The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (53 page)

As noted in the introduction and
chapter 1
, black abolitionist
Henry Highland Garnet focused on the issue of dehumanization and animalization when he assured American slaves, in 1843, that the ultimate goal of slaveholders was “to make you as much like brutes as possible,” and when he told the U.S. Congress, in 1865, that the
Thirteenth Amendment should put an end to an institution based on “snatching man from the high place to which he was lifted by the hand of God, and dragging him down to the level of brute creation, where he is made to be the companion of the horse and the fellow of the ox.”
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We also saw that these statements about treating slaves as animals were confirmed by the testimony of countless slaves and former slaves, including those recorded in the
WPA narratives of the 1930s.

Dehumanization and its implications—the need of African Americans to confront and counteract the kind of white psychological exploitation that would deprive them of the respect and dignity needed for acceptance as equals in a white society—has been the central theme of this book. I have long interpreted “the problem of slavery” as centering on the impossibility of converting humans into the totally compliant,
submissive, accepting chattels symbolized by Aristotle’s ideal of “the
natural
slave.” On the other hand, Garnet acknowledged that brutal treatment could lead to some
internalization, some acceptance or contentment “with a condition of slavery,” even if no genetic domestication took place. In
chapter 8
we noted
David Walker’s anger over numerous examples of slaves’ docility, subservience, and complicity, and his appeal to blacks to prove to Americans “that we are MEN, and not
brutes,
as we have been represented, and by millions treated.” Even the relatively privileged Frederick
Douglass recalled that after he had been “tamed” by interminable work and countless whippings, “Mr.
Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed … the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!”
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As we have seen, it was the kind of perceived animalization implied by Walker and Douglass that led to widespread views of vicious, animal-like
Haitian blacks intent on “revenge”; of the supposed incapacities of freed American slaves and the need for their colonization; and of the urgency of black “uplift” and civilization in the North. These issues reached a climax in Britain when black abolitionists helped destroy support for the ACS and basked in the public recognition of their full humanity. As Walker had predicted, despite his frequent despair, “Treat us like men, and there is no danger but we will all live in peace and happiness together.”

In
chapter 1
we also noted the ways in which a white pathology of racial exploitation, of dehumanizing blacks, led to the theme of self-hatred and sense that “You don’t really belong here” in African American literature. Thus, for blacks as well as whites, the essential issue was how to recognize and establish the full and complete humanity of a “dehumanized people.”

While black abolitionists found new self-esteem and acceptance as full humans in Britain, they struggled with their own sense of identity as they felt compelled to inform the
British regarding the unique evils of
dehumanization in supposedly democratic America. How could an escaped slave like Frederick Douglass, whose extraordinary eloquence, intelligence, and decorum made him a great celebrity, convince thousands of Britons that he had fairly recently been a brute? Paradoxically, as Douglass soon came to understand, the more he
focused his attention in lectures on his own and even other slaves’ dehumanizing treatment, the more he would narrow the boundaries of his own humanity.

Yet British audiences, many of whom had never heard a slave or ex-slave speak, usually expected to hear shocking accounts of cruelty and torture. Many white abolitionists assumed, with some condescension, that Douglass should evoke horror and sympathy by limiting his speeches to accounts of cruel and savage treatment. Douglass soon became extremely sensitive to the
paternalistic and implicitly racist approach of some white American abolitionists who felt he was not competent to handle his own financial affairs and who sought to restrict his desire to assert his own intelligence and capabilities—to develop his own “manhood.”
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But, for a time, Douglass was willing to talk of his own scarred back, to hold up actual whips and chains as examples of torture, and to describe seeing a slave woman have her ear nailed to a post for attempting to run away, adding, “but the agony she endured was so great, that she tore away, and left her ear behind. (Great sensation.)”
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Yet Douglass soon toned down his descriptions and even publicly admitted that despite mistreatment, he had been a relatively privileged slave who had escaped the worst evils of the institution.

Some historians have criticized Douglass and other black abolitionists for not expressing more concern over the plight of English industrial workers and the suffering of the Irish at the start of the
Great
Potato Famine of the 1840s. The question might seem even more meaningful in view of the strong ties between a few leading radical British abolitionists like
Joseph Sturge and the
Chartist movement, as well as the large number of working-class supporters who attended many of Douglass’s lectures. But, as historian
Marcus Cunliffe makes clear, the comparison between American chattel slavery and British “
wage slavery” was part of a much larger cultural contest. There is doubtless some truth to Cunliffe’s conclusion that the abolitionist crusade “would have been altered out of all recognition if they had endeavored to direct a dual assault, on both chattel slavery and wage slavery.” Douglass, who called himself a “man of one idea,” was not unusual in concentrating his efforts on the evils of chattel slavery while expressing occasional sympathy for the victims of other forms of oppression. And as Cunliffe shows, some British and American abolitionists, such as
Richard Oastler and
Charles Edwards Lester, became wholly preoccupied with the evils of British wage slavery. In
Yorkshire, a mass meeting congratulated Oastler, a Chartist and MP who held that the bondage of children working in English cotton mills was “more horrid” than colonial slavery, for exposing “the conduct of those pretended philanthropists and canting hypocrites who travel to the
West Indies in search of slavery, forgetting that there is a more abominable and degrading system of slavery at home.”
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The contest between the two systems of oppression began in the later eighteenth century, when West Indian planters and supporters of the British slave trade claimed that black slaves were much happier and better treated than English industrial workers. In 1788 Gilbert Francklyn, a Tobago planter and propagandist for the West India Committee, compared the horrors of Britain’s emerging industrial factories with a preposterously idyllic picture of West Indian slavery. In response to Thomas Clarkson’s celebrated essay attacking the slave trade, which won a prize at Cambridge University, Francklyn asked: Why did the two great universities not offer prizes “for the best dissertation on the evil effects which the manufactures of Birmingham, Manchester, and other great manufacturing towns, produce on the health of the lives of the poor people employed therein?”
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The subsequent spread of highly regimented and large-scale manufacturing, long hours of work, and increasing use of female and child labor gave strong ammunition to nineteenth-century Southern American defenders of racial slavery, such as
George Fitzhugh and
John C. Calhoun, who contended that American slavery was infinitely more humane than British industrial bondage. Since America was soon flooded with evidence of British working-class suffering and exploitation—from parliamentary reports, articles in the
Edinburgh Review
and London
Times,
to the writings of
Engels,
Carlyle, and
Dickens—the belief that British wage slavery was at least as dehumanizing as American chattel slavery was by no means confined to proslavery Southerners. A famous British traveler to America like geologist Sir
Charles Lyell could report, “The Negroes, so far as I have yet seen them, whether in domestic service or on the farms, appear very cheerful and free from care, better fed than a large part of the labouring class of Europe.”
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Of course, the majority of British writers condemned American slavery as a barbarous anachronism. And, as we have already seen,
Cunliffe shows that the opposing views played into the hands of critics of America and Britain as opposing “reference groups”—an
arrogant democratic republic dependent on viciously exploited black slave labor, and an aristocratic monarchy in which thousands of poor factory children worked up to thirteen hours or more a day. Even in the North, many Americans became convinced that
British abolitionism, with its increasing attacks on American slavery, was a part of a massive plot, led by the aristocrats, Church, and manufacturers, to divert attention from British forms of slavery. Even worse, the antidemocratic conspiracy supposedly aimed to undermine the American Union by exploiting sectional divisions and sending British abolitionists like
George Thompson to America to foment discord. Cunliffe cites the extremely hostile, violent response to Thompson, even in Massachusetts, as evidence of this Anglophobia and commitment to patriotic unity.
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This background provides some context and perspective for the way Frederick
Douglass addressed the subject of wage and chattel slavery, which he did on various occasions during his first time in Britain. Since brief summaries can’t begin to do justice to the profundity and eloquence of his talks or the importance of his arguments, I will devote some space to the text of his extraordinary speech at Bristol, where he and
William Lloyd Garrison both addressed a fairly select audience on August 25, 1846. Repeating many points made in earlier talks, Douglass concentrated on the unique nature of American slavery—whose central evil lay not in whipping and other physical abuse, but in a total domination that closed down the brain and soul of every dehumanized individual.
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After asking the audience to attribute his possible lack of refinement to his experiences as a slave, Douglass stressed that he was not there “to trouble them with any horrible details” of his life as a slave, which could be found in his autobiography. His purpose was rather to examine “the wrongs of three millions of his fellow-countrymen in the United States,” where slavery “assumed a more horrible form” than had ever existed in any other nation. Like
David Walker,
Henry Highland Garnet,
Angelina Grimké, and
James McCune Smith, Douglass made it clear he was referring to “the moral condition of the slaves” more than to “the lashing, branding, cathauling, hunting, imprisoning”:

Throughout his speech Douglass noted some reasons that a British audience might find it difficult or impossible to grasp the full horrors of American slavery. In the United States, there was a “class of philosophers” who denied blacks “equal humanity with the whites, and who spoke of them as being the connecting-link between humanity and the brute creation.” In Britain, various writers and others regarded American slavery with some indifference “on account of the political disadvantages under which some portion of the subjects of this country were said to labour.” This was a clear reference to the Chartist demand for universal male suffrage as an antidote to economic exploitation. Showing that he was well aware of the larger debate, Douglass noted he had heard some individuals say, “ ‘Why talk to us of American slavery—why speak to us of slavery 3000 miles off? We have slavery in England!’ ” Largely as a result of ignorance, according to Douglass, some writers diminished the horrors of American slavery by speaking “of slavery in the army, slavery in the navy, and looking upon the labouring population [contemplating] them as slaves.” One reformer had exclaimed, “ ‘Why does not England set the example by doing away with these forms of slavery at home, before it called upon the United States to do so?’ ”

Douglass had already stressed that he had “not one word to say in defence of any form of oppression on earth—not a sentence in extenuation of the conduct of any tyrant on earth.” He wished and prayed “that tyranny and oppression of every kind might have an end (cheers).” Yet in the United States “there were three millions of human beings who were denied the right to improve themselves; the more like brutes they could be made, the more beastly in their habits they could be made, the better were the wishes of the master accomplished—for his desire was to break up as far as possible all likeness to mankind on the part of the slave.” For this purpose, Douglass continued, masters divided families, took the infant from the mother, made it penal for the slave to be taught his letters, or for a woman “to defend her person from the brutal outrage of an unfeeling master.”