The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (33 page)
Read The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Online
Authors: David Brion Davis
Tags: #History, #United States, #19th Century, #Social History, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies, #Slavery
But as mentioned, 1829 also marked the publication of
David Walker’s
Appeal,
which Richard
Newman has termed “an exclamation point after this decade of anticolonizationist black activism.” In Boston, Walker served as the local agent for
Freedom’s Journal
and
The Rights of All.
60
While dealing with a broad range of issues involving slavery and the concerns of people of
African descent throughout the world, Walker’s
Appeal
paid tribute to
The Rights of All
and emphasized “the absolute necessity” of helping to circulate the paper:
I adopt the language of the Rev. Mr. S. E. Cornish, of New York, editor of the Rights of All, and say: “Any coloured man of common intelligence, who gives his countenance and influence to that colony, further than its missionary object … should be considered as a traitor to his brethren, and discarded by every respectable man of colour.
And every member of that society [
ACS], however pure his motive, whatever may be his religious character and moral worth, should in his efforts to remove the coloured population from their rightful soil, the land of their birth and nativity, be considered as acting gratuitously unrighteous and cruel.
61
Cornish and Walker were not only vocal black opponents of
colonization but represent a broadening faith on the part of literate blacks in print culture and the effectiveness of the written word in elevating and mobilizing people of color and also overcoming white prejudice. As we have seen, by 1829 this belief already had a fairly long tradition and was related to the history of black churches and secular organizations in the Eastern cities. Walker was highly unusual in writing a pamphlet that actually reached the hands of Southern
slaves, thus igniting a national furor, especially after
Nat Turner’s allegedly related slave rebellion of 1831. But the words of Cornish and Walker were also read by important whites, such as the young William Lloyd Garrison,
62
a would-be reformer who, in the words of historian
David Blight, “came hungry and angry and in need of his own liberation as he learned about the desperation of millions that had been caused by slavery in America.”
63
Cornish and Walker were by no means the only or the most influential blacks who interacted with Garrison, though Garrison’s refusal to identify such influence makes it difficult to reconstruct the exact connections between black and white reformers. As historian
Julie Winch has shown, it was
James Forten and his fellow black leaders in Philadelphia, including the family of his wealthy and nearly white son-in-law,
Robert Purvis, who kept radical abolitionism and opposition to the ACS alive during the 1820s. Aided by the wandering but persistent white Quaker abolitionist
Benjamin Lundy, they also helped Garrison emerge in the early 1830s as the central if highly controversial figure in American abolitionism—the man who launched
The
Liberator
in 1831, published an all-out attack on colonization in 1832, founded the
New-England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832, and cofounded the
American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833.
64
While it was Lundy, a longtime friend of Forten’s, who converted Garrison to the abolitionist cause, it was Garrison’s repudiation of
colonization, which Lundy supported in various forms, that won him the devotion of
Forten. Forten’s continuing flow of monetary contributions kept
Garrison’s
The
Liberator
alive (it then ran for thirty-five years), helped Garrison make his fund-raising trip to England in 1833, and prepared the way for the creation of the
American Anti-Slavery Society. Forten also played a major part in persuading the extremely wealthy merchant
Arthur Tappan, who bailed Garrison out of jail in Baltimore, to sever his ties with the ACS. And Forten played a crucial role in rounding up the black subscribers, who made up some 75 percent of
The Liberator
’s subscription list in 1834. Without that continuing black support the paper could not have survived. Forten also wrote countless letters, some containing confidential and negative information on Liberia, which Garrison printed in
The Liberator.
Forten’s home in Philadelphia became a stopping place for scores of abolitionists of both races.
65
Garrison was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, late in 1805 and was only two when his father deserted the family, putting his upbringing entirely in the hands of a strong and deeply religious mother. He was an apprentice at a local newspaper, began writing at an early age, and by 1828 was editing a Boston paper promoting temperance. That year he met
Benjamin Lundy, who since 1821 had been editing
The
Genius of Universal Emancipation,
the first important American abolitionist paper. Lundy was in Boston to gain subscriptions to his paper and raise support for his cause—during his extensive travels he promoted manumissions in the South and assisted black emigrants to Haiti, even sailing to the island a number of times. Lundy in many ways embodied Garrison’s ideal of the reformer-editor, and their meeting opened Garrison’s eyes to the need for an all-out crusade to expose and combat the sins of slavery.
Garrison agreed to move to Baltimore in 1829 and become assistant editor of
The Genius of Universal Emancipation,
freeing Lundy for other priorities. There is much ambiguity regarding the influences and timing that led him to fuse a commitment to immediate emancipation with an unmitigated attack on colonization during the Baltimore years, from 1829 until his return to Boston in 1831 when he launched
The Liberator.
While still in Boston, Garrison had expressed support for the ACS, while adding doubts about the efficiency of its plan, at a Fourth of July fund-raising ACS meeting. In his first edition as assistant editor of
Lundy’s paper, he expressed similar sentiments, praising Liberia and hoping to see the funds for the ACS “as exhaustless as the number of applicants for removal,” while also stressing the shortcomings and inadequacies of a plan that should be viewed and supported as an “auxiliary,” not a “remedy.”
Yet even in Boston, where he had had some personal contacts with blacks, Garrison had been impressed by black opposition to colonization and was influenced in 1829 by an outdoor black celebration of the British abolition of the slave trade. He had far more interaction with blacks in Baltimore, where he lived in a boardinghouse also occupied by
William Watkins, a black reformer with whom Garrison discussed colonization and abolition. Lundy also took Garrison to Philadelphia, where he met both black and white abolitionists. In addition, in Philadelphia Garrison witnessed for the first time some of the cruelties of slave markets and the physical punishment of slaves, while on a more abstract level, he absorbed the radical attacks on “moderation” in such works as
George Bourne’s 1816
The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable
and the English Quaker
Elizabeth Heyrick’s 1824
Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition.
The latter, reprinted by Lundy in
The Genius of Universal Emancipation,
called for “a holy war,—an attack upon the strong holds, the deep intrenchments [
sic
] of the very powers of darkness,” and eventually had a profound impact in both Britain and America.
66
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.