The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (9 page)

Yet, as Obama further reflected, “to admit our doubt and confusion to
whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred.” While he overcame this fear, he also felt “there seemed no reason to expect that whites would look at our private struggles as a mirror into their own souls, rather than yet more evidence of black pathology.”
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In dealing with slavery and its subsequent antiblack racism, there has always been a danger of exaggerating a kind of passive victimhood that elicits white pity as well as contempt for a “damaged black psyche.” The image of blacks as psychologically damaged victims can reinforce the belief in white superiority and has in fact been used to oppose racial integration and civil rights.
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As Obama implies and as this chapter was meant to establish, the central pathology is a
white
pathology intent on animalization as a form of projection for the benefit of whites of all social classes. If this psychological exploitation resulted in some black internalization and even pathology, it also evoked black resistance, from the time of slavery to the thousands of ex-slaves in the South who were routinely arrested for “crimes” like vagabondage and were then
leased out by states to work in mines, plantations, and factories, to say nothing of the later blacks who refused to sit in the back of a bus or to step off a sidewalk to make way for white superiority.

It was often said in the antebellum South that the existence of a debased and slavish race made even
poor whites feel equal to the privileged elite. But this was only part of a larger paradigm. A dialectical and historical connection developed between American slavery and American freedom, between the belief in an inferior, servile race and the vision of classless opportunity. Blacks represented and sometimes absorbed the finitude, imperfections, sensuality, self-mockery, and depravity of human nature, thereby amplifying the opposite qualities in the white race. And this parasitic relationship came to be driven by the special nature of the American “mission” and dream of overcoming the limits and boundaries of past history. However conceived, “the Negro problem” meant that blacks were associated metaphysically with everything that compromised or stood in the way of the American Dream—with finitude, failure, poverty, fate, the sins of our fathers, nemesis. In short, with
dark reality.

As we will see, the antebellum decades were filled with dreams
and fantasies of removing or colonizing this black Id, a vision based on the proposition that the Id would become Ego—that the Negro, if removed from the prejudicial environment of America and returned to Africa, would become a civilized
Black American
who would help
Americanize
Africa. But along with the grimmer models of deporting British
criminals to
Australia and expelling groups like Jews and
Moriscos from late-medieval Spain, the biblical
Exodus had been the archetype for countless groups, including the English
Puritans, to escape oppression and search for a Promised Land. If slaves were caged like domestic animals and deprived of any true freedom of movement, would they not need to travel to “free soil” upon emancipation, in order to gain genuine liberation? In the 1820s thousands of American free blacks sailed off to
Haiti with such expectations. And while the overwhelming majority of free blacks rejected the appeals of the white American Colonization Society, there were continuing black
“back to Africa” movements, culminating in the first
African American mass movement, led in the early 1920s by
Marcus Garvey.
Barack Obama’s reference to the occasional black feeling that “you don’t really belong here” is also confirmed by the many black intellectuals, such as
W. E. B. Du Bois, who became expatriates.

Nevertheless, despite the persistence of slavery’s
legacy—the continuation of much black deprivation, inequality, and white racism even into the twenty-first century—African Americans have remained steadfast in their loyalty and commitment to a special American identity. The arrival and reelection of a black family in the White House has signified a momentous change and a generational transformation with respect to race. It would not be relevant for a book on slavery and emancipation even to summarize the slow and incomplete erosion of racism in the twentieth century. Yet given my emphasis on dehumanization and psychological parasitism, I want to mention the long-term interactions between white and black cultures, from nineteenth-century white black-face
minstrels to the role of blacks in professional and college sports and white responses to black hip-hop. If most whites profited from psychological projection, increasing numbers also succumbed to the appeal of “the
Negro Id.” This nineteenth-century opening eventually enabled African American culture to transform popular music and many other aspects of American culture itself.

Race, as we have seen, came to personify blacks’ supposed incapacity
for freedom in the sense of voluntary work, self-discipline, moral responsibility, and civilized behavior. It became the major justification for slavery, often obscuring the actual and indispensable economic value of slave labor. Yet the
Haitian Revolution, to which we now turn, shook the entire New World and conveyed two contradictory messages with regard to racial capacity and freedom. As we briefly saw in the introduction, there were images of docile slaves suddenly engaged in beastly slaughter,
rape, and unimaginable atrocities. On the other hand, supposedly incapable blacks organized military forces that continued to fight for more than twelve years, creating a new independent nation after defeating not only their white masters but the best armies of France, Britain, and Spain.

On January 2, 1893, Frederick
Douglass rose to deliver a speech dedicating the
Haitian Pavilion at the
Chicago World’s Fair. Douglass was intimately involved in planning the pavilion. As the recent United States minister and consul general to Haiti and exposition commissioner of the Haitian government, the now elder statesman was pleased with the result. Douglass called the pavilion “a city set upon a
hill,” invoking the words of the New Testament, and their use by
John Winthrop to Puritan settlers in 1630 on the deck of the
Arbella.
Douglass took the opportunity of his speech to negate the common stereotype that Haitians were lazy barbarians who devoted their leisure time to “Voodoo” and child sacrifice. But what’s more significant is that Douglass used the speech to reflect back on the past century of slave emancipation. Douglass, after all, was born a slave. And he had won international fame through his writing and oratory in the service of black emancipation. As the most prominent black spokesman and statesman of the New World, Douglass had no difficulty in identifying one of the central events in the history of emancipation:

Douglass made sure to note that blacks owed much to the American and British
abolitionists, including antislavery societies in countries around the world. But blacks, he noted, “owe incomparably more to Haiti than to them all.” It was Haiti that struck first for emancipation; it was “the original pioneer emancipator of the nineteenth century.” Haiti had instructed the world about the dangers of slavery, and had demonstrated that the latent powers and capabilities of the black race had only to be awakened. Once awakened, the former slaves of Saint-Domingue demonstrated their strength in defeating fifty thousand of Napoleon’s veteran troops. Not only that, but these insurgents turned to establish an independent nation of their own making. The white world could and would never be the same. Until Haiti spoke, Douglass pointed out, “no Christian nation had abolished Negro slavery.… Until she spoke, the slave trade was sanctioned by all the Christian nations of the world, and our land of liberty and light included.… Until Haiti spoke, the church was silent, and the pulpit dumb.”
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The history, of course, was more complex than Douglass’s depiction. He knew that. For whites, Haiti was “a very hell of horrors.” The “very name was pronounced with a shudder,” as he noted at the beginning of his speech. And indeed the revolution had inevitably had contradictory effects. As an abolitionist from 1841 to 1865, Douglass avoided mention of the Haitian Revolution in his public speeches, debates, and interviews.
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In the ears of his white audiences, the abolitionist Douglass knew the perceptions of the event all too well. For some, the revolution had been an object lesson in the inevitable social and economic ruin that would attend any form of emancipation. For others, it signaled blood—a veritable white massacre, a racial nightmare made real. Yet this did not change Douglass’s conviction that the Haitian Revolution was a watershed event.

Douglass’s address of 1893 contained an inescapable truth: the Haitian Revolution was a turning point in history. Like 9/11 for modern day Americans, the Haitian Revolution could not be escaped, however much its meaning was rationalized, suppressed, or avoided.
The event demonstrated the possible path of any slaveholding society. Therefore, the
Haitian Revolution impinged in one way or another on the entire
emancipation debate from the British
parliamentary move in 1792 to outlaw the African slave trade to Brazil’s final abolition of slavery ninety-six years later. It is helpful, then, to briefly discuss the significance of Haiti’s birth in order to review some of the ways in which New World slavery was being transformed in the Age of Revolution.

It is important to understand that in the 1780s, the French colony of
Saint-Domingue was no backwater of the New World slave system. It was the centerpiece. The colony produced more than half the world’s
coffee. In 1787, it exported almost as much
sugar as
Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil combined. But the “pearl of the Antilles” was destroyed from 1791 to 1804 by revolution and civil war. The
slaves and free descendants of slaves shook off not only their masters but the most formidable armies of Spain, Britain, and France. Douglass made the situation clear. Unlike the American Revolution, which had been
led by “the ruling race of the world” who “had the knowledge and character naturally inherited from long years of personal and political freedom,” the Haitian rebels represented a race that “stood before the world as the most abject, helpless, and degraded of mankind.”
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Haiti’s freedom “was not given as a boon” by the standing powers “but conquered as a right!” “Her people fought for it. They suffered for it, and thousands of them endured the most horrible tortures, and perished for it.”

This heroic achievement evoked little applause from whites, even those who rejoiced over other movements of national liberation. For reasons that we shall explore later on, the Haitian Revolution reinforced the conviction that emancipation in any form would lead to economic ruin and to the indiscriminate massacre of white populations. The waves of fear traveled even faster than the Dominguan refugees who streamed westward to Cuba and Jamaica and northward to
Spanish Louisiana and the port cities and towns of the United States. Throughout the Americas, planters and government officials learned to live in a state of alert.

But fear seldom overcomes greed. Planters in Cuba, Brazil, Jamaica, and Trinidad clamored for more African slaves who could help make up the deficit in world sugar and coffee production left by the devastation of Saint-Domingue. In one of the ironies of history,
the destruction of
slavery in Saint-Domingue gave an immense stimulus to plantation slavery from neighboring Cuba to far-off Brazil. In December 1803, just after the disease-ridden French army had finally capitulated to
Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s ex-slaves, South Carolina reopened the
slave trade and in the next four years imported some forty thousand Africans. As Charleston’s merchants well knew, the defeat of Napoleon’s
New World ambitions had opened the way for the
Louisiana Purchase, which ensured that American slavery could expand westward without foreign interference into the Lower Mississippi Valley.