The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (17 page)

While the experiences of such groups were in some ways incommensurable,
Michael Walzer suggests that the endless repetition of the Exodus story established a cultural pattern that has shaped Western perceptions and understandings of liberation. He also provides valuable insight into the continuing tension between “Exodus politics” and a messianism that emerges from the Exodus experience but looks forward to “a new heaven and a new earth,” which finally appears (though not mentioned by Walzer) in the
book of Revelation after “the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.”
¹²

The Land of
Canaan, Walzer points out, was simply the antipode of Egypt—a specific geographic place to which Israelites could return, work as free farmers, and enjoy their milk and honey. Exodus politics were attuned to the realities of life, power, and human fallibility. Permanent liberation from Egyptian bondage required social discipline and education. It was not sufficient to survive the march across the desert, to train a new generation that had not been debased by slavery, to conquer Canaan and build a new nation. Far more difficult
was the task of remaining true to the covenant, of preventing the reemergence of Egyptian corruptions from within. The
fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the
First Temple in 586 BCE signified the failed hopes of the first
Exodus. To escape the Babylonian conquest, many Jews even fled to Egypt.
¹³

Jewish messianism arose in the period of the
Babylonian exile when the prophets began to envision a new Exodus, a new covenant, and a restored Israel as the new Promised Land. As the prophet Jeremiah made clear, God’s new covenant would be qualitatively different from the
Sinai covenant, “when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, a covenant which they broke, so that I rejected them.” For God would soon forgive past iniquities and inscribe His law upon the hearts of His people, “in their inmost being,” so “all of them, from the least of them to the greatest, shall heed Me.”
¹⁴
These visions of forgiveness and redemption nourished traditions of Jewish and then Christian messianism that confidently awaited a total transformation of human nature, the restoration of Adamic innocence and Edenic peace. Instead of opposing Egyptian bondage with a free but worldly
Canaan, the messianic writers opposed all the evils of the existing world with a millenarian paradise that would appear, often after a series of apocalyptic terrors, at “the end of days.”
¹⁵
The spiritualizing tendencies of messianism were countered in postbiblical Jewish thought by a sense of historical continuity with the patriarchal age and the specific worldly event of the Exodus from Egypt, leading to the revelation of God’s law. Yet the Jews’ continuing experience of persecution and exile also generated heightened dreams of a second
Moses, a final Exodus, and a “definitive redemption.”
¹⁶
As we shall later see, a similar tension pervaded the American
colonization and abolitionist movements. If the abolitionists’ demand for “immediate emancipation” represented in one sense a moral Exodus from the Egypt of colonization, it also relied on a spiritual regeneration sufficient to overcome not only racial prejudice but every vestige of the Kingdom of Darkness.

American colonizationists were hardly eager to identify the United States with Pharaonic Egypt or to associate their cause with the notorious expulsions of European history.
¹⁷
When Thomas Jefferson wrote
that “we should in vain look for an example in the Spanish
deportation or deletion of the
Moors,” he seems to have meant that, compared to Spain, Virginia would reap far richer benefits and escape far worse calamities by beginning, while “it is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation, peaceably, and in such slow degree, as that the evil will wear off insensibly.” In 1832, a fellow Virginian and ardent colonizationist,
Jesse Burton Harrison, stressed that “the very last cases to which we would compare such gradual withdrawal … would be the expulsion of the eight hundred thousand
Jews from Spain under
Ferdinand and
Isabella, or that of nearly a million of Moors under
Philip III, or that of the
Huguenots from France.” The difference had little to do with consent, since Harrison spoke frankly of the “deportation” of freed slaves, contrary to the usual rhetoric of the Colonization Society. The difference lay in the avoidance of sudden, disruptive change and in the alleged worthlessness to Virginia of the black population. In contrast to America’s blacks, Harrison affirmed, the Jews, Moors, and Huguenots “carried with them greater personal wealth in proportion to their number, finer skill, and more thriving habits than were left behind them.”
¹⁸

The movement to colonize America’s blacks can be put in clearer perspective if we examine some of the precedents or antiprecedents that were at least vaguely familiar to late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans. These historical examples should help us understand the ways in which the colonization movement combined some of the features of deportation with an idealized picture of seventeenth-century English migrations to North America.

Any expulsion or exodus is bound to be seen in a wholly different light by the world’s
Pharaohs and Israelites. Like the biblical Pharaoh and America’s post-Revolutionary whites, the persecutors have typically voiced alarm over the supposedly
sudden
growth of a population of dangerous “strangers” or heretics. Yet the desire to expel or exterminate these unwanted subversives has been restrained, at least temporarily, by a realistic knowledge of their services. In
medieval Europe, for example, the Church’s obsession with religious uniformity was often counterbalanced by a secular recognition that Jews could be extremely
useful to the state because of their knowledge of commerce, credit and banking, medicine, and the languages and customs of distant Christian and Muslim lands. In thirteenth-century England, the Crown derived a significant share of its revenue from a few
extraordinarily wealthy Jewish magnates. It was not until
Henry III’s ruinous taxes had impoverished the Anglo-Jewish community that the way was open for the famous expulsion edict of 1290. Two centuries later, when Spain deported a far larger Jewish population, officials tried to keep the irreplaceable Jewish physicians from leaving the country. At the turn of the seventeenth century, proposals to exterminate or expel Spain’s
Moriscos were resisted by landlords and creditors who relied on their labor.
¹⁹

Such self-interested resistance could be overcome by a belief in two kinds of danger: the fear that the subject population would rise in armed revolt or aid neighboring enemies; and the fear that an unassimilated group would corrupt the purity of a religious or national mission. Often the two fears overlapped, as in the prophecies of Jefferson and other white leaders that the continuing presence of America’s blacks would either undermine the experiment in republican government or provoke what Jefferson described as the “exterminating thunder” of “a god of justice,” who in an armed struggle would favor the oppressed.
²⁰

Internal security served as a pretext, at least, for the expulsion of some 275,000 Moriscos from early modern Spain. Centuries of Christian reconquest had led to the subjugation of large Muslim populations that were often indispensable to the economy but that also rebelled and collaborated with Muslim armies. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Spanish Christians enslaved and massacred the
Moors but also intermarried with them; Christian kings prohibited Moors from emigrating to Muslim lands and also expelled them as security risks.
²¹
The dilemma persisted long after the conquest of
Granada purged Spain of Muslim rulers. The Spanish Moriscos, while nominally Christian, rebelled in the late 1560s, when the Crown tried to eradicate their Moorish customs and culture. Envied for their industry and fecundity, the Moriscos were perceived as internal enemies who might support Turkish attacks on Spain.
Philip III’s decree of 1609, ordering the Moriscos to leave Spain, won enthusiastic popular support at the very moment when Spaniards felt humiliated by concessions to the victorious Dutch; the decree was also hailed as an act of mercy to a population that deserved extermination.
²²

Unlike the Moors and Moriscos, the Spanish
Jews had no potential military allies or traditions of armed rebellion. Although Christians repeated and embellished all the libels fabricated during centuries
of anti-Semitic persecution, the
Edict of Expulsion of 1492 focused on the problem of
assimilation, a problem experienced in different form by nineteenth-century free blacks who sought acceptance in the United States. Following the anti-Jewish riots and massacres of 1391, many Spanish Jews converted to Christianity. To prove the authenticity of their own faith, a few of these Marranos, or “New Christians,” accused others of secret Judaizing practices. Using torture, the Inquisition extracted a sufficient number of confessions to cast doubt on anyone with a trace of Jewish ancestry. The Spanish preoccupation with purity of blood, or
limpieza de sangre,
merged racism with religious prejudice. In theory, Marranos were not denied the possibility of Christian redemption. In actuality, they could always be accused of Judaizing practices and be banished or burned alive. By 1492, when the
Reconquista finally subjected
Granada to Christian rule,
Ferdinand and
Isabella concluded that the Marranos and their descendants would never be free from corruption as long as Jews were allowed to live in Spain, where they could secretly instruct the New Christians and persuade them “to follow the Law of Moses.” One is reminded of the fear expressed by Southern slaveholders that slaves would never unquestioningly accept their status as long as free blacks could poison their minds and represent the possibility of a different way of life. Because Ferdinand and Isabella were determined to prevent “our holy Catholic faith” from being “debased and humbled,” they ordered all Jews to leave Spain within three months.
²³

Even such classic examples of expulsion usually implied a degree of individual choice and self-definition. Thousands of Spanish Jews, including prominent rabbis, accepted last-minute conversion to Christianity as a lesser of evils. Two centuries later, thousands of French
Huguenots preferred Catholicism to exile or death. The French
Acadians, whom the British deported in 1755–56 from
Nova Scotia and adjacent territories, could probably have remained in their homeland had they accepted an unconditional oath of allegiance to the British Crown that would have denied, in effect, the political authority of the pope. Some seventy thousand American
Loyalists, the first refugees from a modern, secular revolution, also rejected the alternative of a loyalty oath and political conversion. To win acceptance none of these exiles, with the arguable exception of several thousand black American Loyalists, faced the impossible requirement of changing the color of his skin.
²⁴

Yet, for many Spanish Jews, Huguenots, and other religious and political refugees, the choice of conversion was equivalent to a choice of enslavement. The alternatives were roughly comparable to those offered to a small number of Southern bondsmen who were given the choice of emigrating to
Liberia or remaining in America as slaves. The meaning of consent is also transformed by violent persecution, which can sometimes bring the oppressors and the oppressed to agree that further coexistence is impossible, especially when the oppressed are perceived and begin to perceive themselves as a separate “nation.” This point is crucially important for an understanding of the occasional cooperation between black emigrationists and white racists after free blacks had been subjected to mob attacks in Northern cities and had finally been defined by the
Supreme Court as “beings of an inferior order” with “no rights which any white man was bound to respect.” A few references to twentieth-century events will help us appreciate how even coercive colonization can be interpreted as a providential escape.

To take the most extreme example, in 1938 the
Nazis’ persecution of Jews entered a new phase with the
Kristallnacht beatings, murders, and attacks on Jewish homes, shops, and synagogues. A few days after Kristallnacht,
Hermann Göring explained privately that the goal of such violence was to force Jews to leave Germany and settle in a distant colony like Madagascar. State Secretary
Ernst von Weizsäcker and other officials subsequently devoted considerable time to the Nazis’ “
Madagascar Project.” The idea of colonizing Jews in Madagascar had actually appeared in anti-Semitic literature in the 1920s and had led the Polish government, which was eager to get rid of
Poland’s “superfluous” Jews, to sound out the governor-general of the French colony. After finally receiving French consent, Poland dispatched a commission to Madagascar in 1937 to investigate the possibility of founding a Jewish settlement there (the two Jewish members of the commission found the island inhospitable and objected to the commission’s report). The fact that Poland and even France were interested in reducing their Jewish populations suggests why neighboring governments refused to take Nazi anti-Semitism seriously or to open their gates to more than a trickle of Jewish refugees. Although some German officials were still considering the goal of colonizing all European Jews in distant territories as late as the summer of 1940,
“resettlement” soon became a Nazi euphemism for unprecedented mass extermination.
²⁵

This experience has dramatized both the urgency and the difficulty of finding asylum for peoples subjected to increasingly violent persecution. Few refugee groups in history have been as fortunate as the French
Huguenots, who for all their suffering were often aided by foreign neighbors and were able to escape by the tens of thousands to Protestant regions in
Switzerland,
Holland, the
Rhineland, and England. When we evaluate the nineteenth-century African colonization movement, we should keep in mind the range of emotions aroused in modern times by the plight of
Soviet
Jews, by the conflict between the British and Irish, by the demand of right-wing Israeli groups that all
Arabs be expelled from Israel, and by Israel’s “
Operation Moses,” which rescued thousands of black
Falashas from
Ethiopia before being disclosed to the world in 1984. Aiding the persecuted does not usually imply even tacit moral approval of the persecutors; it may, however, serve as a humanitarian cloak for prejudice or imply a pragmatic acceptance of the persecution as an irremediable fact of life.