The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (64 page)

69.
Berlin,
Slaves Without Masters,
38–41; Hunt, “Influence of Haiti,” pp. 128–30. Hunt reports that in Virginia some ads for runaways said that the fugitive might try to head for the West Indies (243n49).

70.
Matt D. Childs,
The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery,
Kindle Edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), loc. 2522–2555.

71.
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall,
Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 55, 125–26; Brathwaite,
Development of Creole Society,
246–48, 251–59; Mavis Christine Campbell,
The Dynamics of Change in a Slave Society: A Sociopolitical History of the Free Coloreds of Jamaica, 1800–1865
(Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976), 32–33; Heuman,
Between Black and White,
33–41. In 1829, the Colonial Office extended legal equality to all freedmen in the crown colonies; hoping to unite the entire free population against slave emancipation, the Jamaican Assembly granted equal civil rights in 1830. See also Childs,
1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba.

72.
Robert S. Starobin, ed.,
Denmark Vesey: The Slave Conspiracy of 1822
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970); Richard C. Wade, “The Vesey Plot: A Reconsideration,”
Journal of Southern History
30, no. 2 (1964): 143–61; John Lofton,
Denmark Vesey’s Revolt: The Slave Plot That Lit a Fuse to Fort Sumter
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1983); Robert L. Paquette and Douglas R. Egerton, “Of Facts and Fables: New Light on the Denmark Vesey Affair,”
The South Carolina Historical Magazine
105, no. 1 (Jan. 1, 2004): 8–48; James O’Neil Spady, “Power and Confession: On the Credibility of the Earliest Reports of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy,”
William and Mary Quarterly
68, no. 2 (April 1, 2011): 287–304.

73.
Julie Winch, “The Leaders of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1787–1848” (Ph.D. diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1982), 12–13, 235; Berlin,
Slaves Without Masters,
314–15; David Walker’s
Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America,
ed. Charles M. Wiltse (1829; repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 1965), 20–21; Iain McCalman, “Anti-Slavery and Ultra-Radicalism in Early Nineteenth-Century England: The Case of Robert Wedderburn,”
Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Comparative Studies
7 (Sept. 1986): 100–115. Walker associated Haiti with ancient Carthage and with “that mighty son of Africa, HANNIBAL,” but the lesson he drew from both histories was that internal division led to the slaughter of blacks by their “natural enemies.”

74.
Geggus, “British Opinion,” 137–39.

75.
Brown,
Toussaint’s Clause,
151.

76.
Ibid., 140–49; Geggus, “Haiti and the
Abolitionists: Opinion, Propaganda and International Politics in Britain and France, 1804–1838,” in
Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790–1916
, ed. David Richardson (London: F. Cass, 1986), 113–17. While I have borrowed extensively from Geggus’s masterly studies, I am skeptical about his conclusion that the British abolitionists won the argument regarding Haitian violence. They may have persuaded the public that emancipation in the British colonies would not lead to Haitian-like massacres, but they hardly overturned the dominant images of the Haitian Revolution. In the 1830s, French officials, American observers, and even
Thomas Fowell Buxton expressed surprise that British emancipation proceeded without undue violence.

77.
Nicholls,
From Dessalines to Duvalier,
65.

78.
See especially Geggus, “Haiti and the Abolitionists,” 117–37; Hunt, “Influence of Haiti,” 166–83.

79.
See, for example,
The Liberator,
April 25, 1845, 67. See also White,
Encountering Revolution,
207–11.

80.
Nicholls,
From Dessalines to Duvalier,
45; Pompée Valentin de Vastey,
Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères, ex-colon français
(Cap-Henri, Haiti, 1816), 14. Contrary to Nicholls, Vastey’s text does not explicitly point to Haiti “as the first fruit of a great colonial revolution”; he rather quotes Rousseau and asserts that all Europe repudiates the racist aspersions of the former French colonists.

1.
E. W. Blyden to the Rev. John B. Pinney, July 29, 1859,
New York-Colonization Journal
9 (Oct. 1859): 3. Delany had bitterly denounced the American Colonization Society and belittled
Liberia for more than twenty years. When greeted with enthusiasm by the Liberian people, however, he dramatically changed his views. See Richard Blackett, “
Martin R. Delany and Robert Campbell: Black Americans in Search of an African Colony,”
Journal of Negro History
62 (Jan. 1977): 15. It should be noted that the
ACS, which had always publicly disavowed coercion, had also come to accept the black emigrationists’ goal of limited, selective emigration.

2.
More recent works on the ACS, which have shed light on the movement’s complexity while still taking a critical view, include Beverly C. Tomek,
Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania
(New York: New York University Press, 2011); Nicholas Guyatt, “ ‘The Outskirts of Our Happiness’: Race and the Lure of Colonization in the Early Republic,”
Journal of American History
95 (March 2009): 986–1011; Eric Burns,
Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005); Kenneth C. Barnes,
Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Lamin O. Sanneh,
Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

3.
2
Kings 17. Except where otherwise indicated, biblical quotations are from the Jewish Publication Society translation,
Tanakh: A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985); John Bright,
A History of Israel,
3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), 269–76; Hayim Tadmor, “The Period of the First Temple, the Babylonian Exile and the Restoration,” in
A History of the Jewish People,
ed. H. H. Ben-Sasson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 133–38; William W. Hallo and William Kelly Simpson,
The Ancient Near East: A History
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 131–38. The prophet
Hosea’s rendering of God’s castigation of Israel’s sins and threats of terrible punishment became a central homiletic theme in Jacobean England and a main source of the so-called puritan Jeremiad. Michael McGiffert, “God’s Controversy with Jacobean England,”
American Historical Review
88 (December 1983): 1151–74.

4.
Michael Walzer,
Exodus and Revolution
(New York: Basic Books, 1985), 36–37, 73.

5.
Numbers 16:12–13.

6.
Gary B. Nash,
Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 189–90.

7.
George B. Cheever,
The Guilt of Slavery and the Crime of Slaveholding, Demonstrated from the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures
(Boston: John P. Jewett, 1860), 191–95.

8.
Exodus 14:12.

9.
Daniel Coker,
Journal of Daniel Coker
(Baltimore: Edward J. Coale, 1820), 15–17, 27, 31; Tom W. Shick,
Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settler Society in Nineteenth-Century Liberia
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 22; Robert A. Hill, ed.,
The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers,
vol. 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 291. John B. Russwurm, the Bowdoin College graduate who edited
Freedom’s Journal
and then emigrated to Liberia in 1829, also compared himself to Moses and referred to the Americo-Liberians as Israelites. Penelope Campbell,
Maryland in Africa: The Maryland State Colonization Society, 1831–1857
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 172. Although Garvey denied that he had ever called himself a Moses, he referred continually to the biblical Exodus and to Jewish history in general, including the rise of
Zionism. When quoting letters of Coker and other historical figures, I have retained the spelling and punctuation of the specified text, without inserting
sic.

10.
McGiffert, “God’s Controversy with Jacobean England,” 1153, 1157. McGiffert, who sees John Downame’s Lectures upon the Four First Chapters of the Prophecy of Hosea (1608) as a crucial preparatory step toward the revolution of the saints, disputes the distinctions that
Sacvan Bercovitch (see note 11, infra) and others have made between the themes of American and European Jeremiads.

11.
Sacvan Bercovitch,
The American Jeremiad
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Jan Shipps,
Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Edwin S. Redkey,
Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969); Nell Irvin Painter,
Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977); Edmund David Cronon,
Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Hollis R. Lynch,
Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832–1913
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 117, 121. In his two-volume history of religious refugees from antiquity to the 1960s, Frederick A. Norwood pictures Exodus as the paradigmatic event.
Strangers and Exiles: A History of Religious Refugees,
2 vols. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1969). But for Christians, the Mosaic Exodus could also prefigure or “typify” a decisive change in an individual’s life; for example, this is the way John Bunyan interpreted the publication of his own
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.
Linda H. Peterson,
Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 103.

12.
Walzer,
Exodus and Revolution,
16–17, 120, 134; Revelation 21:1; 2 Peter 3:13.

13.
Walzer,
Exodus and Revolution,
77–80, 115, 120–22; Jeremiah 42–44. Egypt fought together with Judah against the Babylonian invasion and even tried to break the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem.

14.
Jeremiah 31:31–34; Walzer,
Exodus and Revolution,
115–20; Bright,
History of Israel,
269–76, 350; Peter R. Ackroyd,
Exile and Restoration: A Study of Hebrew Thought of the Sixth Century B.C.
(London,: S.C.M. Press, 1968), 17–24.

15.
Walzer,
Exodus and Revolution,
pp. 119–20. It should be stressed that Western perfectionism and utopianism also drew on Classical and Eastern sources.

16.
Ibid., 122–25.

17.
Abraham
Lincoln was a notable exception. In a speech eulogizing
Henry Clay and praising the goals of the American
Colonization Society, Lincoln warned, “Pharaoh’s country was cursed with plagues, and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea for striving to retain a captive people who had already served them more than four hundred years. May like disasters never befall us! If as the friends of colonization hope, the present and coming generations of our countrymen shall by any means, succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery; and, at the same time, in restoring a captive people to their long-lost father-land, with bright prospects for the future; and this too, so gradually, that neither races nor individuals shall have suffered by the change, it will indeed be a glorious consummation.” “Eulogy on Henry Clay,” July 6, 1852, in
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln,
ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), pp. 2, 132.

18.
Thomas Jefferson,
Autobiography,
in
The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson,
ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 51; [Jesse Burton Harrison],
Review of the Slave Question, Extracted from the “American Quarterly Review,” Dec. 1832; Based on the Speech of Th. Marshall, of Fauquier: Showing that Slavery is the Essential Hindrance to the Prosperity of the Slave-Holding States…
(Richmond: T. W. White, 1833), 25. On September 10, 1786, Thomas Barclay had written to Jefferson and John Adams from Tangier, attributing the origin of Moroccan piracy to “the expulsion of the
Moors from Spain in the reign of Phillip the 3d. when 700,000 were banish’d from that Country.” Julian P. Boyd, ed.,
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson,
vol. 10 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 346–47. J. H. Elliott estimates that after the edict of 1609, approximately 275,000
Moriscos left Spain (out of a Morisco population of some 300,000). Between 120,000 and 150,000 Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. J. H. Elliott,
Imperial Spain, 1469–1716
(London: E. Arnold, 1963), 95–98, 301; Léon Poliakov,
The History of Anti-Semitism,
vol. 2,
From Mohammed to the Marranos,
trans. Natalie Gerardi (New York: Vanguard Press, 1973), 199. About 160,000 Huguenots fled from France between 1680 and 1690. Jon Butler,
The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 3. In 1824 Jefferson was privately proposing the deportation of 60,000 blacks a year, “the whole annual increase,” for a period of twenty to twenty-five years. Jefferson to Jared Sparks, Feb. 4, 1824, in
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,
ed. Paul Leicester Ford, 10 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892–1899), 10: 289–93.