel more, and his extended absences gave Garrison a chance to run the paper himself. It quickly became clear that the apprentice had a stronger taste for confrontation—and unlike the diminutive Lundy, Garrison was built like a linebacker. When Garrison labeled Francis Todd, a Massachusetts shipowner whose vessel had transported seventy-five slaves to Louisiana, a “highway robber and murderer” and an “enemy of the human species,” Todd decided the courts were the better part of valor. He sued Garrison for libel and won. Garrison couldn’t pay his fine, so he was sentenced to six months in jail. After his release, Garrison headed north—another slave-trade-driven migration. Settling in Boston, he launched a new paper, called The Liberator.38
Free African Americans were already using the boom in newspaper publication and readership to spread what they had seen and heard from those who had survived forced migration. In 1827, Samuel Cornish began to publish the New York Freedom’s Journal. Cornish, an African American who had been born free in Delaware, had spent 1819 as a missionary to enslaved people on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, just as the long-distance trade to New Orleans was beginning to drain hands from places like Kent County. The newspaper’s first issue contained a harrowing account of something he’d seen there: the sale of a man to a trader Cornish identified as “Mr. W*.”39
Freedom’s Journal was the first African-American newspaper in the United States. It was not Cornish, however, but his Boston subscription agent who made the most influential case that slavery was getting worse and bigger, not better and smaller. Born free in North Carolina, David Walker had also lived in Charleston. There, in 1822, he saw panicked whites torture and execute over thirty enslaved men who had allegedly conspired with a free black man named Denmark Vesey to launch a slave revolt. Fearing for his safety, Walker moved to Boston, where he established a secondhand clothing shop in the city’s African-American neighborhood. (Garrison, who relied heavily on black subscribers and donors in order to publish The Liberator, established his printing shop in the same neighborhood.) Walker’s store was the end of the cotton chain, and as he sat in it, he breathed the dust of frayed fibers that had originally been pulled from the boll by southwestern hands.40
The fibers had a tale to tell, as did the free black sailors who shopped in Walker’s store. When night fell, he wrote these stories down in his office at the back of the narrow shop. He shaped his thoughts into four devastating essays and put them between the covers of one book—and when An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World appeared in September 1829, it was like nothing anyone had ever read before, though it had all been said around a thousand fires. In it, Walker ferociously assailed slavery, slaveholders, and their enablers. Most whites, he charged, either directly or tacitly supported slavery and were thus “our natural enemies”—though slave traders were particular “devils.”
Walker insisted that the dynamism of nineteenth-century slavery made it worse than earlier forms: the ancient Spartans did not lock the Helots in coffles and drag them “from their wives and children, children from their parents, mothers from their suckling babes.” In 1776, “there were but thirteen States in the Union,” but after half a century, “now there are twenty-four, most of which are slave-holding States, and the whites are dragging us around in chains and in handcuffs, to their new States and Territories to work their mines and farms, to enrich them and their children.” He’d read, in white Carolinians’ newspapers, stories decrying the way the Turks denied the Greeks their independence, and “in the same paper was an advertisement, which said ‘Eight well built Virginia and Maryland Negro fellows and four wenches will positively be sold this day to the highest bidder!’”
“Americans! I ask you candidly,” wrote Walker, “was your sufferings under Great Britain one hundredth part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours under you?” Turning to black readers, he proclaimed that “freedom is your natural right.” Walker was playing with fire. He knew how dangerous whites could become. Even white abolitionists feared that violent resistance would turn white audiences against emancipation. But whites had treated enslaved Africans as if it were no crime to bind them “with chains and hand-cuffs,” and then “beat and murder them as they would rattle-snakes.” Thus black people had the same right to defend themselves against crimes and oppressions claimed by America’s revolutionaries. “It is no more harm for you to kill a man who is trying to kill you than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.” And so he praised “Hayti[,] the glory of the blacks and the terror of tyrants . . . men who would be cut off to a man, before they would yield to the combined forces of the whole world.” So: “Act like men.” Prepare, Walker commanded slavery-survivors in the tones of an Old Testament prophet, to inflict the consequences of sin if justice was not done, even if that meant facing one’s own death in the effort. Once the battle was joined, once they saw that victory was possible, slaves would be willing to pay the cost: “Let twelve black men get well armed for battle, and they will kill and put to flight fifty whites. . . . Once you get them started, they glory in death.” For enforced submission disguised mighty rage beneath: “As Mr. Jefferson wisely said, they have never found us out.”41
Walker’s statements required real courage in an era when Granville Sharp had morphed into Granville Sharp Pierce. “If any wish to plunge me into the wretched incapacity of a slave, or murder me for [telling] the truth, know ye, that I am in the hand of God,” he wrote. “What is the use of living, when in fact I am dead.” Hoping to get a rebellion started, Walker stuffed copies of the pamphlet into the pockets of pants and jackets that he sold to sailors. Some knowing, some not, they carried the spore of Walker’s words into the harbors of the slave states, where almost all American merchant ships made annual pilgrimages to pick up cotton bales.42
In March 1830, authorities in Savannah, New Orleans, and Charleston began to find copies
of Walker’s Appeal in the possession of free blacks. They immediately went into panic mode. Seeking to quarantine the pamphlet like a contagious disease, southern state governments banned free black sailors from disembarking from their merchant vessels. They panicked at rumors of slave revolts from New Bern, North Carolina, to the other end of the pipeline of stolen people in Opelousas, Louisiana. Georgia and Mississippi passed laws imposing the death penalty on free black people who disseminated antislavery materials. State legislatures planned to ban the teaching of literacy to enslaved African Americans. Instruction in basic mathematics would remain legal, however, so that black drivers would be able to subtract the number of pounds of cotton picked from the quota, thus deriving the requisite number of lashes to deliver.43
Unlike other political questions, abolition talk carried with it the seed of revolutionary violence. Therefore, southern officials and newspaper writers claimed, it was not protected speech. Savannah’s mayor sent a letter to his Boston counterpart, Harrison Otis, asking the conservative New England politician to arrest the old-clothes dealer for publishing “such a highly inflammatory work.” Though sympathetic to the request, the Boston mayor had to refuse. Walker had broken no Massachusetts law. Rumors in Boston claimed that various southern state governments had put a bounty of $3,000 on Walker’s head—double that if he was brought south still alive. In August 1830, at the age of thirty-three, he collapsed in the doorway of his shop and died in convulsions. Many African Americans in Boston believed that he had been poisoned, though no direct evidence for this survives. The official cause of death was consumption—probably what we would call tuberculosis. Or perhaps Walker had simply breathed too much cotton dust.44
Even with Walker dead, and black sailors locked on board their ships, the language of being “stolen” was already making its way by secret pathways out of lands that were being remade by the whipping-machine and the speculators who fed it with human flesh. Beginning in the mid-1830s, an abolitionist movement finally emerged. Much of its moral force and most trenchant analysis came from former slaves such as Frederick Douglass and other African Americans living in northern communities, including David Walker’s Boston. Of them, many, like Douglass, were Southern refugees who had been pushed to escape from the slavery zone, usually as fugitives, by the new expansion of the slave trade. The new movement would also be led by white allies, most especially William Lloyd Garrison and the host of white women who signed petitions and wrote books. However, the white abolitionists would always be a small minority inside a white northern population that mostly wanted to ignore slavery.45
But in contrast to earlier, more half-hearted white critics, the new abolitionists now agreed that slavery needed to end, and it needed to end as soon as possible. Much of the new urgency now pulsing in their veins had been transmitted to them from formerly enslaved people who had survived the new slave trade—many of whom also became significant actors in the movement. Running beneath abolitionist activity and critique, like the spinal plates under a mountain range, were the words that forced migrants themselves chose to use to understand their history. The language of being “stole” was everywhere in those words, so that in 1849, African-American abolitionist William Wells Brown would assert that his “master” was in fact merely a “man who stole me as soon as I was born.” Brown had first heard that phrasing not in the printed rhetoric of abolitionists, but in the philosophy of the illiterate forced migrants among whom he had once been numbered.46
YET THE ABOLITIONISTS’ HOPE for a dramatic change was implicitly premised on the idea of converting a significant portion of the nation’s white majority to their antislavery cause. In the meantime, could anything limit the damage being inflicted by the juggernaut of slavery expansion, in whose path still lay more than 2 million lives? To many enslaved African Americans, only one phenomenon seemed to offer much immediate help. And this phenomenon, this ally in the cause of ending slavery, came with several drawbacks: it was invisible, it was lacking in physical power, it was prone to giving commands unenforceable by law, and it was often silent.
Go back to the sale that Samuel Cornish witnessed on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, but do not focus on Cornish, an educated free man confronted by the hypocrisies of the slave republic. Put aside the mental maps that draw lines of correspondence and credit to connect nodes like Baltimore to New Orleans. Brush aside, for a moment, price curves of hands sold by a professionalized slave trade. Instead, focus on the existential situation of the man that Mr. W* bought: William, a member of the Methodist church. “[Woolfolk] ordered William to stretch out his hands in order to be tied. [William] rather shrank from this, as every honest man would do[;] however[,] with much piety and resignation, he submitted.” Watching this, his friends, fellow church members, “began to weep bitterly.” William turned: “Don’t cry for me! God is everywhere!” Then Woolfolk led him away.47
William believed that underneath the surface world, where all the powers of the world arrayed themselves against him, lay a world of the spirit where the real value would be measured. It was perhaps the same world through which an enslaved girl moved in a vision she had at a Tennessee prayer meeting, one which, as an old woman, eighty years later, she would recount to an interviewer. Clear as day, she remembered what she had seen: “I was traveling along a big road. Down on each side I saw the souls in torment. Many of them were people I had known in life. They were just roaming and staggering along. They were saying ‘Oh, how long?’ I met on the road a great host, some walking, some on mules, some going down to hell.”48
Image 6.3. White abolitionists and enslaved migrants both focused on the possibility—and for thousands of individuals, the reality—that free African Americans in the Chesapeake and border states were being kidnapped by criminals attracted by the new profits offered by the market in human beings. The man who has been kidnapped here wears respectable work clothes no different from those who have seized him and plan to sell him to the cotton frontier. George Bourne, Picture of Slavery in the United States (Middletown, CT, 1834), 120.
For those taken, for those left behind and bereaved, for all who knew that they, too, could be stolen, the acceleration of slavery’s expansion was hell—separation from all that gave life in the world meaning. By the late 1820s, hell was more real than ever. William professed his faith that God was everywhere, but surely he must have wondered if God would come with him on the road through hell, into the holds of the ships tacking around Florida into the Gulf, if he would climb with William onto the block and stand beside him in the notary’s office in New Orleans.
David Walker, writing in his old-clothes shop in Boston, saw the coffles in his mind’s eye, and prophet-like, predicted that God would arrive on the frontier. And when he did, he would come in the form of an angel of slave rebellion to drown sinners in fire and blood, a right-handed avenging God bringing justice through the sword. Yet the failure of the 1811 revolt on Louisiana’s German Coast illustrated what most individuals who had been stolen away to the frontier of slavery had breathed in as knowledge taught from the cradle. Redemption by revolt was impossible. So many enslaved migrants chose a different exit from hell on earth.
The vast expansion of slavery in the United States happened in tandem with the emergence of evangelical Protestantism. At the time of the American Revolution, most Americans had not participated actively in organized religion. Though most were nominally Protestant, few outside of New England attended church services on a weekly or even monthly basis. But by the 1850s, half or more of all white Americans had come to participate regularly in some sort of church. The vast majority were in evangelical denominations, among which the Methodists and Baptists were the most popular choices. This evangelical Christianity was not exactly like the twenty-first-century version. Unlike many of its descendants, it was usually not fundamentalist in theology. Yet like its twenty-first-century descendants, it did use an informal liturgy. And the evangelical preachers who spread across the continent (and eventually, across
the oceans) insisted that those who would be redeemed needed to undergo an individual conversion experience. Instead of placing their faith in a special ceremony or in some sort of inscrutable predestination, evangelical theologies made the believer’s individual choice to come to God for forgiveness the key moment of salvation.49
Along with millions of individual choices, the growth of slavery helped to make evangelical Protestantism the hegemonic pattern of American religion. Yet the relationship between the two expansions was complex. As of 1790, although Africans and their children had been slaves in North America for more than 160 years, few enslaved people had converted to the staid, planter-dominated Anglicanism of their enslavers. Sometime around 1770, however, the first evangelical Protestant preachers—many of them exiles from theological struggles within the churches of New England—began to travel through the South. Though the planter gentry of the Chesapeake persecuted these “New Light” ministers, other Virginians and Carolinians flocked to their revival meetings. Many enslaved people were at those gatherings. Their presence often galvanized the already emotional New Light revivals into something electric. Enslaved people born in Africa—still in the late 1700s a significant percentage of Chesapeake slaves—came from a part of the world where it was common for gods to throw people on the ground, to breathe in and through them, to ride worshippers’ spirits and remake their lives. These new converts demonstrated the same intensity of conversion, and their fervor was catching. White converts modeled their conversions on enslaved people’s behavior, learning that shouting and singing were appropriate responses to the breath of the divine. Some who expected to scoff with amusement at a slave preacher’s sermon found themselves lying on the ground, soaked in sweat, not quite sure what had happened. Evangelical church communities adopted enslaved men and women as spiritual brothers and sisters, even as experts and guides.50
The Half Has Never Been Told Page 28