The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (72 page)

15.
“Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Convention,”
The
Liberator
(1831–65), June 2, 1837, 7, 23 (American Periodicals Series Online, 90); Sterling,
Turning the World Upside Down,
4.
The Liberator
lists the Grimkés as the main authors of the two pamphlets. The women’s
Address
should not be confused with a piece that appeared in the June 3, 1837,
Colored American,
“For the Colored American. An Address,” which had been delivered before the Female Branch Society of Zion, by William Thompson, at Zion’s Church, on April 5.

16.
Gerda Lerner,
The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), passim;
Catherine H. Birney,
Sarah and
Angelina Grimké: The First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Women’s Rights
(New York: Lee and Shepard, 1885), 172–73. In 1838,
Sarah Grimké published
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes,
the first comprehensive statement of feminism to appear in America. According to Birney, who lived with the sisters toward the end of their lives, the two pamphlets distributed by the Convention made the sisters so widely known, and so increased the desire to hear them speak, “that invitations poured in upon them from different parts of the North and West, as well as from the New England States. It was finally decided that they should go to Boston first, to aid the brave, good women there, who, while willing to do all that women could do for the cause in a private capacity, had not yet been persuaded to open their lips for it in any kind of public meeting. It was not contemplated, however, that the sisters should address any but assemblies of women. Even Boston was not yet prepared for a greater infringement of the social proprieties” (173).

17.
Sterling,
Turning the World Upside Down,
13; Karcher,
First Woman in the Republic,
246.

18.
Sterling,
Turning the World Upside Down,
14, 30–31; Karcher,
First Woman in the
Republic,
244–47. In 1838 a larger number of women joined the Convention in Philadelphia, but a hostile mob attempted to disrupt the meeting and then burned down Pennsylvania Hall, driving the group to another location. The local press blamed the abolitionists for provoking the violence by seating blacks and whites side by side, a step toward the much feared racial “amalgamation.”

19.
Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women,
Address to Free Colored Americans,
21.

20.
Ibid., 30–31.

21.
Ibid., 31, 5–6.

22.
Ibid., 4.
Sarah Grimké had been exposed to the realities of slavery from the time she was a small child. The most knowledgeable abolitionists, like
Theodore Dwight Weld, who married
Angelina Grimké, emphasized the same point. Weld wrote that from personal observation in the South, he knew that “atrocious cruelty” “is the rule, not the exception; that those who hold human beings as property will inflict upon them greater cruelties than they do upon their brutes.” Yet such treatment was only “an appendage of slavery” that could turn the public mind “from the crowning horror of slavery.” “At the
present crisis,
the inflictions of slavery on mind—its prostration of conscience—its reduction of accountability to a chattel—its destruction of personality—its death-stab into the soul of the slave—should constitute the main prominence before the public mind” (Weld to J. F. Robinson, May 1 (?), 1836, in
Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké, 1822–1844
, ed. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, 2 vols. (1934; repr., Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), 1:296–97.

23.
Nat Turner’s revolt began on August 22, 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia. As they moved through the countryside, Turner and some fifty to sixty mounted insurgents killed nearly sixty whites, most of them women and children. While Virginia’s militia and vigilantes killed well over one hundred suspected insurrectionists, Turner eluded searchers for sixty-eight days and was not hanged until November 11, 1831, when he spoke of receiving divine revelations and demanded, “Was not Christ crucified?” The traumatic slaughter of so many white families underscored the risks and costs of an allegedly paternalistic institution, and in January 1832 it enabled legislators from the largely nonslaveholding western counties of Virginia to launch a unique and futile debate in the legislature over the future of a labor system that greatly favored the tidewater region.
Samuel McDowell Moore, one of the delegates from the west, “blamed slavery for the loose morals, ignorance, and lack of industry that he believed characterized too much of the state’s white population.” David Brion Davis,
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 208–10; Lacy K. Ford,
Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 369.

24.
Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women,
Address to Free Colored Americans,
17–18. Toward the end of the document, the women implore Northern blacks to resist using violent means to rescue their “brethren” from being seized as fugitive slaves. But the language strongly recognizes the free blacks’ desire and motivation to counter violence with violence as well as God’s own needed intervention: “We marvel, as we behold these reproachful scenes, that the God of Justice has held back his avenging sword. …[H]e will assuredly visit this nation in judgment unless she repent.” Aside from their devotion to
Jesus’s model of nonresistance, the women argue pragmatically that any violent attempts at rescue “can only end in disappointment; they infuriate public sentiment still more against you, and furnish your blood-thirsty adversaries with a plausible pretext to treat you with cruelty … and render doubly difficult the duties of those who have been called by Jehovah to assert the colored man’s right to freedom, and to vindicate his character from those calumnies which have been heaped upon him” (29).

25.
Ibid., 6 (my italics).

26.
Drew Gilpin Faust,
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American
Civil War
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 236–37. The fact that Southerners mutilated the bodies of Union troops and demanded segregated cemeteries and burial grounds for the Confederate dead fits in with the glorification of the Lost Cause and all-out resistance to
Radical Reconstruction, which underscores the impossibility of any effective educational and rehabilitation program for emancipated slaves.

27.
Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women,
Address to Free Colored Americans,
6.

28.
Ibid., 12–15.

29.
Ibid., 16.

30.
Ibid.

31.
Ibid., 32.

32.
My treatment of Walker relies heavily on Peter P. Hinks,
To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren:
David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance
(University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), a book based on a doctoral dissertation I directed.

33.
David Walker, in
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 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1965), 56–59.

34.
There has long been debate, even among historians, over the causes of Walker’s death. While it is probable that no certain answer will ever be found, Hinks presents a convincing argument “that available sources shed no light on the shadowing of Walker, while they strongly support a natural death from a common and virulent urban disease of the nineteenth century.” Hinks,
To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren,
269–70.

35.
Ibid., 86, 111.

36.
Ibid., 85. Hinks adds, “A number of them preferred the dance halls of the North end or the gambling, dog fights, drinking, and sexual carousing that also flourished there and on the north slope.”

37.
Ibid., 213.
William Lloyd Garrison was an exception. He wrote: “We deprecate the spirit and tendency of this Appeal. Nevertheless, it is not for the American people, as a nation, to denounce it as bloody or monstrous. Mr. Walker but pays them in their own coin, but follows their own creed, but adopts their own language. We do not preach rebellion—no, but submission and peace.”
The Liberator,
January 8, 1831.

38.
Walker,
Appeal,
29.

39.
Hinks,
To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren,
xvi.

40.
Walker,
Appeal,
62.

41.
Ibid., 62–63.

42.
Hinks even affirms that Walker “would rush to agree with
Stanley Elkins’s basic assessment that the experience of enslavement in America deeply affected and often damaged most blacks’ sense of self and hindered their ability to create a core identity based on autonomy and entitlement.” Hinks,
To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren,
217–18n34.

43.
Walker,
Appeal,
15, 27.

44.
Ibid., 26.

45.
Eric Foner,
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 317 and passim.

46.
Walker,
Appeal,
27.

47.
Ibid., 28, 17, 30.

48.
Woodson,
Mind of the Negro,
654, 658.

49.
With respect to time, both authors imply a religious sense of
kairos,
defined by
Paul Tillich as “a decisive moment” of qualitative change that must be distinguished from
chronos,
that is, chronological or “watch time.” See David Brion Davis,
Slavery and Human Progress
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 128.

50.
Hinks,
To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren,
228; Walker,
Appeal,
43, 25, passim.

51.
Hinks,
To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren,
249.

52.
Walker,
Appeal,
70.

53.
John Stauffer, ed.,
The Works of
James McCune Smith, Black Intellectual and Abolitionist
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), xiii. In addition to producing this invaluable collection of McCune Smith’s writings, Stauffer has included much biographical information in his prize-winning
The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). As Stauffer points out, one of the reasons McCune Smith fell into obscurity soon after his death in 1865 was that he wrote no book and his essays, published on cheap newsprint, had little popular appeal. More important, his descendants soon passed for white and “wanted him erased from the historical record” (ibid., xvi–xvii). My account of McCune Smith is almost wholly dependent on Stauffer, including e-mails from him, but I have also drawn on David Blight’s early essay, “In Search of Learning, Liberty, and Self-Definition: James McCune Smith and the Ordeal of the Antebellum Black Intellectual,” in
Afro-Americans in New York Life and History
9, no. 2 (July 1985): 7–17.

54.
Stauffer,
Works of James McCune Smith,
xiii, xix–xxiii, and passim; Stauffer,
Black Hearts of Men,
65–66, 86–88, and passim.

55.
Stauffer,
Works of James McCune Smith,
55.

56.
Ibid., 59.

57.
Ibid., 274.

58.
Ibid., 265.

59.
Ibid., 264–65.

60.
Ibid., 275–78.

61.
Ibid., 279. Curiously, at other times McCune Smith seems to have preferred “black” to “colored.”

62.
Ibid., 245–63.

63.
Ibid., 195–99. In 1865, McCune Smith referred to Walker’s
Appeal,
in James McCune Smith, quoted from
A Memorial Discourse; by Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, Delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives, Washington City, D.C. on Sabbath, February 12
,
1865
, with an introduction by James McCune Smith, M.D. (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1865), 52.

64.
Stauffer,
Works of James McCune Smith,
195–99.

65.
Ibid., 187.

66.
Ibid., 199.

67.
Ibid., 189.

68.
Stauffer,
Black Hearts of Men,
135–44. Stauffer points out that despite its failure, the North Elba enterprise was a “dress rehearsal for the project of distributing land during Reconstruction.”

69.
Ibid., 144, 117, and passim.

70.
Stauffer,
Works of James McCune Smith,
xxiv.

71.
Stauffer,
Black Hearts of Men,
127.

72.
Ibid., 157–58. Despite their continuing friendship,
Gerrit Smith’s disillusion led him to make an impulsive remark in an 1857 letter to
Horace Greeley’s
Tribune,
which infuriated McCune Smith. Gerrit stated that “the mass of blacks are ignorant & thriftless,” words that conformed with Greeley’s own racism. In an angry letter to Gerrit, on April 9, 1858, McCune Smith retorted that “the heaviest blow we blacks could possibly receive came from your hand” (Stauffer,
Works of James McCune Smith,
319–20). Gerrit Smith’s disillusion reached a climax in his reaction to the results of John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, which led to his temporary insanity and commitment to an insane asylum at Utica, New York.

73.
Stauffer,
Black Hearts of Men,
168–74.

74.
Juliet E. K. Walker, “Racism, Slavery, and Free Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship in the United States before the Civil War,”
Business History Review
60 (Autumn,
1986): 344–58.
Leidesdorff was born in the West Indies to a black mother and Danish father, became a sea captain in New Orleans, and then passed as a Californian Mexican as he developed an import-export business, ship chandlery shop, lumberyard, and shipyard before provisioning the U.S. Army in the Mexican-American war.