The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation
Page 19
This particular speech omits the sense of prophetic fulfillment that gave Garveyism much of its appeal. As Dr. McGuire put it, “After ages of almost forlorn hope the Jews are rejoicing in the triumphs of Zionism and the repossession of the land of their forefathers. Their fullness of time has come. So will ours, for, in the Eternal Volume of Truth it is predicted that ‘Princes shall come out of Egypt.’ ”30 McGuire reported that when Garvey was convicted of mail fraud, he delivered the simple, reverberating sentence: “Gentlemen of the jury, this is a spiritual movement.” McGuire added, “the Jews made of Zionism a spiritual movement and today the goal is achieved, the fact accomplished. Africanism must become a universal spiritual movement among Negroes.” In actuality, when Garvey heard the jury’s verdict, he cursed “the Jews” and shouted anti-Semitic remarks that may have affected the sentence delivered by Judge Julian W. Mack, a Jew who had been praised by a black journalist and friend of Garvey’s as a model of understanding and fairness.31
By any material measurement, Garveyism was an even more disastrous failure than the earlier colonization movement. The Black Star Line and Negro Factories Corporation quickly sank in a sea of incompetence and corruption. Although Garvey attracted thousands of West Indian immigrants, who were derisively called “the black Jews of Harlem” because of their clannishness, enterprise, and business skills, many American blacks were repelled by his megalomania, obsession with racial purity, and contempt for African American culture. Far from unifying the American black community, his movement spawned dissent and became an easy target for infiltration by the federal government’s Bureau of Investigation. The Liberian elite, though initially interested in attracting productive settlements in the Cape Palmas region, soon became alarmed by the prospect of losing its own monopoly of power and acquiring militants bent on expelling Britain, France, Belgium, and other colonial nations from Africa. Victimized and betrayed by some of his followers, Garvey was finally imprisoned, pardoned, and deported to Jamaica. But regardless of the size of his following and the practicability of his program, which are still in dispute, Garvey became a hero and a powerful symbol in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.32
Without considering tributes by such figures as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Norman Manley, Elijah Mohammed, and Malcolm X, it is sufficient to turn to a less likely leader. In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. laid a wreath at Garvey’s shrine in Kingston, Jamaica. Before an audience of some two thousand, King summed up Garvey’s meaning for nonseparatist blacks: “Garvey was the first man of color in the history of the United States to lead and develop a mass movement. He was the first man on a mass scale and level to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny and make the Negro feel he was somebody.”33 This, we should recall, was the professed goal of Liberia’s founders—although Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, to say nothing of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, were precisely what the ACS wanted to prevent. In pre–Civil War America, no one could foresee the circuitous route by which the example of Liberia would help to nourish black nationalism, which would nourish, in its turn, the domestic demand for equal civil rights.
How do these reflections affect our evaluation of the colonization movement? No doubt early colonizationists of both races would feel vindicated if we allowed them a selective glimpse of the past century and a half: a panorama that included the fratricidal Civil War, in which President Lincoln long supported various colonizationist plans and in which some 200,000 black soldiers and sailors helped to ensure a Union victory;34 the crushed hopes of Reconstruction; the suffering inflicted by the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow; the lynching between 1889 and 1946 of nearly four thousand blacks; the growth of festering urban ghettos; the persistence of white racism and black deprivation; the report that in 1980, a half century after the predicted termination of the most gradual emigration plans, blacks constituted 12 percent of the nation’s population but 45 percent of the inmates of state and federal prisons; that in family income blacks ranked thirteenth out of fourteen American ethnic groups, earning on average 60 percent of the income of whites, 50 percent of the income of Asian-Indians, and only 46 percent of the income of Japanese-Americans; but that in 2012 Americans would reelect a black president.35
With respect to the intractability of prejudice and racial conflict, the colonizationists were clearly better prognosticators than the abolitionists. Edward Blyden and Marcus Garvey acknowledged this point. The glaring defect in the colonizationist ideology was the refusal to recognize the vital contributions that blacks had made and would continue to make to American civilization.36 Even the best-intentioned white reformers and missionaries remained obstinately blind to the fact that from the beginnings of American history, the lives of blacks and whites had been intertwined on the most complex social, cultural, economic, and psychological levels.37 America, that mythic amalgam of hope, abstract principles, and mission, was as much black as white.
This reasoning brings us at last to the true and insidious meaning of the colonization movement, which was never dependent on the number of blacks shipped off to Liberia. It was sufficient to use philanthropic language to expatriate the entire race, to wall blacks off as an extraneous and dangerous presence that someday, somehow would disappear and no longer affront white vision. Psychologically and ritualistically, the ACS “deported” blacks while affirming their capacity to flourish in a distant, tropical clime. This strategy, which simply assumed new forms in the twentieth century, is deceptive precisely because it is seldom cynical and has often been combined with genuine goodwill.
For example, in his annual message to Congress in 1862, Lincoln described his unsuccessful efforts to find sites for voluntary black colonization in which emigrants would be protected “in all the rights of freemen” and ensured conditions “which shall be equal, just, and humane.” Liberia and Haiti, Lincoln observed, are “the only countries to which colonists of African descent from here, could go with certainty of being received and adopted as citizens.” Unfortunately, the president added, few of the blacks contemplating emigration were willing to go to either Liberia or Haiti. For Lincoln, a man of goodwill who thought he knew the blacks’ best interest, the problem seemed insoluble. While historians debate the timing of Lincoln’s abandonment of colonization, Eric Foner convincingly argues that it occurred by mid-1864, well after his Emancipation Proclamation.38
As the war progressed, Lincoln ultimately abandoned colonization and saw the necessity of combining racial coexistence with equal protection of the law. Two months before Lincoln was killed, William Henry Channing, the abolitionist chaplain of the House of Representatives, invited Henry Highland Garnet to deliver a sermon to Congress commemorating the recent congressional passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which Lincoln had strongly supported. Garnet, who had been born a slave and had in 1843 exhorted America’s slaves to rebel, who had become an expatriate in Jamaica and had then become an ardent supporter of the Union cause, was the first black to address Congress.39
Taking as his text the twenty-third verse of St. Matthew, Garnet first denounced the modern scribes and Pharisees who ruled the state. Professing to believe in principles of righteousness passed down from Moses, Socrates, Plato, the early church fathers, the Magna Carta, and the Declaration of Independence, America’s leaders had continued to defend or tolerate an institution that embodied the “concentrated essence of all conceivable wickedness,” “snatching man from the high place to which he was lifted by the hand of God, and dragging him down to the level of the brute creation, where he is made to be the companion of the horse and the fellow of the ox.” If slavery had finally been destroyed merely from necessity, in the course of war, as Garnet acknowledged, he exhorted Congress to enfranchise every class “at the dictation of justice. Then we shall have a Constitution that shall be reverenced by all.”40
What is most striking, in view of the themes we have pursued, is the way Garnet merged freedmen’s rights with a powerful transfiguration of t
he Exodus trope. The amendment abolishing slavery, he noted, could not escape divine notice:
The nation has begun its exodus from worse than Egyptian bondage; and I beseech you that you say to the people, “that they go forward.” With the assurance of God’s favor in all things done in obedience to his righteous will, and guided by day and by night by the pillars of cloud and fire, let us not pause until we have reached the other and safe side of the stormy and crimson sea. Let freemen and patriots mete out complete and equal justice to all men, and thus prove to mankind the superiority of our Democratic, Republican Government.
Favored men, and honored of God as his instruments, speedily finish the work which he has given you to do. Emancipate, Enfranchise, Educate, and give the blessings of the gospel to every American citizen.41
As Garnet envisioned a modern day of jubilee, quoting from a poem that called for “our” Aaron, Miriam, and Joshua, it was not only the slaves or the African Americans who stood in need of deliverance from Egyptian bondage. In the United States whites themselves were yoked to the blacks they had enslaved. The nation as a whole, modeled on ancient dreams of deliverance and fulfillment, could march no further forward than all the victims of its self-betrayal.
6
Colonizationist Ideology: Leonard Bacon and “Irremediable Degradation”
BACON’S “REPORT” OF 1823
Colonizationists and abolitionists agreed that the insuppressible problem originated with the African slave trade, which Congress had outlawed in 1807. Since the federal government had been able to achieve this significant reform, colonizationists reasoned that national support could be mobilized to undo the evil consequences of the slave trade by instituting a kind of counter slave trade that would return the victims and their descendants to their native land. By reversing an unfortunate stream of history, Americans could bypass a question some abolitionists had posed since the eighteenth century: was not every buyer and keeper of slaves, as Theodore Dwight Weld maintained, a “joint partner in the original sin” of man stealing, making it “the business of every moment to perpetrate it afresh, however he may lull his conscience by the vain plea of expediency or necessity?”1 For colonizationists, this rhetoric of moral condemnation (when not confined to the Atlantic slave trade) could only be counterproductive: it would obviously alienate and embitter Southerners as well as many Northerners and thus prevent any effective action from being taken.
The fear that disputes over slavery would lead to disunion and civil war was greatly aggravated by the congressional crisis of 1819–21 over admitting Missouri as a slave state. But in 1823 the British abolitionist movement, well publicized in America and long dedicated to eradicating all branches of the African slave trade, launched a parliamentary campaign for the amelioration and gradual abolition of slavery in the British colonies. The flood of literature generated by this struggle suggested that the monarchical mother country, which Americans had blamed since the 1760s for imposing on them the unwanted curse of slavery, was at last putting the young republic to shame. Like the British abolitionists, the American colonizationists were confident that a movement led by distinguished political figures, appealing to the highest moral concerns of the nation but also attuned to the need for compromise and skilled at merging diverse interests in a common cause, could eventually find a solution for a seemingly insoluble problem.
In the United States, however, the problem of slavery—the growing conflict between a modern ideology of individual freedom and a system of exploitative labor that served the interests of millions of landholders, producers, and especially consumers—had become fatally intertwined with the problem of race. Since the West Indian slaves lived thousands of miles from Britain, British abolitionists were relatively free from the issue of racial “amalgamation.” But, as we will see later, antiblack racism increased in America as the emergence of abolitionism raised the image of hundreds of thousands or even millions of blacks bursting free from the chains of slavery and assimilating in some way with white society. Ironically, and not accidentally, the focus on race as the major obstacle to emancipation diverted attention from the economy’s parasitic dependence on an immensely profitable labor system.
According to the growing consensus, it was the African Americans’ alleged incapacity for freedom and responsible citizenship, not their indispensable role in the economy as productive field hands, that stood as the major roadblock to slave emancipation. The way problems are conceived and structured reveals much about unexamined assumptions and the issues, such as the economic benefits American whites received from black slave labor, that cannot be faced. While the colonization movement tried to build a national following by appealing to diverse sectional interests, its approach to the problem of race rested on two widely shared but highly questionable assumptions: first, that the nation would become more prosperous and secure if free white workers replaced black slaves; second, that even though America’s emancipated blacks were mired in poverty and deprived of education and elemental civil rights, they were capable of creating a civilized, prosperous, and respected society in Africa. Though it is important to keep these assumptions in mind, we should also move beyond contemptuous exclamations over the colonizationists’ “inconsistencies.” If we wish to know why the movement attracted so many intelligent and sensitive white Americans who detested slavery and who genuinely wanted to improve the condition of African Americans, we must look more closely at their understanding of social evil and the human ability to overcome evil. We can gain some insight into these matters and into the connections that well-intentioned colonizationists drew between slavery and race by examining in some detail Leonard Bacon’s 1823 “Report on Colonization,” which helped to marshal the antislavery sentiment of New England Congregationalists behind the national movement. The space I devote to Bacon does not mean that I consider him a more important figure than such supporters of colonization as Henry Clay or Abraham Lincoln. Rather, I think that Bacon will help illuminate a much-neglected state of mind held by a significant number of white Northerners, as well as crucial connections between slavery and historical conceptions of original sin that I have discussed in earlier books.
The son of a Connecticut missionary and a graduate of Yale College and Andover Theological Seminary, Bacon became at age twenty-three the minister at New Haven’s Center Church, whose congregation included such notable figures as Eli Whitney, Noah Webster, and Senator James Hillhouse, as well as many members of the Yale faculty. In the 1840s, after Bacon had become nationally prominent as a clerical leader, critic of slavery, and advocate of African American education and uplift, he recalled that in 1823 he had strongly endorsed the views of the British abolitionists and had learned much from their reports and pamphlets. In his own influential “Report” of 1823, written when he was still a student at Andover on behalf of a committee appointed by the Society of Inquiry Respecting Missions, he clearly identified himself with the cause of Wilberforce and Clarkson, whose “unwearied labors” and “cry against the wrongs of Africa” had led not only to the abolition of the slave trade by “every Christian power in both continents” but to “a total revolution in public sentiment” regarding “the most high-handed outrage that ever was practiced by fraud and power against simplicity and weakness.”2
In 1823, Bacon called on American philanthropists to “summon up their energies to a like effort,” and predicted that “the same spirit which answered to the plea of Wilberforce” would enable benevolent Americans to arouse the nation, alleviate great evils, and delay “if not utterly prevent” some ominous “final catastrophe” related to “the evils attendant on the circumstances of our black population.” This vague and awkward phrasing reveals Bacon’s uncertainty over the precise nature of “the evils” and the people responsible for them, as well as the tension he felt as he struggled to find a formula that would “excite” public opinion and lead to effective reform without evoking a “feverish, half-delirious excitement like that produced by the agitation
of the Missouri question.”3 Aside from the aftershocks left by the Missouri confrontation, Bacon was proposing active clerical involvement in a social and political movement at a transitional moment in the history of the so-called benevolent empire of missionary and reform societies. The official Congregationalist establishment, challenged and weakened by Unitarians in Massachusetts, had been unseated in Connecticut in 1818 by a coalition of religious and political dissidents. A vast network of Congregationalist-Presbyterian moral societies, long committed to using coercive methods in their campaigns against Sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, and sexual immorality, had also collapsed.4 But as young ministers like Bacon came to terms with religious toleration and the power of public opinion, they could draw comfort from the growing success of religious revivals and the apparent conquest of atheistic “infidelity”; from the public enthusiasm for missionary enterprises and for such national institutions as the American Bible Society; and from theological innovations that made increasing room for individual initiative even within the bleak cellblock of Calvinism.5
For all his circumlocutions, Bacon depicts black slavery in America as the prime evil, the nation’s fatal defect, the cause from which racial degradation “is only a single necessary consequence.” To understand Bacon’s approach to race, we must first consider the particular evils he finds in American slavery and the connection between such evils and the doctrine of sin. According to Bacon, Andover’s ministers and missionaries needed to convince the public that slavery in America was far more iniquitous than the slavery of antiquity or of modern Asia and Africa. In no pagan, Islamic, or Christian country, with the single exception of the West Indies, was slavery “so terrible in its character, so pernicious in its tendency, so remediless in its anticipated results, as the slavery which exists in these United States.” Bacon hastens to explain that the evil he has in mind had nothing to do with physical well-being or even with floggings and bodily suffering. For the most part, he is willing to concede, the material standard of living of American slaves—their “mere animal existence”—presented no grounds for complaint. Allowing for some exceptions, “the condition of a slave, in most parts of the United States, is generally as much superior to that of a slave in the West Indies, as the condition of an American farmer is to that of an Irish peasant.”6