In 1833, Paul married an Englishwoman, a fact which, coupled with his enthusiastic response to British slave emancipation and the appeal of working with other abolitionists, encouraged him to remain in Britain until 1836. Paul no doubt realized that when he and his wife returned to the United States, they would be subjected to great prejudice as an interracial couple. As it turned out, they were unable to find a place to live together, and Garrison arranged for Mrs. Paul to live in Northampton, at the home of Garrison’s father-in-law, for one year, while Nathaniel was on a speaking tour.23 Though Paul succeeded in raising thousands of dollars in Britain and even lent money to Garrison, he outraged the Wilberforce community by spending and charging even more than he received. He therefore returned to Albany, where he became the pastor of a Baptist church and continued to condemn racial prejudice and call for black moral uplift and improvement until he died in 1839 at age forty-six.24
In April 1833, after a year of successful lecturing in Britain, Paul wrote an important letter to William Lloyd Garrison. By the time the letter appeared in The Liberator, Garrison had arrived in Britain and joined Paul on an extensive tour to defeat Cresson, who finally returned to America in the fall of 1833. In his letter, Paul could joyfully report that “the voice of this nation is loud and incessant against the system of slavery. Its death warrant is sealed, so far as it relates to the British West Indies.” He modestly concluded by saying that his lecture tours had been successful and that his arguments had received “decided approbation from all classes of people.” He had even had breakfast twice with “the venerable Wilberforce” and had met “the patriotic Clarkson,” both “Angels of liberty.” But the decisive point related to Britain’s answer to America’s “hypocritical pretenders to humanity and religion, who are continually crying out, ‘What shall we do with our black and colored people?’ ”25 Since Paul felt a deep bond to America, based in part on the fact that his father had been a Revolutionary War veteran and an eminent leader and Baptist minister in Boston, he rejoiced, while also expressing anger, in the discovery that Britain presented a spectacular answer to America’s great racist question “what shall we do with them?”
[T]o contrast the difference in the treatment that a colored man receives in this country, with that which he receives in America, my soul is filled with sorrow and indignation. I could weep over the land of my nativity!…Here, if I go to church, I am not pointed to the ‘negro seat’ in the gallery; but any gentleman opens his pew door for my reception. If I wish for a passage in a stage, the only question that is asked me is, ‘Which do you choose, sir, an inside or an outside seat?’ If I stop at a public inn, no one would ever think here of setting a separate table for me; I am conducted to the same table with other gentlemen. The only difference that I have ever discovered is this, I am generally taken for a stranger, and they therefore seem anxious to pay me the greater respect.26
Like large numbers of future African American visitors, Paul was astonished and immensely gratified by the British treatment of a man of color. The widespread acceptance in America of some form of colonization depended on the conviction that white prejudice was so strong and entrenched that the two races could never live together with any prospect of peace or equality. Yet, for Paul and his successors, the tolerance they encountered in England, Ireland, and Scotland not only exposed the hollow hypocrisy of American claims of freedom and democracy but seemed to prove that the crushing white prejudice they met at home could be overcome. With this in mind, they continued to dramatize the contrast between America and Britain as thousands of Britons flocked to hear their rapturous odes to British tolerance, compassion, and humanitarianism. Just as Britain took the momentous and risky step of emancipating some 800,000 colonial slaves, Nathaniel Paul and subsequent black speakers, including many fugitive slaves, reinforced the righteousness of the cause. Even as increasing doubts arose about the economic consequences of emancipation, black abolitionists could continue to reassure British audiences concerning the justice of freeing human beings like themselves. And Paul’s list of situations in which he was treated as an equal, as a “gentleman,” implied a kind of democratic acceptance that cloaked the issue of social class. In America, race had long superseded class. In Britain, despite a highly structured class system that included levels of respect and contempt, African American abolitionists, even fugitive slaves, received remarkable respect apart from class, even as racism began to emerge in the late 1840s and 1850s.
After Garrison arrived in Britain in 1833, he joined Nathaniel Paul on a tour, rebutting the claims of Elliot Cresson that the ACS was primarily dedicated to slave emancipation. Paul and Garrison often spoke together, as at a public meeting held in London’s Exeter Hall on July 13, attended by two thousand people and featuring speeches by prominent abolitionists intended “to expose the real character and objects of the American Colonization Society and to promote the cause of universal emancipation.”
Cresson, called “an apostate Quaker” by Paul, had tried to defame Garrison as a “convicted libeler” who had been convicted and thrown into prison in the United States. Paul, first emphasizing the importance of his own dark complexion, contended that Garrison had “suffered forty-nine days incarceration in a prison in the city of Baltimore, in the State of Maryland, because he had the hardihood to engage in defence of the suffering slaves in that State.” Paul then noted that in a supposed “land of freedom and equality,” the laws of America were so “exceedingly liberal” that they allowed a thriving trade in “the souls and bodies of our fellow creatures.” “Mr. Garrison had the impudence, the unblushing effrontery to state, in a public newspaper, that this traffic was a direct violation of the laws of God, and contrary to the principles of human nature. (Cheers) This was the crime of which he was convicted.” Indeed, Paul went on, Wilberforce, Clarkson, Buxton, and the abolitionists present in the room would all have been “indicted, convicted, and thrown into prison if they had resided in Maryland and “pursued the course they have adopted in this country.” As a final stab against Cresson and the ACS, before turning to a detailed denunciation of the racism and hypocrisy of colonization, Paul added that the “Court and Jury would have convicted the whole Anti-Slavery Society of this country, and would have transported them all to Liberia as the punishment of their crimes (Laughter and loud cheers).”27
As R. J. M. Blackett shows, Nathaniel Paul’s role in overcoming British support of the ACS prepared the way for succeeding African American abolitionists’ efforts in Britain to build a cordon or “antislavery wall” around the United States, so that, as Frederick Douglass put it, “wherever a slaveholder went, he might be looked down upon as a man-stealing, cradle-robbing, and woman-stripping monster, and that he might see reproof and detestation on every hand.”28 The blacks’ goal of exposing the evils of American slavery and racism brought a unity to their otherwise diverse interests as well as to the fractured Anglo-American abolitionist movement, enabling some supporters and opponents of political abolitionism (Garrisonians) to work together. As Blackett observes, the building and preservation of the antislavery cordon for more than thirty years required a pragmatic mentality as well as “skill, determination, and consummate diplomacy on the part of black Americans. As products of American slavery and discrimination, they brought an authenticity, a legitimacy, to the international movement that their white co-workers could never claim. They were the bona fide representatives of millions of oppressed human beings.”29
If the African American abolitionists gave a certain unity to Anglo-American antislavery movements, they also provided a certain unity to their highly diversified audiences. When fugitive slave Samuel Ringgold Ward toured Britain in the mid-1850s, he found that within a month of his arrival “I had been upon the platforms of the Bible Tract, Sunday School, Missionary, Temperance, and Peace, as well as the Anti-Slavery Societies.”30
One must remember that British abolitionists achieved their goals of colonial slave emancipation in 1834 and of ending apprent
iceship in 1838. But the spectacular success of the British abolitionist movement then furnished a model and incentive for a wide range of other causes. Joseph Sturge, the wealthy Quaker who helped found the radical Agency Committee in 1831 and then led the campaign against apprenticeship, went on in 1839 to help found the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (today known as Anti-Slavery International), dedicated to worldwide slave emancipation. Officials in the BFASS also served in the British Peace Society, the Aborigines Protection Society, and other reform organizations. Sturge himself, a pacifist and teetotaler, supported the liberal Anti-Corn Law League and radical workers’ Chartist movement, helped found the National Complete Suffrage Union for universal male enfranchisement, and tried to broker an alliance between the bourgeois Anti-Corn Law League and the Chartists—a movement born as an alliance of factory workers, artisans, and middle-class radical reformers determined to democratize the British political system.31
In short, the sympathetic crowds that cheered the black American abolitionists, including crowds of working-class laborers, arrived with highly diverse interests. But they all opposed “slavery” and were reassured by the African Americans that their own nation had not only achieved a high level of racial tolerance but had set a model for the world in abolishing a deeply rooted social evil. Later questions about the economic failure of that action only highlighted the national achievement of moral justice. But there was clearly a conflict or at least tension between Sturge’s merging of antislavery with Chartist outrage over domestic suffering and injustice, and the way African American abolitionists celebrated a monarchic nation that treated them as equal human beings and that led the world in abolishing a unique and unparalleled evil. As we will see later, Frederick Douglass repeatedly stressed the uniqueness of chattel slavery, arguing that there was no more similarity between examples of British domestic oppression and American slavery “than there was between light and darkness.” We will later need to examine the fact that British abolitionism could exercise this dual character, both promoting broader moral progress and unintentionally supporting the status quo.
THE PROBLEMS OF RACE, DEHUMANIZATION, AND WAGE SLAVERY
As noted in the introduction and chapter 1, black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet focused on the issue of dehumanization and animalization when he assured American slaves, in 1843, that the ultimate goal of slaveholders was “to make you as much like brutes as possible,” and when he told the U.S. Congress, in 1865, that the Thirteenth Amendment should put an end to an institution based on “snatching man from the high place to which he was lifted by the hand of God, and dragging him down to the level of brute creation, where he is made to be the companion of the horse and the fellow of the ox.”32 We also saw that these statements about treating slaves as animals were confirmed by the testimony of countless slaves and former slaves, including those recorded in the WPA narratives of the 1930s.
Dehumanization and its implications—the need of African Americans to confront and counteract the kind of white psychological exploitation that would deprive them of the respect and dignity needed for acceptance as equals in a white society—has been the central theme of this book. I have long interpreted “the problem of slavery” as centering on the impossibility of converting humans into the totally compliant, submissive, accepting chattels symbolized by Aristotle’s ideal of “the natural slave.” On the other hand, Garnet acknowledged that brutal treatment could lead to some internalization, some acceptance or contentment “with a condition of slavery,” even if no genetic domestication took place. In chapter 8 we noted David Walker’s anger over numerous examples of slaves’ docility, subservience, and complicity, and his appeal to blacks to prove to Americans “that we are MEN, and not brutes, as we have been represented, and by millions treated.” Even the relatively privileged Frederick Douglass recalled that after he had been “tamed” by interminable work and countless whippings, “Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed … the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!”33
As we have seen, it was the kind of perceived animalization implied by Walker and Douglass that led to widespread views of vicious, animal-like Haitian blacks intent on “revenge”; of the supposed incapacities of freed American slaves and the need for their colonization; and of the urgency of black “uplift” and civilization in the North. These issues reached a climax in Britain when black abolitionists helped destroy support for the ACS and basked in the public recognition of their full humanity. As Walker had predicted, despite his frequent despair, “Treat us like men, and there is no danger but we will all live in peace and happiness together.”
In chapter 1 we also noted the ways in which a white pathology of racial exploitation, of dehumanizing blacks, led to the theme of self-hatred and sense that “You don’t really belong here” in African American literature. Thus, for blacks as well as whites, the essential issue was how to recognize and establish the full and complete humanity of a “dehumanized people.”
While black abolitionists found new self-esteem and acceptance as full humans in Britain, they struggled with their own sense of identity as they felt compelled to inform the British regarding the unique evils of dehumanization in supposedly democratic America. How could an escaped slave like Frederick Douglass, whose extraordinary eloquence, intelligence, and decorum made him a great celebrity, convince thousands of Britons that he had fairly recently been a brute? Paradoxically, as Douglass soon came to understand, the more he focused his attention in lectures on his own and even other slaves’ dehumanizing treatment, the more he would narrow the boundaries of his own humanity.
Yet British audiences, many of whom had never heard a slave or ex-slave speak, usually expected to hear shocking accounts of cruelty and torture. Many white abolitionists assumed, with some condescension, that Douglass should evoke horror and sympathy by limiting his speeches to accounts of cruel and savage treatment. Douglass soon became extremely sensitive to the paternalistic and implicitly racist approach of some white American abolitionists who felt he was not competent to handle his own financial affairs and who sought to restrict his desire to assert his own intelligence and capabilities—to develop his own “manhood.”34 But, for a time, Douglass was willing to talk of his own scarred back, to hold up actual whips and chains as examples of torture, and to describe seeing a slave woman have her ear nailed to a post for attempting to run away, adding, “but the agony she endured was so great, that she tore away, and left her ear behind. (Great sensation.)”35 Yet Douglass soon toned down his descriptions and even publicly admitted that despite mistreatment, he had been a relatively privileged slave who had escaped the worst evils of the institution.
Some historians have criticized Douglass and other black abolitionists for not expressing more concern over the plight of English industrial workers and the suffering of the Irish at the start of the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s. The question might seem even more meaningful in view of the strong ties between a few leading radical British abolitionists like Joseph Sturge and the Chartist movement, as well as the large number of working-class supporters who attended many of Douglass’s lectures. But, as historian Marcus Cunliffe makes clear, the comparison between American chattel slavery and British “wage slavery” was part of a much larger cultural contest. There is doubtless some truth to Cunliffe’s conclusion that the abolitionist crusade “would have been altered out of all recognition if they had endeavored to direct a dual assault, on both chattel slavery and wage slavery.” Douglass, who called himself a “man of one idea,” was not unusual in concentrating his efforts on the evils of chattel slavery while expressing occasional sympathy for the victims of other forms of oppression. And as Cunliffe shows, some British and American abolitionists, such as Richard Oastler and Charles Edwards Lester, became wholly preoccupied with the evils of British wage slavery. In Yorkshir
e, a mass meeting congratulated Oastler, a Chartist and MP who held that the bondage of children working in English cotton mills was “more horrid” than colonial slavery, for exposing “the conduct of those pretended philanthropists and canting hypocrites who travel to the West Indies in search of slavery, forgetting that there is a more abominable and degrading system of slavery at home.”36
The contest between the two systems of oppression began in the later eighteenth century, when West Indian planters and supporters of the British slave trade claimed that black slaves were much happier and better treated than English industrial workers. In 1788 Gilbert Francklyn, a Tobago planter and propagandist for the West India Committee, compared the horrors of Britain’s emerging industrial factories with a preposterously idyllic picture of West Indian slavery. In response to Thomas Clarkson’s celebrated essay attacking the slave trade, which won a prize at Cambridge University, Francklyn asked: Why did the two great universities not offer prizes “for the best dissertation on the evil effects which the manufactures of Birmingham, Manchester, and other great manufacturing towns, produce on the health of the lives of the poor people employed therein?”37
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 39