The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (32 page)

Yet this disillusion had little effect on continuing African American pride in the Haitian Revolution and even on later proposals for black emigration to Haiti. In 1826, when
John Brown Russwurm became the third black to graduate from an American college, he gave the graduation address, on “
The Condition and Prospects of Haiti.” At Bowdoin, where Russwurm’s fellow students included Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, it seemed appropriate for the first black graduate to celebrate both the Haitian Revolution and the future prospects of the republic:

We find a similar optimism thirty-five years later in the
Weekly Anglo-African
magazine:

As historian
Richard S. Newman has emphasized, the refusal of early white antislavery organizations to condemn
colonization pushed black reformers, who were excluded from such groups as the
Pennsylvania Abolition Society, “into the national spotlight.”
⁴⁰
Richard Allen,
James Forten, and
John Gloucester continued to hold protest meetings in the 1820s against the ACS in and around Philadelphia, with Allen declaring that “The land we have watered with our tears and our blood is now OUR MOTHER COUNTRY.” While there was no clear-cut continuity, black organizations opposing slavery and colonization appeared in the 1820s throughout the Northeast and Midwest. Talk of forming national organizations led in 1830 to the first meeting of the
American Society for Free Persons of Color in Philadelphia. Under the tutelage of Allen and Forten, the American Society affirmed the blacks’ “firm and settled conviction” that the problems of slavery and racism could be addressed only on American soil.
⁴¹

The late 1820s have been seen as the beginning of a black Renaissance, with the launching of two black newspapers,
Freedom’s Journal
and
The
Rights of All,
as well as the publication of
David Walker’s famous
Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World
(which we will discuss in detail in
chapter 8
).
⁴²
The newspapers were the creations of John
Brown Russwurm and Samuel Eli
Cornish, whose lives deserve a brief summary.

A mulatto, Samuel Cornish was born in 1795 to free colored parents, probably farmers, in Delaware. After attending a small female-run Methodist school, he moved to Philadelphia, where, thanks to the guidance of black Presbyterian minister
John Gloucester, Cornish underwent the lengthy and rigorous ordination process to become a Presbyterian minister. He probably attended and was certainly very familiar with the 1817 anticolonization meeting at the
Bethel Church. He then worked as a missionary in Maryland and as a reformer in the slums of New York City before founding New York’s first black Presbyterian church. But it was as a journalist—no doubt the most important black journalist before
Frederick Douglass—that Cornish made his major contribution. In March 1827 he became the senior editor, with Russwurm as junior editor, of the first
African American newspaper,
Freedom’s Journal;
in 1829 he founded and edited
The
Rights of All,
and from 1836 to 1842, the
Colored American.
A devoted abolitionist, Cornish was one of the founding members of the biracial American Anti-Slavery Society and held high-ranking positions in the American Missionary Association and American Bible Society.
⁴³

John Brown Russwurm was born in 1799 in Jamaica, the son of a white American merchant and his black, no doubt slave, mistress. The father not only accepted his paternity but brought John up in his household as a privileged mulatto son and sent him off to a boarding school in Quebec; the father subsequently moved to Portland, Maine, and settled down with a white wife. The father seemed proud of John, introduced him to the best society in Portland, and continued to send him to the best schools in preparation for his later admission to Bowdoin.
⁴⁴

Though his father died when he was sixteen, Russwurm continued to live with his stepmother, with whom he had a continuing close relationship. It was not until he went to Boston to look for work and experience that Russwurm encountered the shock of racial poverty and discrimination. Since he had long lived apart from a normal American racial identity, it was doubtless easier for him to think of leaving it. In 1826, the year of his Bowdoin graduation speech celebrating
Haiti, he expressed some interest in emigrating to Haiti and also thought it “advisable,” after talking with friends, to turn down a “liberal offer” from the ACS to take a post in Liberia—perhaps in
anticipation of his defection from the anticolonization cause and decision in 1829 to migrate and spend the rest of his life in Liberia, where he initially worked as colonial secretary for the
ACS.
⁴⁵

By March 1827, when a number of prominent New York ministers and other blacks met at the home of
Boston Crummell (father of
Alexander Crummell) to found
Freedom’s Journal,
a number of pressing issues faced the black community. The
Missouri Crisis of 1819–21 had suddenly exposed slavery as a critically divisive issue that could threaten the very existence of the nation, reinforcing desires to repress and avoid the subject as much as possible. There was also an inevitable tendency to blame blacks for the country’s most dangerous problem.
⁴⁶
The nature and future of antislavery were therefore much in doubt. Since Britain had shown that the mobilization of public opinion, largely on moral grounds, could lead to legislation outlawing the Atlantic slave trade, there was a strong inclination to look to Britain as a model, especially given the stature of such towering figures as
Thomas Clarkson and
William Wilberforce. But by the late 1820s, the British movement for the amelioration and very gradual ending of slavery, begun in 1823, was clearly not succeeding. In both Britain and America, a decline of faith in gradualism was marked in the mid-1820s by enthusiasm for a boycott of slave produce, a movement that promised to give a cutting edge to the moral testimony of individuals. It is a striking coincidence, as we will see, that both the British and American antislavery movements shifted toward “immediatism” by 1830.
⁴⁷

Meanwhile,
Freedom’s Journal
was launched when the ACS was in some ways at its peak, receiving strong clerical support and endorsement from much of the press and from most white opponents of slavery, including prominent future abolitionists. But if most opponents of slavery assumed that abolition was unfeasible in America without some form of colonization, the ACS was officially committed to voluntary emigration and therefore assumed that most blacks could be converted and made to see their own self-interest, especially if they were made more aware of how unwelcome they were in a white society (and assuming that the mortality and other difficulties in Liberia were as temporary as those associated with the founding of
Jamestown and
Plymouth, a repeated argument).

In other words, African American opinion was ultimately essential. But, as the ACS struggled with the problem of recruiting reluctant
black volunteers, for ten years most of the white press cooperated by refusing to print resolutions passed by gatherings of blacks rejecting the ACS program.
⁴⁸
All of which highlights the extraordinary importance of the first black newspaper, which under
Cornish respectfully but lucidly rejected colonization as a plan that would actually strengthen and perpetuate slavery. Even more important,
Freedom’s Journal
provided a voice for blacks, even for a very short period, on a variety of issues related to human dignity and the overcoming of negative stereotypes related to the growing white consensus that the nation would immensely benefit from the blacks’ total removal. According to historian
David Swift, “If there were roughly 1,300 black subscribers by the summer of 1827, it can be concluded that several thousand black people read at least parts of a weekly issue.”
⁴⁹

In the initial issue of
Freedom’s Journal,
Cornish and Russwurm (who as junior editor took the backseat to the more dominant voice of Cornish)
⁵⁰
affirmed the central purpose of the journal:

During Cornish’s crucial six months as editor,
Freedom’s Journal
focused on such matters as colonization, racial prejudice, poverty, economic opportunity, uplift, and temperance, interspersed with curiosity pieces and items of public interest. In the discussion of political subjects, Cornish, in contrast to the later Garrisonians, affirmed, “we shall ever regard the constitution of the United States as our polar star.” Also in contrast to
Garrison, Cornish assured his readers that “It ever has been our object to use the most pacific measures, studiously avoiding every thing that might tend to irritate the feelings of any.” As a Presbyterian minister and a transitional figure in the history of black abolitionists, Cornish was deferential to whites who had shown a long-standing concern for the black community, and he professed a desire to consider facts and give colonization a fair hearing—even while stressing his opposition to colonization “in principle, object, and tendency.”
⁵²
Black historian
Benjamin Quarles concluded that Cornish’s newspapers “generally furnished an accurate barometer of Negro thought,”
⁵³
and he won great plaudits from such figures as
David Walker in 1829 and
Theodore S. Wright in 1837.
⁵⁴

Despite evidence of rising antiblack sentiment and racist responses to
Freedom’s Journal,
Cornish held firm to his central conviction that “We are unwavering in our opinion that the time is coming (though it may be distant) in which our posterity will enjoy equal rights.”
⁵⁵
But
Russwurm, who took over editorship when Cornish left, had increasing doubts on this point and ultimately became convinced that the depth and immutability of white racism presented a permanent obstacle to slave
emancipation—unless some way could be found to remove free blacks. Under his editorship,
Freedom’s Journal
printed more announcements for colonization, including emigration plans for
Haiti, and became less vituperative toward the ACS. Nevertheless, Cornish was greatly surprised by Russwurm’s decision to move to Liberia and his parting defense of colonization in March 1829 in
Freedom’s Journal.
⁵⁶

Russwurm assured readers that though he supported universal emancipation as ardently as ever, the goal was impossible “unless some door is opened whereby the emancipated may be removed as fast as they drop their galling chains, to some other land besides the free states.” Cornish and others had called for an objective consideration of the facts, and for Russwurm the facts were clear. If a state like
Virginia freed its slaves, it would require their removal; in which case Northern states would pass laws prohibiting their entry. This barrier to emancipation could only be overcome by getting rid of “present prejudices,” but “It will never be in our power to remove or overcome them.” Indeed, “So easily are these prejudices imbibed, that we have often noticed the effects on young children who could hardly speak plainly, and were we a believer in dreams, charms, &c we should believe that they imbibed them with their mother’s milk.”
⁵⁷

Despite Russwurm’s attempt to placate opponents by reminding them of his long, hard work opposing the
ACS, he was seen by many blacks as a traitor. The shock and vituperative responses from the paper’s subscribers indicate strong anticolonizationist sentiment among the black elite and probably the black community in general. After Russwurm’s defection to Liberia, the backers of
Freedom’s Journal
solicited Cornish to take back the editorship and continue the paper as a weekly. Cornish accepted, but given the furor over Russwurm’s last issues, the title was changed to
The
Rights of All
(published monthly). Cornish now dealt in more strongly critical terms with what he termed the “chimerical plans” of colonization,
⁵⁸
assuring his readers that Russwurm had not had any effect except in inducing a need for reforming the quality of the paper. Yet much space was devoted to the racial crisis in
Cincinnati, where Black laws and the violent persecution of
free blacks led to a mass migration to Canada, an event that Russwurm could have used to his advantage if he had remained as an editor.
⁵⁹