The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (26 page)

What is most striking, in view of the themes we have pursued, is
the way Garnet merged freedmen’s rights with a powerful transfiguration of the
Exodus trope. The amendment abolishing slavery, he noted, could not escape divine notice:

As Garnet envisioned a modern day of jubilee, quoting from a poem that called for “our” Aaron, Miriam, and Joshua, it was not only the slaves or the African Americans who stood in need of deliverance from Egyptian bondage. In the United States whites themselves were yoked to the blacks they had enslaved. The nation as a whole, modeled on ancient dreams of deliverance and fulfillment, could march no further forward than all the victims of its self-betrayal.

Colonizationists and abolitionists agreed that the insuppressible problem originated with the African
slave trade, which Congress had outlawed in 1807. Since the federal government had been able to achieve this significant reform, colonizationists reasoned that national support could be mobilized to undo the evil consequences of the slave trade by instituting a kind of counter slave trade that would return the victims and their descendants to their native land. By reversing an unfortunate stream of history, Americans could bypass a question some abolitionists had posed since the eighteenth century: was not every buyer and keeper of slaves, as
Theodore Dwight Weld maintained, a “joint partner in the original sin” of man stealing, making it “the business of every moment to perpetrate it afresh, however he may lull his conscience by the vain plea of expediency or necessity?”
¹
For colonizationists, this rhetoric of moral condemnation (when not confined to the Atlantic slave trade) could only be counterproductive: it would obviously alienate and embitter Southerners as well as many Northerners and thus prevent any effective action from being taken.

The fear that disputes over slavery would lead to disunion and civil war was greatly aggravated by the congressional
crisis of 1819–21
over admitting Missouri as a
slave state. But in 1823 the
British abolitionist movement, well publicized in America and long dedicated to eradicating all branches of the African slave trade, launched a parliamentary campaign for the amelioration and gradual abolition of slavery in the British colonies. The flood of literature generated by this struggle suggested that the monarchical mother country, which Americans had blamed since the 1760s for imposing on them the unwanted curse of slavery, was at last putting the young republic to shame. Like the British abolitionists, the American colonizationists were confident that a movement led by distinguished political figures, appealing to the highest moral concerns of the nation but also attuned to the need for compromise and skilled at merging diverse interests in a common cause, could eventually find a solution for a seemingly insoluble problem.

In the United States, however, the problem of slavery—the growing conflict between a modern ideology of individual freedom and a system of exploitative labor that served the interests of millions of landholders, producers, and especially consumers—had become fatally intertwined with the problem of race. Since the
West Indian slaves lived thousands of miles from Britain, British abolitionists were relatively free from the issue of racial “
amalgamation.” But, as we will see later, antiblack racism increased in America as the emergence of
abolitionism raised the image of hundreds of thousands or even millions of blacks bursting free from the chains of slavery and assimilating in some way with white society. Ironically, and not accidentally, the focus on race as the major obstacle to emancipation diverted attention from the economy’s parasitic dependence on an immensely profitable labor system.

According to the growing consensus, it was the African Americans’
alleged incapacity for freedom and responsible citizenship, not their indispensable role in the economy as productive field hands, that stood as the major roadblock to slave emancipation. The way problems are conceived and structured reveals much about unexamined assumptions and the issues, such as the economic benefits American whites received from black slave labor, that cannot be faced. While the colonization movement tried to build a national following by appealing to diverse sectional interests, its approach to the problem of race rested on two widely shared but highly
questionable assumptions: first, that the nation would become more prosperous and secure
if free white workers replaced black slaves; second, that even though America’s emancipated blacks were mired in poverty and deprived of education and elemental civil rights, they were capable of creating a civilized, prosperous, and respected society in Africa. Though it is important to keep these assumptions in mind, we should also move beyond contemptuous exclamations over the
colonizationists’ “inconsistencies.” If we wish to know why the movement attracted so many intelligent and sensitive white Americans who detested slavery and who genuinely wanted to improve the condition of African Americans, we must look more closely at their understanding of social evil and the human ability to overcome evil. We can gain some insight into these matters and into the connections that well-intentioned colonizationists drew between slavery and race by examining in some detail Leonard Bacon’s 1823 “
Report on Colonization,” which helped to marshal the antislavery sentiment of New England
Congregationalists behind the national movement. The space I devote to Bacon does not mean that I consider him a more important figure than such supporters of colonization as
Henry Clay or Abraham Lincoln. Rather, I think that Bacon will help illuminate a much-neglected state of mind held by a significant number of white Northerners, as well as crucial connections between slavery and historical conceptions of original sin that I have discussed in earlier books.

The son of a Connecticut missionary and a graduate of Yale College and Andover Theological Seminary, Bacon became at age twenty-three the minister at
New Haven’s Center Church, whose congregation included such notable figures as Eli Whitney, Noah Webster, and Senator James Hillhouse, as well as many members of the Yale faculty. In the 1840s, after Bacon had become nationally prominent as a clerical leader, critic of slavery, and advocate of African American education and uplift, he recalled that in 1823 he had strongly endorsed the views of the British abolitionists and had learned much from their reports and pamphlets. In his own influential “Report” of 1823, written when he was still a student at Andover on behalf of a committee appointed by the
Society of Inquiry Respecting Missions, he clearly identified himself with the cause of
Wilberforce and
Clarkson, whose “unwearied labors” and “cry against the wrongs of Africa” had led not only to the abolition of the slave trade by “every Christian power in both continents” but to “a total revolution in public sentiment”
regarding “the most high-handed outrage that ever was practiced by fraud and power against simplicity and weakness.”
²

In 1823, Bacon called on American philanthropists to “summon up their energies to a like effort,” and predicted that “the same spirit which answered to the plea of
Wilberforce” would enable benevolent Americans to arouse the nation, alleviate great evils, and delay “if not utterly prevent” some ominous “final catastrophe” related to “the evils attendant on the circumstances of our black population.” This vague and awkward phrasing reveals Bacon’s uncertainty over the precise nature of “the evils” and the people responsible for them, as well as the tension he felt as he struggled to find a formula that would “excite” public opinion and lead to effective reform without evoking a “feverish, half-delirious excitement like that produced by the agitation of the
Missouri question.”
³
Aside from the aftershocks left by the Missouri confrontation, Bacon was proposing active clerical involvement in a social and political movement at a transitional moment in the history of the so-called benevolent empire of missionary and reform societies. The official
Congregationalist establishment, challenged and weakened by
Unitarians in
Massachusetts, had been unseated in
Connecticut in 1818 by a coalition of religious and political dissidents. A vast network of Congregationalist-
Presbyterian moral societies, long committed to using coercive methods in their campaigns against Sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, and sexual immorality, had also collapsed.
⁴
But as young ministers like Bacon came to terms with religious toleration and the power of public opinion, they could draw comfort from the growing success of religious revivals and the apparent conquest of atheistic “infidelity”; from the public enthusiasm for missionary enterprises and for such national institutions as the
American Bible Society; and from theological innovations that made increasing room for individual initiative even within the bleak cellblock of
Calvinism.
⁵

For all his circumlocutions, Bacon depicts black slavery in America as the prime evil, the nation’s fatal defect, the cause from which racial degradation “is only a single necessary consequence.” To understand Bacon’s approach to race, we must first consider the particular evils he finds in American slavery and the connection between such evils and the doctrine of sin. According to Bacon, Andover’s ministers and missionaries needed to convince the public that slavery in America was far more iniquitous than the slavery of antiquity or of modern
Asia and Africa. In no pagan, Islamic, or Christian country, with the single exception of the West Indies, was slavery “so terrible in its character, so pernicious in its tendency, so remediless in its anticipated results, as the slavery which exists in these United States.” Bacon hastens to explain that the evil he has in mind had nothing to do with physical well-being or even with floggings and bodily suffering. For the most part, he is willing to concede, the material standard of living of American slaves—their “mere animal existence”—presented no grounds for complaint. Allowing for some exceptions, “the condition of a slave, in most parts of the United States, is generally as much superior to that of a slave in the West Indies, as the condition of an American farmer is to that of an Irish peasant.”
⁶

One explanation for the pernicious and ominous character of slavery in the United States, according to Bacon, lay in the blatant contradiction between human bondage and “the primary principles of our republican government.” Although Bacon was hardly a moral relativist, he concludes that slavery was perfectly consistent with the tyrannical systems of government in the Old World and even with the more democratic principles of
ancient Greece and
Rome. If slavery was a shocking anachronism in the United States, as Bacon indicates, it had become a political evil only in modern times. A similar point extends to stages of economic development. Ignoring the economic benefits of slave labor to the nation as a whole, Bacon likens slaves to “the degraded serfs of a Polish aristocracy” and suggests that
Virginia might rival New England’s enterprise and wealth if only her 425,000 slaves were replaced by a free and independent yeomanry who “in blood and complexion, as well as in immunities and enjoyments, should be one with the proudest of her children.”
⁷
Even apart from the desire for racial homogeneity, most American commentators shared this republican conviction that slavery subverted the nation’s prospects for balanced economic growth and prosperity, at least in the longer term.