The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

  31. Akpan, “Black Imperialism,” 229–34; Johnson, Bitter Canaan, 5–9, 90–91, 135, 138–40, 175–97; Ibrahim K. Sundiata, Black Scandal: America and the Liberian Labor Crisis, 1929–1936 (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1980), passim; Sundiata, “The Black Planters: African Environment and Ecology in the Bight of Biafra in the Era of Abolition, 1827–1930,” part 3. (I am much indebted to Professor Sundiata for sending me a copy of this manuscript.) British naval patrols had used Fernando Po, in the Bight of Biafra, as a base for intercepting slave ships. Some of the recaptives and their descendants became successful cocoa planters.

  32. Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 26–27, 50; Shick, “Quantitative Analysis of Liberian Colonization,” 45–59; Wiley, Slaves No More, 311n2. Wiley calculates a total by 1866 of 13,136 immigrants sent under the auspices of the ACS and the Maryland State Colonization Society. This number was augmented by 5,722 “repatriated” African captives who were freed by the United States Navy and taken to Liberia; 4,701 of these recaptured Africans landed in Liberia in a single year, 1860. The ACS also listed 346 immigrants from Barbados, and 9 from Indian Territory. Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 68, table 16; ACS, Fifteenth Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: James C. Dunn, 1867), 95.

  33. Despite the official goal of assimilation, only a few hundred Africans, together with two or three favored tribes, had become Liberian citizens after the first twenty years of settlement. In 1884, tribal delegates were given the right to speak in the legislature on matters concerning their respective tribes, but this reform provided natives with little power. It was not until the administration of President William V. S. Tubman (1944–71) that the government adopted a serious “Unification Policy.” Schmokel, “Settlers and Tribes,” 171, 172; Akpan, “Black Imperialism,” 228, 234–35. African resentment toward the continuing dominance of the small minority of Americo-Liberians (no more than 5 percent of the population) contributed to Samuel K. Doe’s bloody coup of 1980. Despite the survival of American traditions and institutions, Charles S. Johnson found in 1930 that at least 95 percent of the population was illiterate; before World War II, more than 95 percent of all trade was controlled by foreigners, most of the food consumed by Liberians was imported, there were no technicians available to repair broken engines and machinery, and in Monrovia there was not a single qualified physician “apart from those supplied by the missions, Firestone, Pan American Airways, and those connected with American military installations.” Bitter Canaan, 129–33. In the early 1980s, Liberia had a per capita income ($400) below that of Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Egypt; from 1971 to 1984 life expectancy at birth had risen from 44 to 54 (compared to 65 in Jamaica); in 1984 literacy stood at 24 percent (compared to 76 percent in Jamaica). The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1987.

  34. Tom W. Shick touches on this question when he briefly compares the nineteenth-century development of Liberia, South Africa, Australia, and Argentina. See Behold the Promised Land, 135–43.

  35. Ibid., 114–18, 141–42.

  36. Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 94–102, 138; The North Star, March 2, 1849, in Black Abolitionist Papers, microfilm edition, ed. Peter C. Ripley et al. (hereafter BAP), reel 5, 992–93.

  37. Douglass is quoted in Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978), 92. In Martin Delany’s earlier phrasing of this idea, which had long been advanced by many white colonizationists, “we believe it to be the duty of the Free, to elevate themselves in the most speedy and effective manner possible; as the redemption of the bondman depends entirely upon the elevation of the freeman.” The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Politically Considered (Philadelphia: printed by author, 1852), 205. But in his famous 1843 Address to the Slaves, Henry Highland Garnet had nearly inverted the argument: “While you have been oppressed, we have also been partakers with you; nor can we be free while you are enslaved. We therefore write to you as being bound with you.” An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America (New York: printed by author, 1848), 90. And in 1856, John Gains pointed out that the existence of Haiti had not diminished American racial prejudice or “removed one unholy law”; he concluded that “a Negro Republic, on the coast of Africa, the Caribee Islands, or South America, will never induce the haughty Saxon to respect us at home, unless it be a power physically as strong as Russia, and morally [as strong] as England or France.” Quoted in Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks’ Search for Freedom, 1830–1861 (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 266–67.

  38. Richard MacMaster, “Henry Highland Garnet and the African Civilization Society,” Journal of Presbyterian Church History 48 (Summer 1970): 99–100; Joel Schor, Henry Highland Garnet: A Voice of Black Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 154. The argument that even black radicals were committed to the redemption of American institutions is admirably documented in a 1987 Yale senior essay by Matthew A. Lamberti, “ ‘Mismatched Messiahs’: Black Abolitionists and the Redemption of American Institutions, 1829–1860.”

  39. Garnet to Douglass, The North Star, Jan. 26, 1849, BAP, reel 5, 959–60.

  40. African Repository 22 (November 1846): 347; Schor, Henry Highland Garnet, 101–3.

  41. The Patriot, May 22, 1851, BAP, reel 6, 942. For guidance to Garnet’s writings, I am much indebted to a brilliant Yale senior essay written in 1986 by Seth Moglen, “Henry Highland Garnet and the Problem of Black Nationalism in Antebellum America.”

  42. Hollis R. Lynch, “Pan-Negro Nationalism in the New World, before 1862,” in The Making of Black America: Essays in Negro Life and History, ed. August Meier and Elliott Rudwick (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 51, 52, 58; Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden, 3–6; Anthony J. Barker, The African Link: British Attitudes to the Negro in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1550–1807 (London: F. Cass, 1978), 96, 192–93; Robert O. Collins, ed., Problems in African History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 7–55; ACS, Tenth Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: Way & Gideon, 1827), 8–10; ACS, Fourteenth Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: James C. Dunn, 1831), vii–xi. It was not until the 1840s that the “American school of ethnology,” led by Dr. Samuel George Morton and George R. Gliddon, asserted the view that ancient Egyptians were Caucasians and that blacks had been held as slaves in antiquity just as in modern times. William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 39, 50–51, 97. For a discussion of blacks in Hannibal’s army and in antiquity in general, see Frank M. Snowden Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970); Snowden, Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

  43. Gregory U. Rigsby, Alexander Crummell: Pioneer in Nineteenth-Century Pan-African Thought (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987), 65–66, 71–73; Wilson J. Moses, “Civilizing Missionary: A Study of Alexander Crummell,” Journal of Negro History 60, no. 2 (April 1975): 233–39; Moses, Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 63–68.

  44. Miller, Search for a Black Nationality, 182–205; Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden, 24–25.

  45. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or, Life among the Lowly (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1888), 482–84. For Delany’s hostility toward Mrs. Stowe for approving the “dependent colonizationist settlement of Liberia,” see Cyril E. Griffith, The African Dream: Martin R. Delany and the Emergence of Pan-African Thought (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), 20–21.

  46. Lynch, “Pan-Negro Nationalism in the New World,” 52; African Repository 14 (Jan. 1838): 20.

  47. Wiley, Slaves No More, 162; Jo M. Sullivan, “Mississippi in Africa: Settlers Among the Kru, 1835–1847,” Liberian Studies Journal 8, no.
2 (1978–79): 79–94.

  5. COLONIZING BLACKS, PART III: FROM MARTIN DELANY TO HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET AND MARCUS GARVEY

  1. Wilson Jeremiah Moses perceptively shows that assimilation and nationalism were not mutually exclusive and that black nationalism should not be equated with territorial separation. However, his hostility to “civilizationism” brings a tone of contempt to his treatment of black nationalists, whom he regards as “conservatives.” With the exception of Crummell, they were not seen as conservatives by their contemporaries, and it can be argued that the true conservatives were those who opposed “elevation” and improvement and who idealized dysfunctional traditions. Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978).

  2. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (New York: Scribner, 1975), 97.

  3. Robert M. Berdahl, “New Thoughts on German Nationalism,” American Historical Review, 77 (1972): 65–80; G. Eley, “Nationalism and Social History,” Social History 6 (1981): 83–107; E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962), 164; François Fejtö, “Europe on the Eve of the Revolution,” in The Opening of an Era: 1848: An Historical Symposium, ed. François Fejtö (New York: H. Fertig, 1948, 1966), 41–42. Hobsbawm, who also notes the messianic claims of “the Russian Slavophils with their championship of Holy Russia,” maintains that it was “rational” to look only to Paris: “But in those days there had been only one great and revolutionary nation and it made sense (as indeed it still did) to regard it as the headquarters of all revolutions, and the necessary prime mover in the liberation of the world” (Age of Revolution, 164). Such reasoning, which seems to accept the possible messianic role of a nation-state, could apply with even greater force to the United States, whose revolution had led to a kind of political stability and economic growth that was attracting hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

  4. “Henry Highland Garnet’s Speech at an Enthusiastic Meeting of the Colored Citizens of Boston,” The Weekly Anglo-African, September 19, 1859, reprinted in Sterling Stuckey, The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 183. Garnet’s ideal of “a grand centre of negro nationality” was strikingly similar to Ahad Ha-’Am’s view of Zionism in 1912, as summarized by David Vital: “The true aim of Zionism, namely the fostering of a new national life and a new national consciousness in all parts of scattered Jewry, was not the achievement of ‘a secure refuge for the people of Israel,’ but of ‘a fixed centre for the spirit of Israel.’ ” Vital, Zionism: The Crucial Phase (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 60.

  5. Martin Robison Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Politically Considered (Philadelphia: printed by author, 1852), 158.

  6. Ibid., 12–13, 159, 203–08. Although Delany’s book denounced both the ACS and Liberia, he reprinted a long extract from the First Annual Report of the Trustees of Donations for Education in Liberia, which presents a rather glowing picture of the Republic; he also defended the colonizationist Benjamin Coates, who reported that he had recently left the ACS. Ibid., 35, 162–68.

  7. Hollis R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832–1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 117–18; Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 154–56. Both Blyden and Garvey were West Indians who favored black “racial purity,” who were deeply prejudiced against mulattoes, and who lacked the respect for American institutions that was so pronounced among even radical American blacks such as Henry Highland Garnet.

  8. Floyd Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 236–40. Douglass changed his mind and canceled the trip when the outbreak of war offered new opportunities, as he put it, to “serve the cause of freedom and mankind.”

  9. See especially Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 71–145.

  10. Edwin S. Redkey, Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969), 298. Redkey also points out that there was little commercial trade between the United States and West Africa and consequently little cheap transport, in contrast to the shipping facilities between the United States and Europe (299).

  11. See Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010).

  12. Ibid., 23–58; Moses, Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 76, 197–219; Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861–1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1965), 110–11; James E. Turner, “Historical Dialectics of Black Nationalist Movements in America,” Western Journal of Black Studies 1, no. 3 (Sept. 1977): 164–80.

  13. Redkey, Black Exodus, 22–35, 150–286; P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement: 1816–1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 251. In 1868 Delany urged blacks to sail to Liberia on the ACS-sponsored Golconda; he continued to correspond with William Coppinger, seeking appointment as U.S. minister to Liberia, a post that was actually conferred on Garnet. Miller, Search for a Black Nationality, 266.

  14. Redkey, Black Exodus, 44.

  15. Much further attention needs to be given to the writings of black women, who are almost wholly ignored in the standard historical accounts but whose views are becoming accessible in such collections as Henry Louis Gates, ed., The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, 30 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), and in such studies as Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

  16. Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 586–87, 610. Garvey, who hoped to use Liberia as a base for expelling white imperialists from Africa, had earlier claimed that Liberia was founded “for the purpose of helping the refugee slave and the exiled African to re-establish a foothold in his native land; therefore, no Liberian, neither at home nor abroad, has any moral or other right preventing Negroes to return to their home to do the best they can for its development.” Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. 4 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 632–33. But his praise of Liberia’s founders and leaders did not prevent President King’s government from forbidding on June 30, 1924, the entry of any UNIA members into the country. Garvey’s advance party, which arrived in July, was promptly seized and deported. “Press Release by Ernest Lyon, Liberian Consul General in the U.S., July 10, 1924,” in ibid., vol. 5, 611; Stein, World of Marcus Garvey, 210–13.

  17. Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 25–27, 55–57.

  18. Ibid., 56.

  19. Ibid., 56–57; ibid., vol. 5, 531. As early as 1829, David Walker, in his famous Appeal, in Four Articles; together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, had played with this inversion, noting that the Egyptians who enslaved the Israelites “were Africans or coloured people, such as we are—some of them yellow and others dark—a mixture of Ethiopians and the natives of Egypt—about the same as you see the coloured people of the United States at the present day.” Yet, aside from emphasizing the relative mildness of the Israelites’ bondage compared to that of the American blacks, Walker was religious enough to side with God and identify his cause with that of Moses. Reprinted in Stuckey, The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism, 47, 50, 104, 111.

  20. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 23, 50–52, 137; Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 244–51; Louis R. Harlan, “Booker T. Washington’s Discovery of
Jews,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 274. For black celebrations of deliverance, see William H. Wiggins Jr., O Freedom! Afro-American Emancipation Celebrations (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987).

  21. Waldo E. Martin Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 109–10, 123, 201; The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, ed. John W. Blassingame, vol. 3, 1855–63 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 556; Delany, Condition, 18–19; Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden, 63–65; August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), 248; Arnold Shankman, “Friend or Foe? Southern Blacks View the Jew, 1880–1935,” in Turn to the South: Essays on Southern Jewry, ed. Nathan M. Kaganoff and Melvin I. Urofsky (Charlottesville: American Jewish Historical Society by the University Press of Virginia, 1979), 109–14; Harlan, “Booker T. Washington’s Discovery of Jews,” 268–75. For a broad overview of early Jewish-black relations, nothing can rival Harold David Brackman’s unpublished diss., “The Ebb and Flow of Conflict: A History of Black–Jewish Relations Through 1900” (Ph.D. diss., University of California Los Angeles, 1977). A few American blacks had encountered Jews as Southern planters and slaveholders (one of whom, Judah P. Benjamin, became the second most powerful leader of the Confederate States of America), and as Northern merchants and abolitionists. For different approaches to the history of Jewish-black relations, beginning with the Iberian and Caribbean background, see David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 82–101; Robert G. Weisbord and Arthur Stein, Bittersweet Encounter: The Afro-American and the American Jew (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970); David Levering Lewis, “Parallels and Divergences: Assimilationist Strategies of Afro-American and Jewish Elites from 1910 to the Early 1930s,” Journal of American History 71, no. 3 (Dec. 1984): 543–64; and Hasia R. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977). Despite some historical errors, Lenora E. Berson’s The Negroes and the Jews (New York: Random House, 1971) contains important information and insights, but it is almost useless to scholars because it lacks notes, any reference to sources or bibliography, and an index.