The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

  For early black nationalists like Edward Wilmot Blyden, a young West Indian immigrant to the United States who was inspired by the Reverend John B. Pinney and by William Coppinger and other Northern white colonizationists, Liberia gave substance to a growing faith that Africa’s ancient glories—the glories of Egypt, Nubia, and Carthage—could be restored. After landing on Liberian soil late in 1850, Blyden described in the official journal of the ACS “the delight with which I gazed upon the land of Tertullian, ancient father in the Christian Church; of Hannibal and Henry Diaz, renowned generals; yes, and the land of my forefathers.” White colonizationists had actually helped to popularize the views of the Comte de Volney, James C. Prichard, and other European writers who had affirmed that the Egyptians and eminent North Africans of antiquity were Negroid.42

  Alexander Crummell experienced a similar sense of exaltation in 1853 when he and his family arrived in Monrovia from England and beheld a nation governed and populated by blacks. With his friend Henry Highland Garnet, Crummell had been educated at the African Free School in New York City, at Noyes Academy in New Hampshire (where they were attacked and driven away by an armed mob), and at Oneida Institute in upstate New York; after being denied admission to the Episcopal Theological Seminary because of his race, he then studied mathematics, classics, and theology at Cambridge University. Like Blyden, he was confident that “the days of Cyprian and Augustine shall again return to Africa.” As a missionary he hailed Liberia as the site of a new and more glorious civilization: “The world needs a higher type of true nationality than it now has: why should not we [Liberians] furnish it?…Why not make ourselves a precedent?”43

  In 1859, even Martin Delany made his peace with Liberia, while declaiming this theme of black nationality. Having earlier shifted his sights from New World emigration to a plan for exploring and colonizing the Niger Valley, Delany compromised his principles and sought financial aid from ACS officials, some of whom were already supporting Garnet’s rival African Civilization Society. Although Delany had always been one of Liberia’s harshest critics, he sailed to Monrovia on a Liberian bark, accompanied by three prosperous black entrepreneurs and thirty-three emigrants selected by the ACS. During the ten weeks he spent in the Republic, before moving on to Lagos and Abeokuta, Delany admired the neat brick houses and coffee plantations, met the president, traveled with Crummell, and insisted that he had never “spoken directly ‘against Liberia.’ ” He assured the white colonizationist John B. Pinney that he was highly pleased with the Liberians, “a noble, struggling people, who only require help from the intelligent of their race, to make them what they desire and should be.” He proclaimed to enthusiastic crowds that “Your country shall be my country,” and that “the desire of African nationality has brought me to these shores.”44

  Ironically, these phrases of Blyden, Crummell, and Delany almost precisely echoed the famous letter written by George Harris, the fictional runaway slave in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had outraged abolitionists from the moment the novel was published in 1852. Stowe’s character, it should be emphasized, had studied for four years at a French university; he and his family were light enough in complexion to pass for white, had his sympathies been inclined toward his “father’s race.” But, as Harris explains:

  It is with the oppressed, enslaved African race that I cast in my lot; and, if I wished anything, I would wish myself two shades darker, rather than one lighter.

  The desire and yearning of my soul is for an African nationality. I want a people that shall have a tangible, separate existence of its own; and where am I to look for it?…On the shores of Africa I see a republic,—a republic formed of picked men, who, by energy and self-educating force, have, in many cases, individually raised themselves above a condition of slavery. Having gone through a preparatory stage of feebleness, this republic has, at last, become an acknowledged nation on the face of the earth,—acknowledged by both France and England. There it is my wish to go, and find myself a people.45

  In Harris’s apotheosis of nationality, in his acknowledgment that Liberia had “subserved all sorts of purposes, by being played off, in the hands of our oppressors, against us … as a means of retarding our emancipation,” and in his affirmation that blacks as a nation could best serve the cause of their race, Harriet Beecher Stowe conveyed to millions of readers the central concerns of black nationalists of the 1850s.

  It was not in a work of fiction, for example, that Hilary Teague, the wealthy editor of the Liberia Herald, informed an enthusiastic gathering of Liberians that “upon you … depends, in a measure you can hardly conceive, the future destiny of the race. You are to give the answer whether the African race is doomed to interminable degradation … a libel upon the dignity of human nature; or whether they are capable to take an honourable rank amongst the great family of nations.”46 This was one “answer” to the crucial issue of black dehumanization that we examine throughout this book. Nor were such thoughts confined to a privileged elite. Grandville B. Woodson, a former slave from Mississippi who emigrated to Liberia at age sixteen, wrote in 1853 from the isolated and poverty-ridden Greenville settlement:

  This is the land of our fore fathers, the land from which the children went, back to the land they are Returning. Liberia is now spreading her rich perfume roun and about the big valleys of the World and introducing and calling out to her suns and Daughters to rise and come up out of the Valley of ignorance and Heathenism.47

  5

  Colonizing Blacks, Part III: From Martin Delany to Henry Highland Garnet and Marcus Garvey

  NATIONALISM

  The profound sense of mission and deliverance brings us unavoidably to the relationships between nationalism, assimilation, and Westernization (or modernization, if one prefers the less troubling term). These concepts, extraordinarily slippery in any context, have been further complicated by the explosive debates and sloganeering of the past century. Revolts against political, economic, and cultural dependency have long “assimilated” and exploited the rhetoric of the West’s own disenchantment with civilization and its discontents. It has long been fashionable to romanticize the authenticity, conviviality, and lack of inhibitions of premodern ways of life. But attacks on Eurocentric uplift and “civilizationism” were more appropriate for the twentieth century’s arrogant beginning than for its somber end. Whatever evils Westernization may have brought the world, only the most die-hard primitivist or cynic can dismiss the benefits of abolishing slavery, improving public health, promoting economic growth, pursuing the ideals of individual equality and self-fulfillment, and cultivating a respect for cultural and religious diversity. Nevertheless, a bias against professionalism, technocracy, improvement, and moral respectability has often prevented historians from appreciating the aspirations and genuine accomplishments of Westernized black nationalists who understood the world they faced, as well as the kind of skills and knowledge needed to empower the powerless, to break through the constricting coils of dependency, including those cultivated by well-meaning whites in search of authentic emotion or an antimodernist soul.

  Assimilation is often thought of in the passive sense of being absorbed: in the nineteenth century, for example, various “unified” nation-states sought to assimilate ethnic and national minorities by eroding their distinctive identities. But one can actively and selectively assimilate foreign ideas and methods, as the history of numerous peoples has shown, in order to strengthen collective identity. For most black leaders in antebellum America, the key question was whether their people could obtain the freedom and power to make significant choices—especially the choice to assimilate and syncretize whatever they needed to develop their full human potentialities. That is why there is a certain artificiality to the conventional dichotomy between assimilationists and separatists, both of whom were intent on overcoming the deeply entrenched obstacles to economic opportunity for blacks. Most advocates of racial separation wanted to gain control over the purposes and goals of assimilation.1

>   For many American liberals of our time, haunted by accounts of the origins of two world wars, horrified by outbursts of superpatriotism, terrorism, and religious fanaticism in a thermonuclear age, nationalism has long seemed as repugnant as a dangerous disease. The term is confusing because it can refer to a sense of national solidarity shared by many diverse groups within a nation-state, such as the Basques, Bretons, Flemings, Savoyards, and Alsatians of France, or the scores of ethnic and linguistic groups that make up modern India. But nationalism also applies to similar feelings confined to a specific ethnic or religious group, such as the Sikhs, Magyars, Shiites, Czechs, Catholic Irish, or modern Palestinians. Nationalism does not necessarily include the demand for a national territory—Simon Dubnow, for example, can be termed a major figure in the history of Jewish nationalism even though he envisioned cultural autonomy within existing political territories, not a separate Jewish state. What various nationalists share is a determination to resist being persecuted or made subservient as a people, a sense of loyalty to their own traditions and culture, and a commitment to some kind of collective and historical mission. The first of these concerns, while preeminent for British North American colonists in 1776 and for later subjects of the Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, and Russian empires, has become a pretext for war or oppression when nationalism has merged with the consolidation and expansion of nation-states. “The paradox of nationalism,” E. J. Hobsbawm points out, “was that in forming its own nation it automatically created the counter-nationalism of those whom it now forced into the choice between assimilation and inferiority.”2 The world has repeatedly seen how the nationalism or national liberation of one group can lead to the political, social, and economic enslavement of another.

  The Age of Emancipation, which witnessed the eradication of legal chattel slavery in the Western Hemisphere, was also the age when European nation-states became unified and industrialized; when militant nationalistic movements emerged, from Ireland to the Turkish empire; and when elites in parts of the future Third World first became conscious of their societies’ “underdevelopment” and need for both modernization and ultimate independence. As various scholars have shown, nationalist leaders generally fabricated historical myths and traditions to encourage ideological cohesiveness and belief in some kind of manifest destiny, as white Americans termed it in the 1840s. Thus France, whose first revolution provided the model for both nationhood and world liberation, became in the words of the Saint-Simonians “the Christ of the nations.” According to Giuseppe Mazzini, the torch of freedom had passed from France to Italy; according to Adam Mickiewicz, to Poland. For the radical Hegelians it was Germany’s mission to redeem the world.3 America’s black nationalists were well aware of the effervescent dreams rising from Europe’s “springtime of peoples” and that were personified in such touring celebrities as Louis Kossuth.

  The ideal of solidarity, of subordinating individuals to the supposed interests of an ethnic group or nation, can obviously open the way to demagoguery and tyranny. A small elite, such as the one that ruled Liberia, may even arrogate to itself the right to define the interests of an entire race. This strategy has often been used to legitimate privilege and exploitation within an oppressed social class or ethnic group. The appeal for solidarity has also helped to perpetuate simplistic and monolithic stereotypes, which then become attached to anyone who belongs to the class, group, or so-called nation. These familiar dangers must be balanced, however, against other considerations. In view of the growing disparities in wealth and power in the nineteenth-century world, coupled with the racism that increasingly consigned non-western peoples to a status of permanent inferiority, one must draw a clear distinction between nationalisms mobilized for regional or global dominance and nationalisms designed to protect or restore a nucleus of human dignity.

  When Henry Highland Garnet advocated selective emigration to Africa as a means of creating a “negro nationality,” he was not envisioning a mass withdrawal from the United States or even asserting a claim to a particular territory. For Garnet and other black nationalists of his time, the crucial goal was to free individual blacks from the subservience, dishonor, and persecution they suffered simply by virtue of being black—of belonging, like the ancient Israelites, to an enslaved nation. In 1859 Garnet tried to clarify the goals of his African Civilization Society in a speech to a large audience in Boston. After affirming his faith that blacks could advance toward equal rights in the United States while also helping to civilize Africa and undermine the Southern slave economy, he spoke of establishing “a grand centre of negro nationality, from which shall flow the streams of commercial, intellectual, and political power which shall make colored people respected everywhere.” The key issues were power and respect. In response to a hostile, anticolonizationist question about the location of such a center, Garnet did not rule out Africa but expressed a hope that it would be in the Southern United States, “especially if they reopen the African slave trade.” “In Jamaica,” he pointed out, “there are forty colored men to one white; Hayti is ours; Cuba will be ours soon, and we shall have every island in the Caribbean Sea.”4

  There is no need here to review the history of black nationalism except as it illuminates the antebellum controversies over colonization and slave emancipation to which we will later turn. It should be stressed that black nationalism was not necessarily linked with emigration and that American blacks who moved to Canada, Africa, or the Caribbean had not necessarily abandoned hope of winning citizenship and equality within the United States. If nationalism is equated with racial pride and the determination of a people to shape their own lives and not pass on an irreversible heritage of degradation, dependency, and humiliation, virtually all American black writers and speakers were nationalists—and here this historical term is needed to draw a contrast with the many mulattoes in West Indian societies who tried to dissociate themselves from the interests of blacks and slaves. In the United States black nationalism, in this very general sense, was closely wedded to the ideals of uplift, enterprise, and respectability preached with special fervor by the black clergy, whose profession offered one of the few channels open for black leadership. This rhetoric of moral improvement has often repelled modern antielitist intellectuals who can afford to disdain the aspirations and self-discipline of their own forebears (or own youth) and romanticize styles of life that men like Richard Allen, Garnet, Pennington, David Ruggles, Douglass, Crummell, and Delany tried to overcome. Today it is difficult to comprehend that courageous radicalism was once thoroughly compatible with calls for moral discipline as defined by a self-appointed elite. This fusion of protest and self-help was as characteristic of the emigrationists as it was of the so-called assimilationists.

  Despite their hatred for the ACS, black nationalists became increasingly inclined in the 1850s to accept the argument that the elevation of blacks depended on removing at least some of their population from a malignantly prejudiced environment. By 1852, Martin Delany had concluded:

  We are politically, not of them, but aliens to the laws and political privileges of the country.… Our descent, by the laws of the country, stamps us with inferiority—upon us has this law [the Fugitive Slave Law] worked corruption of blood. We are in the hands of the General Government, and no State can rescue us.5

  Like the Poles in Russia, the Hungarians in Austria, and the Jews throughout Europe, Delany wrote, America’s blacks were “a nation within a nation,” but far more debased in condition than any other population. White prejudice and oppression had paralyzed the “energies” of blacks; instead of thinking of business or self-improvement, young men willingly accepted servile positions that offered “the best opportunity to dress and appear well.” In every town and city, men of superior talent wasted their lives as barbers and hotel waiters. William Whipper, a black lumber dealer and abolitionist, had defined the problem in a vivid phrase that Delany quoted: “ ‘They cannot be raised in this country, without being stoop shouldered.’ ” Yet the daily ar
rival of Irish and German immigrants showed what physiological and psychological changes a land of promise, a land of “unrestricted soil,” could produce. To prove “that there are circumstances under which emigration is absolutely necessary to [a people’s] political elevation,” Delany cited among several examples “the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt to the land of Judea,” and “the ever memorable emigration of the Puritans, in 1620, from Great Britain, the land of their birth, to the wilderness of the New World.”6

  I have suggested that the African colonization movement contributed to this nationalistic hope not only by founding Liberia and prophesying the messianic achievements of an Americo-Liberian civilization but by dwelling on the futility of individual progress for blacks living in a society dedicated to white supremacy. While conveying this message, the ACS bitterly alienated blacks by its equivocations on slave emancipation, its use of racist language and racist threats, and its refusal to respect black organizations and leadership. Perhaps because God spared the United States from devastating plagues, at least until 1861, the ACS showed little interest in finding or negotiating with a black Moses. Yet there was a complex dynamic between racist contempt and black pride, between the white desire to expel and the black quest for independence, between white nationalism and black nationalism. It was no accident that in later years Edward Blyden and Marcus Garvey both welcomed incidents of racial oppression that might enable more blacks to perceive the true character of American society and thus make them want to emigrate to Africa. Blyden, who worked closely with the ACS in the 1880s, rejoiced when the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. As he wrote William Coppinger, the secretary-treasurer and most active leader of the ACS: “I think that God who has His hands both upon Africa and America will deepen the prejudice against the Negro in the United States. He will continue to harden Pharaoh’s heart, until the oppressed shall be driven from the house of bondage, as Israel was from Egypt, to do his work in the land of his fathers.” Thirty-six years later, Marcus Garvey defended Jim Crow laws, thanked white Southerners for having “lynched race pride into the Negroes,” and held a two-hour conference in Atlanta with Edward Clarke, the second-ranking national leader of the Ku Klux Klan.7