The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (28 page)

The existence of slavery and the presence in Boston and New Haven of an oppressed race descended from slaves presented Bacon with a tangible model for grappling with the problems of evil and moral responsibility. The moral “inability” of African Americans, as a discrete, identifiable group, conveyed by contrast a presumption of “ability” to white Americans, who could take comfort in their freedom from insurmountable deprivations. Physically marked off by nature and stamped with what Bacon termed a visible “brand,” blacks had little freedom of choice and appeared to lack any “power to the contrary”; like
Jonathan Edwards’s sinners, they were only free to obey their strongest inclinations.

While Bacon did not explicitly apply such moral philosophy to his case study, he made it clear that the African American could not be raised “from the abyss of his degradation.”
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Not in the United States, that is, where as we have seen the force of prejudice was infinitely magnified by the fear of
Samson “thirsting for vengeance” and bursting his chains asunder. But as this very fear attested, the psychological damage of slavery, like the debilities of sin, was not irreversible. From the perspective of New Divinity theology, the most alarming aspect of the American dilemma was the way it cut blacks off from all the “means” of grace—from the preaching, Sunday schools, benevolent societies, and what
Horace Bushnell would later call “Christian nurture”—that softened the heart, expanded the soul, cultivated the moral sense, and prepared the way for an “active conversion” to spiritual freedom. What inspired Bacon and other missionary types was the realization that the “black cloud” provided white Americans with an opportunity to prove that they could transcend the national evil of slavery by removing its victims to a missionary world where the victim-beneficiaries could save themselves while also Christianizing and saving Africa.

The question of the slave’s degradation and impaired moral and intellectual capacities led inescapably to the effects of emancipation. To what degree did liberation within the supposedly free American environment negate the “depraved” condition produced by enslavement? Significantly, the issue that led to the appointment of Bacon’s committee of 1823 was not slavery but whether the
Society of Inquiry “ought at present to make any exertions in favor of the black population
of our country.” In 1816, before the
American Colonization Society was formed, the Society of Inquiry had listened to a discourse on “the condition of the black population of our country,” and Bacon’s committee was later appointed “to inquire respecting the black population of the United States.” The “Report” does not begin with slavery or the slave trade but with the degraded condition of 1,769,000 black people within the United States, a “strange anomaly of a large part of the nation that loves to call itself the freest, happiest, and most enlightened nation on the globe.”
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Even in the Northern states, Bacon points out, everyone was familiar to some extent with the barrier of “
Caste”—a word
Robert A. Warner retained 117 years later in his classic 1940 study
New Haven Negroes
—that cut blacks off “from all that is valuable in citizenship” and condemned them to wander “like foreigners and outcasts, in the land which gave them birth.” After comparing the inequalities of blacks and whites with those of the Sudra and Brahman, Bacon concludes that American racial prejudice was even more insuperable than the institution of caste in
India. In infancy the Negro “finds himself, he knows not why, the scorn of his playmates, from the first moment that their little fingers can be pointed at him in derision. In youth, he has no incentive to prepare for an active and honorable manhood. No visions of usefulness, or respectability, animate his prospects.” The thousands of blacks in New England, far from contributing to “the good order and happiness of society,” added more to the parish poor rates than they did to the government’s revenue. Throughout the free states, blacks were mired in “irremediable degradation.”
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The latter term, which Bacon repeatedly uses to describe the condition of slaves and free blacks, connotes a lowering in grade, rank, status, or honor, a dragging down in moral and intellectual character. Yet Bacon, who on this topic favors the passive voice, never identifies or describes the degraders. He never specifically acknowledges that Northern whites prevented black children from attending the common schools; denied unwealthy blacks the
right to
vote (a statutory prohibition in
Connecticut and
Rhode Island); excluded them from most skilled trades, thereby confining blacks to the most menial forms of employment; forced them to ride on the outside of stagecoaches and to live in squalid, segregated districts in proximity to crime and vice. If the Negro was “always degraded in the estimation of the community,” Bacon seems purposefully vague about the laws
and customs that actively deprived and humiliated the Negro, so that “the deep sense of that degradation enters into his soul and makes him degraded indeed.” Although Bacon had rejected the
Calvinists’ deterministic theory of original sin, he adopted a resigned and passive posture toward the no less deterministic social forces which, in his view, transformed Northern free blacks into paradigms of moral inability, salvageable only by the shock therapy of physical removal.

Like most other colonizationists (including
Abraham Lincoln), Bacon refrains from censuring white racial prejudice, though as a minister he would take prudent steps to weaken it. Prejudice, he suggests, is the inevitable response to a physiognomic difference made “by the God of nature.” The crucial point, in modern terms, was the way an ethnic division, which often appears between competing but roughly equal groups, coincided with an extreme form of superordination and subordination in a society that increasingly professed equality as a norm.
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Well-to-do whites in cities like
New Haven were happy to mix as superiors with the black barbers and servants who shaved their faces, cut their hair, washed and pressed their clothes, cleaned their houses and stables, and cooked and served their food. But no members of such a servant race were allowed to interact with whites as social equals.
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This merger of class and somatic barriers to “
amalgamation” meant, as Bacon puts it, that “a slave cannot be really emancipated.… You may call him free, you may enact a statute book of laws to make him free, but you cannot bleach him into the enjoyment of freedom.” In these and other passages Bacon merges physical characteristics—the “brand” of skin color or other features—with the effects of social degradation: free blacks are “as a body, ignorant and vicious,” “more vicious and miserable than slaves can be.” Although Bacon sincerely wishes to alleviate the misery and rescue blacks from “the scoffs and the scorn to which they are exposed,” he cannot, when faced with a racially defined “other,” conceal his own distaste, contempt, and fear.
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Clearly Bacon did not think that some racial defect explained the omnipresence of blacks “in our penitentiaries, and jails, and poor-houses…[in] the abodes of poverty, and the haunts of vice.” Nor does he appear to blame African Americans for not appearing “in the society of the honest and respectable”—in the sanctuaries of God and in “the schools in which it is our boast that the meanest citizen can enjoy the benefits of instruction.” Unfortunately, blacks
were “separated by obstacles which they did not create, and which they cannot surmount, from all the institutions and privileges to which the other portions of the community owe their superiority.” In other words, their own physical difference cut them off from educational and moral influences from which they would otherwise benefit. Bacon admits that a few exceptional blacks had overcome every obstacle to moral and social improvement. But the “peculiar circumstances or powers” of such individuals could not weaken Bacon’s convictions about the constraints of race or what later writers would call “the Negro problem.” His views on this subject are particularly revealing since they are uncontaminated by any notion of inherent inferiority; indeed, as a young clergyman Bacon sought to mitigate the depravity of New Haven’s black community precisely because he knew that whites would behave the same way if subjected to the same conditions.
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Although we should not minimize the power and utility of racial symbolism, it is important to note that concerns and anxieties similar to those of the colonizationists could appear in a nonracial setting. At the time of the colonization debates, Bacon’s counterparts in Europe were beginning to discover “dangerous classes” multiplying on what the historian
John M. Merriman terms “the
urban frontier”—the faubourgs that ringed the growing cities of
France and other countries. These marginal people, including ragpickers, hawkers, Gypsies, peddlers, vagabonds, and prostitutes, were described in precisely the same terms as America’s free blacks. Addicted to poverty and vice, they lived for the present moment only, giving no thought to the future or to familial or social obligations. They were, in the words of
Antoine-Honoré Frégier, “the vicious and delinquent agglomerations which agitate the metropolises and in the substantial cities of countries other than France.”
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“Vicious,” with its connotations of vice, ferocity, and animality, seems to have been the favorite term used by both the American colonizationists and the European officials who voiced alarm over the “new barbarians” who imperiled civilization and who were therefore removed as far from the urban centers as possible. The American moral societies at the beginning of the nineteenth century revealed a similar, nonracial concern over premonitions of urban vice and disorder. But, as
George M. Fredrickson has discovered, the first annual report of the
Boston Prison Discipline Society, “an organization for
penal reform, pointed out…[in 1826] that Negroes constituted a disproportionately large percentage of the prison population of the Northeastern states and concluded that ‘the first cause existing in society of the frequency and increase of crime, is the degraded character of the colored population.’ ” In 1828, Leonard Bacon made a similar point about New Haven’s blacks. Despite the extremely low percentage of blacks in the Northern population, racism was so deeply entrenched that it overrode other ways of interpreting and simplifying the disruptions of urban life.
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New Haven’s notorious
Liberian Hotel, owned by
William Lanson, a wealthy black contractor, and located in a factory section east of town known as “New Liberia,” fulfilled the long-standing fantasies of an interracial counterculture. Rumors of lewd entertainment, cheap whisky, prostitution, and a black man who kept three white mistresses, prompted raids by self-constituted posses that “arrested” whites of both sexes but apparently left the blacks undisturbed. The very name “New Liberia” was a mocking reminder that New Haven’s blacks were already “colonized” in a region off-limits to whites.
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Although few people blamed blacks for all the crime, delinquency, and vulgar behavior that preoccupied various reform societies, colonizationists suggested that the removal of blacks would go far toward restoring order and moral values. One further observation will underscore the complexity of this racial displacement. Some Europeans, particularly in England, may have indulged in fantasies about the benefits of deporting the dangerous or marginal classes to a
Botany Bay. For Europeans, however, it would have been inconceivable to think of such unwanted people as redeemable victims who deserved compensation for past wrongs, as potential missionaries who would be restored, as Bacon put it, “to a real freedom in the land of their fathers,” as exemplars whose achievements abroad would even “elevate, in some degree, the character of those who remained.”
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For colonizationists like Bacon, the racial problem absorbed the issues of urban depravity and of imposing discipline on a threatening and potentially disruptive underclass. But, as we have seen, for Bacon and his associates blacks represented something more than a dangerous underclass. They embodied sin—paradoxically, as victims of “the most high-handed outrage that ever was practiced by fraud and power against simplicity and weakness”; as agents and examples of human behavior when the faculties have been totally “degraded”; and
as a providential challenge to white Americans, who could thereby prove their “moral ability” to atone for past wrongs, to escape the retribution of racial or civil war, and to unite in “a great enterprise” that
Bacon compares to “a river whose broad, deep, peaceful streams are supplied by perennial fountains, and whose pure waters, like the waters of Jordan, shall wash away from our national character this foul and loathsome leprosy.”
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Bacon’s wording may have been deliberately ambiguous: he presumably means that “our national character” will be cleansed of a particularly grievous sin; “loathsome leprosy,” like his more explicit use of “the black cloud,” can refer to the institution of slavery, since he expresses confidence that the ACS “will ultimately be the means of exterminating slavery in our country [and] will eventually redeem and emancipate a million and a half of wretched men.”
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Yet in view of the negative imagery Bacon applies to blacks, coupled with the traditional association of leprosy with Africans, the passage also conveys the joyous sense of relief and purification that America can expect when the nation has been purged of nonwhites. The context suggests that Bacon sees no conflict between these readings. He is not proposing that America’s “leprosy,” blight, or sin be transferred to Africa. To grasp Bacon’s meaning, one must take seriously his faith in the stupendous promise of salvation in history. Loathsome sin, far from being the ground for despair, was the launching pad for redemption. For American blacks colonization would be a genuine emancipation, a “death” of social death and moral inability, a rebirth into a world in which the yearning for freedom was not nullified by white mockery and prejudice.
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