The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (38 page)

It is this theme, especially including Walker’s crucial faith in God’s power to help change the hearts and minds of people, that brings us back to
Grimké’s
Address.
Like Walker, Grimké is much concerned with what she terms the slaves’ “mental and spiritual degradation,” though she never mentions the slaves’ passivity and complicity. But like Walker, she would have passionately agreed with Frederick
Douglass’s assertion, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that “The most telling, the most killing refutation of slavery, is the presentation of an industrious, enterprising, thrifty, and intelligent free black population.”
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Indeed, this was the central goal in both Grimké’s and Walker’s pamphlets, along with a racially integrated and harmonious society of black and white Americans, free from prejudice. And both ultimately rely on God to support a revolutionary transformation in both black and white consciousness—a transformation that would transcend the ordinary progression of time and history.
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Walker’s despair over the behavior of his fellow blacks is at least partly countered by his prophetic voice—
Hinks rightly states that he
“virtually equated his pronouncements with the word of God.” After proclaiming that England is the blacks’ great friend, he ends one chapter with the declaration: “O Americans! Americans!! I call God—I call angels—I call men, to witness, that your DESTRUCTION
is at hand,
and will be speedily consummated unless you REPENT.” He affirms that God has a special love for the colored people of the world, who are destined to be the ones who finally Christianize the world. While determined to undermine the psychological foundations of blacks’ individual self-deception and, as in a religious conversion, to free the repressed but “unconquerable disposition” in their breasts, Walker speaks ultimately of a collective mission founded on a special, “chosen,” relationship with God. A millennial vision pervades his work.
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But Hinks rightly notes that Walker’s “stature as an architect of black
nationalism has been overstated, and his commitment to a racially integrated society in which racial distinctiveness would play little role has been relatively ignored.”
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Despite his extremely acute sense of black victimization, Walker several times strikes the note of Christian forgiveness for the past if only whites could recognize black humanity. And he clearly believed that a change in black behavior could help facilitate that goal. Notwithstanding his few threats of black violence and divine retribution, Walker tried in the end to convey a very simple message:

In many ways James McCune Smith became the fulfillment of David Walker’s dreams of the educated and fully liberated African American leader. Despite their difference in age and formal education, Walker’s and McCune Smith’s interests overlapped—from major issues regarding slavery and race to the use of violence, the significance of a contented black bootblack, and the need to respond to
Jefferson’s “Fourteenth Query” in his
Notes on the State of Virginia.
Only recently rescued from amazing obscurity (by historian
John Stauffer),
McCune Smith was “the foremost black intellectual in the nineteenth century,” an ardent abolitionist who “with his polymath curiosity … aimed to elevate his race.”
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Born a slave in New York City in 1813 (his unknown father was white), McCune Smith was formally freed in 1827 by the final
Emancipation Act of New York State. As a boy McCune Smith became a star student at the
New York African Free-School No. 2, an institution run by whites that was also attended by some of the most famous blacks of the next decades. Thanks to his early learning of foreign languages, McCune Smith became fluent in Greek, Latin, and French and proficient in German, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew. Though turned down by American medical schools because of his race, McCune Smith was accepted by the highly prestigious University of Glasgow. During his five years abroad, always scoring near the top of his class, he won B.A., M.A., and M.D. degrees and became well read in the classics and humanities as well as in mathematics, statistics, and science. When he returned to New York in 1837, the year of
Sarah Grimké’s
Address,
McCune Smith was the most educated African American before W. E. B.
DuBois, and welcomed as a celebrity by the leaders of the city’s African American community. In Glasgow, McCune Smith had joined with Scottish abolitionists, living in an environment relatively free from racism, and had become deeply aware of the effects of American racial prejudice, which he considered a system of “caste.”
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In New York, McCune Smith established a successful medical practice, treating both blacks and whites, and also ran a pharmacy. He won respect from white physicians for both his successful practice and his scientific writings. After marrying a woman from an esteemed black family, McCune Smith lived in a spacious house in Manhattan and helped raise his own family. Though somewhat reserved and private in personality, he became active in black literary and reform societies and gave lectures that ranged from highly empirical praise for and justification of the Haitian Revolution to a scientific rebuttal of the
phrenological argument that skulls could be used to prove the
inferiority of the brains of black people. McCune Smith also found time to become a highly prolific writer on a vast range of subjects. Along with publishing pieces in leading medical journals, he became
the New York correspondent for
Frederick Douglass’s Paper
and in 1855 wrote the introduction to Douglass’s famous
My Bondage and My Freedom.
Douglass termed McCune Smith the “foremost
black influence” in his life. Along with friends Douglass,
Gerrit Smith, and
John Brown, McCune Smith helped to found a new political party, the
Radical Abolitionists, and chaired its inaugural convention in Syracuse in June 1855. The party accepted the possible need for violence, exemplified in John Brown’s later plan at
Harpers Ferry, and in many ways fulfilled
David Walker’s dreams.

Like
Grimké and Walker, McCune Smith’s overriding concerns were the elevation of the free black population, transforming the hearts as well as minds of white people, slave emancipation, and the eventual goal of a society of integrated equals. Like Walker, McCune Smith became deeply troubled over the passivity and complicity of blacks who had
internalized a racist identity, but unlike Walker, he overcame this concern in a way that greatly reinforced his millenarian faith in African American destiny: “I freely confess that I long feared the case to be otherwise and almost admitted as true the bitter saying of those who branded us as a pusillanimous and unmanly people, tamely bearing the lash and apparently fit for slavery. But at length that error has exploded.”
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By 1843, when McCune Smith gave this lecture on “
The Destiny of the People of Color,” abolitionism and black resistance had created more grounds for optimism than in 1829, when Walker wrote his
Appeal.
McCune Smith was especially encouraged by the blacks’ success in defeating the
colonization movement’s hopes and expectations, the achievements of black Methodism, and the way blacks in Ohio had responded to the
Black laws that “dehumanized [them] as far as laws could reach.” Amazingly, he concluded with a prophecy that the African Americans’ struggle for liberty would lead to a revolutionary contribution to American culture:

This deep commitment to the idea of historical progress shaped McCune Smith’s landmark response, in 1859, to the Fourteenth Query of Thomas Jefferson’s
Notes on the State of Virginia.
Like David Walker, McCune Smith saw the essence of American racism in Jefferson’s “suspicion” “that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are
inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind,” and in Jefferson’s crucial question, “What further is to be done with these people?” That question would never have been asked, according to McCune Smith, if Jefferson “had been acquainted with the philosophy of human progress.” If he had possessed the wisdom for which he is celebrated, Jefferson would have welcomed the presence of blacks “as one of the positive elements of natural progress,” as McCune Smith had shown in an earlier article, “
Civilization: Its Dependence on Physical Circumstances,” which drew on the writings of
Henry Thomas Buckle and
John Stuart Mill. On at least two occasions, McCune Smith also underscored Jefferson’s hypocritical inconsistency by referring to his long affair with
Sally
Hemings and his legacy of black grandchildren—“living testimony” “that there is nothing essentially hideous or distinctly deformed in a black complexion.”
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McCune Smith fulfills Walker’s hopes by presenting a scientific analysis of the physical differences between whites and blacks—bones, muscles, texture of hair, color of skin—designed to show there were no true barriers that would prevent the two races from living together “in harmony under American institutions, each contributing to the peace and prosperity of the country.” In 1859 McCune Smith could cite the equality of laws in
Maine,
Massachusetts, and
Rhode Island as an example of democratic progress, enabling all men, “including black and white,” to live “in peace and harmony.”
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This detailed exercise followed his challenge to the idea of any “standard” occupied by the whites that was
elevated
above that occupied by the black population: “Is it [the standard] ingenuity in constructing machinery? Is it in morals? Is it in physical courage? Or is it to be measured by the tone a ‘shop-keeping gentility?’ ” “Who is the more elevated?” McCune Smith asks, the master “with a slave-whip
in his hand—or the poor Christian slave, his breast heaving, his eyes raining tears, his flesh rooted up, quivering beneath the lash, whilst he prays to God to soften the heart of the accomplished torturer.” Given the ambiguity of the word “elevated,” the real question was whether “there is anything in the races themselves” that would prevent “a harmonious dwelling together.”
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We may recall that when Leonard Bacon gave a strongly affirmative answer to this question, he cited the repugnant
Indian
caste system and argued that the gap between American whites and blacks was even deeper and more immutable. As McCune Smith took a global view of human skin color, he noted that in India the “Tiars,” “free cultivators” who were only one-third below the top caste ranking, “must not come within thirty-six steps of a Brahmin, or within twelve of a Nayr”—hardly a more egalitarian picture than that of race in America. More to the point, he observed that “In India there are not only many Hindoos with complexion perfectly black, but what is more singular, the Brahmins, even of the highest caste, vary in complexion from nearly white to perfectly black. Darkness of skin and hair, far from being exceptional or inherently derogatory, was “part and parcel of the great original stock of humanity—of the rule, and not of the exception.” True whiteness, on the other hand, was a mark of defect, evidenced by the albino children born of all races. Above all, McCune Smith argued that differences in complexion originated as a result of climatic and environmental influences, and, given constant racial intermingling, there were more differences within a race than between races.
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McCune Smith finds final and dubious grounds for hope in the fact that newspapers, in the fifty years since Jefferson wrote, have adopted the term “colored people” instead of “black” or “negro.” “The class is the same, the name is changed; they are no longer blacks, bordering on bestiality; they are ‘colored,’ and they are a ‘people.’ ” McCune Smith is convinced that this means “a lessening of the distance—a step towards harmony and reciprocal kindness between man and his fellow man—between the black and the white man in this Republic.”
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McCune Smith displayed similar questionable optimism regarding historical progress in his brilliant and scientifically reasoned but faulty essay on the dependence of civilization on “physical circumstances.” At that time, when little was known about the effects of culture, it appeared that racist ethnology could best be overcome by an
extreme form of
environmentalism. With great erudition, McCune Smith examines the peoples of the world and not only correlates levels of civilization with climate and geographical location but argues that the dark races of the tropics quickly gain in both physical vigor and mental abilities as they move into temperate zones. While nature had given them dark skin as a protection against heat, civilization—and McCune Smith stresses that the term means “coming together”—is restricted to temperate climes. As black Africans became “colored Americans,” however, they soon equalled whites in the “physical and mental peculiarities” that supposedly distinguish all American peoples. Refuting any notion of innate racial superiority or inferiority, McCune Smith affirms that so-called
Anglo-Saxons were in fact a mixture of all
Indo-European races, who owed their success to the fortunate accidents of climate and a favorable geographic position. McCune Smith especially stresses the evils of human isolation, the benefits of intermixture, and the unique duty and opportunity facing “colored Americans” who for the first time in recorded history have the chance of becoming part of “civilization.”
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