63. David W. Blight, “Garrison’s Legacy for Our Time,” in William Lloyd Garrison at Two Hundred: History, Legacy, and Memory, ed. James B. Stewart (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 5.
64. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, passim; Newman, Transformation of American Abolitionism, 112–16.
65. Newman, Transformation of American Abolitionism, 112–16; Mayer, All on Fire, 101, 110, 116, 147, 173. While Mayer gives some recognition to Forten’s aid and names James G. Barbadoes as Garrison’s “chief black ally” in Boston, Winch shows that Forten’s support and influence were considerably stronger than previous historians have recognized. On the essential black support of Garrison and The Liberator, see Donald M. Jacobs, “William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and Boston’s Blacks, 1830–1865,” The New England Quarterly 44, no. 2 (June 1971): 261.
66. Elizabeth Heyrick, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition (London, 1824), 36; Davis, “Emergence of Immediatism,” 248–57. In 1829 there were still slaves in Philadelphia, even though Pennsylvania had passed a gradual emancipation act in 1780.
67. This paragraph is a revised version of the opening paragraph in Davis, “Emergence of Immediatism,” 238–39.
68. “TO THE PUBLIC,” The Liberator, January 1, 1831.
69. Newman, Transformation of American Abolitionism, 105.
70. Ibid., 105–6.
71. For black gratitude towards Garrison in Boston, see James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979), 84.
72. Quoted in Jacobs, “William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and Boston’s Blacks,” 260.
73. “ADDRESS of the Rev. Theodore S. Wright…,” Colored American, Oct. 14, 1837.
74. Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization, Part 2, 8.
75. Ibid., Part 1, 104–05; Part 2, 14.
76. Ibid., Part 1, 155–56.
77. Blight, “Garrison’s Legacy for Our Time,” 7.
8. FREE BLACKS AS THE KEY TO SLAVE EMANCIPATION
1. Carter G. Woodson, ed., The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written During the Crisis, 1800–1860 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1969), 654, 658.
2. Frederick Douglass, “Temperance and Anti-Slavery: An Address Delivered in Paisley, Scotland, on 30 March 1846,” The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, ed. John W. Blassingame, vol. 1: 1841–46 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 206.
3. For the more positive view, see Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 40–41.
4. Carter Godwin Woodson, Negro Orators and Their Orations (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1925), 93.
5. This paragraph draws on Christopher Mark Brady Allison, “Floating on the Stream of Prejudice: The Making of the Religious Activism of Samuel Cornish” (M.A. thesis, Yale University, May 2010), 24, 29.
6. “Address by Abraham D. Shadd, William Hamilton, and William Whipper, 13 June 1832,” in The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 3, The United States, 1830–1846, ed. C. Peter Ripley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 109–15.
7. Address to the People of Color of the City of New York, by Members of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society (New York, 1834), 3–7.
8. Ibid.; Objects of the Phoenix Society of New York, 8. Led by prominent black and white figures, the Phoenix Society grew rapidly and founded a high school for colored youth as well as Ward Societies with lending libraries, reading rooms, and lecture series devoted to history and science as well as “morals, literature, and the mechanic arts.” Much effort was given to the promotion of temperance and wholesome evening activities for black youth. Samuel Cornish, cofounder of the first black newspaper, played a key role in raising funds (often from women) to build up the Society’s library holdings. Dorothy B. Porter, “The Organized Educational Activities of Negro Literary Societies, 1828–1846,” The Journal of Negro Education 5, no. 4 (Oct. 1936): 565–67.
9. While the financial crisis and depression of 1837 lay ahead, there would be continuing efforts to induce urban blacks to find employment in the countryside.
10. Address to the People of Color, 4.
11. W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 237–40. According to Rorabaugh’s charts, per capita consumption of distilled spirits was much higher in Scotland and Sweden than in the United States. In America the consumption of beer rose rapidly after 1881.
12. Douglass, “Temperance and Anti-Slavery,” 206; Donald Yacovone, “The Transformation of the Black Temperance Movement, 1827–1854: An Interpretation,” Journal of the Early Republic 8, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 281–97. Douglass also drew on personal experience to argue that slaveholders used alcohol to mollify and subdue their slaves. For reformers, the parallels and metaphors between slavery and intemperance were endless.
13. Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, An Address to Free Colored Americans (New York, 1837).
14. Quotation from Ruth Bogin and Jean Fagan Yellin, introduction to The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 12; Dorothy Sterling, ed., Turning the World Upside Down: The Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Held in New York City, May 9–12, 1837 (includes the Minutes of the Convention) (New York: CUNY Feminist Press, 1987), passim; Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 244–48; Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830–1844 (1933; repr., Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1957), 142–44; Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 93–95.
15. “Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Convention,” The Liberator (1831–65), June 2, 1837, 7, 23 (American Periodicals Series Online, 90); Sterling, Turning the World Upside Down, 4. The Liberator lists the Grimkés as the main authors of the two pamphlets. The women’s Address should not be confused with a piece that appeared in the June 3, 1837, Colored American, “For the Colored American. An Address,” which had been delivered before the Female Branch Society of Zion, by William Thompson, at Zion’s Church, on April 5.
16. Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), passim; Catherine H. Birney, Sarah and Angelina Grimké: The First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Women’s Rights (New York: Lee and Shepard, 1885), 172–73. In 1838, Sarah Grimké published Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, the first comprehensive statement of feminism to appear in America. According to Birney, who lived with the sisters toward the end of their lives, the two pamphlets distributed by the Convention made the sisters so widely known, and so increased the desire to hear them speak, “that invitations poured in upon them from different parts of the North and West, as well as from the New England States. It was finally decided that they should go to Boston first, to aid the brave, good women there, who, while willing to do all that women could do for the cause in a private capacity, had not yet been persuaded to open their lips for it in any kind of public meeting. It was not contemplated, however, that the sisters should address any but assemblies of women. Even Boston was not yet prepared for a greater infringement of the social proprieties” (173).
17. Sterling, Turning the World Upside Down, 13; Karcher, First Woman in the Republic, 246.
18. Sterling, Turning the World Upside Down, 14, 30–31; Karcher, First Woman in the Republic, 244–47. In 1838 a larger number of women joined the Convention in Philadelphia, but a hostile mob attempted to disrupt the meeting and then burned down Pennsylvania Hall, driving the group to another location. The local press blamed the abolitionists for provoking the violence by seating blacks and whites side by side, a step
toward the much feared racial “amalgamation.”
19. Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Address to Free Colored Americans, 21.
20. Ibid., 30–31.
21. Ibid., 31, 5–6.
22. Ibid., 4. Sarah Grimké had been exposed to the realities of slavery from the time she was a small child. The most knowledgeable abolitionists, like Theodore Dwight Weld, who married Angelina Grimké, emphasized the same point. Weld wrote that from personal observation in the South, he knew that “atrocious cruelty” “is the rule, not the exception; that those who hold human beings as property will inflict upon them greater cruelties than they do upon their brutes.” Yet such treatment was only “an appendage of slavery” that could turn the public mind “from the crowning horror of slavery.” “At the present crisis, the inflictions of slavery on mind—its prostration of conscience—its reduction of accountability to a chattel—its destruction of personality—its death-stab into the soul of the slave—should constitute the main prominence before the public mind” (Weld to J. F. Robinson, May 1 (?), 1836, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké, 1822–1844, ed. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, 2 vols. (1934; repr., Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), 1:296–97.
23. Nat Turner’s revolt began on August 22, 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia. As they moved through the countryside, Turner and some fifty to sixty mounted insurgents killed nearly sixty whites, most of them women and children. While Virginia’s militia and vigilantes killed well over one hundred suspected insurrectionists, Turner eluded searchers for sixty-eight days and was not hanged until November 11, 1831, when he spoke of receiving divine revelations and demanded, “Was not Christ crucified?” The traumatic slaughter of so many white families underscored the risks and costs of an allegedly paternalistic institution, and in January 1832 it enabled legislators from the largely nonslaveholding western counties of Virginia to launch a unique and futile debate in the legislature over the future of a labor system that greatly favored the tidewater region. Samuel McDowell Moore, one of the delegates from the west, “blamed slavery for the loose morals, ignorance, and lack of industry that he believed characterized too much of the state’s white population.” David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 208–10; Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 369.
24. Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Address to Free Colored Americans, 17–18. Toward the end of the document, the women implore Northern blacks to resist using violent means to rescue their “brethren” from being seized as fugitive slaves. But the language strongly recognizes the free blacks’ desire and motivation to counter violence with violence as well as God’s own needed intervention: “We marvel, as we behold these reproachful scenes, that the God of Justice has held back his avenging sword. …[H]e will assuredly visit this nation in judgment unless she repent.” Aside from their devotion to Jesus’s model of nonresistance, the women argue pragmatically that any violent attempts at rescue “can only end in disappointment; they infuriate public sentiment still more against you, and furnish your blood-thirsty adversaries with a plausible pretext to treat you with cruelty … and render doubly difficult the duties of those who have been called by Jehovah to assert the colored man’s right to freedom, and to vindicate his character from those calumnies which have been heaped upon him” (29).
25. Ibid., 6 (my italics).
26. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 236–37. The fact that Southerners mutilated the bodies of Union troops and demanded segregated cemeteries and burial grounds for the Confederate dead fits in with the glorification of the Lost Cause and all-out resistance to Radical Reconstruction, which underscores the impossibility of any effective educational and rehabilitation program for emancipated slaves.
27. Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Address to Free Colored Americans, 6.
28. Ibid., 12–15.
29. Ibid., 16.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 32.
32. My treatment of Walker relies heavily on Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), a book based on a doctoral dissertation I directed.
33. David Walker, in Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble To the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to those of THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ed. Charles M. Wiltse (New York: Hill & Wang, 1965), 56–59.
34. There has long been debate, even among historians, over the causes of Walker’s death. While it is probable that no certain answer will ever be found, Hinks presents a convincing argument “that available sources shed no light on the shadowing of Walker, while they strongly support a natural death from a common and virulent urban disease of the nineteenth century.” Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 269–70.
35. Ibid., 86, 111.
36. Ibid., 85. Hinks adds, “A number of them preferred the dance halls of the North end or the gambling, dog fights, drinking, and sexual carousing that also flourished there and on the north slope.”
37. Ibid., 213. William Lloyd Garrison was an exception. He wrote: “We deprecate the spirit and tendency of this Appeal. Nevertheless, it is not for the American people, as a nation, to denounce it as bloody or monstrous. Mr. Walker but pays them in their own coin, but follows their own creed, but adopts their own language. We do not preach rebellion—no, but submission and peace.” The Liberator, January 8, 1831.
38. Walker, Appeal, 29.
39. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, xvi.
40. Walker, Appeal, 62.
41. Ibid., 62–63.
42. Hinks even affirms that Walker “would rush to agree with Stanley Elkins’s basic assessment that the experience of enslavement in America deeply affected and often damaged most blacks’ sense of self and hindered their ability to create a core identity based on autonomy and entitlement.” Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 217–18n34.
43. Walker, Appeal, 15, 27.
44. Ibid., 26.
45. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 317 and passim.
46. Walker, Appeal, 27.
47. Ibid., 28, 17, 30.
48. Woodson, Mind of the Negro, 654, 658.
49. With respect to time, both authors imply a religious sense of kairos, defined by Paul Tillich as “a decisive moment” of qualitative change that must be distinguished from chronos, that is, chronological or “watch time.” See David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 128.
50. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 228; Walker, Appeal, 43, 25, passim.
51. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 249.
52. Walker, Appeal, 70.
53. John Stauffer, ed., The Works of James McCune Smith, Black Intellectual and Abolitionist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), xiii. In addition to producing this invaluable collection of McCune Smith’s writings, Stauffer has included much biographical information in his prize-winning The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). As Stauffer points out, one of the reasons McCune Smith fell into obscurity soon after his death in 1865 was that he wrote no book and his essays, published on cheap newsprint, had little popular appeal. More important, his descendants soon passed for white and “wanted him erased from the historical record” (ibid., xvi–xvii). My account of McCune Smith is almost wholly dependent on Stauffer, including e-mails from him, but I have also drawn on David Blight’s early essay, “In Search of Learning, Liberty, and Self-Definition: James McCune Smith and the Ordeal of the Antebellum Black Intellectual,” in Afro-Americans in New Y
ork Life and History 9, no. 2 (July 1985): 7–17.
54. Stauffer, Works of James McCune Smith, xiii, xix–xxiii, and passim; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 65–66, 86–88, and passim.
55. Stauffer, Works of James McCune Smith, 55.
56. Ibid., 59.
57. Ibid., 274.
58. Ibid., 265.
59. Ibid., 264–65.
60. Ibid., 275–78.
61. Ibid., 279. Curiously, at other times McCune Smith seems to have preferred “black” to “colored.”
62. Ibid., 245–63.
63. Ibid., 195–99. In 1865, McCune Smith referred to Walker’s Appeal, in James McCune Smith, quoted from A Memorial Discourse; by Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, Delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives, Washington City, D.C. on Sabbath, February 12, 1865, with an introduction by James McCune Smith, M.D. (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1865), 52.
64. Stauffer, Works of James McCune Smith, 195–99.
65. Ibid., 187.
66. Ibid., 199.
67. Ibid., 189.
68. Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 135–44. Stauffer points out that despite its failure, the North Elba enterprise was a “dress rehearsal for the project of distributing land during Reconstruction.”
69. Ibid., 144, 117, and passim.
70. Stauffer, Works of James McCune Smith, xxiv.
71. Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 127.
72. Ibid., 157–58. Despite their continuing friendship, Gerrit Smith’s disillusion led him to make an impulsive remark in an 1857 letter to Horace Greeley’s Tribune, which infuriated McCune Smith. Gerrit stated that “the mass of blacks are ignorant & thriftless,” words that conformed with Greeley’s own racism. In an angry letter to Gerrit, on April 9, 1858, McCune Smith retorted that “the heaviest blow we blacks could possibly receive came from your hand” (Stauffer, Works of James McCune Smith, 319–20). Gerrit Smith’s disillusion reached a climax in his reaction to the results of John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, which led to his temporary insanity and commitment to an insane asylum at Utica, New York.
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 53