The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation
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Grimké’s Address and Walker’s Appeal differ dramatically in style and approach. Unlike Grimké, Walker was appealing to slaves as well as to the literate free black minority who, he clearly hopes, would read his passionate words to their illiterate brethren. As he seeks to arouse and unite the entire black population, even outside the United States, he becomes highly emotional, in what amounts to a stream-of-consciousness sermon and at times seems close to losing control. Walker’s pamphlet evoked much condemnation from white readers, and even the pioneer abolitionist Benjamin Lundy wrote that Walker “indulges himself in the wildest strain of fanaticism” and censured his “attempt to rouse the worst passions of human nature.”37 Yet Walker and Grimké share the same central concerns, assumptions, and even hopes and ideals. Both focus on “slavery at its worst,” and Walker devotes many pages to the passionate argument that black slavery in the Americas is by far the worst form of oppression known in human history, worse even than that suffered by the ancient Israelites, Sparta’s Helots, and slaves of the Romans. For Walker it is this fact, coupled with the intransigence of white racism, that justifies violent resistance—though he hopes for other possibilities.
Even more than Grimké, Walker expresses a deep concern over the way “slavery at its worst” has dehumanized American slaves and even many free blacks. On the issue of “incapacity,” Walker anticipates Grimké in repeatedly emphasizing the word “ignorance” but then conveys fury over the slaves’ subservience and complicity in aiding slaveholders. In one of the most memorable passages in the Appeal, Walker stops on the street in Boston to talk to a free black “with a string of boots on his shoulders,” and remarks,
“what a miserable set of people we are!” He asked why?—Said I, “we are so subjected under the whites, that we cannot obtain the comforts of life, but by cleaning their boots and shoes, old clothes, waiting on them, shaving them &c.” Said he, (with the boots on his shoulders) “I am completely happy ! ! ! I never want to live any better or happier than when I can get a plenty of boots and shoes to clean! ! !”
Walker then explains that he is not troubled by such low employments as a reality of life but by the thought that whites will conclude “our Creator made us to be an inheritance to them for ever, when they see that our greatest glory is centered in such mean and low objects … My objections are, to our glorying and being happy in such low employments.”38
Far worse for Walker was the way white oppression and dehumanization had led to submissiveness and even complicity on the part of black slaves. As Hinks puts it, Walker became convinced of “some significant degree of internal assent within black individuals to the supposed naturalness of white dominion over blacks.”39 What had happened, as Hinks interprets Walker’s basic understanding, was that blacks failed to see their own oppression since they had internalized the whites’ definition of their own identity and even felt a sense of duty and indebtedness to their more paternalistic masters. Walker provides numerous examples of slave docility and complicity, coupled with emotional outbursts:
O, my God!—in sorrow I must say it, that my colour, all over the world, have a mean, servile spirit, They yield in a moment to the whites, let them be right or wrong—the reason they are able to keep their feet on our throats. Oh! my coloured brethren, all over the world, when shall we arise from this death-like apathy?—and be men! !40
We read of an American slave woman who, being led south for sale with some sixty other slaves, enabled the white trader to recapture all the other blacks after they had escaped. Then we turn to the West Indies and South America, where “there are six or eight coloured persons for one white. Why do they not take possession of those places?…The fact is, they are too servile, they love to have Masters too well! !” In one passage, especially surprising in a supposedly revolutionary work, Walker claims that such evidence “shows at once, what the blacks are”:
we are ignorant, abject, servile and mean, and the whites know it—they know that we are too servile to assert our rights as men—or they would not fool with us as they do. Would they fool with any other peoples as they do with us? No, they know too well, that they would get themselves ruined. Why do they not bring the inhabitants of Asia to be body servants to them? They know they would get their bodies rent and torn from head to foot. Why do they not get the Aborigines of this country to be slaves to them and their children, to work their farms and dig their mines? They know well that the Aborigines of this country, or (Indians) would tear them from the earth.… But my colour, (some, not all,) are willing to stand still and be murdered by the cruel whites.41
In a number of such passages, Walker seems momentarily to doubt the innate equality of races or at least to accept the Stanley Elkins view that the extreme oppression of American slavery had led to compliant and brainwashed “Sambos” who had internalized the aims and goals of the master class.42
Given these uncertainties, Walker is understandably drawn to and becomes almost obsessed with Thomas Jefferson’s infamous lines on black inferiority in Notes on the State of Virginia. Walker tells his readers that Jefferson “was one of [the] great[est] characters as ever lived among the whites” and “a much greater philosopher the world never afforded.” As a result of his stature, Jefferson’s verdict on blacks “has in truth injured us more, and has been as great a barrier to our emancipation as any thing that has ever been advanced against us.”43
Nevertheless, Walker leads up to Jefferson’s key statement with his own exclamation: “Oh! coloured people of these United States, I ask you, in the name of that God who made us, have we, in consequence of oppression, nearly lost the spirit of man, and in no very trifling degree, adopted that of brutes [i.e., become domesticated animals]? Do you answer, no?—I ask you, then, what set of men can you point me to, in all the world, who are so abjectly employed by their oppressors, as we are by our natural enemies?” After further examples of black dehumanization, Walker asks,
How could Mr. Jefferson but say, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind?”…[H]ow could Mr. Jefferson but have given the world these remarks respecting us, when we are so submissive to them, and so much servile deceit prevail among ourselves—when we so meanly submit to their murderous lashes, to which neither the Indians nor any other people under Heaven would submit?44
Having argued that the blacks’ dehumanized behavior had given Jefferson strong grounds for such a conclusion, Walker underscores the frightening implications of Jefferson’s crucial question, “ ‘What further is to be done with these people?’ ” Jefferson suggests that this question embarrasses many white advocates of emancipation who are then inclined to join “those who are actuated by sordid avarice only [in defending slavery].” And as a matter of fact, even late in the Civil War proslavery Democrats continued to prod Republicans with the question, “What is to be done with the negroes who may be freed?”45 Walker agrees with Jefferson, arguing that white abolitionists are constantly betrayed by “our treachery, wickedness, and deceit.” Blacks cannot therefore count on their white friends but must take a lesson from Jefferson and realize that nothing will count until they unite and prove “that we are MEN.”46
If Walker’s own examination of black dehumanization could lead him, with tears in his eyes, to “exclaim to my God, ‘Lord didst thou make us to be slaves to our brethren, the whites?’ ” then it was all the more certain that “Mr. Jefferson’s remarks respecting us, have sunk deep into the hearts of millions of the whites, and never will be removed this side of eternity.” Walker must thus struggle with Jefferson’s words—even at one point cleverly turning them around, when he advances his “suspicion,” backed by historical evidence, whether whites are “as good by nature as we are or not.” But above all he responds by exhorting his fellow blacks, especially the more educated “men of sense,” to disprove Jefferson and resolve his own anxiet
ies and doubts by overcoming the dehumanizing and bestializing effects of slavery and racial prejudice. It is primarily faith in God’s support and providence that leads Walker to proclaim, “You have to prove to the Americans and the world, that we are MEN, and not brutes, as we have been represented, and by millions treated.”47
It is this theme, especially including Walker’s crucial faith in God’s power to help change the hearts and minds of people, that brings us back to Grimké’s Address. Like Walker, Grimké is much concerned with what she terms the slaves’ “mental and spiritual degradation,” though she never mentions the slaves’ passivity and complicity. But like Walker, she would have passionately agreed with Frederick Douglass’s assertion, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that “The most telling, the most killing refutation of slavery, is the presentation of an industrious, enterprising, thrifty, and intelligent free black population.”48 Indeed, this was the central goal in both Grimké’s and Walker’s pamphlets, along with a racially integrated and harmonious society of black and white Americans, free from prejudice. And both ultimately rely on God to support a revolutionary transformation in both black and white consciousness—a transformation that would transcend the ordinary progression of time and history.49
Walker’s despair over the behavior of his fellow blacks is at least partly countered by his prophetic voice—Hinks rightly states that he “virtually equated his pronouncements with the word of God.” After proclaiming that England is the blacks’ great friend, he ends one chapter with the declaration: “O Americans! Americans!! I call God—I call angels—I call men, to witness, that your DESTRUCTION is at hand, and will be speedily consummated unless you REPENT.” He affirms that God has a special love for the colored people of the world, who are destined to be the ones who finally Christianize the world. While determined to undermine the psychological foundations of blacks’ individual self-deception and, as in a religious conversion, to free the repressed but “unconquerable disposition” in their breasts, Walker speaks ultimately of a collective mission founded on a special, “chosen,” relationship with God. A millennial vision pervades his work.50
But Hinks rightly notes that Walker’s “stature as an architect of black nationalism has been overstated, and his commitment to a racially integrated society in which racial distinctiveness would play little role has been relatively ignored.”51 Despite his extremely acute sense of black victimization, Walker several times strikes the note of Christian forgiveness for the past if only whites could recognize black humanity. And he clearly believed that a change in black behavior could help facilitate that goal. Notwithstanding his few threats of black violence and divine retribution, Walker tried in the end to convey a very simple message:
Treat us like men, and there is no danger but we will all live in peace and happiness together.… Treat us like men, and we will be your friends. And there is not a doubt in my mind, but that the whole of the past will be sunk into oblivion.… The whites may say it is impossible, but remember that nothing is impossible with God.52
JAMES MCCUNE SMITH AND JEFFERSON’S “WHAT FURTHER IS TO BE DONE WITH THESE PEOPLE?”
In many ways James McCune Smith became the fulfillment of David Walker’s dreams of the educated and fully liberated African American leader. Despite their difference in age and formal education, Walker’s and McCune Smith’s interests overlapped—from major issues regarding slavery and race to the use of violence, the significance of a contented black bootblack, and the need to respond to Jefferson’s “Fourteenth Query” in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Only recently rescued from amazing obscurity (by historian John Stauffer), McCune Smith was “the foremost black intellectual in the nineteenth century,” an ardent abolitionist who “with his polymath curiosity … aimed to elevate his race.”53
Born a slave in New York City in 1813 (his unknown father was white), McCune Smith was formally freed in 1827 by the final Emancipation Act of New York State. As a boy McCune Smith became a star student at the New York African Free-School No. 2, an institution run by whites that was also attended by some of the most famous blacks of the next decades. Thanks to his early learning of foreign languages, McCune Smith became fluent in Greek, Latin, and French and proficient in German, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew. Though turned down by American medical schools because of his race, McCune Smith was accepted by the highly prestigious University of Glasgow. During his five years abroad, always scoring near the top of his class, he won B.A., M.A., and M.D. degrees and became well read in the classics and humanities as well as in mathematics, statistics, and science. When he returned to New York in 1837, the year of Sarah Grimké’s Address, McCune Smith was the most educated African American before W. E. B. DuBois, and welcomed as a celebrity by the leaders of the city’s African American community. In Glasgow, McCune Smith had joined with Scottish abolitionists, living in an environment relatively free from racism, and had become deeply aware of the effects of American racial prejudice, which he considered a system of “caste.”54
In New York, McCune Smith established a successful medical practice, treating both blacks and whites, and also ran a pharmacy. He won respect from white physicians for both his successful practice and his scientific writings. After marrying a woman from an esteemed black family, McCune Smith lived in a spacious house in Manhattan and helped raise his own family. Though somewhat reserved and private in personality, he became active in black literary and reform societies and gave lectures that ranged from highly empirical praise for and justification of the Haitian Revolution to a scientific rebuttal of the phrenological argument that skulls could be used to prove the inferiority of the brains of black people. McCune Smith also found time to become a highly prolific writer on a vast range of subjects. Along with publishing pieces in leading medical journals, he became the New York correspondent for Frederick Douglass’s Paper and in 1855 wrote the introduction to Douglass’s famous My Bondage and My Freedom. Douglass termed McCune Smith the “foremost black influence” in his life. Along with friends Douglass, Gerrit Smith, and John Brown, McCune Smith helped to found a new political party, the Radical Abolitionists, and chaired its inaugural convention in Syracuse in June 1855. The party accepted the possible need for violence, exemplified in John Brown’s later plan at Harpers Ferry, and in many ways fulfilled David Walker’s dreams.
Like Grimké and Walker, McCune Smith’s overriding concerns were the elevation of the free black population, transforming the hearts as well as minds of white people, slave emancipation, and the eventual goal of a society of integrated equals. Like Walker, McCune Smith became deeply troubled over the passivity and complicity of blacks who had internalized a racist identity, but unlike Walker, he overcame this concern in a way that greatly reinforced his millenarian faith in African American destiny: “I freely confess that I long feared the case to be otherwise and almost admitted as true the bitter saying of those who branded us as a pusillanimous and unmanly people, tamely bearing the lash and apparently fit for slavery. But at length that error has exploded.”55 By 1843, when McCune Smith gave this lecture on “The Destiny of the People of Color,” abolitionism and black resistance had created more grounds for optimism than in 1829, when Walker wrote his Appeal. McCune Smith was especially encouraged by the blacks’ success in defeating the colonization movement’s hopes and expectations, the achievements of black Methodism, and the way blacks in Ohio had responded to the Black laws that “dehumanized [them] as far as laws could reach.” Amazingly, he concluded with a prophecy that the African Americans’ struggle for liberty would lead to a revolutionary contribution to American culture:
For we are destined to write the literature of this republic, which is still, in letters, a mere province of Great Britain. We have already, even from the depths of slavery, furnished the only music which the country has yet produced. We are also destined to write the poetry of the nation; for as real poetry gushes forth from minds embued with a lofty perception of the truth, so our faculties, enlarged in th
e intellectual struggle for liberty, will necessarily become fired with glimpses at the glorious and the true, and will weave their inspiration into song.56
This deep commitment to the idea of historical progress shaped McCune Smith’s landmark response, in 1859, to the Fourteenth Query of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. Like David Walker, McCune Smith saw the essence of American racism in Jefferson’s “suspicion” “that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind,” and in Jefferson’s crucial question, “What further is to be done with these people?” That question would never have been asked, according to McCune Smith, if Jefferson “had been acquainted with the philosophy of human progress.” If he had possessed the wisdom for which he is celebrated, Jefferson would have welcomed the presence of blacks “as one of the positive elements of natural progress,” as McCune Smith had shown in an earlier article, “Civilization: Its Dependence on Physical Circumstances,” which drew on the writings of Henry Thomas Buckle and John Stuart Mill. On at least two occasions, McCune Smith also underscored Jefferson’s hypocritical inconsistency by referring to his long affair with Sally Hemings and his legacy of black grandchildren—“living testimony” “that there is nothing essentially hideous or distinctly deformed in a black complexion.”57
McCune Smith fulfills Walker’s hopes by presenting a scientific analysis of the physical differences between whites and blacks—bones, muscles, texture of hair, color of skin—designed to show there were no true barriers that would prevent the two races from living together “in harmony under American institutions, each contributing to the peace and prosperity of the country.” In 1859 McCune Smith could cite the equality of laws in Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island as an example of democratic progress, enabling all men, “including black and white,” to live “in peace and harmony.”58