Slavery seizes a rational and immortal being crowned by Jehovah with glory and honor, and drags him down to a level with the beasts that perish. It makes him a thing, a chattel personal, a machine to be used to all intents and purposes for the benefit of another.… It would annihilate the individual worth and responsibility conferred upon man by his Creator. It deprives him of the power of self-improvement.… It prevents him from laboring in a sphere to which his capacities are adapted. It abrogates the seventh commandment, by annulling the obligations of marriage, and obliging the slaves to live in a state of promiscuous intercourse, concubinage, and adultery.… It dooms its victims to ignorance, and consequently to vice.
The Address then quotes Southerner Samuel McDowell Moore, who delivered a blistering attack on slavery during the debate over emancipation and deportation in Virginia’s House of Delegates, in January 1832, in response to Nat Turner’s revolt:
I think I may safely assert that ignorance is the inseparable companion of slavery, and that the desire of freedom [evidenced by Nat Turner] is the inevitable consequence of implanting in the human mind any useful degree of intelligence: it is therefore the policy of the master that ignorance of his slaves should be as profound as possible; and such a state of ignorance is wholly incompatible with the existence of any moral principles or exalted feeling in the breast of the slave.22
So depicting slavery “at its worst” creates a huge dilemma. Grimké is now calling for the emancipation of dehumanized humans whose supposed ignorance and lack of foresight would seem to preclude any capability of becoming responsible free citizens or participants in the social compact. Grimké clearly recognized the danger of slipping into a racist conclusion, a circular, self-perpetuating argument in which the dehumanization of slavery leads to an Aristotelian view of the docile “natural slave,” of men born to be bondsmen.
It was doubtless Sarah Grimké’s stroke of brilliance to add the citation, “(Speech of Mr. Moore, House of Delegates, Va., 1832),” following the passage above that “such a state of ignorance is wholly incompatible with the existence of any moral principles or exalted feeling in the breast of the slave.” Nat Turner’s bloody insurrection was still a vivid memory, especially in the minds of many free blacks and white Southerners such as Grimké.23 If the Executive Committee of the AASS had earlier seen the wisdom of praising the “peaceful endurance” of New York City blacks when confronting a racist mob, this was now an occasion, for Grimké, to refer very obliquely to the slaves’ desire for freedom and capacity for armed resistance—to the slaveholders’ failure at achieving full dehumanization.
Later on there is another significant reference to the Nat Turner–inspired Virginia legislative debate, following an appeal to Northern free blacks to consider abstaining, “as far as practicable,” from the products of slave labor. After stressing that friends of emancipation were increasingly interested in such a boycott and in finding free labor substitutes, Grimké affirms that the Southern slave will rejoice at the news that his Northern friends “feel a sympathy so deep for his sufferings, that they cannot partake of the proceeds of his unrequited toil.” But how could supposedly ignorant, dehumanized chattel be aware of Northern abolitionists? One answer came from “Mr. Goode,” whose resolution produced “the celebrated debate” in the Virginia legislature, and who reminded planters who were in a state of near panic over Turner’s rebellion that many slaves were “ ‘wise and intelligent men, constantly engaged in reflection, informed of all that was occurring, and having their attention fixed upon the Legislature.’ ” Grimké also cites evidence of slaves who “spent many a midnight hour in discussing the probable results of the abolition movements,” to say nothing of the fact that every Northern fugitive slave “who is carried back, bears to his unhappy countrymen an account of all that is doing.”24
But how can one reconcile the view that slavery transforms a human into “a thing, a chattel personal, a machine to be used … for the benefit of another” with the image of recaptured fugitives secretly conveying the latest news about Northern abolitionists to highly alert slaves who also converse about Nat Turner and the Virginia legislative debates? Of course we now know that the desires and goals of slaveholders were considerably limited by the slaves’ resistance, negotiation, subcultures, and by the realities of human nature. The slave community also included a broad spectrum, ranging from lowly field workers to a few highly privileged bondspeople who sometimes had extraordinary power and responsibilities. And we discussed earlier the historians’ debates inspired in part by Stanley Elkins’s 1959 “Sambo” stereotype, and examined the complexities of slave dehumanization, white psychological parasitism, and the effects of such racism on black self-esteem.
For Grimké and the women abolitionists, however, the crucial and overriding premise came with their declaration that “the people of color are not in any respect inferior to the white man, and that under favorable circumstances they would rise again to the rank they formerly held.” If the minds of the American slaves, “who are writhing under the lash of worse than Egyptian taskmasters … are beclouded by ignorance and enfeebled by suffering,” we are assured that they “need only to have the same advantages which Europeans and their descendants have enjoyed, [in order] triumphantly to refute the unfounded calumny that they are inferior in powers of intellect, and less susceptible of mental improvement.”25
Given these assumptions, one can imagine a “modern” reformer proposing a massive Freedman’s Bureau rehabilitation program, working to convey equal “advantages,” to accompany slave emancipation. In very limited ways, the British plan of “apprenticeship,” inaugurated in 1834 with slave emancipation, was advertised as a step in this direction of “preparation” for freedom. But, given America’s tradition of mistrusting government power (and before the era of Social Security or even support for high-school education), any widespread agreement that slave emancipation required an expensive program of rehabilitation would have been seen as a fatal barrier to emancipation. As it happened, Congress had to override President Andrew Johnson’s veto in order to permit the unpopular Freedman’s Bureau to continue its valuable work for three more years. It is true that after the Civil War the federal government spent over $4 million in launching a huge grassroots campaign to reinter the bodies of some 303,536 Union soldiers who were left in the South and vulnerable to vengeful former Confederates. However, historian Drew Gilpin Faust stresses that this reburial program “would have been unimaginable before the war” and, significantly, that the U.S. Colored Troops were especially targeted and segregated in death as well as in life.26
Like Frederick Douglass, Sarah Grimké saw that the best answer to the dilemma of slave dehumanization and black capability lay in what Douglass termed “the presentation of an industrious, enterprising, thrifty, and intelligent free black population,” though Grimké put far greater emphasis on religious values like piety and humility. Religion reinforced the women abolitionists’ faith that local and private efforts could be effective and that the Northern free blacks could become a model for a grassroots campaign led by literate, knowledgeable, and educated blacks aided by white abolitionists and religious or charitable organizations.
As the Address puts it, speaking to the women’s black “brethren and sisters”:
Nothing will contribute more to break the bondman’s fetters, than an example of high moral worth, intellectual culture and religious attainments among the free people of color—living epistles known and read of all men—a standard of exalted piety, of dedication to the works of righteousness, of humble-mindedness, of Christian charity; to which abolitionists may confidently point … and demand of them [slaveholders], in view of what their slaves might be, to restore their victims to themselves, to the human family, and to God.27
To convince readers of the possibility of such restoration, Grimké then presents many pages of evidence of black achievement and capability, starting with ancient Africa (especially Egypt) and including the current te
stimony of teachers regarding the intellectual progress of black students. The Address even underscores the attainments of black “Generals, Physicians, Philosophers, Linguists, Poets, Mathematicians, and Merchants.” Noted for their kindness and generosity, most free blacks were even in some ways in a more favorable situation for “the growth of piety,” since being in “the furnace of adversity” they were less corrupted by prosperity and “the love of money, which is the root of all evil.”
The Address finally turns to the sensitive issue of offering some advice before making a final appeal. Nothing is said of the supposed “vices” traditionally associated with black degradation. Invoking the model of Christ’s humility, Grimké recommends simplicity and frugality with regard to clothing and physical appearance and warns against attending the theater, a “sink of vice” that made use of the racist stereotypes of the blacks’ oppressors. Since many of the presumed readers worked as servants for white families, “who have been educated with deep-rooted prejudices against you,” the blacks had the opportunity “of proving that these prejudices are as unfounded as they are unjust—of exhibiting in your deportment, that moral loveliness which will constrain those who regard themselves as your superiors, to acknowledge that worth can neither be determined by the color of the skin, nor by the station occupied.” Along with this optimism, the blacks are warned to carefully avoid “families which pay little or no respect to the Sabbath, that you may escape the contamination arising from such intercourse.”28
Even house servants are exhorted to save money for the education of their children, and “every exertion” is urged for the establishment of good schools to aid “in the great work of moral and intellectual elevation”:
On the rising generation depends in a great measure the success of that enterprise, which aims at establishing Christian and Republican equality among the citizens of these United States. Let us then labor to implant in the minds of our children a love for useful learning, to imbue them thoroughly with religious feeling, to train them to habits of thinking, of industry and economy, to lead them to the contemplation of noble and benevolent objects, that they may regard themselves as responsible beings upon whom high and holy duties devolve.29
The ultimate and crucial goal of such education is to prepare the rising black generation to participate in “the great moral conflict between light and darkness, which now agitates our guilty country.” While enthusiastically praising African Americans for launching a true abolition movement by repudiating the ACS, Grimké now calls on blacks to unite, “whenever you can,” with such white organizations (and she is well aware of racist exclusion) as antislavery societies, peace societies (“based on the principle that all war is inconsistent with the gospel”), temperance societies, moral reform societies, maternal associations, and other groups dedicated to “the great work of Reformation.” Such racial integration will have “reciprocal benefit,” because it will tend to remove that unchristian prejudice which “bites like a serpent, and stings like an adder.” Yet Grimké, as a member of the somewhat racially integrated Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, was well aware that blacks “may have to suffer much in thus commingling, but we entreat you to bear hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ that your children, and your children’s children, may be spared the anguish you are compelled to endure on this account.”30
In a final call for cooperation in abolishing slavery, racial prejudice, and inequality, Grimké proclaims that the women
are sensible that our brethren of color have a more difficult and delicate part to act in this reformation, than their white fellow-citizens; but we confidently believe, that as their day is, so their strength will be; and we commend them and the cause of human rights, in which we are engaged, to Him [Jesus] who is able to save unto the uttermost all who come unto God by Him. May he strengthen us to pursue our holy purposes with the zeal of the Apostles and the spirit of the Martyrs.31
DAVID WALKER AND OVERCOMING SLAVE DEHUMANIZATION
David Walker’s famous and radical Appeal To the Coloured Citizens of the World, published in 1829, would seem to have come from a different world than Sarah Grimké’s Address. Calling on the colored population of the world to unite and resist slavery and racial oppression, by violence if necessary, Walker’s Appeal was smuggled into the slaveholding South where it evoked a sense of panic and defensive legislation and was blamed, along with other “inflammatory” works, for helping to incite Nat Turner’s insurrection of 1831. But as we shall see, Walker and Grimké shared many of the same central concerns and values, including a passionate desire to solve the problems of black dehumanization and white racism, a religious aspiration to uplift the black population, and the goal of finally integrating blacks and whites as equal human beings in a democratic republic.
Walker, who was born to a free mother and slave father in Wilmington, North Carolina, grew up surrounded by slaves and a few other free blacks.32 Like Sarah Grimké, as a Southerner he had the opportunity to view slavery “at its very worst,” especially as he traveled around the South and lived for some years in Charleston, South Carolina, where he probably had some contact with Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy of 1822. Even as a child Walker managed to receive a highly exceptional education, no doubt related to black religious organizations, with which he remained in contact when he moved to Boston in the mid-1820s. In Wilmington and Charleston, Walker interacted with free blacks who were highly skilled and well educated and he developed a deep devotion to the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In the Appeal, Walker pays passionate tribute to Philadelphia’s bishop Richard Allen, even quoting a long letter from Allen attacking the colonization movement and declaring that “we are an unlettered people, brought up in ignorance, not one in a hundred can read or write, not one in a thousand has a liberal education; is there any fitness for such to be sent into a far country, among heathens, to convert or civilize them, when they themselves are neither civilized or Christianized?”33 Like other free blacks in the anticolonization and emerging antislavery movement, Walker expressed pride in the Haitian Revolution, which blacks in Boston began celebrating in the mid-1820s, and was keenly aware of a tradition of rebellion that extended from the American slave conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 to Denmark Vesey.
In Boston, Walker started a used clothing store, a business blacks were beginning to dominate. He married in 1826, and by 1830, a year after the publication of his Appeal, had three children. In August 1830, the Boston Index of Deaths reported that Walker had died of consumption at the age of thirty-three, shortly after the death of a daughter from the same illness. Various stories immediately emerged, however, claiming that he had been murdered by Southern bounty hunters or other enemies.34 By 1830 there were some 1,875 free blacks in Boston and Walker lived and worked next to self-employed barbers, tailors, bootblacks, and other small businessmen. As a rising member of Boston’s African Lodge of Prince Hall Masonry, Walker also gained access to many of the most prominent men in the city’s black community, including a few ministers, teachers, and lawyers. Black Freemason lodges, extending to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and even Alexandria, Virginia, were part of the urban networks that enabled a systematic correspondence among black leaders and helped create a black abolitionist movement, which, based on fervent opposition to the ACS, revolutionized white abolitionism by the early 1830s. This development was also aided by two other institutions to which David Walker had close connections: the Massachusetts General Colored Association and the first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal.
Black opposition to being colonized in Africa coincided, as we have seen, with rising and virulent white racism and discrimination. Thus the efforts of blacks like Walker to unite and change the world around them were in part a response to daily threats and insults and to the ridicule in animalizing cartoons and posters that declared them unfit for freedom. Historian Peter Hinks is surely right when he argues that Walker and other black reformers, from Maria Stewart to the Negro Convention
Movement of the 1830s, were not kowtowing to whites when they set the highest priority on black uplift and moral improvement. When they called for education, industry, temperance, self-confidence, ambition, regular work habits, and Protestant religion, they were seeking black empowerment—equipping blacks to compete and succeed in a society based on those values. Walker “knew full well that an integral part of white America’s oppression of blacks was to deprive them of the opportunity to acquire knowledge” and to discourage behavior, such as diligence, enterprise, and temperance, that generated individual and collective respect.35
Although Sarah Grimké and the antislavery women approached the subject from a different angle than Walker died, they all agreed on the need to counter racism and discrimination by uplifting and empowering the free black population. Both black and white reformers were themselves empowered and motivated by a broad evangelical movement, the so-called Second Great Awakening, that nourished reforms ranging from public schools to temperance, universal male suffrage, and slave emancipation. However, as Hinks points out when considering divisions in the black community, many of Boston’s African Americans “were neither church-going nor temperate, and they were not committed to study and displayed little interest in adopting the reformers’ prescriptions for self-improvement.”36
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 27