The phrase “immediate emancipation” has long evoked confusion and controversy. To the general public in the 1830s it meant simply the abolition of black slavery without delay or preparation. But the word “immediate” may denote something other than closeness in time; to many abolitionists it signified a rejection of intermediate agencies or conditions, a directness or forthrightness in action or decision. In this sense immediatism suggested a repudiation of the various media, such as colonization or apprenticeship, that had been advocated as remedies for the evils of slavery. To many reformers the phrase mainly implied a direct, intuitive consciousness of the sinfulness of slavery and a sincere, “immediate” commitment to work for its abolition. In this subjective sense the word “immediate” was charged with religious overtones and referred more to the moral disposition of the reformer than to a particular plan for emancipation. Thus, some reformers confused immediate abolition with an immediate personal decision to abstain from consuming slave-grown produce; and a person might be considered an immediatist if he or she was genuinely convinced that slavery should be abolished absolutely and without compromise, though not necessarily without some preparation. Such a range of meanings led unavoidably to misunderstanding. The ambiguity, however, was something more than semantic confusion. The doctrine of immediatism, in the form it took in both Britain and America in the 1830s, was at once a logical culmination of the antislavery movement and a token of a major shift in intellectual history, as abolitionists reacted against continuing slaveholder recalcitrance as well as a generation of unsuccessful “gradualism.”67
Garrison’s conversion in Baltimore to immediatism was visceral and total and had more to do with his own unrestrained, uninhibited language and actions than with any specific program for emancipation. For example, he was jailed for libel because he published a list indicting local merchants and community leaders for sinful ties with slavery. The meaning of immediatism for Garrison is exemplified by his famous rhetoric in the first issue of The Liberator:
I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.68
Such language was far more extreme than that of early black abolitionists, except for some passages in David Walker’s Appeal. But the blacks’ writing presupposed a kind of immediatism, and 20 percent of the nearly two hundred articles published in The Liberator’s first year came from black writers. In order to counteract the claims of slavery’s apologists, many white abolitionists began appending black “testimony” to their essays condemning black slavery. One antiabolitionist declared that Garrison was nothing but a “white Negro.” And black abolitionist William Watkins wrote in The Liberator in 1831: “We recognize, in The Liberator…a FAITHFUL REPRESENTATIVE OF OUR sentiments and interests; and an uncompromising advocate of OUR indefensible rights.”69 As Richard Newman concludes, “Whites were the newcomers to the more radical abolitionist strategy of declaring a moral war against bondage; black activists had been using it for decades.”70
Thanks to this connection, Garrison’s gratitude to his “colored brethren” was more than matched by immense loyalty and affection on the part of blacks.71 If Garrison’s attacks on slavery and colonization conveyed little that was new, they served to mobilize the black community. As James Forten put it in a letter to Garrison, “Upon the colored population in the free states, it has operated like a trumpet call. They have risen in their hopes and feelings to the perfect stature of men; in this city [Philadelphia], every one of them is as tall as a giant.”72 Theodore Wright later echoed the same message: “At that dark moment we heard a voice;—it was the voice of GARRISON, speaking in trumpet tones! It was like the voice of an angel of mercy!…The signs of the times began to indicate brighter days.”73
While Garrison never directly gave credit to blacks for converting him on the subject of colonization, he did emphasize that blacks had long opposed the idea and strongly refuted opponents’ claims that he himself was responsible for anticolonizationist sentiment in the black community:
From the organization of the American Colonization Society, down to the present time, the free people of color have publicly and repeatedly expressed their opposition to it. They indignantly reject every overture for their expatriation. It has been industriously circulated by the advocates of colonization, that I have caused this hostility to the African scheme in the bosoms of blacks; and that, until the Liberator was established, they were friendly to it. This story is founded upon sheer ignorance. It is my solemn conviction that I have not proselytized a dozen individuals; for the very conclusive reason that no conversions were necessary.74
Following this statement, in his Thoughts on African Colonization, Garrison printed sixty-eight pages on “Sentiments of the People of Color,” documenting black protests against colonization. But strangely enough, while he began with the two Philadelphia resolutions of 1817, signed by James Forten, Garrison overlooked Freedom’s Journal and other sources and jumped to a large number of documents from 1831 and 1832. Despite his claims of near universal black opposition to colonization, this gap in dates seemed to undermine his denial of his own influence.
In Thoughts on Colonization, as in his other writings, Garrison reveals an unmitigated religious faith that he can overcome the lies and misrepresentations that had enabled the ACS to win support from much of the clergy, media, and even state legislatures, to say nothing of the general public. His model, quite simply, was the kind of religious conversion that begins by exposing sin and guilt and leads to immediate repentance and change of behavior—a “teetotal” abandonment of alcohol, in the terms of temperance. He clearly hoped that the widespread belief in ultimate divine judgment or retribution would reinforce this kind of war on sin.
As we have seen, John Russwurm became convinced that since no such “conversion” could possibly end or even mitigate America’s profound racism and discrimination against blacks, colonization became the only solution. In contrast, Garrison documented the racial discrimination and blamed it on the ACS—as part of their efforts “to render the situation of the free blacks intolerable” and thus coerce people like Russwurm into leaving. Determined to create and nourish “the bitterest animosity against the free blacks,” the ACS kept warning the free states, “Your colored population can never be rendered serviceable, intelligent or loyal; they will only, and always, serve to increase your taxes, crowd your poor-houses and penitentiaries, and corrupt and impoverish society!” At the end of Thoughts on Colonization, Garrison took the risk of printing colonization documents claiming that in Connecticut blacks comprised only a thirty-fourth of the population, and yet furnished one-third of all convicts, and that in Vermont 24 of the 918 blacks were in the penitentiary.75
Yet Garrison thought he could convince his readers that with the defeat and removal of colonization, the way would be open for the uplift and improvement of the free black population, for an all-out campaign against racial prejudice and discrimination, and for the crusade to convince slaveholders of their sins. It is significant that in his survey of racism, Garrison concentrates on discriminatory state laws and says little about the public opinion he is confident he can help transform. And with respect to that goal, given the public’s generally negative views of slavery, he again and again highlights the proslavery aspects of the ACS, arguing that their main and ultimate objective is to strengthen and perpetuate the slave syste
m by removing from the South the great bulk of the country’s free black population, which, he and the colonizationists agree, presents an increasingly corruptive and dangerous influence on the slaves.
Since people supported colonization for quite diverse and even conflicting reasons, it was not difficult to dismiss many criticisms as applying to others and not oneself. But that was not easy when it came to a central contradiction. As Garrison put it:
In one breath, colonization orators tell us that the free blacks are pests in the community; that they are an intemperate, ignorant, lazy, thievish class; that their condition is worse than that of the slaves; and that no efforts to improve them in this country can be successful, owing to the prejudices of society. In the next breath we are told what mighty works these miserable outcasts are to achieve—that they are the missionaries of salvation, who are to illumine all Africa—that they will build up a second American republic—and that our conceptions cannot grasp the result of their labors. Now I, for one, have no faith in this instantaneous metamorphosis. I believe that neither a sea voyage nor an African climate has any miraculous influence on the brain.76
This passage, while devastating as criticism of the ACS, raises the crucial issue, to be explored in the next chapter, of how to “improve and uplift” the free black population. Even though Garrison and the abolitionists rejected the portrayal of an “intemperate, ignorant, lazy, thievish class,” and especially the argument that free blacks in the North were worse off than slaves in the South, they recognized the dismal and depressing effects of generations of profound discrimination. Garrison stressed the intellectual and social deprivations of slavery and accused the ACS of thwarting the education of free blacks.
Yet there were some significant differences between white and black abolitionists. As David Blight has observed, “For blacks especially, many of whom were former slaves who wore the scars of bondage on their backs and in their psyches, the emergencies of freedom, security, and basic rights did not permit them the luxury of debate over ideological or strategic purity that sometimes occupied white abolitionists.”77 Garrison’s free black supporters were even more focused on the issues of education and improvement and much more concerned with social equality and civil rights. They were also far more pragmatic in their approach to reform and would become impatient and sometimes mystified by the white abolitionists’ ideological debates and divisions. But these differences would become more apparent in the 1840s and 1850s, after the division of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the emergence of political activism.
8
Free Blacks as the Key to Slave Emancipation
RECOGNITION OF THE ISSUE
On March 8, 1853, Frederick Douglass wrote a long and highly detailed response to Harriet Beecher Stowe, now world famous as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who had requested information that “would permanently contribute to the improvement and elevation of the free coloured people in the Unites States.” Nearly twenty years after the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass emphasized a point that had dominated early relations between black and white American abolitionists but had then declined as a priority: “The most telling, the most killing refutation of slavery, is the presentation of an industrious, enterprising, thrifty, and intelligent free black population.” He also stressed that “the most powerful arguments now used by the Southern slaveholder, and the one most soothing to his conscience, is that derived from the low condition of the free coloured people in the North.”1
As already implied in our discussions of the Haitian Revolution and the option of colonizing freed American slaves, the ongoing status of blacks who had already been emancipated, whether in Haiti, the Northern American states, or the British West Indies, had a crucial bearing on debates over the immediate or gradual liberation of millions of African American slaves whose future place in society was difficult to predict. Indeed, it is worth underscoring the obvious but often neglected point that for the general public, especially in America, the key issue raised by abolitionism was the status and condition of freed slaves. Stowe’s and Douglass’s interest in the “permanent … improvement and elevation” of the free black population also ties in with our earlier central theme of dehumanization and animalization as part of the process of reducing a human to the status of chattel property, an instrument to serve the needs of an owner. Ideally, for the master or mistress, a slave is a person who has internalized a consuming desire to please and flatter the owner, like a loving pet. As we have seen, according to Northerners like the eminent and procolonizationist New England clergyman Leonard Bacon, writing in 1823, slavery had so completely dehumanized the African American that he could never safely be raised “from the abyss of his degradation” without being colonized in a much less racist environment.
Unfortunately, in 1853, seventy-three years after Pennsylvania first led the Northern states toward gradual emancipation, twenty-six years after New York State celebrated the liberation of its last slaves, reformers like Douglass and Stowe realized that the plight of free blacks in the North had in some ways continued to deteriorate, a point dramatized by the African Americans’ own testimony, by proslavery arguments and statistics on black incarceration in the North, and especially by the dangers imposed by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Even in 1846 Douglass had acknowledged, after a Philadelphia mob had attacked a black temperance society parade of 1,200 marchers and then rampaged against blacks and their homes for two days:
The colored man in the United States has great difficulties in the way of moral, social, and religious advancement. Almost every step he takes towards mental, moral, or social improvement is repulsed by the cold indifference or the active mob of the white. He is compelled to live an outcast from society … and the very fact of his degradation is given as a reason why he should be continued in the condition of a slave.2
Yet, as we shall see, many free blacks had overcome formidable barriers to great achievement, and countless black and white abolitionists had struggled to educate and elevate the free black community in ways that would counteract the parasitical abuse of institutional racism, by which whites gained pride and a sense of superiority from the blacks’ alleged “incapacity” and loss of self-respect—a form of psychological exploitation that depended on “keeping Negroes in their place.”
The complexities of this struggle, especially involving such issues as black gratitude and reaction to white paternalism, demand special imaginative efforts on the part of both author and reader. We must try at the start to imagine what it would have been like to have been both a free black abolitionist and a white abolitionist in the antebellum North.
As free “Negroes” in the mid-1840s, we abolitionists and most other blacks are always conscious that most of our brethren are chattel slaves in the South and that we can easily be kidnapped, or officially arrested, and sold in the South, suddenly deprived of our family members and our very names. But in some ways free blacks are better off in the Deep South. New laws have been passed to keep us from entering or settling in states north of the Ohio River, and many towns in the North have passed ordinances requiring us to register or even post bond for good behavior. Most states deny us the right to vote, sit on juries, or even testify against whites in court. Most free blacks are illiterate and even our children have little chance of attaining a grade school education. Perhaps most important, we are surrounded by white supremacy and are constantly viewed as inferior people in our daily interactions with whites—who sometimes verbally curse or ridicule us or even spit on us on the street, and whose egos climb when we bow or step off the walk to let them pass. No matter how close we might become to a white friend, we cannot accompany him or her to most restaurants, hotels, stores, libraries, lectures, concerts, and public places (except in a few radical communities).
It is true, there have been many breakthroughs since 1830, when the vast majority of our brethren regarded all whites as our enemies. Black and white abolitionists changed this stereotype.
Now, we “can witness the labors and sacrifices of white men and women in a cause inseparably linked with our own.” At abolitionist meetings, we speak to racially mixed audiences of both men and women. In short, white abolitionists have heightened our optimism and our quest for self-improvement and self-respect, though most of us feel that despite their hatred of slavery, they care far too little about the true social equality of the two races.3
Beginning in the 1830s, with the rise of “immediatism” or “modern” abolitionism, we worked closely with white abolitionists, convincing them to repudiate the American Colonization Society. Gradually we saw the need for some independence as they focused on abstractions and became embroiled in needless and distractive conflicts. We are of course immensely grateful to those very few who speak out on our behalf, but we are no less conscious of the traces of condescension and superiority conveyed, often unconsciously, even by most of our ardent white supporters.
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 25
