The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (23 page)

The profound sense of mission and deliverance brings us unavoidably to the relationships between nationalism,
assimilation, and Westernization (or
modernization, if one prefers the less troubling term). These concepts, extraordinarily slippery in any context, have been further complicated by the explosive debates and sloganeering of the past century. Revolts against political, economic, and cultural dependency have long “assimilated” and exploited the rhetoric of the West’s own disenchantment with civilization and its discontents. It has long been fashionable to romanticize the authenticity, conviviality, and lack of inhibitions of premodern ways of life. But attacks on Eurocentric uplift and “civilizationism” were more appropriate for the twentieth century’s arrogant beginning than for its somber end. Whatever evils Westernization may have brought the world, only the most die-hard primitivist or cynic can dismiss the benefits of abolishing slavery, improving public health, promoting economic growth, pursuing the ideals of individual equality and self-fulfillment, and cultivating a respect for cultural and religious diversity. Nevertheless, a bias against professionalism, technocracy, improvement, and
moral respectability has often prevented historians from appreciating the aspirations and genuine accomplishments of Westernized black nationalists who understood the world they faced, as well as the kind of skills and knowledge needed to empower the powerless, to break through the constricting coils of dependency, including those cultivated by well-meaning whites in search of authentic emotion or an antimodernist soul.

Assimilation is often thought of in the passive sense of being absorbed: in the nineteenth century, for example, various “unified” nation-states sought to assimilate ethnic and national minorities by eroding their distinctive identities. But one can actively and selectively assimilate foreign ideas and methods, as the history of numerous peoples has shown, in order to strengthen collective identity. For most black leaders in antebellum America, the key question was whether their people could obtain the freedom and power to make significant choices—especially the choice to assimilate and syncretize whatever they needed to develop their full human potentialities. That is why there is a certain artificiality to the conventional dichotomy between assimilationists and separatists, both of whom were intent on overcoming the deeply entrenched obstacles to economic opportunity for blacks. Most advocates of racial separation wanted to gain control over the purposes and goals of assimilation.
¹

For many American liberals of our time, haunted by accounts of the origins of two world wars, horrified by outbursts of superpatriotism, terrorism, and religious fanaticism in a thermonuclear age, nationalism has long seemed as repugnant as a dangerous disease. The term is confusing because it can refer to a sense of national solidarity shared by many diverse groups within a nation-state, such as the
Basques,
Bretons,
Flemings,
Savoyards, and
Alsatians of France, or the scores of ethnic and linguistic groups that make up modern
India. But nationalism also applies to similar feelings confined to a specific ethnic or religious group, such as the
Sikhs,
Magyars,
Shiites,
Czechs, Catholic
Irish, or modern
Palestinians. Nationalism does not necessarily include the demand for a national territory—
Simon Dubnow, for example, can be termed a major figure in the history of
Jewish nationalism even though he envisioned cultural autonomy within existing political territories, not a separate Jewish state. What various nationalists share is a determination to resist being persecuted or made subservient as a people, a sense of loyalty to their own
traditions and culture, and a commitment to some kind of collective and historical mission. The first of these concerns, while preeminent for British North American colonists in 1776 and for later subjects of the
Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, and
Russian empires, has become a pretext for war or oppression when nationalism has merged with the consolidation and expansion of nation-states. “The paradox of nationalism,”
E. J. Hobsbawm points out, “was that in forming its own nation it automatically created the
counter-nationalism of those whom it now forced into the choice between assimilation and inferiority.”
²
The world has repeatedly seen how the nationalism or national liberation of one group can lead to the political, social, and economic enslavement of another.

The Age of Emancipation, which witnessed the eradication of legal chattel slavery in the Western Hemisphere, was also the age when European nation-states became unified and industrialized; when militant nationalistic movements emerged, from
Ireland to the Turkish empire; and when elites in parts of the future Third World first became conscious of their societies’ “underdevelopment” and need for both modernization and ultimate independence. As various scholars have shown, nationalist leaders generally fabricated historical myths and traditions to encourage ideological cohesiveness and belief in some kind of manifest destiny, as white Americans termed it in the 1840s. Thus France, whose first revolution provided the model for both nationhood and world liberation, became in the words of the Saint-Simonians “the Christ of the nations.” According to
Giuseppe Mazzini, the torch of freedom had passed from France to
Italy; according to
Adam Mickiewicz, to
Poland. For the radical
Hegelians it was
Germany’s mission to redeem the world.
³
America’s black nationalists were well aware of the effervescent dreams rising from Europe’s “springtime of peoples” and that were personified in such touring celebrities as
Louis Kossuth.

The ideal of
solidarity, of subordinating individuals to the supposed interests of an ethnic group or nation, can obviously open the way to demagoguery and tyranny. A small elite, such as the one that ruled
Liberia, may even arrogate to itself the right to define the interests of an entire race. This strategy has often been used to legitimate privilege and exploitation within an oppressed social class or ethnic group. The appeal for solidarity has also helped to perpetuate simplistic and monolithic stereotypes, which then become attached to
anyone who belongs to the class, group, or so-called nation. These familiar dangers must be balanced, however, against other considerations. In view of the growing disparities in wealth and power in the nineteenth-century world, coupled with the racism that increasingly consigned non-western peoples to a status of permanent inferiority, one must draw a clear distinction between nationalisms mobilized for regional or global dominance and nationalisms designed to protect or restore a nucleus of human dignity.

When
Henry Highland Garnet advocated selective emigration to Africa as a means of creating a “negro nationality,” he was not envisioning a mass withdrawal from the United States or even asserting a claim to a particular territory. For Garnet and other black nationalists of his time, the crucial goal was to free individual blacks from the subservience, dishonor, and persecution they suffered simply by virtue of being black—of belonging, like the ancient
Israelites, to an enslaved nation. In 1859 Garnet tried to clarify the goals of his
African Civilization Society in a speech to a large audience in Boston. After affirming his faith that blacks could advance toward equal rights in the United States while also helping to civilize Africa and undermine the Southern slave economy, he spoke of establishing “a grand centre of negro nationality, from which shall flow the streams of commercial, intellectual, and political power which shall make colored people respected everywhere.” The key issues were power and respect. In response to a hostile, anticolonizationist question about the location of such a center, Garnet did not rule out Africa but expressed a hope that it would be in the Southern United States, “especially if they reopen the African slave trade.” “In
Jamaica,” he pointed out, “there are forty colored men to one white; Hayti is ours;
Cuba will be ours soon, and we shall have every island in the Caribbean Sea.”
⁴

There is no need here to review the history of black nationalism except as it illuminates the antebellum controversies over colonization and slave emancipation to which we will later turn. It should be stressed that black nationalism was not necessarily linked with emigration and that American blacks who moved to Canada, Africa, or the Caribbean had not necessarily abandoned hope of winning citizenship and equality within the United States. If nationalism is equated with racial pride and the determination of a people to shape their own lives and not pass on an irreversible heritage of degradation, dependency, and humiliation, virtually all American black writers
and speakers were nationalists—and here this historical term is needed to draw a contrast with the many
mulattoes in West Indian societies who tried to dissociate themselves from the interests of blacks and slaves. In the United States black nationalism, in this very general sense, was closely wedded to the ideals of uplift, enterprise, and respectability preached with special fervor by the black clergy, whose profession offered one of the few channels open for black leadership. This rhetoric of moral improvement has often repelled modern antielitist intellectuals who can afford to disdain the aspirations and self-discipline of their own forebears (or own youth) and romanticize styles of life that men like
Richard Allen,
Garnet,
Pennington,
David Ruggles,
Douglass,
Crummell, and Delany tried to overcome. Today it is difficult to comprehend that courageous radicalism was once thoroughly compatible with calls for moral discipline as defined by a self-appointed elite. This fusion of protest and self-help was as characteristic of the emigrationists as it was of the so-called assimilationists.

Despite their hatred for the ACS, black nationalists became increasingly inclined in the 1850s to accept the argument that the elevation of blacks depended on removing at least some of their population from a malignantly prejudiced environment. By 1852,
Martin Delany had concluded:

Like the
Poles in
Russia, the
Hungarians in Austria, and the
Jews throughout Europe, Delany wrote, America’s blacks were “a nation within a nation,” but far more debased in condition than any other population. White prejudice and oppression had paralyzed the “energies” of blacks; instead of thinking of business or self-improvement, young men willingly accepted servile positions that offered “the best opportunity to dress and appear well.” In every town and city, men of superior talent wasted their lives as barbers and hotel waiters. William Whipper, a black lumber dealer and abolitionist, had defined the problem in a vivid phrase that Delany quoted: “ ‘They cannot be raised in this country, without being stoop shouldered.’ ” Yet the
daily arrival of Irish and German immigrants showed what physiological and psychological changes a land of promise, a land of “unrestricted soil,” could produce. To prove “that there are circumstances under which emigration is absolutely necessary to [a people’s] political elevation,” Delany cited among several examples “the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt to the land of Judea,” and “the ever memorable emigration of the Puritans, in 1620, from Great Britain, the land of their birth, to the wilderness of the New World.”
⁶