The Many-Headed Hydra
Page 34
Shame on you! you who add house to house
and joining field to field until not an acre remains,
and you are left to dwell alone in the land. (5:8)
The meaning of jubilee lay in the experiences and struggles of the oppressed, as explained in Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good tidings to the afflicted;
he has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
and a day of the vengeance of our God
to comfort all who mourn. (61:1–2)
Isaiah thus enlarged jubilee’s meaning from the ameliorist management of Leviticus to a day of vengeance on behalf of the afflicted, the bound, the brokenhearted, the captive, and the grieving. Isaiah gave voice to a class that no longer begged for reforms but rather demanded justice. When he returned to Nazareth and began preaching, Jesus opened the scroll in the synagogue to this passage in Isaiah. Then Jesus said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Jubilee was therefore not a question of interpretation but a matter of action. From law (Leviticus) to poetics (Isaiah) to fulfillment (Luke), the liberation of jubilee was retained, calling for restitution of land, manumission of the bonded, remission of debt, and cessation of work.
In the modern era, jubilee was employed by the English revolutionaries of the 1640s, including James Nayler and the early Quakers and Gerard Winstanley and the Diggers, as a means of resisting both expropriation and slavery. It remained a living idea after the revolution, to be carried forward by John Milton, John Bunyan, and James Harrington (Oceana). Revived in the late eighteenth century, it appeared occasionally in the era of the American Revolution (one Janet Schaw, in the West Indies in 1775 to observe Christmas festivities, reported that slaves called the holiday “an universal Jubilee”) and took on broad transatlantic power in the 1780s.13 In 1769, Trinculo’s Trip to the Jubilee was presented on the London stage. In 1782 Thomas Spence wrote “The Jubilee Hymn; Or, A Song to be sung at the Commencement of the Millennium, If Not Sooner.” It was set to the tune of the national anthem, “God Save the King” (or later, in America, to “America”):
HARK! how the trumpet’s sound
Proclaims the land around
The jubilee!
The sceptre now is broke,
Which with continual stroke
The nations smote!
Hell from beneath doth rise,
To meet thy lofty eyes,
From the most pompous size,
Now brought to nought!
Since then this Jubilee
Sets all at Liberty
Let us be glad.
Behold each man return
To his possession
No more like drones to mourn
By landlords sad!
Spence was born in 1750 in Newcastle. Growing up on the waterfront as one of nineteen children in his family, young Spence joined the congregation of John Glas (1695–1773), a Presbyterian schismatic who followed the tenets of the primitive Christians as he understood them, advocating simple law, no penal code, no accumulation of property, love feasts, Scotch broth, the gift of speech, and plenty of song. Spence’s mentor was Dr. James Murray, who supported the American Revolution, opposed enclosure, and asked in his “Sermons To Asses” (1768), “Do people ever act contrary to any divine law, when they resume their rights, and recover their property out of the hands of those who have unnaturally invaded it?” Moreover, “Was the jewish jubilee a levelling scheme?” These questions were particularly relevant in Newcastle, where the bourgeoisie was then seeking to sell or lease eighty-nine acres of the town common, a plan thwarted by commoners, who pulled down the lessee’s house and fences and drove his cattle away. Inspired by the victory, Spence in 1775 wrote a lecture that he delivered before the Newcastle Philosophical Society, wherein he proposed the abolition of private property: “The country of any people . . . is properly their common,” he explained. Taking the historical view, he continued, “The first landholders [were] usurpers and tyrants,” as were their heirs. Everyone else had become a stranger in the land of their birth. He advised appointing a day on which the inhabitants of each parish would meet “to take their long-lost rights into possession.” Spence would soon call that day jubilee; the Philosophical Society would denounce him for his “ERRONEOUS and dangerous levelling principles.”14
Jubilee lay at the heart of what came to be known as Spence’s Plan, which was chalked on walls, minted on tokens, published in halfpenny tracts that were hawked in the streets, and sung in taverns. Spence was arrested four times in the 1790s as a seditious author and a “Dangerous Nuisance.” Despite the jailings and imprisonments, the insults and death threats from members of the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, he persisted. He struck a token to commemorate the death of Lord George Gordon, the insurrectionist of 1780. In The End of Oppression; Or, a Quartern Loaf for Two-Pence; being a Dialogue between an Old Mechanic and a Young One, he wrote that revolution could be accomplished by a “few thousand of hearty determined fellows well armed.” By 1802 the prime minister of England would be informed that there was scarcely a wall in London that did not have chalked upon it the slogan “Spence’s Plan and Full Bellies.”
After moving to London in 1792, Spence took an interest in Atlantic affairs, and especially in what sailors, Native Americans, and African Americans might contribute to a worldwide revolutionary movement. He wrote about hydrarchy in The Marine Republic (1794), in which a dying man gives a ship to his sons. It is, the man specifies, to be “COMMON PROPERTY. You all will be EQUAL OWNERS, and shall share the profits of every voyage equally among you.” His injunctions are drawn up as a constitution, like the articles of pirates. When his sons, the marine republicans of the title, grow weary of England’s oppressive government, they “set sail for America, where they [expect] to see government administered more agreeably to their notions of equality and equity.” After their ship is wrecked on an uninhabited island, they establish the Republic of Spensonia, which “looks backward to the medieval commune and forward to the withering away of the state.”15
In The Reign of Felicity (1796), Spence constructed a dialogue in which one character remarks that American Indians are the “only freemen remaining on the face of the earth”; another explains that the Indians, unlike European workers, are “unwarped by slavish custom.” Spence, like Christian Gottlieb Priber earlier in the century, believed that the Native Americans would attract the slaves and disenfranchised laborers created by European imperialism and help lead them to liberation. He knew of the triracial communities among the Seminoles and in the southeastern United States. In 1814 he would offer a spirited defense, in The Giant Killer, of the Cherokee lands; that same year, during a sacred revolt (which owed much to the federation attempts of Tecumseh, on the one hand, and to the inspiration of the African American struggle for emancipation, on the other), the Muskogees would be destroyed at the Battle of Horsehoe Bend. Apocalyptic teachings (“when the moon would be turned into blood”), the presence of numerous métis people, the earthquakes of 1811, the leadership of Paddy Walch and Peter McQueen, and a new dance had all united the Muskogee against the ecunnaunuxulgee (“people greedily grasping lands”) in a desperate defense against the forces that were to bring the cotton plantation.16
Thomas Spence. Robert Robinson, Thomas Bewick: His Life and Times (1887).
Spence also understood the African-American interest in jubilee:
For who can tell but the Millennium
May take its rise from my poor Cranium?
And who knows but it God may please
It should come by the West Indies?
His question brings us back to the West Indian Wedderburn and the African American trad
ition of jubilee, which began in a subversive reading of the Bible and continued that way for generations. Similar readings had earlier inspired or been manifest in the revolutionary Christianity of the “blackymore maide” named Francis and the conversation between Sarah Wight and Dinah “the moor” about the biblical deliverance from Egyptian slavery; the use, by slaves, of the radical message of itinerant ministers of the Great Awakening to formulate their own, new designs for freedom; and the creativity of slaves and their allies, in the era of the American Revolution, in citing the Bible not only to predict an end to bondage but to justify the use of force in ending it. The resistance of slaves during the 1760s and 1770s moved many to take public positions against “man-stealing” and slavery itself. One of these was the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, who in 1774 published Thoughts on Slavery. He concluded (not unlike the revolutionary J. Philmore) that “liberty is the right of every human creature as soon as he breathes the vital air. And no human law can deprive him of that right which he derived from a law of nature.” These sentiments would inform the evangelical and missionary work of the Methodists over the next fifty years. Baptists took a similar stand.17
That such churchmen were not, however, unqualified abolitionists is shown by a look at Wesley’s right-hand man, Thomas Coke, the founder of the Methodist missions in the 1780s, who made eighteen transatlantic voyages during his lifetime. He took pride in the Irish Methodists who betrayed the United Irishmen’s attempts to take Dublin in the spring of 1798, and he believed that Methodists played a key role in preventing West Indian slaves from rising on an English island during the 1790s (“If they have Religious Liberty, their Temporal Slavery will be comparatively but a small thing”). He reported to the government on the seditious activities of obscure, humble churches in the north of England in 1800–1.18 And yet so broad was the discussion of jubilee that he devoted considerable, if equivocal, attention in his Commentary on the Holy Bible (1801) to Leviticus 25. Coke’s view started with the point that land required rest. Jubilee would demonstrate the “fructifying influences of divine power,” it would curb avarice, and it would prevent the ambitious designs of individuals to procure estates in order to oppress others. Coke did not advocate jubilee from below, or approve of an agrarian law, or associate the practice with the English commons or the American lands. He seemed to approve the interpretation of Maimonides, that jubilee led to saturnalia in which “everyone put a crown upon his head.”19
Methodist and Baptist ministers—some formally educated, others penniless, self-appointed “tub preachers”—began in the 1780s to preach jubilee to largely poor congregations in Britain, the Caribbean, and North America. A growing number of these preachers were African Americans: in addition to Wedderburn, their number included Moses Baker, George Liele, Moses Wilkinson, John Marrant, Thomas Nicholas Swigle, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, John Jea, and George Gibb. The story of Moses, the flight from Egyptian slavery, and jubilee were all important to these ministers and their followers. The Baltimore Conference of Methodists declared to its mixed-race congregation in 1780 that “slavery is contrary to the laws of God, man, and nature” (though in five years it would suspend this belief in practice, permitting slaveholders to join the congregation). Baptists also preached an end to slavery in general and jubilee in particular. Several ministers spread the message far and wide. Liele, for example, left Savannah for Kingston, Jamaica, in 1782 and formed that island’s first Baptist church two years later. “Preaching took very good effect with the poorer sort, especially the slaves,” among whom he worked as a wagoner. Other ministers left North America with the British army and carried their revolutionary heritage to Nova Scotia, British Honduras, London, and Sierra Leone.20
Within these Atlantic circuits, jubilee was taught by sermon but also by song, especially during the revivals and camp meetings of the early nineteenth century, in what has been called the Second Great Awakening. Ministers, exhorters, and obeah men taught a call-and-response style of singing. Rhythmic complexity, gapped scales, body movements, and extended repetitions of short melodic phrases characterized the singing, which has also been called the “shout.” Musicologists have noted the influence in the shout of African songs, work songs, and Indian dances. The practice of teaching the song and the Scriptures by lining out (wherein someone who could read sang one line, then those who could not read sang the same line, and so on) ensured a close, enthusiastic relationship between leader and chorus. The contrast with stiff, hierarchical upper-class religious ceremony and singing could hardly have been greater.21
Slaves and free people of color such as Wedderburn adopted biblical passages such as jubilee from Baptist and Methodist preachers and took them in new, rebellious directions. Gabriel organized a slave revolt in Richmond, Virginia, in the jubilee year 1800. He and his fellow militants were emboldened by the success of the Haitian Revolution, encouraged by the preachings of abolitionist Quakers, Methodists, and Baptists, and assisted by French revolutionaries and perhaps also by United Irishmen. Mingo, a preacher and exhorter, read the stories of Moses and Joshua. Gabriel was especially fond of Judges 15, in which Sampson “smote them hip and thigh with great slaughter,” slaying “a thousand men” with “the jawbone of an ass.” Gabriel’s insurrectionary plan was ruined by a storm, after which twenty-seven were hanged, religious congregations were further segregated, and laws were passed forbidding prayer meetings between sundown and sunup.22
Closer in age and experience to Wedderburn was Denmark Vesey, born in 1767 in the Caribbean (St. Thomas, Virgin Islands), skilled as a sailor, and converted to Methodism. A cosmopolitan, he had slaved in St. Domingue, studied with the Moravians, and learned several languages. He settled with his master, a sea captain, in Charleston, South Carolina, where during the turbulent decade of the 1790s the Methodist Francis Asbury preached on Isaiah 61 and its promise “to proclaim liberty to captives.” Vesey became a leader in the free black community and the Methodist church. He, too, took inspiration from the victory in Haiti, and possibly more direct assistance as well, as one of his fellow conspirators, Monday Gell, may have corresponded with the president of the black republic. In 1809 the Negro steward of the ship Minerva smuggled insurrectionary pamphlets into Charleston; Vesey read them aloud, as he did the Bible. In 1820 the planters passed a law against “incendiary publications.” Two years later, Vesey planned to lead an insurrection that would include Jack Glenn, a painter, who spoke of deliverance from bondage; Monday, an Igbo from the lower Niger; “Gullah Jack,” a conjuror; and Peter Royas, a ship’s carpenter who believed the group would get help from England. Vesey’s organizing thus brought together a coalition of different workers—agrarian, artisan, and nautical—from the different traditions of Africa, England, the West Indies, and America. The revolt, which expressed the power of transatlantic pan-Africanism, frightened the slaveowning ruling class; in response, Charleston’s rulers immediately passed the 1822 Negro Seaman Act, which permitted the sheriff to board any incoming vessel and to arrest any black sailor for the duration of the ship’s stay in the port of Charleston.23
Less than a decade later, sailors would begin smuggling David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of The United States of America (1829) into the ports of the South. Walker invoked the legacies of the American and Haitian Revolutions as he exposed the butcheries, cruelties, and murders of slavery, as he railed against avaricious oppressors and hypocritical Christians, as he refuted the racist arguments of Thomas Jefferson, and as he called, with unassailable logic, for an armed war of liberation. His Appeal, which drew strongly on the apocalyptic prophetic tradition of Ezekiel and Isaiah, quickly became the manifesto of pan-African freedom.24
William Lloyd Garrison was another singer of jubilee, and another product of the waterfront. His maternal grandparents had sailed as bonded laborers from Liverpool; his father was a drunken sailor and his mother a flinty, New Light Baptist. His brother was a seafaring m
an, too. Although his mother warned him against the “hydra of politics,” he would enter the political arena and transform it forever, bringing to it the antinomian spirit of 1649. Taught by David Walker and Benjamin Lundy (who escorted freedmen to Haiti), Garrison spoke on July 4 in the year of Walker’s Appeal at the Park Street Church in Boston, proclaiming “liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.” It was a turning point in the abolitionist alliance. Garrison called on Atlantic strengths—the motley crew, the fellow creatures, God as no respecter of persons—and inveighed against capitalists, slavemasters, and tyrants alike. He reprinted Bunyan’s “Vanity Fair,” declared that the world was his country, wrote “with the finger of God on the hearts of men,” and promised to “bind up the broken-hearted, and set the captive free!”25
By the 1830s, African American children were singing hymns such as “Don’t You Hear the Gospel Trumpet Sound Jubilee?” Despite the repression and terror that rained down on its efforts to implement jubilee, African American Christianity remained a religion of action, characterized by shouting, dancing, singing, weeping, jerking, and speaking in tongues. The movement to abolish slavery sang its way to freedom. Spence began this jubilee singing, which continued in tavern and chapel in Kingston, Charleston, New York, Boston, Providence, and Dublin, in the multitude of joyful hymns following August 1, from the classics of the Wesley brothers, through the marches of the Civil War, to Henry Work’s “popular” sheet music of “Kingdom Coming”—