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Chapter two

Abolitionism

The three decades leading to the Civil War saw the birth and growth of a mass social movement for the abolition of slavery. The abolitionist movement became a significant force in U.S. politics; it involved tens of thousands of active members, and mobilized and influenced even greater numbers. The abolitionist movement remains one of the most important social movements ever seen in this country. This chapter is not meant to be a comprehensive history of abolitionism in the United States. Rather, it aims to highlight some of the key features of the movement: its explosive growth from a marginal movement to one involving tens of thousands; its political diversity as illustrated in the debates and competing approaches within the movement; and its points of intersection and divergence with the currents of Black separatism and radicalism both before and after the Civil War.

In its early years, the abolitionist movement was marginalized, ridiculed, and attacked. As Michael Goldfield notes: “At first, abolitionists were denounced throughout the country, especially in New England. They were stoned, had their meetings broken up, were arrested, and were threatened to death.”1 Abolitionists were unpopular in both the North and South. As Goldfield reports: “Let us look first at their strongest opponents. Leonard Richards has analyzed anti- abolitionist mobs in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Utica, New York, concluding that the rank and file overwhelmingly consisted of commercial and property men, in stark contrast with the composition of the abolitionist ranks in both cities. Herbert Aptheker argues ‘the most avid opponents of Abolitionism were the rich—slaveowners and their lackeys, the merchants and their servitors, the dominant figures in politics, the press, the churches, and the schools.’”2 The Ohio legislature passed a resolution condemning the abolitionists as “wild, delusive, and fanatical.”3 Yet by 1838, one abolitionist estimated that there were more than 1,400 antislavery societies, with at least 112,000 members.4 Thousands of activists, both Black and white, dedicated themselves to the eradication of slavery.

The new abolitionist movement that began to take shape in the 1830s was quite different to its predecessors. The earlier generation of abolitionists was politically conservative and timid. In 1827, twenty-four abolition societies with a membership of 1,500 existed in the free states, and the slave states had 130 societies with a membership of 6,625.5 As Benjamin Quarles points out, “These earlier abolitionists had a religious orientation, a moderate and conciliatory tone, and...a colonizationist outlook. With branches in the slaveholding South, these reformers counted in their ranks an imposing roster of men of means and high public position. No Negroes or women held membership in their societies.”6

These early abolitionists believed that slavery would gradually disappear of its own accord. Writes Quarles: “With rare exceptions...these early abolitionists were gradualists, trusting what they conceived as the slow but inevitable operation of religious and equalitarian principles. They felt that slavery was not to be abolished overnight but that it would certainly disappear in the fullness of time.”7 Moreover, the previous generation of abolitionists was not particularly hostile to slaveholders in the South and often crafted its appeal to them by making reference to the slaveholders’ own best interests.

Many historians date the beginning of the modern abolitionist movement to the publication of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, in 1831. In contrast to the earlier generation of abolitionists, Garrison called for an immediate end to slavery. The first issue of Garrison’s publication made clear how it would approach the struggle against slavery: “I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation.... I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard.”8

Along with the Liberator, Garrison launched the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832. Twelve people, all white, attended the founding meeting and declared the organization’s purpose to be the abolition of slavery and the improvement of the economic conditions of Northern Blacks. In December 1833, Garrison and sixty other abolitionists founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia.

The influence of the abolitionist movement grew, but so too did the number of factions within the movement. Almost immediately, the abolitionist movement split into gradualist and militant wings. The issue of Black membership in abolition societies and the call for “social equality” for Blacks (i.e., whether the movement should go beyond advocating the abolition of slavery to embracing equality of Blacks and whites in all spheres of life) similarly divided abolitionists. The militant wing of the abolitionist movement was itself divided over several questions, including the role of women in the abolitionist movement; the relationship between abolitionists and labor unions; the use of force or of “moral suasion”; and proposals for Black emigration. Of these, the latter two will be discussed in detail here.

The debate over “moral suasion” versus force built to its climax in John Brown’s 1859 raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry. On one side of the abolitionist movement were those who insisted that campaigns of education were necessary to persuade politicians and, in some cases, even slaveholders themselves, to abolish slavery. On the other side of this debate were those like Brown, who believed that only struggle would overthrow slavery.

The Role of Black Abolitionists

While the contribution of Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society to the “second generation” of abolitionists was fundamental, it may be more correct to assign the pivotal role to David Walker, who published his antislavery Appeal in 1829.9 A clothing dealer in Boston, Walker was also an agent for Freedom’s Journal, the first Black newspaper in the United States. His writings share many of the themes later developed by other nineteenth-century Black intellectuals. “We are the most degraded, wretched, and most abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began,” wrote Walker. He targeted whites, like Thomas Jefferson, who spoke against slavery, but were themselves slaveholders and held that Black people were inferior to whites:

For let no one of us suppose that the refutations which have been written by our white friends are enough—they are whites—we are Blacks. We, and the world wish to see the charges of Mr. Jefferson refuted by the Blacks themselves, according to their chance; for we must remember that what the whites have written respecting this subject, is other men’s labors, and did not emanate from the Blacks.10

Walker named four factors for the condition of Blacks: slavery, ignorance, “the preachers of Jesus Christ,” and the influence of the American Colonization Society—an organization of whites that sought to repatriate Blacks to Africa.11 Walker argued that Blacks had to fight for economic and political rights in the United States and therefore should oppose schemes of emigration.

Let no man of us budge one step, and let slave-holders come to beat us from our country. America is more our country, than it is the whites.... The greatest riches in all America have arisen from our blood and tears—and will they drive us from our property and homes, which we have earned with our blood?12

Walker died in August 1830, soon after the publication of the third edition of his Appeal. Copies of his tract were found in Georgia, Virginia, and Louisiana.13 Although his public career was short, his influence was large. The abolitionist movement was to receive its most consistent support from Blacks, and Black abolitionists weighed in on all the central questions in the movement discussed above. But they also brought particular insight to the questions of the relations of Blacks and whites in the movement and to the movement’s position on emigration to Africa.

Henry Highland Garnet, another Black abolitionist, was deeply influenced by Walker’s ideas. Born a slave in Maryland in 1816, he escaped with his family to New York City. Garnet’s address at the National Negro Convention held in Buffalo, New York, in 1843, echoed the sentiments of Walker:

Brethren arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour. Let every slave throughout the land do this, and the days of slavery are numbered. You cannot be more oppressed than you have been—you cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Rather die freemen than live to be slaves. Remember that you are four millions!... Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance!14

Like Walker, Garnet stressed Black resistance to slavery. His evolving political perspective illustrated in microcosm all the key questions the movement confronted. He helped bring to a head the debate among Black abolitionists concerning the question of moral suasion and armed resistance. Garnet, like other Black nationalists after him, initially opposed schemes of separation like the proposals to emigrate to Africa. “America is my home, my country, and I have no other,” he explained in 1848.15 Yet Garnet was to change his position, as did several other Black abolitionists, on emigrationism after 1850.

Martin R. Delany’s The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States is widely considered as the first manifesto of Black nationalism in the United States, making Delany “the founding father of Black nationalism.”16 A Harvard-trained physician, Delany’s early political activity included a stint in 1846 as coeditor of Frederick Douglass’ abolitionist newspaper, North Star, and as a passionate opponent of the American Colonization Society. The American Colonization Society—with a Congressional appropriation of $100,000 in 1819—purchased a strip of land three miles wide and 36 miles long on the west coast of Africa. This strip of land was named Liberia—and its capital was named Monrovia, in honor of then-president James Monroe. However, with the passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Act (FSA), which gave slaveholders the right to recapture escaped slaves even in free states and territories, Delany grew quite pessimistic about the prospects for either coexistence with whites or for abolishing slavery itself. The FSA created a force of federal commissioners empowered to pursue fugitive slaves in any state and return them to their owners. No statute of limitations applied, so that even those slaves who had been free for many years could be (and were) returned.

“We love our country,” Delany wrote in 1852, “dearly love her, but she doesn’t love us—she despises us, and bids us be gone, driving us from her embraces.”17 In a similar vein, he wrote to William Lloyd Garrison, “I am not in favor of caste, nor a separation of the brotherhood of mankind, and would as willingly live among white men as Black, if I had an equal possession and enjoyment of privileges; but shall never be reconciled to live among them, subservient to their will—existing by mere sufferance, as we, the colored people, do, in this country.”18

Delany became the most vocal advocate of emigrationism among Black abolitionists. He continued to oppose the American Colonization Society’s attempt to colonize Liberia, which he referred to as “a poor miserable mockery—a burlesque on a government,”19 and instead argued for resettlement in the Western Hemisphere—including such locations as Canada, the West Indies, Central and South America.20

Delany went further than Garnet in developing a Black nationalist approach and aims for the movement. He argued at an 1854 national emigration convention (an outgrowth of the pro-emigration Negro Convention Movement established in 1817):

Let it then be understood, as a great principle of political economy, that no people can be free who themselves do not constitute an essential part of the ruling element of the country in which they live.... The liberty of no man is secure who controls not his own political destiny.... A people, to be free, must necessarily be their own rulers: that is, each individual must, in himself, embody the essential ingredient—so to speak—of the sovereign principle which composes the true basis of his liberty.21

The struggle for Black freedom, argued Delany, was not “a question of rich against the poor, nor the common people against the higher classes,” that is, a class struggle, “but a question of white against Black—every white person, by legal right, being held superior to a Black or colored person.”22

Delany’s call for Black emancipation aimed at creating a Black elite to replace a society ruled by whites. Foreshadowing the type of appeal that Booker T. Washington later became known for, Delany argued: “Let our young men and women prepare themselves for usefulness, trading, and other things of importance.... Educate them for the store and the country house...to do everyday practical business.”23 By 1860, Delany’s battle cry had become “Africa for the Africans.”24

Delany was also aware that any colonization of Africa would have to involve the assistance or support of one of the “Great Powers.” Delany looked to Britain and France for assistance in the colonization project. “The National Council shall appoint one or two special commissioners, to England [and] France, to solicit...the necessary outfit and support.”25 After all, he argued, Africa was ready for colonization: “The land is ours—there it lies with inexhaustible resources; let us go and possess it.”26

Douglass and Radical Abolitionism

The preeminent Black abolitionist of this period was Frederick Douglass. More than any other abolitionist of the time, Douglass tied the antislavery struggle to a general struggle against oppression in all forms; and, unlike the emigrationists, Douglass saw the Black struggle as being rooted in the United States.

Douglass was born a slave in 1817. At age sixteen, he recounts in his autobiography, he resisted a whipping by the plantation’s overseer. “I was a changed being after that fight,” he wrote. “I had reached the point at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, though I still remained a slave in form. When a slave cannot be flogged, he is more than half free.”27 Douglass escaped in 1838, and soon became active with William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist group. Over the next ten years, he became the most renowned Black abolitionist in the United States. During this period, on most questions, Douglass lined up squarely with Garrison. Like Garrison, he strongly objected to Henry Garnet’s 1843 call for insurrection, arguing it would only end in disaster. Likewise, he opposed all plans for emigration. Following Garrison, Douglass argued that because the U.S. constitution was a pro-slavery document, holding office or participating in electoral activity would be immoral and sanctify slavery itself.

Nevertheless, differences between Garrison and Douglass had already emerged. In 1847, Douglass had started publication of his own newspaper, the North Star, despite Garrison’s objections. “The man who has suffered the wrong is the man to demand redress,” argued Douglass. “He who has endured the cruel pangs of Slavery is the man to advocate Liberty.”28 Other differences of substance emerged. Douglass began to reassess the tenets of Garrisonian abolitionism. He soon came to reject the idea that nonviolent resistance could end slavery. He told a Boston audience in 1849 that he would “welcome the intelligence to-morrow, should it come, that the slaves had risen in the South, and that the sable arms which had been engaged in beautifying and adorning the South were engaged in spreading death and devastation there.”29 Douglass also came to reject some of Garrison’s views on politics and political activity. Instead of the wholesale rejection of political activity advocated by Garrison, Douglass came to see political action as another arena of action for the abolitionist movement, describing such action as a “legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery.”30 Indeed, he came to believe that political action was necessary, and that the federal government had a responsibility to eradicate slavery. He also argued against Garrison’s slogan of “No union with slaveholders.” For abolitionists to push for a secession from the slave states would deprive slaves of their allies and slavery would continue even if the north had washed its hands of it, Douglass argued.31 Until 1849, Douglass claimed to be loyal to Garrison’s credo. But it was clear that Douglass had begun to shake off some of the limitations of Garrison’s politics. In 1851, he made public his break with Garrison on several key questions at the annual convention of the Anti-Slavery Society.

Douglass also extended his analysis of how racism was used to divide white from Black in the slaveholding South to the North, as well. Garrison and his leading followers tended to be upper-middle-class Northerners who reflected the outlook of their class. Their elitist views left little room for a broader critique of American society, much less any sympathy for working people or their organization. In contrast, Douglass grasped the class dynamic of racism in U.S. society. The “poor laboring white man” was “almost as much a slave as the Black slave himself,” Douglass argued. Explaining this view, he added, “The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the Black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony. Both were plundered by the same plunderers.”32

Though Douglass had considerable illusions about Republicanism, he shared none of Garrison’s glorification of Northern society, had none of his sympathy for the very rich, and saw clearly how the North was complicit in the slavery of the South. He put the case most forcefully in a speech on the Fourth of July, delivered in 1852:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.33

Douglass’ denunciation of the hypocrisy of U.S. “democracy” did not, however, lead him to join forces with those who supported emigration as a solution to slavery and racism. Douglass opposed the idea of emigrationism as well as the emphasis that Garnet and Delany put on race. He once said that he thanked God for making him a man, whereas Delany thanked God for making him a Black man.34 Douglass believed that slavery was an aberration from the revolutionary traditions that the United States was founded upon. Douglass had illusions about what could be achieved under bourgeois democracy. He served in a number of government posts after the Civil War even while the U.S. government stepped back from granting Blacks full citizenship. But in the pre-Civil War years, his politics were considerably more consistent and clearer than those of the early Black nationalists.

This short review of debates in the abolitionist movement, particularly among Black abolitionists, allows us to make several observations about the character of the Black struggle and Black nationalism. These themes would recur over the next century in subsequent movements for Black civil rights. First, the political paths that both Garnet and Delany took demonstrated that Black nationalism was not primarily a reflection of their primary aspirations or a reflection of any material base for a Black nation. Rather, their adoption of separatism was a reaction to white racism. When the prospect for Black and white unity seemed possible in fighting racism, as in the Civil War period, both abandoned their emigrationist positions. With the defeat of Reconstruction in 1877 (see Chapter Four), they returned to separatist politics. Similarly, the only period when Frederick Douglass flirted with emigrationism was at the lowest point following the defeat of Reconstruction, when he considered the possibilities of any other form of struggle to be very dim.35

Second, separatism and assimilation have to be seen as the expression of the contradictory position in which the small Black elite under slavery found itself. This class aspired to fully become part of American capitalism, and therefore impelled it to seek assimilation, but the existence of slavery and racism placed severe limits on this process, forcing the elite into a separatist position. Finally, as Wilson Moses points out, in the pre-Civil War period there was no clear-cut distinction between Black nationalism and assimilation. Nationalists like Delany “were dedicated to Christianizing and ‘civilizing’ the African continent and actively solicited the support of whites to accomplish this goal. Avowed integrationists, like Douglass, were willing to participate in all-Black institutions, and defended their right to do so.”36

Revolutionary Abolitionism

Despite its often on-target criticisms of the largely white-led abolitionist movement, the politics that Garnet and Delany represented didn’t offer a militant strategy to confront slavery and racism. On this score, Douglass, the avowed integrationist, was in the vanguard. In breaking with the Garrisonian politics of “moral suasion,” Douglass came to the conclusion that armed force would be necessary to rid the country of slavery. Above all, throughout his career Douglass never lost sight of the importance of struggle. It was this commitment to struggle that led Douglass to see both the necessity of Black self-activity and the need for unity with whites who sought to fight slavery. He thus moved from advocacy of moral suasion to advocating armed resistance. “The slaveholder has been tried and sentenced,” he declared in 1857. “He is training his own executioners.”37

One of the abolitionists who influenced Douglass to question the idea of nonresistance, or moral suasion, was John Brown. Brown’s conviction that slavery was actually a state of war made an impression on Douglass. Douglass writes of Brown, “[T]hough a white gentleman, is in sympathy with a Black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”38

John Brown stood out as a white abolitionist who was never charged with racism. Writes Quarles, “Brown’s relationships with Negroes had been close, continuous, and on a peer basis.... Apparently no Negro who ever knew Brown ever said anything in criticism of his attitude or behavior toward colored people. Brown’s attitude toward slavery and his grim and forceful response to it were shaped by many things, of which his own personal experiences with Negroes was not the least.”39

Brown had distinguished himself as an antislavery fighter in the 1850s in Kansas, where a civil war between pro-slavery and antislavery forces raged in the decade before the outbreak of the nationwide Civil War. The attempt of Brown and eighteen other armed men to capture the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the intent of arming slaves in the South for an insurrection, was certainly the boldest blow struck against slavery before the Civil War. Although Douglass demurred from participation in the failed 1859 raid, he defended Brown, even after Brown and his comrades were executed for treason and insurrection:

Did John Brown fail? He certainly did fail to get out of Harpers Ferry before being beaten down by United States soldiers; he did fail to save his own life, and to lead a liberating army into the mountains of Virginia. But he did not go to Harpers Ferry to save his life.

The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? And to this I answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail, who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause. No man, who in his hour of extremest need, when on his way to meet an ignominious death, could so forget himself as to stop and kiss a little child, one of the hated race for whom he was about to die, could by any possibility fail.

Did John Brown fail? Ask Henry A. Wise in whose house less than two years after, a school for the emancipated slaves was taught.

Did John Brown fail? Ask James M. Mason, the author of the inhuman fugitive slave bill, who was cooped up in Fort Warren, as a traitor less than two years from the time that he stood over the prostrate body of John Brown.

Did John Brown fail? Ask Clement C. Vallandingham, one other of the inquisitorial party; for he too went down in the tremendous whirlpool created by the powerful hand of this bold invader. If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men, for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia—not Fort Sumter, but Harpers Ferry and the arsenal—not Col. Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises.

When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone—the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union—and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown’s, the lost cause of the century.40