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PART I
Cotton Mather CHAPTER 1 Human Hierarchy
THEY WEATHERED BRUTAL WINTERS, suffered diseases, and learned to cope with the resisting Native Americans. But nothing brought more destruction to Puritan settlements than the Great Hurricane of 1635. On August 16, 1635, the hurricane—today judged to be perhaps Category 3— thundered up the Atlantic Coast, brushing Jamestown and passing over eastern Long Island. The storm’s eye glanced at Providence to the east and moved inland, snatching up thousands of trees like weeds. In the seven-yearold Massachusetts Bay Colony, the hurricane smashed down English homes as if they were ants, before reaching the Atlantic Ocean and swinging knockout waves onto the New England shores.
Large ships from England transporting settlers and supplies were sitting ducks. Seamen anchored one ship, the James, off the coast of New Hampshire to wait out the hurricane. Suddenly, a powerful wave sliced the ship’s anchors and cables like an invisible knife. Seamen slashed the third cable in distress and hoisted sail to cruise back out to a safer sea. The winds smashed the new sail into “rotten rags,” recorded notable Puritan minister Richard Mather in his diary. As the rags disappeared into the ocean, so did hope.
Abducted now by the hurricane, the ship headed toward a mighty rock.
All seemed lost. Richard Mather and fellow passengers cried out to the Lord for deliverance. Using “his own immediate good hand,” God guided the ship around the mighty rock, Mather later testified. The sea calmed. The crew hurriedly rigged the ship with new sails. The Lord blew “a fresh gale of wind,” allowing the captain to navigate away from danger. The battered James arrived in Boston on August 17, 1635. All one hundred passengers credited God for their survival. Richard Mather took the deliverance as a charge “to walk uprightly before him as long as we live.” 1 As a Puritan minister, Richard Mather had walked uprightly through fifteen years of British persecution before embarking on the perilous journey across the Atlantic to begin life anew in New England. There, he would be reunited with his illustrious ministerial friend John Cotton, who had faced British persecution for twenty years in Boston, England. In 1630, Cotton had given the farewell sermon to hundreds of Puritan founders of New England communities, blessing their fulfillment of God’s prophetic vision. As dissenters from the Church of England, Puritans believed themselves to be God’s chosen piece of humanity, a special, superior people, and New England, their Israel, was to be their exceptional land.
2 Within a week of the Great Hurricane, Richard Mather was installed as pastor of Dorchester’s North Church near the renowned North Church of the new Boston, which was pastored by John Cotton. Mather and Cotton then embarked on a sacred mission to create, articulate, and defend the New England Way. They used their pens as much as their pulpits, and they used their power as much as their pens and pulpits. They penned the colonies’ first adult and children’s books as part of this endeavor. Mather, in all likelihood, steered the selection of Henry Dunster to lead colonial America’s first college, Harvard’s forerunner, in 1640. And Cotton did not mind when Dunster fashioned Harvard’s curriculum after their alma mater, Cambridge, setting off an ideological trend. Like the founders of Cambridge and Harvard before them, the founders of William & Mary (1693), Yale (1701), the University of Pennsylvania (1740), Princeton (1746), Columbia (1754), Brown (1764), Rutgers (1766), and Dartmouth (1769)—the other eight colonial colleges—regarded ancient Greek and Latin literature as universal truths worthy of memorization and unworthy of critique. At the center of the Old and New England Greek library hailed the resurrected Aristotle, who had come under suspicion as a threat to doctrine among some factions in Christianity during the medieval period.
3 In studying Aristotle’s philosophy, Puritans learned rationales for human hierarchy, and they began to believe that some groups were superior to other groups. In Aristotle’s case, ancient Greeks were superior to all non-Greeks.
But Puritans believed they were superior to Native Americans, the African people, and even Anglicans—that is, all non-Puritans. Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BCE, concocted a climate theory to justify Greek superiority, saying that extreme hot or cold climates produced intellectually, physically, and morally inferior people who were ugly and lacked the capacity for freedom and self-government. Aristotle labeled Africans “burnt faces”—the original meaning in Greek of “Ethiopian”—and viewed the “ugly” extremes of pale or dark skins as the effect of the extreme cold or hot climates. All of this was in the interest of normalizing Greek slaveholding practices and Greece’s rule over the western Mediterranean. Aristotle situated the Greeks, in their supreme, intermediate climate, as the most beautifully endowed superior rulers and enslavers of the world. “Humanity is divided into two: the masters and the slaves; or, if one prefers it, the Greeks and the Barbarians, those who have the right to command; and those who are born to obey,” Aristotle said. For him, the enslaved peoples were “by nature incapable of reasoning and live a life of pure sensation, like certain tribes on the borders of the civilized world, or like people who are diseased through the onset of illnesses like epilepsy or madness.” 4 By the birth of Christ or the start of the Common Era, Romans were justifying their slaveholding practices using Aristotle’s climate theory, and soon the new Christianity began to contribute to these arguments. For early Christian theologians—whom Puritans studied alongside Aristotle—God ordained the human hierarchy. St. Paul introduced, in the first century, a threetiered hierarchy of slave relations—heavenly master (top), earthly master (middle), enslaved (bottom). “He who was free when called is a slave of Christ,” he testified in 1 Corinthians. “Slaves” were to “obey in everything those that are your earthly masters, not with eyeservice as men-pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing the Lord.” In a crucial caveat in Galatians 3:28, St. Paul equalized the souls of masters and slaves as “all one in Christ Jesus.” All in all, ethnic and religious and color prejudice existed in the ancient world. Constructions of races—White Europe, Black Africa, for instance— did not, and therefore racist ideas did not. But crucially, the foundations of race and racist ideas were laid. And so were the foundations for egalitarianism, antiracism, and antislavery laid in Greco-Roman antiquity.
“The deity gave liberty to all men, and nature created no one a slave,” wrote Alkidamas, Aristotle’s rival in Athens. When Herodotus, the foremost historian of ancient Greece, traveled up the Nile River, he found the Nubians “the most handsome of peoples.” Lactantius, an adviser to Constantine I, the first Christian Roman emperor, announced early in the fourth century: “God who creates and inspires men wished them all to be fair, that is, equal.” St.
Augustine, an African church father in the fourth and fifth centuries, maintained that “whoever is born anywhere as a human being, that is, as a rational mortal creature, however strange he may appear to our senses in bodily form or colour or motion or utterance, or in any faculty, part or quality of his nature whatsoever, let no true believer have any doubt that such an individual is descended from the one man who was first created.” However, these antislavery and egalitarian champions did not accompany Aristotle and St. Paul into the modern era, into the new Harvard curriculum, or into the New England mind seeking to justify slavery and the racial hierarchy it produced.
5 When John Cotton drafted New England’s first constitution in 1636, Moses his judicials, he legalized the enslavement of captives taken in just wars as well as “such strangers as willingly selle themselves or are sold to us.” The New England way imitated the Old England way on slavery. Cotton reproduced the policies of his British peers close and far away. In 1636, Barbados officials announced that “Negroes and Indians that come here to be sold, should serve for Life, unless a Contract was before made to the contrary.” 6 The Pequot War, the first major war between the New England colonists and the area’s indigenous peoples, erupted in 1637. Captain William Pierce forced some indigenous war captives onto the Desire, the first slaver to leave British North America. The ship sailed to the Isla de Providencia off Nicaragua, where “Negroes” were reportedly “being . . . kept as perpetuall servants.” Massachusetts governor John Winthrop recorded Captain Pierce’s historic arrival back into Boston in 1638, noting that his ship was hauling “salt, cotton, tobacco and Negroes.” 7 The first generation of Puritans began rationalizing the enslavement of these “Negroes” without skipping a Christian beat. Their chilling nightmares of persecution were not the only hallucinations the Puritans had carried over the Atlantic waters in their minds to America. From the first ships that landed in Virginia in 1607, to the ships that survived the Great Hurricane of 1635, to the first slave ships, some British settlers of colonial America carried across the sea Puritan, biblical, scientific, and Aristotelian rationalizations of slavery and human hierarchy. From Western Europe and the new settlements in Latin America, some Puritans carried across their judgment of the many African peoples as one inferior people. They carried across racist ideas—racist ideas that preceded American slavery, because the need to justify African slavery preceded colonial America.
AFTER ARAB MUSLIMS conquered parts of North Africa, Portugal, and Spain during the seventh century, Christians and Muslims battled for centuries over the prize of Mediterranean supremacy. Meanwhile, below the Sahara Desert, the West African empires of Ghana (700–1200), Mali (1200–1500), and Songhay (1350–1600) were situated at the crossroads of the lucrative trade routes for gold and salt. A robust trans-Saharan trade emerged, allowing Europeans to obtain West African goods through Muslim intermediaries.
Ghana, Mali, and Songhay developed empires that could rival in size, power, scholarship, and wealth any in the world. Intellectuals at universities in Timbuktu and Jenne pumped out scholarship and pumped in students from around West Africa. Songhay grew to be the largest. Mali may have been the most illustrious. The world’s greatest globe-trotter of the fourteenth century, who trotted from North Africa to Eastern Europe to Eastern Asia, decided to see Mali for himself in 1352. “There is complete security in their country,” Moroccan Ibn Battuta marveled in his travel notes. “Neither traveler nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence.” 8 Ibn Battuta was an oddity—an abhorred oddity—among the Islamic intelligentsia in Fez, Morocco. Hardly any scholars had traveled far from home, and Battuta’s travel accounts threatened their own armchair credibility in depicting foreigners. None of Battuta’s antagonists was more influential than the intellectual tower of the Muslim world at that time, Tunisian Ibn Khaldun, who arrived in Fez just as Battuta returned from Mali. “People in the dynasty (in official positions) whispered to each other that he must be a liar,” Khaldun revealed in 1377 in The Muqaddimah, the foremost Islamic history of the premodern world. Khaldun then painted a very different picture of sub-Sahara Africa in The Muqaddimah: “The Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery,” Khaldun surmised, “because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.” And the “same applies to the Slavs,” argued this disciple of Aristotle. Following Greek and Roman justifiers, Khaldun used climate theory to justify Islamic enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans and Eastern European Slavs—groups sharing only one obvious characteristic: their remoteness. “All their conditions are remote from those of human beings and close to those of wild animals,” Khaldun suggested. Their inferior conditions were neither permanent nor hereditary, however. “Negroes” who migrated to the cooler north were “found to produce descendants whose colour gradually turns white,” Khaldun stressed. Dark-skinned people had the capacity for physical assimilation in a colder climate. Later, cultural assimilationists would imagine that culturally inferior African people, placed in the proper European cultural environment, could or should adopt European culture. But first physical assimilationists like Khaldun imagined that physically inferior African people, placed in the proper cold environment, could or should adopt European physicality: white skin and straight hair.
9 Ibn Khaldun did not intend merely to demean African people as inferior.
He intended to belittle all the different-looking African and Slavic peoples whom the Muslims were trading as slaves. Even so, he reinforced the conceptual foundation for racist ideas. On the eve of the fifteenth century, Khaldun helped bolster the foundation for assimilationist ideas, for racist notions of the environment producing African inferiority. All an enslaver had to do was to stop justifying Slavic slavery and inferiority using climate theory, and focus the theory on African people, for the racist attitude toward darkskinned people to be complete.
There was one enslavement theory focused on Black people already circulating, a theory somehow derived from Genesis 9:18–29, which said “that Negroes were the children of Ham, the son of Noah, and that they were singled out to be black as the result of Noah’s curse, which produced Ham’s colour and the slavery God inflicted upon his descendants,” as Khaldun explained. The lineage of this curse of Ham theory curves back through the great Persian scholar Tabari (838–923) all the way to Islamic and Hebrew sources. God had permanently cursed ugly Blackness and slavery into the very nature of African people, curse theorists maintained. As strictly a climate theorist, Khaldun discarded the “silly story” of the curse of Ham.
10 Although it clearly supposed Black inferiority, the curse theory was like an unelected politician during the medieval period. Muslim and Christian enslavers hardly gave credence to the curse theory: they enslaved too many non-Black descendants of Shem and Japheth, Ham’s supposed non-cursed brothers, for that. But the medieval curse theorists laid the foundation for segregationist ideas and for racist notions of Black genetic inferiority. The shift to solely enslaving Black people, and justifying it using the curse of Ham, was in the offing. Once that shift occurred, the disempowered curse theory became empowered, and racist ideas truly came into being.
11 CHAPTER 2 Origins of Racist Ideas
RICHARD MATHER AND John Cotton inherited from the English thinkers of their generation the old racist ideas that African slavery was natural and normal and holy. These racist ideas were nearly two centuries old when Puritans used them in the 1630s to legalize and codify New England slavery —and Virginians had done the same in the 1620s. Back in 1415, Prince Henry and his brothers had convinced their father, King John of Portugal, to capture the principal Muslim trading depot in the western Mediterranean: Ceuta, on the northeastern tip of Morocco. These brothers were envious of Muslim riches, and they sought to eliminate the Islamic middleman so that they could find the southern source of gold and Black captives.
After the battle, Moorish prisoners left Prince Henry spellbound as they detailed trans-Saharan trade routes down into the disintegrating Mali Empire.
Since Muslims still controlled these desert routes, Prince Henry decided to “seek the lands by the way of the sea.” He sought out those African lands until his death in 1460, using his position as the Grand Master of Portugal’s wealthy Military Order of Christ (successor of the Knights Templar) to draw venture capital and loyal men for his African expeditions.
In 1452, Prince Henry’s nephew, King Afonso V, commissioned Gomes Eanes de Zurara to write a biography of the life and slave-trading work of his “beloved uncle.” Zurara was a learned and obedient commander in Prince Henry’s Military Order of Christ. In recording and celebrating Prince Henry’s life, Zurara was also implicitly obscuring his Grand Master’s monetary decision to exclusively trade in African slaves. In 1453, Zurara finished the inaugural defense of African slave-trading, the first European book on Africans in the modern era. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea begins the recorded history of anti-Black racist ideas. Zurara’s inaugural racist ideas, in other words, were a product of, not a producer of, Prince Henry’s racist policies concerning African slave-trading.
1 The Portuguese made history as the first Europeans to sail along the Atlantic beyond the Western Sahara’s Cape Bojador in order to bring enslaved Africans back to Europe, as Zurara shared in his book. The six caravels, carrying 240 captives, arrived in Lagos, Portugal, on August 6, 1444. Prince Henry made the slave auction into a spectacle to show the Portuguese had joined the European league of serious slave-traders of African people. For some time, the Genoese of Italy, the Catalans of northern Spain, and the Valencians of eastern Spain had been raiding the Canary Islands or purchasing African slaves from Moroccan traders. Zurara distinguished the Portuguese by framing their African slave-trading ventures as missionary expeditions.
Prince Henry’s competitors could not play that mind game as effectively as he did, in all likelihood because they still traded so many Eastern Europeans.
2 But the market was changing. Around the time the Portuguese opened their sea route to a new slave export area, the old slave export area started to close up. In Ibn Khaldun’s day, most of the captives sold in Western Europe were Eastern Europeans who had been seized by Turkish raiders from areas around the Black Sea. So many of the seized captives were “Slavs” that the ethnic term became the root word for “slave” in most Western European languages. By the mid-1400s, Slavic communities had built forts against slave raiders, causing the supply of Slavs in Western Europe’s slave market to plunge at around the same time that the supply of Africans was increasing. As a result, Western Europeans began to see the natural Slav(e) not as White, but Black.
3
THE CAPTIVES IN 1444 disembarked from the ship and marched to an open space outside of the city, according to Zurara’s chronicle. Prince Henry oversaw the slave auction, mounted on horseback, beaming in delight. Some of the captives were “white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned,” while others were “like mulattoes,” Zurara reported. Still others were “as black as Ethiops, and so ugly” that they almost appeared as visitors from Hell.
The captives included people in the many shades of the Tuareg Moors as well as the dark-skinned people whom the Tuareg Moors may have enslaved.
Despite their different ethnicities and skin colors, Zurara viewed them as one people—one inferior people.
4 Zurara made it a point to remind his readers that Prince Henry’s “chief riches” in quickly seizing forty-six of the most valuable captives “lay in his own purpose; for he reflected with great pleasure upon the salvation of those souls that before were lost.” In building up Prince Henry’s evangelical justification for enslaving Africans, Zurara reduced these captives to barbarians who desperately needed not only religious but also civil salvation.
“They lived like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings,” he wrote. What’s more, “they have no knowledge of bread or wine, and they were without covering of clothes, or the lodgement of houses; and worse than all, they had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in bestial sloth.” In Portugal, their lot was “quite the contrary of what it had been.” Zurara imagined slavery in Portugal as an improvement over their free state in Africa.
5 Zurara’s narrative covered from 1434 to 1447. During that period, Zurara estimated, 927 enslaved Africans were brought to Portugal, “the greater part of whom were turned into the true path of salvation.” Zurara failed to mention that Prince Henry received the royal fifth (quinto), or about 185 of those captives, for his immense fortune. But that was irrelevant to his mission, a mission he accomplished. For convincing readers, successive popes, and the reading European world that Prince Henry’s Portugal did not engage in the slave trade for money, Zurara was handsomely rewarded as Portugal’s chief royal chronicler, and he was given two more lucrative commanderships in the Military Order of Christ. Zurara’s bosses quickly reaped returns from their slave trading. In 1466, a Czech traveler noticed that the king of Portugal was making more selling captives to foreigners “than from all the taxes levied on the entire kingdom.” 6 Zurara circulated the manuscript of The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea to the royal court as well as to scholars, investors, and captains, who then read and circulated it throughout Portugal and Spain.
Zurara died in Lisbon in 1474, but his ideas about slavery endured as the slave trade expanded. By the 1490s, Portuguese explorers had crept southward along the West African coast, rounding the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean. In their growing networks of ports, agents, ships, crews, and financiers, pioneering Portuguese slave-traders and explorers circulated the racist ideas in Zurara’s book faster and farther than the text itself had reached. The Portuguese became the primary source of knowledge on unknown Africa and the African people for the original slave-traders and enslavers in Spain, Holland, France, and England. By the time German printer Valentim Fernandes published an abridged version of Zurara’s book in Lisbon in 1506, enslaved Africans—and racist ideas—had arrived in the Americas.
7
IN 1481, THE PORTUGUESE began building a large fort, São Jorge da Mina, known simply as Elmina, or “the mine,” as part of their plan to acquire Ghanaian gold. In due time, this European building, the first known to be erected south of the Sahara, became West Africa’s largest slave-trading post, the nucleus of Portugal’s operations in West Africa. A Genoese explorer barely three decades old may have witnessed the erection of Elmina Castle.
Christopher Columbus, newly married to the daughter of a Genoese protégé of Prince Henry, desired to make his own story—but not in Africa. He looked instead to East Asia, the source of spices. After Portuguese royalty refused to sponsor his daring westward expedition, Queen Isabel of Spain, a great-niece of Prince Henry, consented. So in 1492, after sixty-nine days at sea, Columbus’s three small ships touched the shores that Europeans did not know existed: first the glistening Bahamas, and the next night, Cuba.
8 Almost from Columbus’s arrival, Spanish colonists began to degrade and enslave the indigenous American peoples, naming them negros da terra (Blacks from the land), transferring their racist constructions of African people onto Native Americans. Over the years that followed, they used the force of the gun and the Bible in one of the most frightful and sudden massacres in human history. Thousands of Native Americans died resisting enslavement. More died from European diseases, from the conditions they suffered while forcibly tilling fields, and on death marches searching and mining for gold. Thousands of Native Americans were driven off their land by Spanish settlers dashing into the colonies after riches. Spanish merchant Pedro de Las Casas settled in Hispaniola in 1502, the year the first enslaved Africans disembarked from a Portuguese slave ship. He brought along his eighteen-year-old son Bartolomé, who would play an outsized role in the direction slavery took in the so-called New World.
9 By 1510, Bartolomé de Las Casas had accumulated land and captives as well as his ordination papers as the Americas’ first priest. He felt proud in welcoming the Dominican Friars to Hispaniola in 1511. Sickened by Taíno slavery, the Friars stunned Las Casas and broke abolitionist ground, rejecting the Spanish line (taken from the Portuguese) that the Taíno people benefited, through Christianity, from slavery. King Ferdinand promptly recalled the Dominican Friars, but their antislavery sermons never left Bartolomé de Las Casas. In 1515, he departed for Spain, where he would conduct a lifelong campaign to ease the suffering of Native Americans, and, possibly more importantly—solve the settlers’ extreme labor shortage. In one of his first written pleas in 1516, Las Casas suggested importing enslaved Africans to replace the rapidly declining Native American laborers, a plea he made again two years later. Alonso de Zuazo, a University of Salamanca–trained lawyer, had made a similar recommendation back in 1510. “General license should be given to bring negroes, a [people] strong for work, the opposite of the natives, so weak who can work only in undemanding tasks,” Zuazo wrote. In time, some indigenous peoples had caught wind of this new racist idea, and they readily agreed that a policy of importing African laborers would be better. An indigenous group in Mexico complained that the “difficult and arduous work” involved in harnessing a sugar crop was “only for the blacks and not for the thin and weak Indians.” Las Casas and company birthed twins—racist twins that some Native Americans and Africans took in: the myth of the physically strong, beastly African, and the myth of the physically weak Native American who easily died from the strain of hard labor.
10
ALTHOUGH LAS CASAS’S IDEAS were at first discounted, his treatises soon became a useful tool for Spain’s growing empire and its investment in American slavery. Bishop Sebastián Ramirez de Fuenleal reported in 1531 that the “entire population . . . of Espanola, San Juan and even Cuba are demanding that they should have negroes to mine gold” and produce crops.
Las Casas led the charge for the historic passage in 1542 of the “New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians.” That memorable year, he also finished and sent to Prince Philip II his classic, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, and issued his third memorial recommending that enslaved Africans replace Native Americans.
At some point after that, Las Casas read Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s book.
The more he read, the less he could square the African slave trade with the teachings of Jesus Christ. In History of the Indies (1561), released five years before his death, Las Casas regretted “the advice he gave the king” to import enslaved Africans. He saw in Zurara’s writing evidence revealing the slave trade to “be the horror that it is.” Las Casas lamented Zurara’s attempt “to blur [the slave trade] with the mercy and goodness of God.” Las Casas tried to close the door on African slavery, after opening it for so many Spanish slaveholders. He failed. A powerful reformer labeled a radical extremist in his last days—like every antiracist who came after him—Las Casas was condemned in Spain after his death, and his works were practically banned there. Catholic Spain’s Protestant rivals published and republished his devastating Account of the Destruction of the Indies—in Dutch (1578), French (1578), English (1583), and German (1599)—in their quest to label the Spanish Empire corrupt and morally repugnant, all in their quest to replace Spain as Europe’s superpower.
11
DESPITE SPAIN’S RISE, Portugal remained the undisputed power of the African slave trade. And Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s racist ideas remained Europe’s undisputed defenders of slave trading until another man, an African, rose up to carry on the legacy. Around 1510, Al-Hasan Ibn Muhammad alWazzan al-Fasi, a well-educated Moroccan, accompanied his uncle on a diplomatic mission down into the Songhay Empire. Eight years later, he was enslaved on another diplomatic voyage along the Mediterranean Sea. His captors presented the learned twenty-four-year-old to the scholarly Pope Leo X in Italy. Before dying in 1521, the pope freed the youngster, converted him to Christianity, renamed him Johannes Leo, and possibly commissioned him to write a survey of Africa. He became known as Leo the African, or Leo Africanus. He satisfied Italian curiosity in 1526 with the first scholarly survey of Africa in Europe, Della descrittione dell’Africa (Description of Africa).
Leo Africanus described the etymology of Africa and then surveyed African geography, languages, cultures, religions, and diseases. His summation: “There is no Nation under Heaven more prone to Venery [sexual indulgence].” The Africans “leade a beastly kind of life, being utterly destitute of the use of reason, of dexterities of wit, and of all arts,” Africanus wrote. “They . . . behave themselves, as if they had continually lived in a Forrest among wild beasts.” Leo the African did not ignore the elephant in the room. How do “I my selfe write so homely of Africa,” he asked, when “I stand indebted [to Africa] both for my birth” and education? He considered himself to be a “historiographer” charged with telling “the plaine truth in all places.” Africanus did not mind if Africans were denigrated. He believed he was describing Africans accurately.
12 Leo Africanus established himself through Della descrittione dell’Africa as the world’s first known African racist, the first illustrious African producer of racist ideas (as Zurara was the first illustrious European producer of racist ideas). Anyone can consume or produce racist ideas of African inferiority— any European, any Asian, any Native American, any Latina/o, and any African. Leo’s African ancestry hardly shielded him from believing in African inferiority and European superiority, or from trying to convince others of this plain racist “truth.” Leo Africanus may have never visited the fifteen African lands he claims to have seen. He could have paraphrased the notes of Portuguese travelers.
But veracity did not matter. Once the manuscript was finished in 1526, once it was published in Italian in 1550, and once it was translated into French and Latin in 1556, readers across Western Europe were consuming it and tying African people to hypersexuality, to animals, and to the lack of reason. It is not known what happened to Leo the African, the author of the most widely read and most influential book on Africa—next to Zurara’s—during the 1500s. He made countless Europeans feel that they knew him, or rather, knew Africa.
Around the time Leo the African’s text was making its way through Europe, and around the time Richard Mather’s parents were born, the British began their quest to break the Portuguese monopoly on African slave-trading, eager to reap the benefits and grow their empire. In 1554, an expedition captained by John Lok, ancestor of philosopher John Locke, arrived in England after traveling to “Guinea.” Lok and his compatriots Robert Gainish and William Towerson docked with 450 pounds of gold, 250 ivory tusks, and five enslaved African men. These three Englishmen established themselves as the new authorities on Africa and African people among curious British minds. Their opinions seemed to be shaped as much by the Portuguese and French as by their own observations. Sounding like Leo Africanus or Zurara, Gainish labeled Africans a “people of beastly living, without a God, law, religions, or common wealth.” The five “beasts” that he and his shipmates brought back to England all learned English and were sent back to Africa to serve as translators for English traders.
13 As English contact with Africans matured, so did the desire to explain the radical color differences. Writers like Gainish applied climate theory to the dark skins of Africa and the light skins of Europe. The popular theory made sense when looking at Europe, the Mediterranean, and Africa. But what about the rest of the world? During the final decades of the sixteenth century, a new genre of British literature adopted a different theory. Writers brought amazing stories of the world into Anglican homes, into the Puritan homes of Richard Mather and John Cotton, and into the homes of other future leaders of colonial America. And these worldly stories were as racist as they were amazing. CHAPTER 3
Coming to America
EXPLORERS WROTE ABOUT their adventures, and their tales fascinated Europeans. This new travel literature gave Europeans sitting by their firesides a window into faraway lands where different-looking people resided in cultures that seemed exotic and strange. But the literary glimpses that explorers provided of African lands were usually overshadowed by the selfinterests of the backers of the expeditions, who aimed most of all to fulfill their colonizing and slave-trading desires. Even a lonely abolitionist, French philosopher Jean Bodin, found his thoughts bogged down by tales connecting two simultaneous discoveries: that of West Africans, and that of the dark, tailless apes walking around like humans in West Africa. Africa’s heat had produced hypersexual Africans, Bodin theorized in 1576, and “intimate relations between the men and beasts . . . still give birth to monsters in Africa.” The climate theory of Africa’s hot sun transforming the people into uncivil beasts of burden still held the court of racist opinion. But not much longer.
1 For English travel writer George Best, climate theory fell apart when he saw on an Arctic voyage in 1577 that the Inuit people in northeastern Canada were darker than the people living in the hotter south. In a 1578 account of the expedition, Best shied away from climate theory in explaining “the Ethiopians blacknesse.” He found an alternative: “holy Scripture,” or the curse theory that had recently been articulated by a Dominican Friar in Peru and a handful of French intellectuals, a theory more enticing to slaveholders.
In Best’s whimsical interpretation of Genesis, Noah orders his White and “Angelike” sons to abstain from sex with their wives on the Ark, and then tells them that the first child born after the flood would inherit the earth.
When the evil, tyrannical, and hypersexual Ham has sex on the Ark, God wills that Ham’s descendants shall be “so blacke and loathsome,” in Best’s telling, “that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde.” 2 The first major debate between racists had invaded the English discourse.
This argument about the cause of inferior Blackness—curse or climate, nature or nurture—would rage for decades, and eventually influence settlers to America. Curse theorists were the first known segregationists. They believed that Black people were naturally and permanently inferior, and totally incapable of becoming White. Climate theorists were the first known assimilationists, believing Black people had been nurtured by the hot sun into a temporary inferiority, but were capable of becoming White if they moved to a cooler climate.
George Best produced his curse theory in 1578, in the era between Henry VII and Oliver Cromwell, a time during which the English nation was experiencing the snowballing, conflicting passions of overseas adventure and domestic control, or, to use historian Winthrop Jordan’s words, of “voyages of discovery overseas” and “inward voyages of discovery.” The mercantile expansion abroad, the progressively commercialized economy at home, the fabulous profits, the exciting adventure stories, and the class warfare all destabilized the social order in Elizabethan England, a social order being intensely scrutinized by the rising congregation of morally strict, hyperdictating, pious Puritans.
George Best used Africans as “social mirrors,” to use Jordan’s phrase, for the hypersexuality, greed, and lack of discipline—the Devil’s machinations— that he “found first” in England “but could not speak of.” Normalizing negative behavior in faraway African people allowed writers to de-normalize negative behavior in White people, to de-normalize what they witnessed during intense appraisals of self and nation.
PROBABLY NO ONE in England collected and read travel stories more eagerly than Richard Hakluyt. In 1589, he published his travel collection in The Principall Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation.
In issuing this monumental collection of nearly all the available documents describing British overseas adventures, Hakluyt urged explorers, traders, and missionaries to fulfill their superior destiny, to civilize, Christianize, capitalize, and command the world.
3 The Puritans believed, too, in civilizing and Christianizing the world, but their approach to the project was slightly different from that of most explorers and expedition sponsors. For the others, it was about economic returns or political power. For Puritan preachers, it was about bringing social order to the world. Cambridge professor William Perkins rested at the cornerstone of British Puritanism in the late sixteenth century. “Though the servant in regard of faith and the inner man be equal to his master, in regard of the outward man . . . the master is above the servant,” he explained in Ordering a Familie, published in 1590. In paraphrasing St. Paul, Perkins became one of the first major English theorists—or assimilationist theologians, to be more precise— to mask the exploitative master/servant or master/slave relationship as a loving family relationship. He thus added to Zurara’s justifying theory of Portuguese enslavers nurturing African beasts. For generations to come, assimilationist slaveholders, from Richard Mather’s New England to Hispaniola, would shrewdly use this loving-family mask to cover up the exploitation and brutality of slavery. It was Perkins’s family ordering that Puritan leaders like John Cotton and Richard Mather used to sanction slavery in Massachusetts a generation later. And it was Perkins’s claim of equal souls and unequal bodies that led Puritan preachers like Cotton and Mather to minister to African souls and not challenge the enslavement of their bodies.
4 Richard Mather was born in 1596 in northeastern England at the height of William Perkins’s influence. After Perkins died in 1602, Puritan Paul Baynes succeeded him at Cambridge. Richard Mather closely studied Baynes’s writings, and he probably could quote his most famous treatise, Commentary on Ephesians. In the commentary, Baynes said slavery was partly a curse for sins and partly a result of “civil condition,” or barbarism. “Blackmores” were “slavish,” he said, and he urged slaves to be cheerfully obedient. Masters were to show their superiority through kindness and through a display of “a white sincere heart.” 5
AS RICHARD MATHER came of age, Richard Hakluyt was establishing himself as England’s greatest promoter of overseas colonization. Hakluyt surrounded himself with a legion of travel writers, translators, explorers, traders, investors, colonizers—everyone who might play a role in colonizing the world—and began mentoring them. In 1597, he urged mentee John Pory, a recent Cambridge graduate, to complete a translation that may have been on Hakluyt’s list for quite some time. Pory translated Leo Africanus’s Geographical Histories of Africa into English in 1600. English readers consumed it as quickly as other Europeans had for decades, and they were just as impressed. In a long introduction, Pory argued that climate theory could not explain the geographical distinctions in color. They must be “hereditary,” Pory suggested. Africans were “descended from Ham the cursed son of Noah.” 6 Whether they chose to illuminate the stamp of Blackness through curse theory or climate theory, the travel writers and translators of the time had a larger common goal, and they accomplished it: they ushered in the British age of adventure. They were soon followed by another group: the playwrights. With the English literacy rate low, many more British imaginations were churned by playwrights than by travel writers. At the turn of the century, a respected London playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon was escorting English audiences back into the ancient world and around modern Europe, from Scotland (Macbeth), to Denmark (Hamlet), to inferior Blackness and superior Whiteness in Italy (The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice). The racial politics of William Shakespeare’s Othello did not surprise English audiences when it premiered in 1604. By the late 1500s, English dramatists were used to manufacturing Satan’s Black agents on earth. Shakespeare’s first Black character, the evil, oversexed Aaron in Titus Andronicus, first came to the stage in 1594. Down in Spain, dramatists frequently staged Black people as cruel idiots in the genre called comedias de negros.
7 Shakespeare’s Othello is a Moorish Christian general in the Venetian military, a character inspired by the 1565 Italian tale Gli Hecatommithi, and possibly by Leo Africanus, the Christian Moor in Italy who despised his Blackness. Othello’s trusted ensign, Iago, resents Othello for marrying the Venetian Desdemona. “For that I do suspect the lusty Moor / Hath leaped into my seat,” Iago explains. To Desdemona’s father, Iago labels Othello “an old black ram / . . . tupping your white ewe.” Iago manipulates Othello to make him believe his wife betrayed him. “Her name that was as fresh / as Dian’s visage, is now begrim’d and black / As mine own face,” Othello says before strangling Desdemona. At the play’s climax, Othello realizes his dead wife’s innocence and confesses to Emilia, Desdemona’s maidservant. “O! the more angel she,” Emilia responds. “And you the blacker devil.” Othello commits suicide.
8 The theater-loving Queen Elizabeth did not see Othello, as she did some of Shakespeare’s earlier plays. She died in 1603. When the deadly plague of 1604 subsided, her successor, King James I, arrived in London, and started making plans for his grand coronation. King James I and his wife, Queen Anne of Denmark, saw Othello. But King James I commissioned Shakespeare’s rival playwright, Ben Jonson, to produce an alluring international masque for his coronation, and to mark the end of Elizabethan self-isolation. Queen Anne proposed an African theme to reflect the new king’s international focus. Leo Africanus, travel stories, and Othello had sparked the queen’s interest in Africa. Satisfying his queen, Jonson wrote The Masque of Blackness.
Premiering on January 7, 1605, in the great hall of London’s sparkling Whitehall Palace, which overlooks the snowy banks of the Thames River, The Masque of Blackness was the most expensive production ever presented in London. Its elaborate costumes, exciting dancing, sensational choirs, booming orchestras, exotic scenery, and a luxurious banquet caused all in attendance to marvel at the spectacle. Inspired by climate theory, it was the story of twelve ugly African princesses of the river god Niger who learn they can be “made beautiful” if they travel to “Britannia,” where the sun “beams shine day and night, and are of force / To blanch an Æthiop, and revive a corpse.” Queen Anne herself and eleven court ladies played the African princesses in blackface, inaugurating the use of black paint on the royal stage.
9 The Masque of Blackness presented the imperial vision of King James I, Prince Charles, Richard Hakluyt, and a powerful lineup of English investors, merchants, missionaries, and explorers. And it helped renew British determination to expand Britannia to America. King James chartered the London Company in 1606 with his eyes on North America—one eye on Virginia, another on New England. Although misfortune plagued the New England undertakings, Virginia fared better. Captain John Smith, a mentee of Richard Hakluyt, helped command the expedition of roughly 150 volunteers on the three boats that entered the Chesapeake Bay on April 26, 1607. Against all odds—and thanks to the assistance of the indigenous Powhatan Americans —North America’s first permanent English settlement survived. His mission accomplished, John Smith returned as a hero to England in October 1609.
10 In colonizing Virginia (and later New England), the British had already begun to conceive of distinct races. The word race first appeared in Frenchman Jacques de Brézé’s 1481 poem “The Hunt,” where it referred to hunting dogs. As the term expanded to include humans over the next century, it was used primarily to identify and differentiate and animalize African people. The term did not appear in a dictionary until 1606, when French diplomat Jean Nicot included an entry for it. “Race . . . means descent,” he explained, and “it is said that a man, a horse, a dog or another animal is from good or bad race.” Thanks to this malleable concept in Western Europe, the British were free to lump the multiethnic Native Americans and the multiethnic Africans into the same racial groups. In time, Nicot’s construction became as addictive as the tobacco plant, which he introduced in France.
11 Captain John Smith never returned to Jamestown. He spent the rest of his life as the greatest literary mentee of Richard Hakluyt, promoting British migration to America. Thousands crossed the Atlantic moved by Smith’s exhilarating travel books, which by 1624 included his tale of Pocahontas saving his life. Pocahontas, the “civilized savage,” had by then converted to Christianity, married an Englishman, and visited London. The English approved. Black people did not fare so well, in Smith’s estimation. Settlers read his worldly—or rather, racist—opinions, though, and adopted them as their own. In his final book, published the year of his death in 1631, Smith told “unexperienced” New England planters that the enslaved Africans were “as idle and as devilish as any in the world.” Apparently, Smith thought this knowledge would be useful to planters, probably knowing it was only a matter of time before enslaved Africans were brought to New England.
12 But Smith was only recasting ideas he had heard in England between The Masque of Blackness, the founding of Virginia, and the founding of New England, ideas English intellectuals had probably learned from Spanish enslavers and Portuguese slave-traders. “Men that have low and flat nostrils are as Libidinous as Apes,” cleric Edward Topsell explained in 1607 in Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes. King James made the common association of apes and devils in his 1597 book Daemonologie. In one of his last plays, The Tempest (1611), Shakespeare played on these associations of the ape and devil and African in crafting Caliban, the hypersexual bastard child of a demon and an African witch from a “vile race.” In 1614, England’s first famous working-class poet, John Taylor, said that “black nations” adored the “Black” Devil. In a 1615 address for the planters in Ireland and Virginia, the Reverend Thomas Cooper said that White Shem, one of Noah’s three sons, “shall be Lord over” the “cursed race of Cham”—meaning Noah’s son Ham —in Africa. Future Virginia politician George Sandys also conjured curse theory to degrade Blackness. In a 1620 paraphrase of Genesis, future politician Thomas Peyton wrote of Cain, or “the Southern man,” as a “black deformed elf,” and “the Northern white, like unto God himself.” Five years later, Clergyman Samuel Purchas released the gargantuan four-volume Hakluytus Posthumus of travel manuscripts left to him by his mentor, Richard Hakluyt. Purchas blasted the “filthy sodomits, sleepers, ignorant, beast, disciples of Cham . . . to whom the blacke darknesse is reserved for ever.” These were the ideas about African people circulating throughout England and the English colonies as African people were being hauled into Britannia on slave ships.
13
IN 1619, RICHARD MATHER began ministering not far from the future center of the British slave trade, the port of Liverpool. In those days, the British slave trade was minuscule, and Africans hardly existed in Britannia.
But that would soon change. The vessels of slave traders were cruising deeper and deeper into the heart of West Africa, especially after the Moroccans, armed with English guns, crushed the Songhay Empire in 1591. The vessels of English commerce were cruising deeper and deeper into Virginia, too, as English merchants competed with the Spanish, Portuguese, and rising Dutch and French empires.
14 The first recorded slave ship to arrive in colonial America laden with African people was not originally intended for the English colonies. The Spanish ship San Juan Bautista departed Angola in July 1619 hauling 350 captives, probably headed for Vera Cruz, Mexico. Latin American slaveholders had used racist ideas to craft a permanent slavery for the quarter of a million Africans they held at that time. Two pirate ships probably attacked the Spanish ship in the Gulf of Mexico, snatching some 60 captives, and then headed east. Weeks later, in August 1619, the pirates sold 20 of their Angolan captives in Jamestown to Virginia governor George Yeardley, the owner of 1,000 acres.
15 John Pory, the translator of Leo the African’s book into English, was Yeardley’s cousin, and he ventured to Jamestown in 1619 to serve as Yeardley’s secretary. On July 30, 1619, Yeardley convened the inaugural meeting of elected politicians in colonial America, a group that included Thomas Jefferson’s great-grandfather. These lawmakers named John Pory their speaker. The English translator of Leo the African’s book, who had defended curse theory, thus became colonial America’s first legislative leader.
16 John Pory set the price of America’s first cash crop, tobacco, and recognized the need for labor to grow it. So when the Angolans bound for slavery arrived in August, they were right on time. There is no reason to believe that George Yeardley and the other original enslavers did not rationalize their enslavement of African people in the same way that other British intellectuals did—and in the same way that Latin American slaveholders did—by considering these African people to be stamped from the beginning as a racially distinct people, as lower than themselves, and as lower in the scale of being than the more populous White indentured servants.
The 1625 Virginia census did not list the ages or dates of arrival for most Africans. Nor did the census list any of them—despite in some cases the fact that they had resided in Virginia for six years—as free. Africans were recorded as distinct from White servants. When Yeardley died in 1627, he willed to his heirs his “goods debts chattles servants negars cattle or any other thynge.” “Negars” were dropped below “servants” in the social hierarchy to reflect the economic hierarchy. And this stratification became clear in Virginia’s first judicial decision explicitly referring to race. The court ordered a White man in 1630 “to be soundly whipt before an assembly of negroes & others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and the shame of Christianity by defiling his body in lying with a negro.” The court contrasted the polluted Black woman and the pure White woman, with whom he could lie without defiling his body. It was the first recorded instance of gender racism in America, of considering the body of the Black woman to be a tainted object that could defile a White man upon contact.
17 Richard Mather never saw a slave ship leave the Liverpool docks during his ministerial tenure in Toxteth in the 1620s. Liverpool did not become England’s main slave-ship station until the 1740s, succeeding London and Bristol. British slave-traders were slowly expanding their activities in the 1620s, unlike all those Anglican persecutors of Puritans. The death of King James and the coronation of his son, Charles I, in 1625 set off a persecuting stampede. William Ames, a disciple of William Perkins, who was exiled in Holland, steeled Richard Mather, John Cotton, and countless other Puritans with The Marrow of Sacred Divinity. Translated from Latin into English in 1627, the treatise described the sacred divinity of spiritual equality “between a free man and a servant”; the sacred divinity of “inferiors” owing “subjection and obedience” to their “superiors”; and the sacred divinity of “our blood kin” being “given more love than strangers.” The Marrow’s explanation became a guiding principle for Mather’s generation of Puritans settling the Massachusetts Bay area in the late 1620s and 1630s. Puritans used this doctrine when assessing Native American and African strangers, ensuring intolerance from the start in their land of tolerance.
18 Beginning in 1642, Anglican monarchists and nonconforming parliamentarians locked arms in the English Civil War. As New England Puritans welcomed the nonconforming parliamentarians, Virginia’s royalists prayed for their retreating King Charles I. But in 1649, he was executed.
Three years later, Virginia was forced to surrender to the new ruling parliament.
The economic hierarchy that had emerged in Virginia resembled the pecking order that William Ames had proposed and that Puritans established in New England—although their political and religious allegiances differed.
Large planters and ministers and merchants stood at the top—men like John Mottrom of Virginia’s Northern Neck, who used his power to acquire fertile land, solicit trade, procure labor, and keep legally free people—like Elizabeth Key—enslaved.
19 Elizabeth Key was the daughter of an unnamed African woman and Newport News legislator Thomas Key. Before his death, Thomas had arranged for his biracial daughter to be freed at age fifteen. Her subsequent masters, however, kept her enslaved. At some point, she adopted Christianity.
She birthed a baby, whose father was William Greenstead, an English indentured servant and amateur lawyer on Mottrom’s plantation. Upon Mottrom’s death in 1655, Key and Greenstead successfully sued the estate for her and her child’s freedom.
Virginia planters followed the Key case almost as closely as they followed the English Civil War. They realized that the English common laws regarding not enslaving Christians—and stipulating that the father’s status determined the child’s status—both superseded curse theory, climate theory, beast theory, evangelical theory, and every other racist theory substantiating Black and biracial enslavement. Elizabeth Key had ravaged the ties that planters had unofficially used to bind African slavery.
20 For Virginia planters, the timing of the Key case could not have been worse. By the 1660s, labor demands had grown. Virginians had uprooted more indigenous communities to expand their farmlands. Landowners were looking increasingly to African laborers to do the work, since their lower death rates made them more valuable and more permanent than temporary indentures. At the same time, the bloody English Civil War that had driven so many from England to America had come to a close, and new socioeconomic opportunities in England slowed the flow of voluntary indentured migrants.
The White servants still arriving partnered with the enslaved Africans in escapes and rebellions, possibly bonding on similar stories of apprehension— being lured onto ships on the western coasts of Africa or Europe.
21 Planters responded to labor demands and laborers’ unity by purchasing more African people and luring Whiteness away from Blackness. In the first official recognition of slavery in Virginia, legislators stipulated, in 1660 (and in stricter terms in 1661), that any White servant running away “in company with any negroes” shall serve for the time of the “said negroes absence”— even if it meant life. In 1662, Virginia lawmen plugged one of Key’s freedom loopholes to resolve “doubts [that] have arisen whether children got by an Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free.” They proclaimed that “all children borne in this country” derived their status from “the condition of the mother.” Trashing English law, they dusted off the Roman principle of partus sequitur ventrem, which held that “among tame and domestic animals, the brood belongs to the owner of the dam or mother.” 22 With this law in place, White enslavers could now reap financial reward from relations “upon a negro woman.” But they wanted to prevent the limited number of White women from engaging in similar interracial relations (as their biracial babies would become free). In 1664, Maryland legislators declared it a “disgrace to our Nation” when “English women . . . intermarry with Negro slaves.” By the end of the century, Maryland and Virginia legislators had enacted severe penalties for White women in relationships with non-White men.
23 In this way, heterosexual White men freed themselves, through racist laws, to engage in sexual relations with all women. And then their racist literature codified their sexual privileges. The Isle of Pines, a bizarre short story published in 1668 by former English parliamentarian Henry Neville, gave readers one such ominous account. The tale purposefully begins in 1589, the year the first edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations appeared. Surviving a shipwreck in the Indian Ocean, George Pines finds himself alone on an uninhabited island with an English fourteen-year-old; a Welsh maidservant; another maidservant, whose Whiteness is clear and ethnicity is not; and “one Negro female slave.” For Pines, “idleness and Fulness of every thing begot in me a desire of enjoying the women.” He persuades the two maids to lie with him, and then reports that the English fourteen-year-old was “content also to do as we did.” The Negro woman, “seeing what we did, longed also for her share.” One night, the uniquely sexually aggressive Black woman makes her move in the darkness while Pines sleeps.
24 The Isle of Pines was one of the first portrayals in British letters of aggressive hypersexual African femininity. Such portrayals served both to exonerate White men of their inhuman rapes and to mask their human attractions to the supposed beast-like women. And the portrayals just kept coming, like the slave ships. Meanwhile, American enslavers publicly prostituted African women well into the eighteenth century (privately thereafter). In a 1736 exchange of letters on the inextricable sexuality and service of “African Ladies,” single White men were counseled in the SouthCarolina Gazette to “wait for the next shipping from the Coast of Guinny”: “Those African Ladies are of a strong, robust Constitution: not easily jaded out, able to serve them by Night as well as Day.” On their isles of pines in colonial America, White men continued to depict African women as sexually aggressive, shifting the responsibility of their own sexual desires to the women.
Of the nearly one hundred reports of rape or attempted rape in twenty-one newspapers in nine American colonies between 1728 and 1776, none reported the rape of a Black woman. Rapes of Black women, by men of all races, were not considered newsworthy. Like raped prostitutes, Black women’s credibility had been stolen by racist beliefs in their hypersexuality. For Black men, the story was similar. There was not a single article in the colonial era announcing the acquittal of a suspected Black male rapist. One-third of White men mentioned in rape articles were acknowledged as being acquitted of at least one charge. Moreover, “newspaper reports of rape constructed white defendants as individual offenders and black defendants as representative of the failings of their racial group,” according to journalism historian Sharon Block.
25 Already, the American mind was accomplishing that indispensable intellectual activity of someone consumed with racist ideas: individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity. Negative behavior by any Black person became proof of what was wrong with Black people, while negative behavior by any White person only proved what was wrong with that person.
Black women were thought to aggressively pursue White men sexually, and Black men were thought to aggressively pursue White women sexually.
Neither could help it, the racist myth posited. They naturally craved superior Whiteness. Black women possessed a “temper hot and lascivious, making no scruple to prostitute themselves to the Europeans for a very slender profit, so great is their inclination to white men,” dreamt William Smith, the author of New Voyage to Guinea in 1744. And all of this lasciviousness on the part of Black men and women stemmed from their relatively large genitalia, the theory went. As early as 1482, Italian cartographer Jayme Bertrand depicted Mali emperor Mansa Musa almost naked on his throne with oversized genitals.
26
SOME WHITE MEN were honest enough to broadcast their attractions, usually justifying them with assimilationist ideas. Royalist Richard Ligon, exiled from parliamentary England in Barbados, sat at a dinner adoring the “black Mistress” of the colony’s governor. Barbados had become richer than all the other British colonies combined by the mid-1600s. Sugar was planted right up to the steps of homes, and the residents ate New England food instead of growing their own. To Ligon, the Black mistress had “the greatest beauty and majesty together: that ever I saw in one woman,” exceeding Queen Anne of Denmark. Ligon presented her with a gift after the dinner. She responded with “the loveliest smile that I have ever seen.” It was impossible for Ligon to tell what was whiter, her teeth “or the whites of her eyes.” This was one of the many small stories that made up Ligon’s A True and Exact Historie of the Island of Barbadoes in 1657, the year Elizabeth Key’s case was finally settled. In one story, a submissive slave named “Sambo” tells on his fellows who are planning a slave revolt and refuses his reward. In another, Ligon informs a “cruel” master of Sambo’s desire to be “made a Christian.” By English law, we cannot “make a Christian a Slave,” the master responds. “My request was far different from that,” Ligon replies, “for I desired him to make a Slave a Christian.” If Sambo becomes a Christian, he can no longer be enslaved, the master says, and it will open “such a gap” that “all of the planters in the island” will be upset. Ligon lamented that Sambo was to be kept out of the church. But at the same time, he gave enslavers a new theory to defend their enterprise: Blacks were naturally docile, and slaves could and should become Christians. Planters had feared the conversion of slaves because they believed that if their slaves were Christian, they would have to be freed—and Elizabeth Key’s successful suit showed that the laws supported this belief. Ligon’s distinction between making “a Christian a slave” and “a slave a Christian” turned this idea on its head. Though it took time, eventually it became the basis for closing the religious loophole Key had exposed. Ligon lifted the biblical law of converting the unconverted over British law barring the enslavement of Christians. He promoted the idea of baptizing enslaved Africans through the docile figure of Sambo, and planters and intellectuals almost certainly got the point: submissive, confessing Sambo desired Christianity, and he should be permitted to have it. Indeed, Christianity would only make slaves more docile. Ligon’s recommendation of Christianizing the slave for docility appeared during a crucial time of intellectual innovation. And as intellectual ideas abounded, justifications for slavery abounded, too.
ON NOVEMBER 28, 1660, a dozen men gathered in London and founded what became known as the Royal Society. Europe’s scientific revolution had reached England. Italians initiated the Accademia dei Lincei in 1603, the French L’Academie française was founded in 1635, and the Germans established their national academy, Leopoldina, in 1652. King Charles II chartered the Royal Society as one of the first acts of his restored anti-Puritan monarchy in 1660. One of the early leaders of the Royal Society was one of England’s most celebrated young scholars, the author of The Sceptical Chymist (1661) and the father of English chemistry—Robert Boyle. In 1665, Boyle urged his European peers to compile more “natural” histories of foreign lands and peoples, with Richard Ligon’s Historie of Barbados serving as the racist prototype.
27 The year before, Boyle had jumped into the ring of the racial debate with Of the Nature of Whiteness and Blackness. He rejected both curse and climate theorists and knocked up a foundational antiracist idea: “The Seat” of human pigmentation “seems to be but the thin Epidermes, or outward Skin,” he wrote. And yet, this antiracist idea of skin color being only skin deep did not stop Boyle from judging different colors. Black skin, he maintained, was an “ugly” deformity of normal Whiteness. The physics of light, Boyle argued, showed that Whiteness was “the chiefest color.” He claimed to have ignored his personal “opinions” and “clearly and faithfully” presented the truth, as his Royal Society deeded. As Boyle and the Royal Society promoted the innovation and circulation of racist ideas, they promoted objectivity in all their writings.
28 Intellectuals from Geneva to Boston, including Richard Mather’s youngest son, Increase Mather, carefully read and loudly hailed Boyle’s work in 1664. A twenty-two-year-old unremarkable Cambridge student from a farming family copied full quotations. As he rose in stature over the next forty years to become one of the most influential scientists of all time, Isaac Newton took it upon himself to substantiate Boyle’s color law: light is white is standard. In 1704, a year after he assumed the presidency of the Royal Society, Newton released one of the most eminent books of the modern era, Opticks. “Whiteness is produced by the Convention of all Colors,” he wrote.
Newton created a color wheel to illustrate his thesis. “The center” was “white of the first order,” and all the other colors were positioned in relation to their “distance from Whiteness.” In one of the foundational books of the upcoming European intellectual renaissance, Newton imaged “perfect whiteness.” 29 Robert Boyle would not live to read Opticks. He died, after a long and influential life, in 1691. During his lifetime, he did not merely found chemistry, whiten light, power the Royal Society, and inspire Isaac Newton, the Mather clan, and throngs of intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic.
Boyle sat on the original Council for Foreign Plantations in 1660, which was commissioned concurrently with the Royal Society to centralize and advise the vast empire that Charles II inherited.
In 1661, Boyle’s council made its first formal plea to planters in Barbados, Maryland, and Virginia to convert enslaved Africans. “This Act . . .
shall [not] . . . impead, restrain, or impair” the power of masters, the council made sure to note. The council’s pleas resounded louder and louder each year as the plantation economy surged across the Western Hemisphere, as a growing flock of powerful British ministers vied for submission of African souls, and as planters vied for submission of their bodies. Missionaries endeavored to grow God’s kingdom as planters endeavored to grow profits. The marriage of Christian slavery seemed destined. But enslaved Africans balked. The vast majority of Africans in early America firmly resisted the religion of their masters. And their masters balked, too. Enslavers would not, or could not, listen to sermons to convert their slaves. Saving their crops each year was more important to them than saving souls. But of course they could not say that, and risk angering their ministers. Enslavers routinely defended their inaction by claiming that enslaved Africans were too barbaric to be converted.
The racist debate over the cause of Blackness—climate or curse—had been joined by this new racist debate over Blacks’ capability for Christianity.
The segregationist belief that enslaved Africans should not or could not be baptized was so widespread, and so taboo to discuss—as Richard Ligon found in Barbados—that virtually no enslaver took to writing to defend it in a major piece in the 1600s. That did not stop the assimilationists, who believed that lowly enslaved Africans, practicing their supposed animalistic religions, were capable of being raised to Christianity. In the 1660s, there emerged a missionary movement to publicize this divine duty to resistant slaveholders and slaves. Richard Mather’s grandson spent his adult life carrying this movement to the churches of New England. But Mather did not live to see it. CHAPTER 4 Saving Souls, Not Bodies
WHEN CHARLES II restored the English throne in 1660, he restored the religious persecution of Puritans. Roughly 2,000 Puritan ministers were forced out of the Church of England during the Great Ejection. In New England, Richard Mather had lost some hearing and sight in one eye. But he was still as defiant to the crown as he had been as a younger man, and he steered New England nonconformists as adroitly as he had done for three decades. His fellow theological captain, John Cotton, had died in 1652.
Mather’s first wife had also died, and he had married Cotton’s widow, Sarah Hankredge Story Cotton. His youngest son, Increase Mather, married Sarah’s daughter—now his stepsister—Maria Cotton, further interlacing the ties between the famous Cottons and Mathers. As if to triple-knot the family tie, Increase and Sarah named their first son, upon his birth on February 12, 1663, Cotton Mather.
Richard Mather lived six years after the birth of his grandson. When he died, Increase Mather honored his father by writing his biography, putting in print Richard Mather’s providential deliverance from the Great Hurricane of 1635, a story as meaningful to the Mather lineage as any passage in the Bible.
Increase Mather, who took the helm of John Cotton’s famed North Church of Boston in 1664, taught all ten of his eventual children that they were regular receivers of divine providence like their grandfather. Increase especially expressed this exceptionality to Cotton Mather. In time, Cotton would make his father a prophet. He combined the best of the Cottons and Mathers, eclipsing them all in America’s historical memory. By the century’s end, African slavery sounded as natural to the colonists as the name “Cotton Mather,” and hardly any intellectual was more responsible for this binding than Cotton Mather himself. Cotton Mather was not the sole progenitor of such ideas, however. He was influenced by the books he read by his contemporaries. And few, if any, books influenced Cotton Mather’s racist ideas more than Richard Baxter’s A Christian Directory.
From his British ministerial post in Kidderminster, Richard Baxter urged slaveholders across the ocean to follow God’s law in making slaves into Christians in his well-traveled treatise A Christian Directory (1664–1665). He told them to “make it your chief end in buying and using slaves, to win them to Christ, and save their Souls.” Be sure to “let their Salvation be far more valued by you than their Service.” Although he was at the head of the missionary movement, Baxter was not alone in proselytizing to African people. As early as 1657, English Dissenter George Fox prevailed on his newly founded Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, to convert the enslaved. Eschewing church hierarchies, and preaching that everyone had access to the “inward light of God,” the Quakers seemed primed to one day produce abolitionists and antiracists.
1 In an effort to square his Christian faith—or his nation’s Christian faith— with slavery, Baxter tried to argue that some kind of benevolent slavery was possible and would be helpful for African people. These assimilationist ideas of Christianizing and civilizing enslaved Africans were particularly dangerous because they gave convincing power to the idea that slavery was just and should not be resisted. And so Baxter, a nonconforming Puritan, conformed— and conformed his Puritan readers—to most, though certainly not all, of the racist policies of Charles II’s expanding slaveholding empire. People who have “forfeited life or liberty” can be enslaved, Baxter wrote. However, “to go as pirates and catch up poor negroes . . . is one of the worst kind of thievery in the world.” Enslavers “that buy them and use them as beasts and .
. . neglect their souls, are fitter to be called incarnate devils than Christians.” Baxter naïvely believed there existed in bulk in the slave trade what he called a “voluntary-slave.” He tried to will into existence a world where loving masters bought voluntary slaves to save their souls. Baxter’s world remained a heavenly dream crafted long ago by Gomes Eanes de Zurara. But even that dream world was seen as a threat by enslavers. American enslavers were still afraid to baptize Africans, because Christian slaves, like Elizabeth Key, could sue for their freedom.
2 The colonies moved quickly to legalize the proselytizing demands of missionaries like Richard Baxter, and to hush the freedom cries from Christian slaves. In 1667, Virginia decreed that “the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage.” New York did the same in 1664, as did Maryland in 1671. “May more” masters, the Virginia legislators inscribed, “carefully endeavor the propagation of Christianity” to slaves. Masters were supposed to care for the resisting souls of their captives.
But what about their resisting bodies? In 1667, the English Parliament empowered masters to control the “wild, barbarous and savage nature” of enslaved Africans “only with strict severity.” And in 1669, the personal physician of Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, one of the Lords Proprietor of the Province of Carolina, in his draft of the original Fundamental Constitution of the Carolinas, awarded the founding planters of the province “absolute power and authority” over their captives.
3
WHEN JOHN LOCKE moved to London in 1667 to become the personal physician of Lord Cooper, he had much more to offer the colonizing British politician than his medical expertise. He had studied at the feet of Robert Boyle after his educational tenure at Oxford, and he had ended up collecting more travel books than philosophy texts for his immense personal library.
Lord Cooper asked Locke to draw up the Carolinas constitution and serve as the secretary of the Proprietors (and soon the Council of Trade and Plantations and the Board of Trade and Plantations). Not many Englishmen were more knowledgeable—or less compassionate—than Locke about British colonialism and slavery. “You should feel nothing at all of others’ misfortune,” Locke advised a friend in 1670.
4 Between all his colonial and medical duties, by July 1671 Locke had written the first draft of his lasting philosophical monument, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. Over the next two decades, he revised and expanded the essay before its grand appearance in four books in 1689.
That year, Locke also released his Two Treatises of Government, attacking monarchy, requesting a “government with the consent of the governed,” and distinguishing between temporary “servants” and “slaves, who being captives taken in a just war, are by the right of nature subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power of their masters.” Just as Richard Baxter had pushed his “voluntary slave” theory to defend slavery in his free Christian society, John Locke pushed his “just war” theory to defend slavery in his free civil society.
In any society, the mind “at first . . . is rasa tabula,” Locke famously wrote in An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. If people are born without innate intelligence, then there cannot be a natural intellectual hierarchy. But Locke’s egalitarian idea had a caveat. As Boyle and Newton painted unblemished light white, Locke more or less painted the unblemished mind white. Locke used the term “white paper” much more often than “blank slate” or “tabula rasa” to describe the child’s “as yet unprejudiced Understanding.” 5 Locke also touched on the origin of species in An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. Apes, whether “these be all Men, or no, all of human Species”, depended on one’s “definition of the Word Man,” because, he said, “if History lie not,” then West African women had conceived babies with apes. Locke thus reinforced African female hypersexuality in a passage sent round the English-speaking world. “And what real Species, by that measure, such a Production will be in Nature, will be a new Question.” Locke’s new “Question” reflected another new racist debate that most debaters feared to engage in publicly. Assimilationists argued monogenesis: that all humans were one species descended from a single human creation in Europe’s Garden of Eden. Segregationists argued polygenesis: that there were multiple origins of multiple human species.
Ever since Europeans had laid eyes on Native Americans in 1492, a people unmentioned in the Bible, they had started questioning the biblical creation story. Some speculated that Native Americans had to have descended from “a different Adam.” By the end of the sixteenth century, European thinkers had added African people to the list of species descended from a different Adam. In 1616, Italian freethinker Lucilio Vanini said—as Locke suggested later—that Ethiopians and apes must have the same ancestry, distinct from Europeans. But no one made the case for polygenesis as stoutly as French theologian Isaac La Peyrère in Prae-Adamitae in 1655. Translated into English in 1656, Men Before Adam was publicly burned in Paris and banned from Europe (after Locke secured a copy). Christians tossed La Peyrère in prison and burned Vanini at the stake for defying the Christian monogenesis story of Adam and Eve. But they could not stop the drift of polygenesis.
To justify Black enslavement, Barbados planters actually “preferred” the polygenesis theory over the curse theory of Ham, according to eyewitness Morgan Godwyn. Godwyn made this revelation in a 1680 pamphlet that criticized racist planters for making “those two words, Negro and Slave”, synonymous, while “White” was “the general name for Europeans.” This Anglican brought his missionary zeal from Virginia to Barbados in the 1670s.
He stood at the forefront of his denomination’s efforts to baptize enslaved Africans, aping a Quaker named William Edmundson.
6
IN 1675, A WAR more destructive than the Great Hurricane of 1635 ravaged New England. Three thousand Native Americans and six hundred settlers were killed, and numerous towns and burgeoning economies were destroyed during King Philip’s War. In the midst of the carnage, William Edmundson, who had founded Quakerism in Ireland, arrived in Rhode Island, reeling from his failure to convert enslaved Africans in Barbados. When his failures continued in Rhode Island, he began to understand that slavery was holding back his missions, and he told slave-owning Quakers as much in a letter in 1676. Edmundson had an assimilationist vision, a vision to “restrain and reclaim” African people from “their accustomed filthy, unclean practices” in defiling each other. Quakers’ “self-denial” of human property could “be known to all.” Abolitionist ideas blossomed again a dozen years later among the Mennonite and Quaker founders of Germantown in Philadelphia, this time, without Edmundson’s assimilationist ideas. Mennonites were an Anabaptist denomination born out of the Protestant Reformation in the German- and Dutch-speaking areas of Central Europe. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, orthodox authorities lethally persecuted the Mennonites. The Mennonites did not intend to leave behind one site of oppression to build another in America.
Mennonites therefore circulated an antislavery petition on April 18, 1688.
“There is a saying, that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are,” they wrote. “In Europe there are many oppressed” for their religion, and “here those are oppressed” for their “black colour.” Both oppressions were wrong. Actually, as an oppressor, America “surpass[ed] Holland and Germany.” Africans had the “right to fight for their freedom.” The 1688 Germantown Petition Against Slavery was the inaugural antiracist tract among European settlers in colonial America. Beginning with this piece, the Golden Rule would forever inspire the cause of White antiracists. Antiracists of all races—whether out of altruism or intelligent selfinterest—would always recognize that preserving racial hierarchy simultaneously preserves ethnic, gender, class, sexual, age, and religious hierarchies. Human hierarchies of any kind, they understood, would do little more than oppress all of humanity.
But powerful slaveholding Philadelphia Quakers killed the Germantown petition out of economic self-interest. William Edmundson had likewise suffered for promoting antislavery arguments a dozen years earlier.
Slaveholding Quakers across New England had banished Edmundson from their meetings. The elderly founder of the American Baptist Church, Rhode Island’s Roger Williams, called Edmundson “nothing but a bundle of ignorance.” Not many New Englanders read Edmundson’s letter to slaveholding Quakers, and not many noticed its significance. Everyone was focused on King Philip’s War.
7 In early August 1676, Increase Mather—the theological scion of New England with his father dead—implored God from sunup to sundown to cut down King Philip, or Metacomet, the Native American war leader. The conflict had been worsening for a little over a year, and the Puritans had lost homes and dozens of soldiers. Less than a week after Mather’s prayer campaign, Metacomet was killed, more or less ending the war. Puritans cut up his body as if it were a hog’s. A nearly fourteen-year-old Cotton Mather detached Metacomet’s jaw from his skull. Puritans then paraded the king’s remains around Plymouth.
8 Down in Virginia, Governor George Berkeley was trying to avoid a totally different war with neighboring Native Americans, in part to avoid disrupting his profitable fur trade. Twenty-nine-year-old frontier planter Nathaniel Bacon had other plans. The racial laws passed in the 1660s had done little to diminish class conflict. Around April 1676, Bacon mobilized a force of frontier White laborers to redirect their anger from elite Whites to Susquehannocks. Bacon’s mind game worked. “Since my being with the volunteers, the discourse and earnestness of the people is against the Indians,” Bacon wrote to Berkeley in triumph. Berkeley charged Bacon with treason, more worried about armed landless Whites—the “Rabble Crew”—than the Susquehannocks and nearby Occaneechees. But Bacon was not so easily stopped. By summer, the frontier war had quickly become a civil war—or to some, a class war—with Bacon and his supporters rebelling against Berkeley, and Berkeley hiring a militia of mercenaries.
By September 1676, a defiant Bacon had “proclaimed liberty to all Servants and Negroes.” For Governor Berkeley’s wealthy White inner circle, poor Whites and enslaved Blacks joining hands presaged the apocalypse. At the head of five hundred men, Bacon burned down Jamestown, forcing Berkeley to flee. When Bacon died of dysentery in October, the rebellion was doomed. Luring Whites with pardons and Blacks with liberty, Berkeley’s forces persuaded most of Bacon’s army to lay down their weapons. They spent the next few years crushing the rest of the rebels.
Rich planters learned from Bacon’s Rebellion that poor Whites had to be forever separated from enslaved Blacks. They divided and conquered by creating more White privileges. In 1680, legislators pardoned only the White rebels; they prescribed thirty lashes for any slave who lifted a hand “against any Christian” (Christian now meant White). All Whites now wielded absolute power to abuse any African person. By the early eighteenth century, every Virginia county had a militia of landless Whites “ready in case of any sudden eruption of Indians or insurrection of Negroes.” Poor Whites had risen into their lowly place in slave society—the armed defenders of planters—a place that would sow bitter animosity between them and enslaved Africans.
9 COTTON MATHER WAS in college when he detached Metacomet’s jaw from his skull and heard about Bacon’s Rebellion. Back in the summer of 1674, Increase Mather crossed the Charles River to present an eleven-year-old Cotton Mather for admission as the youngest student in Harvard’s history. He was already well known in New England as an intellectual prodigy—or, from the Puritans’ standpoint, the chosen one. Cotton Mather was fluent in Latin, running through fifteen chapters of the Bible a day, and as pious as boys came.
10 Smaller than a sixth-grade pupil, when Cotton Mather walked onto the tiny campus he was like a self-righteous politician entering a corrupted Congress. The dozen or so fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds schemed to break the eleven-year-old’s moral backbone until Increase Mather complained about the hazing. The teenagers stopped prodding him to sin, but sin still bedeviled him.
Sin was like the shadow he could never shake. The most trivial incident could explode into anxiety. One day, his tooth ached. “Have I not sinned with my Teeth?” his mind raced. “How? By sinful, graceless excessive Eating. And by evil Speeches.” Cotton Mather had started stuttering, and the incessant selfsearching and the burden of trying to live up to his two famous names may have worsened his condition. For the young minister-in-training, the soulsearching setback caused him to turn to his ink and quill.
11 Insecure in speech, Cotton Mather seemed to be a different person as a writer—confident, brilliant, and artistic. His father allowed him to write up many important church and government documents. Cotton ended up writing 7,000 pages of sermons in his notebooks between the ages of thirteen and thirty-two, far and away more sermonic pages than any other American Puritan. And his diary from 1681 to 1725 is the lengthiest available of any American Puritan.
12 Cotton Mather had been encouraged by his anxious but reassuring father.
Sooner or later, Cotton steeled his determination to find a way around the mighty rock. The youngster incessantly practiced away his stammer by singing psalms and speaking slowly, and by the end of his Harvard days he had learned to control it. He was delivered.
Cotton Mather cruised to the annual Boston Commencement Day in 1678.
Harvard president Urian Oakes called him to receive his degree. “What a name!” Oakes smiled. “I made a mistake, I confess; I should have said, what names!” 13
THE FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD COTTON MATHER graduated into a British world that was developing more and more sophisticated racist ideas to rationalize African slavery. English scientists and colonizers seemed to be trading theories. Around 1677, Royal Society economist William Petty drafted a hierarchical “Scale” of humanity, locating the “Guinea Negroes” at the bottom. Middle Europeans, he wrote, differed from Africans “in their natural manners, and in the internal qualities of their minds.” In 1679, the British Board of Trade approved Barbados’s brutally racist slave codes, which were securing the investments of traders and planters, and then produced a racist idea to justify the approval: Africans were “a brutish sort of People.” 14 In 1683, Increase and Cotton Mather founded colonial America’s first formal intellectual group, the Boston Philosophical Society. Modeled after London’s Royal Society, the Boston Society lasted only four years. The Mathers never published a journal, but if they had, they might have modeled it after the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, or the Journal des Sçavans in Paris. These were the organs of Western Europe’s scientific revolution, and new ideas on race were a part of that revolution. French physician and travel writer François Bernier, a friend of John Locke’s, anonymously crafted a “new division of the earth” in the French journal in 1684.
15 Through this essay, Bernier became the first popular classifier of all humans into races, which he differentiated fundamentally by their phenotypic characteristics. To Bernier, there existed “four or five Species or Races of men so notably differing from each other that this may serve as the just foundation of a new division of the world.” As a monogenesist, he held that “all men are descended from one individual.” He distinguished four races: the “first” race, which included Europeans, were the original humans; then there were the Africans, the East Asians, and the “quite frightful” people of northern Finland, “the Lapps.” Bernier gave future taxonomists some revisionist work to do when he lumped with Europeans in the “first” race the people of North Africa, the Middle East, India, the Americas, and Southeast Asia.
The notion of Europeans—save the Lapps—as being in the “first” race was part of Western thought almost from the beginning of racist ideas. It sat in the conceptual core of climate theory: Africans darkened by the sun could return to their original White complexion by living in cooler Europe. In advancing White originality and normality, Bernier positioned the “first” race as the “yardstick against which the others are measured,” as historian Siep Stuurman later explained. Bernier simultaneously veiled and normalized, screened and standardized White people—and he eroticized African women. “Those cherry-red lips, those ivory teeth, those large lively eyes . . . that bosom and the rest,” Bernier marveled. “I dare say there is no more delightful spectacle in the world.” It was a subtle contradiction—the diminution of Black people’s total (as racial) humanity in the midst of the elevation of their sexual humanity, a contradiction inherent in much of anti-Black racism. Bernier valued rationality, using it as a yardstick of superiority, irrespective of physicality.
Superior physicality related Africans to those creatures containing the utmost physical prowess—animals. François Bernier posed the notion of two human souls: one hereditary, sensitive, nonrational, and animal-like; the other Godgiven, spiritual, and rational. “Those who excel in the powers of the mind . . .
[should] command those who only excel in brute force,” Bernier concluded, “just as the soul governs the body, and man rules animals.” 16
IT IS UNCLEAR whether Cotton Mather read Bernier’s “new division of the earth.” Next to his father, he was more likely than any other English-speaking New Englander to know a little French and read the Journal des Sçavans. In the years after his graduation, he amassed one of the largest libraries in New England. But the late 1670s and 1680s were a tense time for New England elites. It was difficult to maintain the peace of mind for leisurely reading.
In 1676, English colonial administrator Edward Randolph had journeyed to New England, and he had seen the devastation wrought by King Philip’s War. Randolph, an advocate of stern royal control, informed King Charles II of New England’s vulnerability and suggested that the time had come to snatch the royally appointed chair of autonomy for Massachusetts—the precious charter of 1629—out of colonial hands. In the coming years, while Cotton Mather finished college and prepared for the pulpit, Randolph journeyed back and forth over the Atlantic Ocean. Every trip stirred new rumors of the charter being pulled and a new round of debates on whether to submit, compromise, or defy the king. Some New Englanders were furious at the prospect of losing local rule. “God forbid, that I should give away the Inheritance of my Fathers,” stormed Increase Mather at a town meeting in January 1684.
A year after Cotton Mather became co-pastor with his father of Boston’s North Church, Randolph returned holding the royal revocation of the charter and the installation of a royal governor, Sir Edmund Andros. Much of New England despondently submitted on May 14, 1686. Not Increase Mather, the newly installed head of Harvard. By May 1688, he was in England lobbying the successor to Charles II, James II, who offered religious liberty to Catholics and nonconformists. But during the “Glorious Revolution” later in the year, James II was overthrown by William, the Dutch prince, and James’s daughter, Mary. New Englanders did not sit by idly. In 1689, they raised the baton of revolt. CHAPTER 5
Black Hunts
ON THE EVENING of April 17, 1689, the twenty-six-year-old Cotton Mather probably held a meeting at his house. These elite merchants and ministers plotted to seize the captain of the royal warship guarding Boston Harbor, arrest royalists, and compel the surrender of the royalist contingent on Fort Hill. They hoped to control and contain the revolt, avoid the bloodshed, and await instructions from England, where Increase Mather held his lobbying post before William and Mary. They did not want a revolution. They merely wanted their royally backed local power reestablished. But “if the Country people, by any unrestrainable Violences,” pushed toward revolution, Cotton Mather explained, then to pacify the “ungoverned Mobile” they would present a Declaration of Gentleman and Merchants.
The next morning, conspirators seized the warship captain as planned.
News of the seizure initiated rebellious seizures all over Boston, as the elite plotters feared would occur. A convulsed working-class crowd gathered at the Town House in the center of town, “driving and furious,” avid for royal blood and independence. Mather rushed to the Town House. At noon, he probably read from the gallery a Declaration of Gentleman and Merchants to the revolutionaries. Mather’s calm, assuring, ministerial voice “reasoned down the Passions of the Populace,” according to family lore. By nightfall, Sir Edmund Andros, Edward Randolph, and other known royalists had been arrested, and Puritan merchants and preachers once again ruled New England.
1 The populace remained unruly, however, over the next few weeks. Cotton Mather was tapped to preach at a May convention called to settle the various demands for independence, military rule, or the old charter. He did not see democracy in the different demands; he saw pandemonium. “I am old enough to cry Peace! And in the Name of God I do it,” he preached at the convention.
The next day, town representatives voted to return to the old charter and reappoint the old governor, Simon Bradstreet. Peace, or the old social order of the populace submitting to the ministers and merchants, did not reappear, as Mather had wished. Nearly everyone knew the Bradstreet government was unofficial, as it had not received royal backing. When the king recalled Andros, Randolph, and other royalists in July 1689, it did not calm the masses. “All confusion is here,” one New Englander reported. “Every man is a Governor,” another testified.
2
THE DECLARATION OF GENTLEMAN AND MERCHANTS—most likely written by Mather—resembled another declaration by another prominent intellectual down in Virginia a century later. In the sixth article (of twelve), the writer declared, “The people of New England were all slaves and the only difference between them and slaves is their not being bought and sold.” In unifying New Englanders, Mather tried to redirect the resistance of commoners from local elites to British masters. And in actuality, Mather saw more differences between Puritans and slaves, if his other published words in 1689 were any indication, than between local New Englanders and their British masters. In the collection of sermons Small Offers Toward the Service of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, Mather first shared his racial views, calling the Puritan colonists “the English Israel”—a chosen people. Puritans must religiously instruct all slaves and children, the “inferiors,” Mather pleaded. But masters were not doing their job of looking after African souls, “which are as white and good as those of other Nations, but are Destroyed for lack of Knowledge.” Cotton Mather had built on Richard Baxter’s theological race concept. The souls of African people were equal to those of the Puritans: they were White and good.
3 Mather wrote of all humans having a White soul the same year John Locke declared all unblemished minds to be White. Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton had already popularized light as White. Michelangelo had already painted the original Adam and God as both being White in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. And for all these White men, Whiteness symbolized beauty, a trope taken up by one of the first popular novels by an English woman.
Published in 1688, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave, was the first English novel to repeatedly use terms like “White Men,” “White People,” and “Negro.” Set in the Dutch South American colony of Surinam, Oroonoko is the story of the enslavement and resistance of a young English woman and her husband, Oroonoko, an African prince. Oroonoko’s “beautiful, agreeable and handsome” physical features looked more European than African (“His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat”), and his behavior was “more civilized, according to the European Mode, than any other had been.” Behn framed Oroonoko as a heroic “noble savage,” superior to Europeans in his ignorance, in his innocence, in his harmlessness, and in his capacity for learning from Europeans. And in true assimilationist fashion, one of the characters insists, “A Negro can change colour; for I have seen ’em as frequently blush and look pale, and that as visibly as I ever saw in the most beautiful White.” 4
RICHARD BAXTER ENDORSED the London edition of Cotton Mather’s other 1689 publication, his first book-length work, which became a best seller: Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions.
Baxter rejoiced, having influenced the young Mather, as someone “likely to prove so great a Master Building in the Lords Work.” Mather’s treatise, outlining the symptoms of witchcraft, reflected his crusade against the enemies of White souls. He could not stop preaching about the existence of the Devil and witches. Or perhaps the restlessness of the commoners in the aftermath of the 1689 revolt triggered the real obsession in Cotton Mather.
The revolt, indeed, had fueled public strife against not only the faraway British king but also Puritan rulers of Mather’s stature. Maybe Mather was consciously attempting to redirect the public’s anger away from elites and toward invisible demons. He did regularly preach that anyone and anything that criticized his English Israel must be led by the Devil. Long before egalitarian rebels in America started to be cast off as extremists, criminals, radicals, outsiders, communists, or terrorists, Mather’s community of ministers ostracized egalitarian rebels as devils and witches.
5 “How many doleful Wretches, have been decoy’d into Witchcraft,” Cotton Mather asked in 1691. His father, Increase, preached a lengthy series on devils in 1693 after returning from England with the new Massachusetts charter. Samuel Parris, a Salem minister, preached endlessly about the devils in their midst. And on one dismal day in February 1692, Parris anxiously watched his nine-year-old daughter and eleven-year-old niece suffer chokes, convulsions, and pinches. As their condition worsened each day, the minister’s worsened, too. It dawned on Parris: the girls had been bewitched.
6 While prayers rose up like kites in Salem and nearby towns, the Salem witch hunt began. The number of afflicted and accused spread over the next few months, swelling the public uproar and turning public attention from political to religious strife. And in nearly every instance, the Devil who was preying upon innocent White Puritans was described as Black. One Puritan accuser described the Devil as “a little black bearded man”; another saw “a black thing of a considerable bigness.” A Black thing jumped in one man’s window. “The body was like that of a Monkey,” the observer added. “The Feet like a Cocks, but the Face much like a man’s.” Since the Devil represented criminality, and since criminals in New England were said to be the Devil’s operatives, the Salem witch hunt ascribed a Black face to criminality—an ascription that remains to this day.
7 Cotton Mather’s friends were appointed judges, including merchant John Richards, who had just officiated at Mather’s wedding. In a letter to Richards on May 31, 1692, Mather expressed his support for capital punishment. The Richards court executed Bridget Bishop on June 10, the first of more than twenty accused witches to die.
8 The accused up north in Andover, Massachusetts, confessed that the Black Devil man compelled them to renounce their baptism and sign his book. They rode poles to meetings where as many as five hundred witches plotted to destroy New England, the accused confessed. Hearing about this, Cotton Mather sniffed out a “Hellish Design of Bewitching and Ruining our Land.” Mather ventured to Salem for the first time to witness the executions on August 19, 1692. He came to see the killing of George Burroughs, the supposed general of the Black Devil’s New England army of witches.
Burroughs preached Anabaptist ideas of religious equality on the northern frontier, the kind of ideas that had bred antiracism in Germantown. Mather watched Burroughs plead his innocence at the execution site, and stir the “very great number” of spectators when he recited the Lord’s Prayer, something the judges said witches could not do.
9 “The black Man stood and dictated to him!” Burroughs’s accuser shouted, trying and failing to calm the crowd. Mather heard the ticking time bomb of the spectators, sounding like the unruly masses during the 1689 revolt. As soon as Burroughs was hanged, Mather sought to quell the passions of the crowd by re-inscribing the executive policies of his ruling class into God’s law. Remember, he preached, the Devil often transformed himself into an Angel of Light. Mather clearly believed in the power of religious (and racial) transformation, from Black devils to White angels, with good or bad intentions.
The fervor over witches soon died down. But even after Massachusetts authorities apologized, reversed the convictions, and provided reparations in the early 1700s, Mather never stopped defending the Salem witch trials, because he never stopped defending the religious, class, slaveholding, gender, and racial hierarchies reinforced by the trials. These hierarchies benefited elites like him, or, as he continued to preach, they were in accord with the law of God. And Cotton Mather viewed himself—or presented himself—as the defender of God’s law, the crucifier of any non-Puritan, African, Native American, poor person, or woman who defied God’s law by not following the rules of submission.
10 Sometime after the witch trials, maybe to save their Black faces from accusations of devilishness and criminality, a group of enslaved Africans formed a “Religious Society of Negroes” in Boston. It was one of the first known organizations of African people in colonial America. In 1693, Cotton Mather drew up the society’s list of rules, prefaced by a covenant: “Wee, the miserable children of Adam and Noah . . . freely resolve . . . to become the Servants of that Glorious Lord.” Two of Mather’s rules were instructive: members were to be counseled by someone “wise and of English” descent, and they were not to “afford” any “Shelter” to anyone who had “Run away from their Masters.” Meeting weekly, some members of the society probably delighted in hearing Mather cast their souls as White. Some probably rejected these racist ideas and used the society to mobilize against enslavement. The Religious Society of Negroes did not last. Few Africans wanted to be Christians at that time (though that would change in a few decades). And not many masters were willing to let their captives become Christians because, unlike in other colonies, there was no Massachusetts law stipulating that baptized slaves did not have to be freed.
11 Throughout the social tumult of the 1690s, Mather obsessed over maintaining the social hierarchies by convincing the lowly that God and nature had put them there, whether it applied to women, children, enslaved Africans, or poor people. In A Good Master Well Served (1696), he presumed that nature had created “a conjugal society” between husband and wife; a “Parental Society” between parent and child; and, “lowest of all,” a “herile society” between master and servant. Society, he said, became destabilized when children, women, and servants refused to accept their station. Mather compared egalitarian resisters to that old ambitious Devil, who wanted to become the all-powerful God. This line of thinking became Mather’s everlasting justification of social hierarchy: the ambitious lowly resembled Satan; his kind of elites resembled God.
“You are better fed & better clothed, & better managed by far, than you would be, if you were your own men,” Mather informed enslaved Africans in A Good Master Well Served. His insistence that urbane American slavery was better than barbaric African freedom was not unlike Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s estimation that Africans were better off as slaves in Portugal than they had been in Africa. Do not partake in evil and “make yourself infinitely Blacker than you are all ready,” Mather warned. By obeying, your “souls will be washed ‘White in the blood of the lamb.’” If you fail to be “orderly servants,” then you shall forever welter “under intolerable blows and wounds” from the Devil, “your overseer.” In sum, Mather offered enslaved Africans two options: righteous assimilated Whiteness and slavery to God and God’s minions, or segregated criminal Blackness and slavery to the Devil and the Devil’s minions.
12 Mather’s writings on slavery spread throughout the colonies, influencing enslavers from Boston to Virginia. By the eighteenth century, he had published more books than any other American, and his native Boston had become colonial America’s booming intellectual center. Boston was now on the periphery of a booming slave society centered in the tidewater region of Maryland, Virginia, and northeastern Carolina. The Mid-Atlantic’s moderate climate, fertile land, and waterways for transportation were ideal for the raising of tobacco, and lots of it. Fulfilling the voracious European demand, tobacco exports from this region skyrocketed from 20,000 pounds in 1619 to 38 million in 1700. The imports of captives (and racist ideas) soared with tobacco exports. In the 1680s, enslaved Africans eclipsed White servants as the principal labor force. In 1698, the crown ended the Royal African Company’s monopoly and opened the slave trade. Purchasing enslaved Africans became the investment craze.
13 The economic craze did not yield a religious craze, though. Planters still shied away from converting enslaved Africans, ignoring Mather’s arguments.
One lady inquired, “Is it possible that any of my slaves should go to heaven, and must I see them there?” Christian knowledge, one planter complained, “would be a means to make the slave more . . . [apt] to wickedness.” Cotton Mather’s counterpart in Virginia, Scottish minister James Blair, tried to induce planters to realize the submission wrought by Christianity. The 1689 appointment of the thirty-three-year-old Blair as commissary of Virginia—the highest-ranking religious leader—reflected King William and Queen Mary’s new interest in the empire’s most populous colony. Blair used profits from slave labor to found the College of William & Mary in 1693, the colonies’ second college.
14 In 1699, Blair presented to the Virginia House of Burgesses “a Proposition for encouraging the Christian Education of Indians, Negroes, and Mulatto Children.” Lawmakers responded, rather inaccurately, that the “negroes born in this country are generally baptised and brought up in the Christian religion.” As for imported Africans, lawmakers announced, “the gross bestiality and rudeness of their manners, the variety and strangeness of their languages, and the weakness and shallowness of their minds, render it in a manner impossible to make any progress in their conversion.” For the much more difficult commercial tasks, planters overcame the “strange” languages and had no problem teaching these “shallow-minded rude beasts” in other matters. Planters of impossibilities suddenly became planters of possibilities when instructing imported Africans on the complexities of proslavery theory, racist ideas, tobacco production, skilled trades, domestic work, and plantation management.
15 As Maryland’s commissary, the Oxford-educated Thomas Bray did not fare much better than Blair in converting Blacks during his tour of Maryland in 1700. Returning to London distressed in 1701, he organized the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). King William approved, and an all-star cast of ministers signed up to become founding members of the Church of England’s first systematic effort to spread its views in the colonies. Cotton Mather did not sign up for SPG, distrustful of Anglicans on every level. Even though Mather started mocking “the Society for the Molestation of the Gospel in foreign parts,” he remained in solidarity with Anglican SPG missionaries—and Quaker missionaries—in trying to persuade resistant enslavers to Christianize resistant Africans. Persuading planters was extremely difficult. Then again, persuading them to Christianize their captives was much easier than what Mather’s friend tried to persuade them to do in 1700.
16 CHAPTER 6 Great Awakening
THE NEW CENTURY brought on the first major public debate over slavery in colonial America. New England businessman John Saffin refused to free his Black indentured servant named Adam after Adam served his contracted term of seven years. When Boston judge Samuel Sewall learned of Saffin’s decision essentially to enslave Adam for the foreseeable future, Sewall was livid. Well known as one of the first Salem witch trial judges to publicly apologize, Sewall courageously took another public stand when he released The Selling of Joseph on June 24, 1700. “Originally, and Naturally, there is no such thing as Slavery,” Sewall wrote. He shot down popular proslavery justifications, such as curse theory, the notion that the “good” end of Christianity justified the “evil” means of slavery, and John Locke’s just war theory. Sewall rejected these proslavery theories from the quicksand of another kind of racism. New Englanders should rid themselves of slavery and African people, Sewall maintained. African people “seldom use their freedom well,” he said. They can never live “with us, and grow up into orderly Families.” 1 Samuel Sewall could not be easily cast aside like those powerless Germantown petitioners. A close friend of Cotton Mather, Sewall had received an audience with the king in England, and he had served as judge on the highest court in Boston. He was on track to becoming the Puritans’ chief justice in 1717. When Sewall judged slavery to be bad, he should have opened the minds of many. But proslavery racism had almost always been a close-minded affair. In place of open minds, closed-minded “Frowns and hard Words” bombarded the forty-six-year-old jurist.
John Saffin, in particular, was maddened by Sewall’s attack on his business dealings. A judge himself, Saffin refused to disqualify himself from adjuring a freedom case for Adam. At seventy-five years old in 1701, his lifetime in the trenches of early American capitalism had nurtured his outlook on powerful people. “Friendship & Munificence are Strangers in this world,” Saffin once opined. “Interest and profit are the Principles by [which] all are Sway’d.” No one attacked Saffin, called him “manstealer,” and got away with it.
2 Before the end of 1701, John Saffin had printed A Brief and Candid Answer, to a Late Printed Sheet, Entitled, The Selling of Joseph. “God hath set different Orders and Degrees of Men in the World,” Saffin declared. No matter what Sewall said, it was not an “Evil thing to bring [Africans] out of their own Heathenish Country” and convert them. Saffin, well known among literary historians as a leading seventeenth-century poet, ended his pamphlet in verse with “The Negroes Character”: “Cowardly and cruel are those Blacks Innate, Prone to Revenge, Imp of inveterate hate.” 3 Samuel Sewall won the battle—Adam was freed in 1703 after a long and bitter trial—but he lost the war. America did not rid itself of slavery or of Black people. In the newspaper debate that trailed the Sewall-Saffin dispute, Bostonians seemingly found Saffin’s segregationist ideas more persuasive than Sewall’s. Sewall did get in the last volley in his lost war, prompted by the London Athenian Society questioning whether the slave trade was “contrary to the great law of Christianity.” Sewall answered affirmatively in a fourteen-page pamphlet in 1705. He pointed out that the so-called just wars between Africans were actually instigated by European slave-traders drumming up demand for captives.
4 Meanwhile, the enslaved population continued to rise noticeably, which led to fears of revolts and then, in 1705, new racist codes to prevent revolts and secure human property up and down the Atlantic Coast. Massachusetts authorities forbade interracial relationships, began taxing imported captives, and, over Samuel Sewall’s objections, rated Indians and Negroes with horses and hogs during a revision of the tax code. Virginia lawmakers made slave patrols compulsory for non-slaveholding Whites; these groups of White citizens were charged with policing slaves, enforcing discipline, and guarding routes of escape. The Virginia legislature also denied Blacks the ability to hold office. Evoking repeatedly the term “christian white servant” and defining their rights, Virginia lawmakers fully married Whiteness and Christianity, uniting rich White enslavers and the non-slaveholding White poor. To seal the unity (and racial loyalty), Virginia’s White lawmakers seized and sold all property owned by “any slave,” the “profit thereof applied to the use of the poor of the said parish.” The story would be told many times in American history: Black property legally or illegally seized; the resulting Black destitution blamed on Black inferiority; the past discrimination ignored when the blame was assigned. Virginia’s 1705 code mandated that planters provide freed White servants with fifty acres of land. The resulting White prosperity was then attributed to White superiority.
5 ON MARCH 1, 1706, Cotton Mather asked God whether, if he “[wrote] an Essay, about the Christianity of our Negro and other Slaves”, God would bless him with “Good Servants.” Mather hoped a pamphlet focusing exclusively on this topic would help to shift the minds of enslavers who refused to baptize their captives. By now, he was unquestionably America’s foremost minister and intellectual, having just published his New England history, a toast of American exceptionalism, Magnalia Christi Americana, regarded as the greatest literary achievement of New England’s first century.
6 Mather released The Negro Christianized in June 1706. The “Providence of God” sent Africans into slavery and over to Christian America to have the capacity to learn from their masters the “Glorious Gospel.” They “are Men, and not Beasts”, Mather stressed, opposing segregationists. “Indeed their Stupidity is a Discouragement. It may seem, unto as little purpose, to Teach, as to wash” Africans. “But the greater their Stupidity, the greater must be our Application,” he proclaimed. Don’t worry about baptism leading to freedom.
The “Law of Christianity . . . allows Slavery,” he resolved. He cited the writings of other Puritan theologians as well as St. Paul.
7 On December 13, 1706, Mather believed wholeheartedly that God had rewarded him for writing The Negro Christianized. Members of Mather’s church—“without any Application of mine to them for such a Thing”—spent forty or fifty pounds on “a very likely Slave,” he happily noted in his diary.
New England churches routinely gifted captives to ministers. Mather named “it” Onesimus, after St. Paul’s adopted son, a converted runaway. Mather kept a close racist eye on Onesimus, constantly suspecting him of thievery.
8 Mather’s Christian slavery views were more representative in New England than Samuel Sewall’s or John Saffin’s ideas. But Samuel Sewall’s views continued to echo in the writings of others. In 1706, John Campbell’s first full-fledged essay in his Boston News-Letter, the second newspaper in colonial America, urged the importation of more White servants to reduce the colony’s dependence on enslaved Africans, who were “much addicted to Stealing, Lying and Purloning.” Americans reading early colonial newspapers learned two recurring lessons about Black people: they could be bought like cattle, and they were dangerous criminals like those witches.
From their arrival around 1619, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery. They had thus been stamped from the beginning as criminals. In all of the fifty suspected or actual slave revolts reported in newspapers during the American colonial era, resisting Africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals, not people reacting to enslavers’ regular brutality, or pressing for the most basic human desire: freedom.
9 As the sun fired up the sky on April 7, 1712, about thirty enslaved Africans and two Native Americans set fire to a New York building, ambushing the “Christians” who came to put it out, as the story was told.
Nine “Christians” were slayed, five or six seriously wounded. The freedom fighters ran off into the nearby woods. Fear and revenge smoldered through the city. Within twenty-four hours, six of the rebels had committed suicide (believing they would return to Africa in death); the rest were “hunted out” by soldiers and publicly executed, mostly burned alive. New York colonial governor Robert Hunter, who supervised the hunt, the trials, and the executions, was a member of Thomas Bray’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and the Royal Society. He framed the slave revolt a “barbarous attempt of some of their slaves.” No matter what African people did, they were barbaric beasts or brutalized like beasts. If they did not clamor for freedom, then their obedience showed they were naturally beasts of burden. If they nonviolently resisted enslavement, they were brutalized. If they killed for their freedom, they were barbaric murderers.
Their “barbarism” occasioned a “severe” slave code, resembling the laws passed by the Virginians and Puritans in 1705. New York lawmakers stripped free Blacks of the right to own property, and then they denigrated “the free negroes of the colony” as an “idle, slothful people” who weighed on the “public charge.” 10
IN THE MIDST of relentless African resistance and increasingly vocal antislavery Quakers, British slave-traders were still doing quite well, and they were primed for growth. In 1713, England won the Assiento, the privilege of supplying captives to all those Spanish American colonies, allowing it to soon become the eighteenth century’s greatest slave-trader, following in the footsteps of France, Holland, and the pioneers in Portugal. New England had become the main entryway into the colonies for European and Caribbean goods. Ships setting out from the colonies, mostly from Boston and Newport, Rhode Island, carried the food that fed the British Caribbean’s planters, overseers, and laborers. Ships returned hauling sugar, rum, captives, and molasses, all supplying New England’s largest manufacturing industry before the American Revolution—liquor.
11 Boston’s status as one of the key ports in the colonies left the city vulnerable to disease. On April 21, 1721, the HMS Seahorse sailed into Boston Harbor from Barbados. A month later, Cotton Mather logged in his journal, “The grievous calamity of the smallpox has now entered the town.” One thousand Bostonians, nearly 10 percent of the town, fled to the countryside to escape the judgment of the Almighty.
12 Fifteen years prior, Mather had asked Onesimus one of the standard questions that Boston slaveholders asked new house slaves—Have you had smallpox? “Yes and no,” Onesimus answered. He explained how in Africa before his enslavement, a tiny amount of pus from a smallpox victim had been scraped into his skin with a thorn, following a practice hundreds of years old that resulted in building up healthy recipients’ immunities to the disease.
This form of inoculation—a precursor to modern vaccination—was an innovative practice that prevented untold numbers of deaths in West Africa and on disease-ridden slave ships to ports throughout the Atlantic. Racist European scientists at first refused to recognize that African physicians could have made such advances. Indeed, it would take several decades and many more deaths before British physician Edward Jenner, the so-called father of immunology, validated inoculation.
Cotton Mather, however, became an early believer when he read an essay on inoculation in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1714. He then interviewed Africans around Boston to be sure. Sharing their inoculation stories, they gave him a window into the intellectual culture of West Africa.
He had trouble grasping it, instead complaining about how “brokenly and blunderingly and like Idiots they tell the Story.” 13 On June 6, 1721, Mather calmly composed an “Address to the Physicians of Boston,” respectfully requesting that they consider inoculation. If anyone had the credibility to suggest something so new in a time of peril it was Cotton Mather, the first American-born fellow in London’s Royal Society, which was still headed by Isaac Newton. Mather had released fifteen to twenty books and pamphlets a year since the 1690s, and he was nearing his mammoth career total of 388—probably more than the rest of his entire generation of New England ministers combined.
14 The only doctor who responded to Mather was Zabadiel Boylston, President John Adams’s great-uncle. When Boylston announced his successful inoculation of his six-year-old son and two enslaved Africans on July 15, 1721, area doctors and councilmen were horrified. It made no sense that people should inject themselves with a disease to save themselves from the disease. Boston’s only holder of a medical degree, a physician pressing to maintain his professional legitimacy, fanned the city’s flames of fear. Dr.
William Douglass concocted a conspiracy theory, saying there was a grand plot afoot among African people, who had agreed to kill their masters by convincing them to be inoculated. “There is not a Race of Men on Earth more False Liars” than Africans, Douglass barked.
15 Anti-inoculators like Dr. Douglass found a friendly medium in one of the colonies’ first independent newspapers, the New England Courant, launched by twenty-four-year-old James Franklin in 1721. James Franklin’s fifteenyear-old indentured servant and younger brother, Ben, worked as the typesetter for the newspaper. Feeling disrespected by the Courant, Cotton Mather demanded intellectual obedience like a tired college professor. The general public ignored him and withdrew. Bostonians’ distaste for Mather and Boylston improved only when the epidemic that killed 842 people finally ended in early 1722.
16 As April 1722 approached, Ben Franklin decided he wanted to do more than setting type for his brother’s newspaper. He started anonymously penning letters with fascinating social advice, slipping them under the print shop door for his brother to print in the Courant. Signing the letters Silence Dogood, Ben was inspired by Mather’s 1710 Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good, on maintaining social order through benevolence. The book “gave me such a turn of thinking, as to have an influence on my conduct through life,” Benjamin Franklin later explained to Mather’s son. After publishing sixteen popular letters, Ben revealed the true identity of Silence Dogood to his jealous and overbearing brother. James promptly censured Ben. By 1723, all the ambitious Ben could think about was running away.
17 Before fleeing to Philadelphia, Ben was summoned to a home on Ship Street. He nervously knocked. A servant appeared and led him to the study.
Ben entered and beheld probably the largest library in North America. Cotton Mather forgave Ben for the war of words, as a father would a misbehaving child. No one knows what else the sixty-year-old and seventeen-year-old discussed.
Ben Franklin may have noticed Cotton Mather’s melancholy. Mather’s beloved father, then eighty-four, was ill. When Increase Mather died in his oldest son’s arms on August 23, 1723, the tragedy topped off some weary years for Cotton Mather, who had weathered marital disputes, financial problems, disagreements with Anglican ministers, being passed over twice for the Harvard presidency, and the news that Isaac Newton’s Royal Society would no longer publish his work. Despite all his successes, Mather had begun to worry about his intellectual legacy.
If Mather stayed abreast of current events in the colonies in the 1720s, then he had no reason to worry about his missionary legacy. More fervently than any American voice since the 1680s, Mather had urged slaveholders to baptize enslaved Africans, and enslaved Africans to leave the religions of their ancestors. Moving slowly and carefully uphill, he had made strides over the years. Like-minded Anglican missionaries, such as James Blair, Thomas Bray, and the agents of his Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, had taken this idea further. Whether he realized it or not, and whether he despised the Anglican missionaries or not, Mather’s prayers finally began to be answered during his final years.
Edmund Gibson, the distinguished Anglican bishop of London, decided to eliminate any lingering doubt in planters as to whether they could hold Christian captives. In two letters to Virginians in 1727, he praised and authenticated the innovative statute of 1667 that denied freedom to baptized captives. Gibson talked about how conversion obligated captives to “the greatest Diligences and Fidelity,” an idea that Mather had been stressing for years. The British crown and the aides of Sir Robert Walpole, the first prime minister of Great Britain, echoed the bishop. All of Britain’s religious, political, and economic power now united to free missionaries and planters from having to free the converted, thus reinvigorating proselytizing movements and dooming calls for manumission.
18 More and more enslavers began to listen to the arguments of missionaries that Christian submission could supplement their violence in subduing African people. Actually, the ministers focused on the submission and were mum on the violence. Minister Hugh Jones, a William & Mary professor, published his highly influential Present State of Virginia in 1724.
“Christianity,” Jones wrote, “encourages and orders” African people “to become more humble and better servants.” They should not learn to read and write, though. They were “by Nature cut out for hard Labour and Fatigue.” In his stunningly popular 1722 collection of sermons, James Blair proclaimed that the Golden Rule did not suggest equality between “superiors and inferiors.” Order required hierarchy. Hierarchy required responsibility.
Masters, Blair preached, were to baptize and treat their slaves kindly.
19 Enslavers continued to become more open to these ideas right up until the First Great Awakening, which swept through the colonies in the 1730s, spearheaded by Connecticut native Jonathan Edwards. His father, Timothy Edwards, had studied under Increase Mather at Harvard, and he knew and venerated Cotton Mather. During Edwards’s junior year at Yale in 1718, Cotton Mather had secured the donation from Welsh merchant Elihu Yale that had resulted in the name of America’s third college (the Collegiate School) being changed.
Revivals at Edwards’s Massachusetts church in Northampton jump-started the First Great Awakening around 1733. In awakening souls, passionate evangelicals like Edwards spoke about human equality (in soul) and the capability of everyone for conversion. “I am God’s servant as they are mine, and much more inferior to God than my servant is to me,” the slaveholding Edwards explained in 1741. But the proslavery Great Awakening did not extend to the South Carolina plantation of Hugh Bryan, who was awakened into antislavery thought. Bryan proclaimed “sundry enthusiastic Prophecies of the Destruction of Charles Town and Deliverance of the Negroes from servitude” in 1740. His praying captives stopped laboring. One woman was overheard “singing a spiritual at the water’s edge,” like so many other unidentified antiracist, antislavery Christian women and men who started singing in those years. South Carolina authorities reprimanded Bryan. They wanted evangelists preaching a racist Christianity for submission, not an antiracist Christianity for liberation.
20 Hugh Bryan was an exception in the missionary days of the First Great Awakening, days Cotton Mather would not live to see. Though bedridden, he was happy he lived to see his sixty-fifth birthday on February 13, 1728. The next morning, Mather called his church’s new pastor, Joshua Gee, into the room for prayer. Mather felt a release. “Now I have nothing more to do here,” Mather told Gee. Hours later, Cotton Mather was dead.
21 “He was perhaps the principal Ornament of this Country, and the greatest Scholar that was ever bred in it,” praised the New-England Weekly Journal on February 19, 1728, the day of Mather’s burial. It was an accurate eulogy for the grandson of John Cotton and Richard Mather. Cotton Mather had indeed overtaken the names of his grandfathers, two ministerial giants bred in an intellectual world debating whether Africa’s heat or Ham’s curse had produced the ugly apelike African beasts who were benefiting from enslavement. If his grandfathers consumed in England the racist idea of the African who can and should be enslaved, then Cotton Mather led the way in producing the racist idea of Christianity simultaneously subduing and uplifting the enslaved African. He joined with the producers of racist ideas in other colonial empires, from the mother countries in Europe, and normalized and rationalized the expansion of colonialism and slavery. Europeans were taking over and subduing the Western world, establishing their rightful ruling place as the very standard of human greatness, these racist producers proclaimed in a nutshell. By the time of Mather’s death in 1728, Royal Society fellows had fully constructed this White ruling standard for humanity.
Christianity, rationality, civilization, wealth, goodness, souls, beauty, light, Adam, Jesus, God, and freedom had all been framed as the dominion of White people from Europe. The only question was whether lowly African people had the capacity of rising up and reaching the standard. As America’s first great assimilationist, Cotton Mather preached that African people could become White in their souls.
In 1729, Samuel Mather completed his esteeming biography of his deceased father, as Cotton Mather had done for his father, and as Increase Mather had done for Richard Mather. “When he walked the streets”, Samuel wrote of Cotton Mather, “he still blessed many persons who never knew it, with Secret Wishes.” He blessed the Black man, dearly praying “Lord, Wash that poor Soul; make him white by the Washing of thy SPIRIT.” 22 PART II
Thomas Jefferson CHAPTER 7 Enlightenment
NOTHING FAZED HIM. He carried tired mules. He pressed on while companions fainted. He cut down predators as calmly as he rested in trees at night. Peter Jefferson had a job to do in 1747: he was surveying land never before seen by White settlers, in order to continue the boundary-line between Virginia and North Carolina across the dangerous Blue Ridge Mountains. He had been commissioned to certify that colonial America’s westernmost point had not become like Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, a haven for runaways.
1 In time, Peter Jefferson’s mesmerizing stamina, strength, and courage on surveying trips became transfixed in family lore. Among the first to hear the stories was four-year-old Thomas, overjoyed when his father finally came home at the end of 1747. Thomas was Peter’s oldest son, born on April 13 during the memorable year of 1743. Cotton Mather’s missionary counterpart in Virginia, James Blair, died sixteen days after Thomas’s birth, marking the end of an era when theologians almost completely dominated the racial discourse in America. The year also marked the birth of a new intellectual era.
“Enlightened” thinkers started secularizing and expanding the racist discourse throughout the colonies, tutoring future antislavery, anti-abolitionist, and antiroyal revolutionaries in Thomas Jefferson’s generation. And Cotton Mather’s greatest secular disciple led the way.
“THE FIRST DRUDGERY of settling new colonies is now pretty well over,” Benjamin Franklin observed in 1743, “and there are many in every province in circumstances that set them at ease, and afford leisure to cultivate the finer arts, and improve the common stock of knowledge.” At thirty-seven, Franklin’s circumstances certainly set him at ease. Since fleeing Boston, he had built an empire of stores, almanacs, and newspapers in Philadelphia. For men like him, who leisured about as their capital literally or figuratively worked for them, his observations about living at ease were no doubt true.
Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society (APS) in 1743 in Philadelphia. Modeled after the Royal Society, the APS became the colonies’ first formal association of scholars since the Mathers’ Boston Society in the 1680s. Franklin’s scholarly baby died in infancy, but it was revived in 1767 with a commitment to “all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things.” 2
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION of the 1600s had given way to a greater intellectual movement in the 1700s. Secular knowledge, and notions of the propensity for universal human progress, had long been distrusted in Christian Europe. That changed with the dawn of an age that came to be known as les Lumières in France, Aufklärung in Germany, Illuminismo in Italy, and the Enlightenment in Great Britain and America.
For Enlightenment intellectuals, the metaphor of light typically had a double meaning. Europeans had rediscovered learning after a thousand years in religious darkness, and their bright continental beacon of insight existed in the midst of a “dark” world not yet touched by light. Light, then, became a metaphor for Europeanness, and therefore Whiteness, a notion that Benjamin Franklin and his philosophical society eagerly embraced and imported to the colonies. White colonists, Franklin alleged in Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751), were “making this side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light.” Let us bar uneconomical slavery and Black people, Franklin suggested. “But perhaps,” he thought, “I am partial to the complexion of my Country, for such kind of partiality is natural to Mankind.” Enlightenment ideas gave legitimacy to this long-held racist “partiality,” the connection between lightness and Whiteness and reason, on the one hand, and between darkness and Blackness and ignorance, on the other.
3 These Enlightenment counterpoints arose, conveniently, at a time when Western Europe’s triangular transatlantic trade was flourishing. Great Britain, France, and colonial America principally furnished ships and manufactured goods. The ships sailed to West Africa, and traders exchanged these goods, at a profit, for human merchandise. Manufactured cloth became the most sought-after item in eighteenth-century Africa for the same reason that cloth was coveted in Europe—nearly everyone in Africa (as in Europe) wore clothes, and nearly everyone in Africa (as in Europe) desired better clothes.
Only the poorest of African people did not wear an upper garment, but this small number became representative in the European mind. It was the irony of the age: slave traders knew that cloth was the most desired commodity in both places, but at the same time some of them were producing the racist idea that Africans walked around naked like animals. Producers of this racist idea had to know their tales were false. But they went on producing them anyway to justify their lucrative commerce in human beings.
4 The slave ships traveled from Africa to the Americas, where dealers exchanged at another profit the newly enslaved Africans for raw materials that had been produced by the long-enslaved Africans. The ships and traders returned home and began the process anew, providing a “triple stimulus” for European commerce (and a triple exploitation of African people). Practically all the coastal manufacturing and trading towns in the Western world developed an enriching connection to the transatlantic trade during the eighteenth century. Profits exploded with the growth and prosperity of the slave trade in Britain’s principal port, Richard Mather’s old preaching ground, Liverpool. The principal American slave-trading port was Newport, Rhode Island, and the proceeds produced mammoth fortunes that can be seen in the mansions still dotting the town’s historic waterfront.
In his 1745 book endorsing the slave-trading Royal African Company, famous economics writer Malachy Postlethwayt defined the British Empire as “a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power, on an African foundation.” But another foundation lay beneath that foundation: those all-important producers of racist ideas, who ensured that this magnificent superstructure would continue to seem normal to potential resisters. Enlightenment intellectuals produced the racist idea that the growing socioeconomic inequities between England and Senegambia, Europe and Africa, the enslavers and enslaved, had to be God’s or nature’s or nurture’s will. Racist ideas clouded the discrimination, rationalized the racial disparities, defined the enslaved, as opposed to the enslavers, as the problem people. Antiracist ideas hardly made the dictionary of racial thought during the Enlightenment.
5 Carl Linnaeus, the progenitor of Sweden’s Enlightenment, followed in the footsteps of François Bernier and took the lead classifying humanity into a racial hierarchy for the new intellectual and commercial age. In Systema Naturae, first published in 1735, Linnaeus placed humans at the pinnacle of the animal kingdom. He sliced the genus Homo into Homo sapiens (humans) and Homo troglodytes (ape), and so on, and further divided the single Homo sapiens species into four varieties. At the pinnacle of his human kingdom reigned H. sapiens europaeus: “Very smart, inventive. Covered by tight clothing. Ruled by law.” Then came H. sapiens americanus (“Ruled by custom”) and H. sapiens asiaticus (“Ruled by opinion”). He relegated humanity’s nadir, H. sapiens afer, to the bottom, calling this group “sluggish, lazy . . . [c]rafty, slow, careless. Covered by grease. Ruled by caprice,” describing, in particular, the “females with genital flap and elongated breasts.” 6 Carl Linnaeus created a hierarchy within the animal kingdom and a hierarchy within the human kingdom, and this human hierarchy was based on race. His “enlightened” peers were also creating human hierarchies; within the European kingdom, they placed Irish people, Jews, Romani, and southern and eastern Europeans at the bottom. Enslavers and slave traders were creating similar ethnic hierarchies within the African kingdom. Enslaved Africans in North America were coming mainly from seven culturalgeopolitical regions: Angola (26 percent), Senegambia (20 percent), Nigeria (17 percent), Sierra Leone (11 percent), Ghana (11 percent), Ivory Coast (6 percent), and Benin (3 percent). Since the hierarchies were usually based on which ancestral groups were thought to make the best slaves, or whose ways most resembled those of Europeans, different enslavers with different needs and different cultures had different hierarchies. Generally, Angolans were classed as the most inferior Africans, since they were priced so cheaply in slave markets (due to their greater supply). Linnaeus classed the Khoi (or Hottentot) of South Africa as a divergent branch of humanity, Homo monstrosis monorchidei. Since the late seventeenth century, the Khoi people had been deemed “the missing link between human and ape species.” 7 Making hierarchies of Black ethnic groups within the African kingdom can be termed ethnic racism, because it is at the intersection of ethnocentric and racist ideas, while making hierarchies pitting all Europeans over all Africans was simply racism. In the end, both classified a Black ethnic group as inferior. Standards of measurement for the ethnic groups within the African hierarchies were based on European cultural values and traits, and hierarchymaking was wielded in the service of a political project: enslavement.
Senegambians were deemed superior to Angolans because they supposedly made better slaves, and because supposedly their ways were closer to European ways. Imported Africans in the Americas no doubt recognized the hierarchy of African peoples as quickly as imported White servants recognized the broader racial hierarchy. When and if Senegambians cast themselves as superior to Angolans to justify any relative privileges they received, Senegambians were espousing ethnically racist ideas, just like those Whites who used racist ideas to justify their White privileges. Whenever a Black person or group used White people as a standard of measurement, and cast another Black person or group as inferior, it was another instance of racism. Carl Linnaeus and company crafted one massive hierarchy of races and of ethnic groups within the races. The entire ladder and all of its steps— from the Greeks or Brits at the very top down to the Angolans and Hottentots at the bottom—everything bespoke ethnic racism. Some “superior” Africans agreed with the collection of ethnocentric steps for Africans, but rejected the racist ladder that deemed them inferior to White people. They smacked the racist chicken and enjoyed its racist eggs.
8 Every traded African ethnic group was like a product, and slave traders seemed to be valuing and devaluing these ethnic products based on the laws of supply and demand. Linnaeus did not seem to be part of a grandiose scheme to force-feed ethnic racism to enslaved peoples to divide and conquer them. But whenever ethnic racism did set the natural allies on American plantations apart, in the manner that racism set the natural allies in American poverty apart, enslavers hardly minded. They were usually willing to deploy any tool—intellectual or otherwise—to suppress slave resistance and ensure returns on their investments.
VOLTAIRE, FRANCE’S ENLIGHTENMENT GURU, used Linnaeus’s racist ladder in the book of additions that supplemented his half-million-word Essay on Universal History in 1756. He agreed there was a permanent natural order of the species. He asked, “Were the flowers, fruits, trees, and animals with which nature covers the face of the earth, planted by her at first only in one spot, in order that they might be spread over the rest of the world?” No, he boldly declared. “The negro race is a species of men as different from ours as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhound. . . . If their understanding is not of a different nature from ours it is at least greatly inferior.” The African people were like animals, he added, merely living to satisfy “bodily wants.” However, as a “warlike, hardy, and cruel people,” they were “superior” soldiers.
9 With the publication of Essay on Universal History, Voltaire became the first prominent writer in almost a century daring enough to suggest polygenesis. The theory of separately created races was a contrast to the assimilationist idea of monogenesis, that is, of all humans as descendants of a White Adam and Eve. Voltaire emerged as the eighteenth century’s chief arbiter of segregationist thought, promoting the idea that the races were fundamentally separate, that the separation was immutable, and that the inferior Black race had no capability to assimilate, to be normal, or to be civilized and White. The Enlightenment shift to secular thought had thus opened the door to the production of more segregationist ideas. And segregationist ideas of permanent Black inferiority appealed to enslavers, because they bolstered their defense of the permanent enslavement of Black people.
Voltaire was intellectually at odds with naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, who adopted the name Buffon. Buffon headed the moderate mainstream of the French Enlightenment through his encyclopedic Histoire naturelle (Natural history), which appeared in forty-five volumes over fifty-five years beginning in 1749. Nearly every European intellectual read them. And while Voltaire promoted segregationist thinking, Buffon remained committed to assimilationist ideas.
The argument over Voltaire’s multiple human species versus Buffon’s single human species was one aspect of a larger scientific divide during the Enlightenment era. Their beloved Sir Isaac Newton envisioned the natural world as an assembled machine running on “natural laws.” Newton did not explain how it was assembled. That was fine for Voltaire, who believed the natural world—including the races—to be unchangeable, even from God’s power. Buffon instead beheld an ever-changing world. Buffon and Voltaire did agree on one thing: they both opposed slavery. Actually, most of the leading Enlightenment intellectuals were producers of racist ideas and abolitionist thought.
10 Buffon defined a species as “a constant succession of similar individuals that can reproduce together.” And since different races could reproduce together, they must be of the same species, he argued. Buffon was responding to some of the first segregationist denigrations of biracial people.
Polygenesists were questioning or rejecting the reproductive capability of biracial people in order to substantiate their arguments for racial groups being separate species. If Blacks and Whites were separate species, then their offspring would be infertile. And so the word mulatto, which came from “mule,” came into being, because mules were the infertile offspring of horses and donkeys. In the eighteenth century, the adage “black as the devil” battled for popularity in the English-speaking world with “God made the white man, the devil made the mulatto.” 11 Buffon distinguished six races or varieties of a single human species (and the Khoi people of South Africa he placed with monkeys). He positioned Africans “between the extremes of barbarism and of civilization.” They had “little knowledge” of the “arts and sciences,” and their language was “without rules,” said Buffon. As a climate theorist and monogenesist, Buffon did not believe these qualities were fixed in stone. If Africans were imported to Europe, then their color would gradually change and become “perhaps as white as the natives” of Europe. It was in Europe where “we behold the human form in its greatest perfection,” and where “we ought to form our ideas of the real and natural colour of man.” Buffon sounded like the foundational thinker of modern European art history, Johann Joachim Winckelmann of Germany. “A beautiful body will be all the more beautiful the whiter it is,” Winckelmann said in his disciplinary classic, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of the Art of Antiquity) in 1764. These were the “enlightened” ideas on race that Benjamin Franklin’s American Philosophical Society and a young Thomas Jefferson were consuming and importing to America on the eve of the American Revolution.
12
PETER JEFFERSON ACQUIRED around twelve hundred acres in Virginia’s Albemarle County and went on to represent the county in the House of Burgesses, Virginia’s legislative body. Shadwell, his tobacco plantation, sat about five miles east of the current center of Charlottesville. The Jefferson home was a popular rest stop for nearby Cherokees and Catawbas on their regular diplomatic journeys to Williamsburg. The young Thomas Jefferson “acquired impressions of attachment and commiseration for them which have never been obliterated,” he reminisced years later.
13 While Thomas was raised on the common sight of distinguished Native American visitors, he commonly saw African people as house workers tending to his every need as well as field workers tending to tobacco. In 1745, someone brought a two-year-old Thomas Jefferson out of Shadwell’s big house. Thomas was held up to a woman on horseback who placed him on a pillow secured to the horse. The rider, who was a slave, took the boy for a ride to a relative’s plantation. This was Thomas Jefferson’s earliest childhood memory. It associated slavery with comfort. The slave was entrusted with looking after him, and on his soft saddle he felt safe and secure, later recalling the woman as “kind and gentle.” 14 When he played with African boys years later, Thomas learned more about slaveholding. As he recalled, “The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.” 15 In his home, no one around him saw anything wrong with the tyranny.
Slavery was as customary as prisons are today. Few could imagine an ordered world without them. Peter Jefferson had accumulated almost sixty captives by the 1750s, which made him the second-largest slaveholder in Albemarle County. Peter preached to his children the importance of self-reliance— oblivious of the contradiction—to which he credited his own success.
Peter did not, however, preach to his son the importance of religion. In fact, when Virginia’s First Great Awakening reached the area, it bypassed the Shadwell plantation. Peter did not allow Samuel Davies, who almost singlehandedly brought the Awakening to Virginia, to minister to his children or his captives. It is likely that Peter believed—like many of his slaveholding peers —“that Christianizing the Negroes makes them proud and saucy, and tempts them to imagine themselves upon an equality with the white people,” as Davies reported in his most celebrated sermon in 1757. Some American planters had been sold on Davies’s viewpoint that “some should be Masters and some Servants,” and more were open to converting their captives than ever before. But not enough of them to satisfy Cotton Mather’s likeminded missionaries, who agreed with Davies that “a good Christian will always be a good Servant.” Enslavers commonly “let [slaves] live on in their Pagan darkness,” fearing Christianity would incite their resistance, observed a visiting Swede, Peter Kalm, in the late 1740s. Twenty years later, irritable Virginia planter Landon Carter fumed about Blacks being “devils,” adding, “to make them otherwise than slaves will be to set devils free.” 16 Not all Christian missionaries were protecting slavery by preaching Christian submission in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1742, New Jersey native John Woolman, a store clerk, was asked to write a bill of sale for an unnamed African woman. He began to question the institution and soon kicked off what became a legendary traveling ministry, spreading Quakerism and antislavery. After his first Quaker mission in the harrowing slaveholding South in 1746, Woolman jotted down Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes.
17 “We are in a high Station, and enjoy greater Favours than they,” Woolman theorized. God had endowed White Christians with “distinguished Gifts.” By sanctioning slavery, America was “misusing his Gifts.” Woolman planted his groundbreaking abolitionist tree in the same racist soil that proslavery theologians like Cotton Mather—preaching divine slavery—had used a century ago. Their divergences over slavery itself obscured their parallel political racism that denied Black people self-determination. Mather’s proslavery theological treatises proclaimed masters divinely charged to care for the degraded race of natural servants. Woolman’s antislavery treatise proclaimed Christians to be divinely charged with “greater Favours” to emancipate, Christianize, and care for the degraded slaves. But whether they were to be given eternal slavery or eventual emancipation, enslaved Africans would be acted upon as dependent children reliant on White enslavers or abolitionists for their fate.
18 John Woolman bided his time before submitting his essay to the press of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Woolman knew the history of Quakers quarreling over slavery, of abolitionists disrupting meetings and being banished. He cared just as much about his Quaker ministry and Quaker unity as he did antislavery. In 1752, when abolitionist Anthony Benezet was elected to the press’s editorial board, Woolman knew the time was right to publish his eight-year-old essay. By early 1754, Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette was advertising the new publication of Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes.
By the end of the year, some Quakers had started to move like never before against slavery, pushed by Benezet and Woolman and the contradictions of Christian slavery. Benezet had edited Woolman’s essay. If Woolman thrived in privacy, Benezet thrived in public, and the two reformers made a dynamic duo of antislavery activists. In September 1754, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting approved for publication the Epistle of Caution and Advice Concerning the Buying and Keeping of Slaves. In the Epistle, antislavery reformers struck a compromise, urging Quakers to buy no more slaves. The writers evoked the Golden Law on the sixty-sixth uncelebrated anniversary of the Germantown Petition. Benezet initiated the writing of the Epistle and incorporated input from Woolman. Hundreds of copies were shipped to the quarterly meetings in the Delaware Valley. The front door of American Quakerism had officially been opened to antislavery. But Quaker masters quickly slammed the doors to their separate rooms. Seventy percent refused to free their captives. Woolman learned firsthand of their dogged refusal when he ventured into Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina in 1757.
19 Slavery’s defenders spewed many racist ideas, ranging from Blacks being a backward people, to them living better in America than in Africa, to the curse of Ham. It “troubled” Woolman “to perceive the darkness of their imagination.” He never faltered in shooting back, in his calm, compassionate way. No one is inferior in God’s eyes, he stressed. They had not imported Africans for their own good, as demonstrated by their constant abuse, overwork, starvation, and scarce clothing.
20 In 1760, Woolman traveled to the Rhode Island homes of some of colonial America’s wealthiest slave-traders. Their “smooth conduct” and “superficial friendship” nearly lured him away from antislavery. He ventured back home to New Jersey as he had done from the South years earlier—dragging a heavy bag of thoughts. In arguing against slavery over the years, he found himself arguing against African inferiority, and thus arguing against himself. He had to rethink whether White people were in fact bestowed a “high Station.” In 1762, he updated Considerations on Keeping Negroes.
21 We must speak out against slavery “from a love of equity,” Woolman avowed in the second part of the pamphlet. He dropped the rhetoric of greater “Favours” in a racial sense, although it remained in a religious sense. His antiracism shined. “Placing on Men the ignominious Title SLAVE, dressing them in uncomely Garments, keeping them to servile Labour . . . tends gradually to fix a Nation in the mind, that they are a Sort of People below us in Nature,” stated Woolman. But Whites should not connect slavery “with the Black Colour, and Liberty with the White,” because “where false Ideas are twisted into our Minds, it is with Difficulty we get fair disentangled.” In matters of right and equity, “the Colour of a Man avails nothing.” 22 Woolman’s antiracism was ahead of its time, like his passionate sermons against poverty, animal cruelty, military conscription, and war. But Woolman’s antislavery in the 1750s and 1760s was right on time for the American Revolution, a political upheaval that forced freedom fighters of Thomas Jefferson’s generation to address their relationships with slavery.
23
DR. THOMAS WALKER’S remedies did not work, and when his patient, the forty-nine-year-old father of Thomas Jefferson, died on August 17, 1757, it was an unbelievable sight for all who had heard the family lore of Peter Jefferson’s strength. The fourteen-year-old Thomas had to run his own life.
As the oldest male, he now headed the household, according to Virginia’s patriarchal creed. But by all accounts, the thirty-seven-year-old Jane Randolph Jefferson did not look to her fourteen-year-old son for guidance, or to Dr. Walker, the estate’s overseer. She became the manager of eight children, sixty-six enslaved people, and at least 2,750 acres. Jane Jefferson was sociable, fond of luxury, and meticulous about keeping the plantation’s records—traits she bestowed upon Thomas.
24 In 1760, Thomas Jefferson enrolled in the College of William & Mary, where he thoroughly immersed himself in Enlightenment thought, including its antislavery ideas. He studied under the newly hired twenty-six-year-old Enlightenment intellectual William Small of Scotland, who taught that reason, not religion, should command human affairs, a lesson that would inform Jefferson’s views about government. Jefferson also read Buffon’s Natural History, and he studied Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton, a trio he later called “the three greatest men the world has ever produced.” When Jefferson graduated in 1762, he entered the informal law school of Virginia’s leading lawyer, George Wythe, well known for his legal mind and taste for luxury. Admitted to the bar at twenty-four years old in 1767, Jefferson stepped into the political whirlwind of the House of Burgesses, representing Albemarle County like his father had. The Burgesses protested England’s latest imposition of taxes, prompting Virginia’s royal governor to close their doors on May 17, 1769. Jefferson had been seated all of ten days.
25 Even after he lost his seat, Jefferson actively participated in the growing hostilities to England and to slavery. He took the freedom suit of twentyseven-year-old fugitive Samuel Howell. Virginia law prescribed thirty years of servitude for first-generation biracial children of free parents “to prevent that abominable mixture of white man or women with negroes or mulattoes.” Howell was second generation, and Jefferson told the court that it was wicked to extend slavery, because “under the law of nature, all men are born free.” Wythe, the opposing attorney, stood up to start his rejoinder. The judge ordered Wythe back down and ruled against Jefferson. The law in the colonies was still staunchly proslavery, and racial laws were becoming staunchly segregationist. But then, suddenly, a Boston panel of judges reversed the ideological trend.
26 CHAPTER 8
Black Exhibits
AS THOMAS JEFFERSON supervised the building of his plantation near Charlottesville in October 1772, an enslaved nineteen-year-old woman up the coast gazed anxiously at eighteen gentlemen who identified publicly “as the most respectable characters in Boston.” They all had been instructed to judge whether she had actually authored her famous poetry, especially its sophisticated Greek and Latin imagery. She saw familiar faces: Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, future governor James Bowdoin, megaslaveholder John Hancock, and Cotton Mather’s son Samuel, who is remembered as the last in the line of illustrious Mathers after Richard, Increase, and Cotton. Phillis Wheatley, the poet making her case before Samuel Mather and the other Bostonians, is now remembered as the first in the line of illustrious African American writers.
1 Her enslavement story did not begin like that of many other African people. In 1761, Susanna Wheatley, the wife of tailor and financier John Wheatley, visited the newest storehouse of chained humanity in southwest Boston, not far from where Cotton Mather used to live. Captain Peter Gwinn of the Phillis had just arrived in Boston with seventy-five captives from Senegambia. Looking for a domestic servant, Susanna Wheatley scanned past the “several robust, healthy females” and laid her eyes on a sickly, naked little girl, covered by a dirty carpet. Some of the seven-year-old captive’s front baby teeth had come out, possibly reminding Wheatley of her seven-year-old daughter, who had died. Susanna Wheatley was mourning the ninth anniversary of Sarah Wheatley’s tragic death.
2 Well before she became the most famous Black exhibit in the Western world, the young African girl was most likely purchased by Susanna and John to serve as a living reminder of Sarah Wheatley. Whatever name her Wolof relatives had given her, it was now lost to gray chains, bloody blue waters, and scribbled history. The Wheatleys renamed her after the slave ship that had brought her to them. From the beginning, Phillis Wheatley “had a child’s place,” suggested an early biographer, in the Wheatley’s “house and in their hearts.” Homeschooled, Phillis “never was looked on as a slave,” explained Hannah Mather Crocker, the granddaughter of Cotton Mather.
3 About four years after her arrival, eleven-year-old Phillis jotted down her first poem in English. It was a four-line tribute to the 1764 death (from smallpox) of the seventeen-year-old daughter of the Thachers, a distinguished Puritan family. Phillis was moved to write the poem after overhearing the Wheatleys lament the tragic death of Sarah Thacher.
By age twelve, Phillis had no problem reading Latin and Greek classics, English literature, and the Bible. She published her first poem, “On Messrs.
Hussey and Coffin,” in a December 1767 issue of the Newport Mercury. A storm had almost caused two local merchants to shipwreck off the Boston coast. The Wheatleys had one or both of the merchants over for dinner. Phillis listened intently as the merchant(s) told the story of “their narrow Escape.” In 1767, the fifteen-year-old composed “To the University of Cambridge,” a poem that signified her longing to enter the all-White, all-male Harvard. She had already consumed the assimilationist ideas about her race that had probably been fed to her by the Wheatley family, saying, for instance, “’Twas but e’en now I left my native Shore / The sable Land of error’s darkest night.” Assimilationists were producing the racist idea of unenlightened Africa, and telling Wheatley and other Blacks that the light of America was a gift. The next year, Wheatley continued to marvel in her assimilation—and attack segregationist curse theory—in the poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America.”
Some view our sable race with scornful eye, “Their coulour is a diabolical die”, Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.
In 1771, Phillis Wheatley began assembling her work into a collection, including a number of inspirational poems on the increasing tensions between Britain and colonial America in the 1760s, which became her claim to fame.
The Wheatleys figured that prospective publishers and buyers would need to be assured of Phillis’s authenticity. This is why John Wheatley assembled such a powerhouse of Boston elites in 1772.
4 Hardly believing an enslaved Black girl could fathom Greek and Latin, the eighteen men probably asked her to unpack the classical allusions in her poems. Whatever their questions were, Wheatley dazzled the skeptical tribunal of eighteen men. They signed the following assimilationist attestation: “We whose Names are under-written do assure the World, that the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa.” 5 The Wheatleys were delighted. But even with this attestation in hand, no American publisher was willing to alienate slaveholding consumers by publishing her by now famous poems, which were entering the abolitionist literature of the Revolutionary era. Phillis Wheatley had auditioned and proven the capability of Black humanity to the assimilationist scions of Boston. But unlike the publishers, these men did not have much to lose.
PHILLIS WHEATLEY WAS not the first so-called “uncultivated Barbarian” to be examined and exhibited. Throughout the eighteenth century’s race for Enlightenment, assimilationists galloped around seeking out human experiments—“barbarians” to civilize into the “superior” ways of Europeans —to prove segregationists wrong, and sometimes to prove slaveholders wrong. As trained exotic creatures in the racist circus, Black people could showcase Black capacity for Whiteness, for human equality, for something other than slavery. They could show they were capable of freedom— someday. Few worked as passionately to provide this human evidence, or put up as much money to experiment, as John Montagu, England’s Second Duke of Montagu.
Early in the 1700s, the duke experimented on the youngest son of Jamaica’s first freed Blacks to see if he could match the intellectual achievements of his White peers. The duke sent Francis Williams to an English academy and Cambridge University, where Francis equaled in intellectual attainments his peers who were similarly educated.
Sometime between 1738 and 1740, Williams returned home, probably donning a white wig of curls over his dark skin and assimilated mind. He opened a grammar school for slaveholders’ children and penned fawning Latin odes to every colonial governor of Jamaica. His 1758 anti-Black poem to Governor George Haldane read: “Tho’ dark the stream on which the tribute flows, / Not from the skin, but from the heart it rose.” 6 Celebrity Scottish philosopher David Hume learned about the Cambridgetrained Francis Williams. But neither Williams, nor the growing fashion of having Black boys as servants in England, nor Buffon’s climate theory could change his mind about natural human hierarchy and Blacks’ incapability for Whiteness. Hume declared his segregationist position emphatically. In 1753, he updated his popular critique of climate theory, “Of Natural Characters,” adding the most infamous footnote in the history of racist ideas:
I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the Whites . . . have still something eminent about them. . . . Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. . . . In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.
7
Hume strongly opposed slavery, but like many other abolitionists of the Enlightenment period, he never saw his segregationist thinking as contradicting his antislavery stance. Ignoring his antislavery position, proslavery theorists over the next few decades used David Hume as a model, adopting his footnote to “Of Natural Characters” as their international anthem.
8
SIMILAR EXPERIMENTS OF educating young Black males were carried out in America, and while some segregationists began to accept assimilationist ideas and even oppose slavery, few White Americans rejected racist thinking altogether. On a visit home in 1763 during his nearly two decades of residence in Europe, Benjamin Franklin saw some Black exhibits at a Philadelphia school run by the Associates of Dr. Thomas Bray. The London-based educational group had been named in 1731 after the deceased organizer of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.
Assessing the pupils, Franklin gained “a higher opinion of the natural capacities of the black Race.” Some Blacks could “adopt our Language or Customs,” he admitted. But that seemed to be all Franklin could concede, probably recognizing that the production of racist ideas was essential to substantiating slavery. Seven years later, in lobbying the crown for Georgia’s harsh slave code, Franklin argued that the “majority” of slaves was “of a plotting Disposition, dark, sullen, malicious, revengeful, and cruel in the highest Degree.” 9 For racists like Franklin, it proved difficult to believe that many Blacks were capable of becoming another Francis Williams or Phillis Wheatley.
Racists often understood this capable handful to be “extraordinary Negroes.” Joseph Jekyll actually began his 1805 biography of popular Afro-British writer and Duke of Montague protégé Ignatius Sancho identifying him as “this extraordinary Negro.” These extraordinary Negros supposedly defied the laws of nature or nurture that standardized Black decadence. They were not ordinarily inferior like the “majority.” This mind game allowed racists to maintain their racist ideas in the midst of individual Africans defying its precepts. It doomed from the start the strategy of exhibiting excelling Blacks to change racist minds. But this strategy of persuasion endured.
10 After the Duke of Montagu died in 1749, Selina Hastings, known as the Countess of Huntingdon, replaced him as the principal shepherd of Black exhibits in the English-speaking world. If she had been a Puritan male, Cotton Mather would have adored this Methodist trailblazer, who promoted the writings of Christian Blacks as a testament of Black capability for conversion.
Two years before her death, the countess sponsored Olaudah Equiano’s aptly titled Interesting Narrative of his Nigerian birth, capture, enslavement, education, and emancipation in 1789. Her first and potentially most rewarding campaign was shepherding the inaugural slave narrative of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (James Albert) into print in 1772. The countess almost certainly adored Gronniosaw’s assimilationist plot: the more he conformed to slavery, superior European culture, and Christianity, and left behind his heathen, inferior upbringing in West Africa, the happier and holier he became. Since freedom had been colored white, Gronniosaw believed that in order to be truly free, he had to abandon his Nigerian traditions and become White.
11 Britain’s chief justice, Lord Mansfield, went further than the Duke of Montagu and Selina Hastings and freed a Virginia runaway, James Somerset, overshadowing Gronniosaw’s pioneering slave narrative and Wheatley’s tribunal in Boston in 1772. No one could be enslaved in England, Mansfield ruled, raising antislavery English law over proslavery colonial law. Fearing Mansfield’s ruling could one day extend to the British colonies, the Somerset case prodded proslavery theorists out into the open and roused the transatlantic abolitionist movement. University of Pennsylvania professor and pioneering American physician Benjamin Rush anonymously issued a stinging antislavery pamphlet in Philadelphia in February 1773, using Phillis Wheatley’s work to push the abolitionist case in America.
Rush praised the “singular genius” of Wheatley (without naming her). All the vices attributed to Black people, from idleness to treachery to theft, were “the offspring of slavery,” Rush wrote. In fact, those unsubstantiated vices attributed to Black people were the offspring of the illogically racist mind.
Were captives really lazier, more deceitful, and more crooked than their enslavers? It was the latter who forced others to work for them, treacherously whipping them when they did not, and stealing the proceeds of their labor when they did. In any case, Rush was the first activist to commercialize the persuasive, though racist, abolitionist theory that slavery made Black people inferior. Whether benevolent or not, any idea that suggests that Black people as a group are inferior, that something is wrong with Black people, is a racist idea. Slavery was killing, torturing, raping, and exploiting people, tearing apart families, snatching precious time, and locking captives in socioeconomic desolation. The confines of enslavement were producing Black people who were intellectually, psychologically, culturally, and behaviorally different, not inferior.
Benjamin Rush whacked down curse theory and pushed against a century of American theology, from Cotton Mather to Samuel Davies, in his pamphlet. “A Christian slave is a contradiction in terms,” he argued, demanding that America “put a stop to slavery!” Reprinted and circulated in New York, Boston, London, and Paris, Rush’s words consolidated the forces that in 1774 organized the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the first known antislavery society of non-Africans in North America.
12
TO FIND A publisher for her Poems on Various Subjects, Wheatley had to journey to London in the summer of 1773—where she was greeted and paraded and exhibited like an exotic rock star. There, she secured the financial support of the Countess of Huntingdon. In thanks, Wheatley dedicated her book, the first ever by an African American woman and the second by an American woman, to the countess. The publication of her poems in September 1773, a year after slavery had been outlawed in England and a few months after Rush’s abolitionist pamphlet reached England, set off a social earthquake in London. Londoners condemned American slavery, and American slaveholders resisted the Londoners. And then abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic more firmly resisted the rule of slaveholders in the colonies. In December 1773, the Boston Tea Party set off a political earthquake, and then England’s Coercive Acts, and then the Patriots’ resistance to British rule in the colonies. As the American Revolution budded, British commentators slammed the hypocrisy of Bostonians’ boasts of Wheatley’s ingenuity while keeping her enslaved. The poet was quickly freed.
13 George Washington praised the talents of Phillis Wheatley. In France, Voltaire somehow got his hands on Poems on Various Subjects. Wheatley proved, Voltaire confessed, that Blacks could write poetry. This from a man who a few years prior had not been able to decide whether Blacks had developed from monkeys, or monkeys had developed from Blacks. Still, neither Wheatley nor Benjamin Rush nor any Enlightenment abolitionist was able to alter the position of proslavery segregationists. So long as there was slavery, there would be racist ideas justifying it. And there was nothing Wheatley and Rush could do to stop the production of racist proslavery ideas other than end slavery.
In September 1773, Philadelphia-based Caribbean absentee planter Richard Nisbet attacked Benjamin Rush for peddling “a single example of a negro girl writing a few silly poems, to prove that the blacks are not deficient to us in understanding.” On November 15, 1773, a short, satirical essay appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet containing a rewritten biblical passage as evidence that God had fitted Africans for slavery. A few weeks later, someone released Personal Slavery Established. In attacking Rush (or satirizing Nisbet), the anonymous author plagiarized David Hume’s footnote and wrote of the “five classes” of “Africans”: “1st, Negroes, 2d, Ourang Outangs, 3d, Apes, 4th, Baboons, and 5th Monkeys.” 14
THOMAS JEFFERSON WAS spending even more time away from law in 1773 to oversee the building of his plantation, Monticello. But his mind, like the minds of many rich men in the colonies, remained on building a new nation. They were reeling from British debt, taxes, and mandates to trade within the empire. They had the most to gain in independence and the most to lose under British colonialism. Politically, they could not help but fear all those British abolitionists opposing American slavery, toasting Phillis Wheatley, and freeing the Virginia runaways. Financially, they could not help but salivate over all those non-British markets for their goods, and all those non-British products they could consume, like the world-renowned sugar that French enslavers forced Africans to grow in what is now Haiti. Rebel Virginia legislators met in Williamsburg in 1774.
One of Virginia’s staunchest rebel legislators sent in a scorching freedom manifesto, A Summary View of the Rights of British America. “Can any one reason be assigned why 160,000 [British] electors” should make laws for 4 million equal Americans? His majesty, said the author, had rejected our “great object of desire” to abolish slavery and the slave trade, and thus disregarded “the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice.” Some politicians folded over in disgust as they took in Thomas Jefferson’s rhetorical gunshot at slavery. But “several of the author’s admirers” loved his clever turn: he had blamed England for American slavery. Printed and circulated, Summary View piloted Jefferson into the clouds of national recognition.
15 The British (and some Americans) immediately began questioning the authenticity of a slaveholder throwing a freedom manifesto at the world. No one could question the authenticity of Phillis Wheatley’s 1774 words—“in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle which we call love of freedom”—or the Connecticut Blacks, who a few years later had proclaimed, “We perceive by our own Reflection, that we are endowed with the same Faculties with our masters, and there is nothing that leads us to a Belief, or Suspicion, that we are any more obliged to serve them, than they us.” All over Revolutionary America, African people were rejecting the racist compact that asserted that they were meant to be enslaved.
16 Edward Long watched the rising tidal wave of abolitionism and antiracism from his massive sugar plantation in Jamaica. He realized that a new racial justification was badly needed to save slavery from being abolished. So, in 1774, he breathed new life into polygenesis by issuing his massive book History of Jamaica. Why did it remain so difficult to see that Black people constituted “a different species”? he asked. The ape had “in form a much nearer resemblance to the Negroe race, than the latter bear to White men.” Just as Black people conceived a passion for White people, apes “conceive[d] a passion for the Negroe women,” Long reasoned, as John Locke once had.
Long dedicated a full chapter to discrediting the ability of Jamaica’s old Francis Williams, with, he assured, “the impartiality that becomes me.” Williams’s talents were the result of “the Northern air” of Europe, he said.
Long then contradictorily questioned Williams’s talents, quoting Hume’s footnote. Long assailed Williams for looking “down with sovereign contempt on his fellow Blacks,” as if Long did not share that contempt. Williams selfidentified as “a white man acting under a black skin,” as Long described it.
Williams’s proverbial saying, he said, was, “Shew me a Negroe, and I will shew you a thief.” 17 Later that year, Lord Kames, a Scottish judge and philosopher and one of the engines of the Scottish Enlightenment, followed Long’s History with Sketches of the History of Man. The devastating treatise attacked assimilationist thinking and tore apart monogenesis, which assumed that all the races were one species. Kames’s book carried more force than Long’s.
Few thinkers in the Western world had the intellectual pedigree of Lord Kames in 1774. He paraphrased Voltaire, another supporter of polygenesis, explaining, “There are different [species] of men as well as of dogs: a mastiff differs not more from a spaniel, than a white man from a negro.” Climates created the species, but they could not change one color to another, Kames maintained. Dismissing Adam and Eve, Kames based his multiple creations on the Tower of Babel story in Genesis.
18 Polygenesists loved Sketches. Christian monogenesists bristled at its blasphemy. But the concept of different creation stories and different species started making sense to more and more people in the late eighteenth century as they tried to come to grips with racial difference. How else could they explain such glaring differences in skin color, in culture, in wealth, and in the degree of freedom people enjoyed?
If someone had told Lord Kames that a German doctoral student, fifty-six years his junior, would lead the initial charge against his theory of polygenesis, the old jurist would probably have laughed. And he was known for his sense of humor. Unlike Lord Kames, “I have written this book quite unprejudiced,” the audacious young Johann Friedrich Blumenbach claimed in On the Natural Variety of Mankind. Environment—not separate creations— caused the “variety in humans,” the German wrote in 1775. Blumenbach followed Linnaeus in allotting four “classes of inhabitants,” or races. “The first and most important to us . . . is that of Europe,” he theorized. “All these nations regarded as a whole are white in colour, and if compared with the rest, beautiful in form.” 19 A full-blown debate on the origins of humans had exploded into the European world during the American Revolution. Backing up Blumenbach against Long and Lord Kames was none other than the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, soon to be widely heralded for his legendary Critique of Pure Reason. Kant lectured on “the rule of Buffon,” that all humans were one species from the “same natural genus.” Europe was the cradle of humanity, “where man . . . must have departed the least from his original formation.” The inhabitant of Europe had a “more beautiful body, works harder, is more jocular, more controlled in his passions, more intelligent than any other race of people in the world,” Kant lectured. “Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of whites.” 20 American intellectuals followed this debate between monogenesis and polygenesis in the same way students would follow the debates of their professors. And in following the racist debate, American intellectuals followed the racist debaters. American enslavers and secular intellectuals most likely lined up behind Lord Kames and other polygenesists.
Abolitionists and theologians more likely lined up behind Immanuel Kant and other monogenesists. But these American polygenesists and monogenesists had no problem coming together to inflame public sentiment against England and dismiss their own atrocities against enslaved Africans.
One man, Samuel Johnson, had no problem calling out Americans on this hypocrisy. Johnson was perhaps the most illustrious literary voice in British history. When he opined about public debates, intellectuals in America and England alike paid attention. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin were among those who admired Johnson’s writings.
Johnson did not return the admiration. He loathed Americans’ hatred of authority, their greedy rushes for wealth, their dependence on enslavement, and their way of teaching Christianity to make Blacks docile: “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American,” he once said.
21 Benjamin Franklin had spent years across the water lobbying English power for a relaxation of its colonial policies. He was arguing that England was enslaving Americans, and regularly using the analogy that England was making “American whites black.” All along, Samuel Johnson hated this racist analogy. As Franklin sailed back to America at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, Johnson released Taxation No Tyranny. He defended the Coercive Acts, judged Americans as inferior to the British, and advocated the arming of enslaved Africans. “How is it,” Johnson asked, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Someone in the colonies had to officially answer the great Samuel Johnson. That someone was Thomas Jefferson.
22 CHAPTER 9 Created Equal
ON JUNE 7, 1776, the delegates at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia decided to draft an independence document. The task fell to a thirty-three-year-old marginal delegate, who distinguished himself as a willing and talented writer as he carried out their instructions. The older and more distinguished delegates felt they had more important things to do: addressing the convention, drafting state constitutions, and wartime planning.
1 For years, European intellectuals like France’s Buffon and England’s Samuel Johnson had projected Americans, their ways, their land, their animals, and their people as naturally inferior to everything European.
Thomas Jefferson disagreed. At the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, he paraphrased the Virginia constitution, indelibly penning: “all Men are created equal.” It is impossible to know for sure whether Jefferson meant to include his enslaved laborers (or women) in his “all Men.” Was he merely emphasizing the equality of White Americans and the English? Later in the document, he did scold the British for “exciting those very people to rise in arms among us”—those “people” being resisting Africans. Did Jefferson insert “created equal” as a nod to the swirling debate between monogenesis and polygenesis?
Even if Jefferson believed all groups to be “created equal,” he never believed the antiracist creed that all human groups are equal. But his “all Men are created equal” was revolutionary nonetheless; it even propelled Vermont and Massachusetts to abolish slavery. To uphold polygenesis and slavery, six southern slaveholding states inserted “All freemen are created equal” into their constitutions.
2 Continuing the Declaration, Jefferson maintained that “Men” were “endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.” As a holder of nearly two hundred people with no known plans to free them, Thomas Jefferson authored the heralded American philosophy of freedom. What did it mean for Jefferson to call “liberty” an “inalienable right” when he enslaved people? It is not hard to figure out what Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and indentured White servants meant when they demanded liberty in 1776. But what about Jefferson and other slaveholders like him, whose wealth and power were dependent upon their land and their slaves? Did they desire unbridled freedom to enslave and exploit? Did they perceive any reduction in their power to be a reduction in their freedom? For these rich men, freedom was not the power to make choices; freedom was the power to create choices. England created the choices, the policies American elites had to abide by, just as planters created choices and policies that laborers had to follow. Only power gave Jefferson and other wealthy White colonists freedom from England. For Jefferson, power came before freedom. Indeed, power creates freedom, not the other way around—as the powerless are taught.
“To secure these rights,” Jefferson continued, “it is the right of the people . . . to institute a new government . . . organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness.” As Jefferson sat forward on his Windsor chair and penned this thrilling call for revolutionary action, thousands of Africans were taking matters into their own hands, too, running away from their plantations, setting up their own governments on the frontier, or fighting with the British—all to “effect their safety & happiness.” In South Carolina, there emerged a three-sided conflict, with as many as 20,000 Africans asserting their own interests. An estimated two-thirds of enslaved Africans in Georgia ran away. According to Jefferson’s own calculations, Virginia lost as many as 30,000 enslaved Africans in a single year. Of course, racist planters could not admit that Black runaways were self-reliant enough to effect their own safety and happiness—to be free.
South Carolina planters blamed British soldiers for “stealing” Blacks or persuading them to “desert” their masters.
3 Thomas Jefferson only really handed revolutionary license to his band of wealthy, White, male revolutionaries. He criminalized runaways in the Declaration of Independence, and he silenced women. Boston delegate John Adams sent a letter home to his wife, Abigail, to “laugh” at her strivings for women’s rights. White “children and Apprentices were disobedient” as a result of “our struggle,” Adams said the delegates had been told. “Indians slighted their guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters.” Now she had informed him that women were also “discontented.” 4 After outlining more justifications for independence in his Declaration, Jefferson listed the “long train of abuses & usurpations” by the British monopolists, like “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.” The inability of American merchants and planters to do business with merchants and planters outside the British Empire had checked their freedoms in buying and selling African people to and from anyone, in buying cheaper or better products from non-British sources, in selling their slave-grown crops and manufactured goods outside of Britannica, and in escaping the subjugation of British merchants and banks. Jefferson and his freedom-fighting class of aspiring international free traders gained a powerful ally in 1776. Scottish philosopher Adam Smith condemned England’s trade acts for constraining the “free” market in his instant best seller, The Wealth of Nations. To this founding father of capitalist economics, the wealth of nations stemmed from a nation’s productive capacity, a productive capacity African nations lacked.
“All the inland parts of Africa,” he scripted, “seem in all ages of the world to have been in the same barbarous and uncivilized state in which we find them at present.” Meanwhile, Smith praised Americans for “contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which . . . seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.” The founding fathers beamed reading Adam Smith’s prediction. Jefferson later called Wealth of Nations “the best book extant” on political economy.
5 Jefferson saved the worst of the king’s abuses for last in his Declaration.
Ever the lawyer, ever the wordsmith, he fought back against Samuel Johnson’s charge of American hypocrisy. The English crown, Jefferson wrote, which had prevented Americans from abolishing slavery, was now freeing and arming enslaved Africans to maintain British enslavement over Americans, “thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which [the king] urged them to commit against the LIVES of another.” 6 Rhode Island pastor Samuel Hopkins, an antislavery Puritan, would have found Jefferson’s passage laughable. He had just sent the congress A Dialogue concerning the Slavery of the Africans. Americans’ so-called enslavement to the British was “lighter than a feather” compared to Africans’ enslavement to Americans, Hopkins argued. The electrifying antiracist pamphlet nearly overshadowed the Quakers’ demand in 1776 for all Friends to manumit their slaves or face banishment. “Our education has filled us with strong prejudices against them,” Hopkins professed, “and led us to consider them, not as our brethren, or in any degree on a level with us; but as quite another species of animals, made only to serve us and our children.” Hopkins became the first major Christian leader outside of the Society of Friends to forcefully oppose slavery, but he sat lonely on the pew of antislavery in 1776. Other preachers stayed away from the pew, and so did the delegates declaring independence.
No one had to tell them that their revolutionary avowals were leaking in contradictions. Nothing could persuade slaveholding American patriots to put an end to their inciting proclamations of British slavery, or to their enriching enslavement of African people. Forget contradictions. Both were in their political and economic self-interest.
7 By July 2, 1776, the resolution to declare independence had passed. The delegates then peered over Jefferson’s draft like barbers over a head of hair.
Every time they trimmed, changed, or added something, the hypersensitive Jefferson sank deeper into his chair. Benjamin Franklin, sitting next to him, failed to cheer him up. The delegates cut Jefferson’s long passage calling the English hypocrites. Apparently, delegates from South Carolina and Georgia disliked Jefferson’s characterization of slavery as a “cruel war against human nature”; that language threatened the foundation of their vast estates. The delegates finished making their revisions of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.
8
OVER THE NEXT five years, the fighting remained pitched. But the British failed to crush the revolt. On January 5, 1781, in one of their last-ditch efforts, the Redcoats reached the outskirts of Richmond. British soldiers were hunting Virginia’s governor as if he were a runaway. With 10,000 acres of land in his possession to choose from, Governor Thomas Jefferson hid his family on an inherited property about ninety miles southwest of Monticello. There, in hiding, Jefferson finally found the time to answer the twenty-three “Queries” that French diplomat François Barbé-Marbois had sent to the thirteen American governors in 1780.
The Frenchman asked for information on each colony’s history, government, natural resources, geography, and population. Only a few responded, none as comprehensively as Thomas Jefferson. A new member of Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society, Jefferson had collected thousands of books for his Monticello library and enjoyed a scholarly challenge. He titled his book of answers Notes on the State of Virginia. He wrote for French diplomats and intellectuals as well as close friends in America. He sent Barbé-Marbois the manuscript by the end of 1781.
With no intention to publish, Jefferson unabashedly expressed his views on Black people, and in particular on potentially freed Black people.
“Incorporating the [freed] blacks into the state” was out of the question, he declared. “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” This hodgepodge of thoughts was classic Jefferson, classically both antislavery and anti-abolition—with a segregationist dose of nature’s distinctions, and an antiracist dose acknowledging White prejudice and discrimination.
9 Revolutionary War general George Washington had a different take on the prejudices. When asked to join an antislavery petition campaign in 1785, he did not think the time was right. “It would be dangerous to make a frontal attack on a prejudice which is beginning to decrease,” Washington advised.
Prejudice beginning to decrease in 1785? However General Washington came to this conclusion, the soon-to-be first president sounded one of the first drumbeats of supposed racial progress to drown out the passionate arguments of antiracism.
10 Thomas Jefferson did propose a frontal attack on slavery in Notes on the State of Virginia, a plan he would endorse for the rest of his life: the mass schooling, emancipation, and colonization of Africans back to Africa.
Jefferson, who enslaved Blacks at Monticello, listed “the real distinctions which nature has made,” that is, those traits that he believed made free Black incorporation into the new nation impossible. Whites were more beautiful, he wrote, as shown by Blacks’ “preference of them.” He was paraphrasing Edward Long (and John Locke) in the passage—but it was still ironic that the observation came from the pen of a man who may have already preferred a Black woman.
11 Black people had a memory on par with Whites, Jefferson continued, but “in reason [were] much inferior.” He then paused to mask his racist ideas in scientific neutrality: “It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation. We will consider them here, on the same stage with the whites, and where the facts are not apocryphal on which a judgment is to be formed.” On this “same stage,” he could “never . . . find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never saw an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.” “Religion,” he said, “indeed has produced a Phyllis Wheatley; but it could not produce a poet.” 12 With Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson emerged as the preeminent American authority on Black intellectual inferiority. This status would persist over the next fifty years. Jefferson did not mention the innumerable enslaved Africans who learned to be highly intelligent blacksmiths, shoemakers, bricklayers, coopers, carpenters, engineers, manufacturers, artisans, musicians, farmers, midwives, physicians, overseers, house managers, cooks, and bi- and trilingual translators—all of the workers who made his Virginia plantation and many others almost entirely selfsufficient. Jefferson had to ignore his own advertisements for skilled runaways and the many advertisements from other planters calling for the return of their valuable skilled captives, who were “remarkably smart and sensible,” and “very ingenious at any work.” One wonders whether Jefferson really believed his own words. Did Jefferson really believe Black people were smart in slavery and stupid in freedom?
13 Notes on the State of Virginia was replete with other contradictory ideas about Black people. “They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome” than Whites, because they lacked the forethought to see “danger till it be present,” Jefferson wrote. Africans felt love more, but they felt pain less, he said, and “their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.” That is why they were disposed “to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course.” But on the previous page, Jefferson cast Blacks as requiring “less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight.” In Jefferson’s vivid imagination, lazy Blacks desired to sleep more than Whites, but, as physical savants, they required less sleep.
14 While Jefferson confidently labeled enslaved Africans as inferior to Roman slaves, for Native Americans he cried that the comparison “would be unequal.” While confidently making distinctions between Blacks and Whites, Jefferson equated Native Americans and Whites. As he told François-Jean de Chastellux, who served as liaison between the French and American militaries during the Revolutionary War, Native Americans were “in body and mind equal to the whiteman.” He “supposed the blackman in his present state, might not be so”: “But it would be hazardous to affirm that, equally cultivated for a few generations, he would not become so.” For Jefferson, clarity always seemed to be lacking when it came to racial conceptions. This note proved to be the clearest expression of his assimilationist ideas.
The reason for Native Americans having fewer children than Whites was “not in a difference of nature, but of circumstance,” Jefferson argued. For Black people, the opposite was true. “The blacks,” he said, “whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” The ambitious politician, maybe fearful of alienating potential friends, maybe torn between Enlightenment antislavery and American proslavery, maybe honestly unsure, did not pick sides between polygenesists and monogenesists, between segregationists and assimilationists, between slavery and freedom. But he did pick the side of racism.
15
IN 1782, JEFFERSON had no plans to publish Notes on the State of Virginia.
He was busy putting his life back together, a life torn apart by thirteen years of public service, and by months of being hunted by the British. War had shattered Jefferson’s past. Martha Jefferson’s death on September 6 of that year shattered his future. He had planned to retire and grow old as a planter and scholar in the seclusion of Monticello next to his wife. Overnight, the sanctuary of Monticello became the caged pen of Monticello, bordered by bars of wounding memories. He had to escape. His friends in Congress found a solution.
16 On August 6, 1784, Jefferson arrived in Paris for a new diplomatic stint eager to take advantage of the shopping, the shows, the culture, and the trading prospects. The same week that he made contact with the French foreign minister, Jefferson sent instructions to Monticello to speed up production. He figured that his own captives, and his nation’s captives, would be tasked for the foreseeable future with producing enough tobacco for French merchants to pay back British creditors. At the same time, Jefferson was busy telling abolitionists, “Nobody wishes more ardently [than me] to see an abolition.” Jefferson loathed slavery almost as much as he feared losing American freedom to British banks, or losing his pampered lifestyle in Monticello. He liked and disliked both freedom and slavery, and he never divorced himself from either.
17 Economic diplomacy was Jefferson’s official job. His hobby was science, and he partnered with Benjamin Franklin, who was also in Paris, to defend America from French onslaughts of American inferiority. Jefferson brought his still unpublished Notes on the State of Virginia and “an uncommonly large panther skin” in his baggage. He had two hundred English copies of his Notes printed in Paris in 1785. He sent the manuscript to French intellectuals, to Benjamin Franklin, and to John Adams, James Madison, and James Monroe.
A copy reached a devious printer who without Jefferson’s approval translated it into French in 1786. Jefferson arranged for an English edition to be released in London on his own terms in the summer of 1787. Thereafter, Notes on the State of Virginia would become the most consumed American nonfiction book until well into the mid-nineteenth century.
Count Constantine Volney, known in France as Herodotus’s biographer, was putting his finishing touches on Travels in Syria and Egypt when he read Notes and befriended its author. When Volney first saw the Sphinx in Egypt, he remembered Herodotus—the foremost historian in ancient Greece— describing the “black and frizzled hair” of the ancient Egyptians. Making the connection to the present, Volney mused, “To the race of negroes, at present our slaves, and the objects of our extreme contempt, we owe our arts, sciences, and even the use of speech itself.” American racists ridiculed Volney as an ignorant worshiper of Black people when he visited the United States in 1796. Not Jefferson. He invited Volney and his antiracist ideas and his history of Black ancient Egypt to Monticello. How could Jefferson—the authority of Black intellectual inferiority—look to Volney as the authority of ancient Egypt? Clearly, scientific truths were forever tugging at his self-interests.
18 Thomas Jefferson visited southern France and northern Italy in February 1787. “If I should happen to die in Paris I will beg of you to send me here,” Jefferson wrote in awe of the beautiful countryside of Aix-en-Provence.
When he returned to Paris in June, he may have noticed a copy of the year’s annual oration of the American Philosophical Society (APS), which had been delivered by Princeton theologian Samuel Stanhope Smith. The annual APS oration was the most heralded scholarly lecture in the new nation, and APS members were a who’s who of American power: men like Ben Franklin of Pennsylvania, Alexander Hamilton of New York, and Virginia’s Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. Smith’s oration before APS stood for all intents and purposes as the first great domestic challenge to Jefferson’s Notes.
19 Smith had been pondering assimilationist climate theory for some time.
He may have learned it first from Buffon, or from James Bowdoin’s opening oration of the newly established American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston on May 4, 1780. As the founder and first president of the Academy, as one of Massachusetts’ political leaders, Bowdoin’s address to some of the nation’s leading intellectuals and politicians in Boston probably circulated down to Smith’s New Jersey. If the “natural faculties” of Europeans and Africans were “unequal, as probably is the case,” Bowdoin proclaimed, then we know the reason: climate. Hot climates destroyed the mind and body. In moderate climates in northern America and Europe, humankind would be “capable of greater exertions of both mind and body.” Samuel Stanhope Smith may also have learned climate theory from John Morgan, the founder of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Morgan exhibited two whitening two-year-olds to APS members in 1784. “We meet with few negroes of so beautiful a form,” Morgan said at the time.
20 Samuel Stanhope Smith titled his 1787 lecture “An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species.” He described two causes of human variety: climate and state of society. Hot weather bred physical disorders—like kinky hair, which was “the farthest removed from the ordinary laws of nature.” Cold weather was “followed by a contrary effect”: it cured these ailments, Smith suggested, leaning on Buffon.
In addition to changing climate, a change in the state of society could remove the stamp of Blackness, Smith maintained. Just look at the house slaves. In their nearness to White society, they were acquiring “the agreeable and regular features” of civilized society—light complexion, straight hair, thin lips. “Europeans, and Americans are, the most beautiful people in the world, chiefly, because their state of society is the most improved.” In the end, this assimilationist made sure to disassociate himself from Lord Kames and polygenesis. From only “one pair”—Adam and Eve in Europe—“all of the families of the earth [have] sprung,” Smith closed.
21 Using European features as the standard of measurement, Smith judged light skin and thin lips on Blacks to be more beautiful than dark skin and full lips. He also distinguished between “good hair”—the straighter and longer the better—and “bad hair,” the kinkier and shorter the worse. He positioned biracial people as superior to African people.
In slavery and freedom, as usually the offspring of planters, biracial people oftentimes benefited from a higher social status than people of only African descent, and often they experienced less discrimination as well.
Biracial people were probably more likely to have to perform the backbreaking tasks of the household, and they were often under closer supervision by planters than the slaves in the field, which could be just as backbreaking in a way, if not sexually abusive. Despite their elevated status, they still felt terror of the enslavers, and some antiracist biracial people partnered with Africans to resist White supremacy. Others were no different from White racists in their thinking, discriminating against dark-skinned Blacks, and rationalizing the discrimination, and their elevated status, through notions of their own superiority. In the late eighteenth century, biracial people in Charleston barred dark-skinned people from their business network, the Brown Fellowship Society. In response, the Society of Free Dark Men appeared in that South Carolina town.
22 The American Philosophical Society thanked Samuel Stanhope Smith for “his ingenious and learned Oration” in the minutes. After outlining the position of climate theorists—seemingly the dominant strain of racial thought among northern elites—Smith added a long appendix to the published pamphlet attacking Lord Kames and polygenesis. Races were not fixed and “fitted for different climates,” Smith argued. “The Goths, the Mogus, the Africans have become infinitely meliorated by changing those skies, for which it is said they were peculiarly fitted by nature.” Smith breathlessly asserted that the slave trade—the cause of millions of deaths—had substantially improved the African condition.
23 Samuel Stanhope Smith joined those preeminent intellectuals in Boston’s American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society in attacking polygenesists, in reviving climate theory in America. His scholarly defense of scripture was quickly printed in Philadelphia, in London, and in Lord Kames’s backyard, Edinburgh. By the time he sat down in Princeton’s presidential chair in 1795, he had amassed an international scholarly reputation.
FROM HIS HOME in Paris, Jefferson was closely following—but not closely influencing—the events of the Constitutional Convention. It had begun in Philadelphia on May 25, 1787, months after Samuel Stanhope Smith had addressed some of the delegates on race. Jefferson’s powerful Declaration of Independence had resulted in years of violent struggle against the British, and then in a weak and powerless Confederation of states. Faced with an empty national treasury, erratic trade policies, international disrespect, and fears of the union falling apart, American leaders returned to the nation-building table.
If it was left up to the delegates, some of whom were APS members, Smith’s annual oration would have been the Philadelphia convention’s only serious discussion of race and slavery that year.
In fact, delegates made it clear that slavery would be left out of the conversation. Antislavery discussions were disallowed in drawing up what the writers were pegging as humankind’s ultimate constitution of freedom. It only took a few weeks, though, for slavery and its baggage to creep into the constitutional deliberations. Once opened, the question of slavery never left.
The constitutional debate centered on the issue of the states’ representation in the federal legislature. On a scorching hot June 11, 1787, South Carolina delegate John Rutledge rose at Independence Hall. The former South Carolina governor and future chief justice of the US Supreme Court motioned once again for representation based on taxes (since slaveholding states paid disproportionately high taxes, and thus would monopolize political power). Rutledge was seconded once more by fellow South Carolinian Major Pierce Butler, owner of five hundred people by 1793. Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, another future Supreme Court justice, practically forecasted Rutledge’s motion and had a plan. Rutledge may have been in on that plan. Wilson offered an alternative: “representation in proportion to the whole number of white & other free Citizens & inhabitants . . . and three-fifths of all other persons not comprehended in the foregoing description, except Indians not paying taxes.” The only delegate who pounced on the three-fifths “compromise” was Massachusetts abolitionist and future vice president Elbridge Gerry. “Blacks are property, and are used [in the South] . . . as horses and cattle are [in the North],” Gerry stammered out. So “why should their representation be increased to the southward on account of the number of slaves, [rather] than [on the basis of] horses or oxen to the north?” Gerry looked around. Silence looked back. No one was prepared to answer the unanswerable. A vote sprung from the quietness: 9–2 in favor of the three-fifths clause. A deadlocked Massachusetts abstained. Only New Jersey and Delaware voted against Wilson’s compromise.
24 Equating enslaved Blacks to three-fifths of all other (White) persons matched the ideology of racists on both sides of the aisle. Both assimilationists and segregationists argued, yet with different premises and conclusions, that Black people were simultaneously human and subhuman.
Assimilationists stridently declared the capability of sub-White, sub-human Blacks to become whole, five-fifths, White, one day. For segregationists, three-fifths offered a mathematical approximation of inherent and permanent Black inferiority. They may have disagreed on the rationale and the question of permanence, but seemingly all embraced Black inferiority—and in the process enshrined the power of slaveholders and racist ideas in the nation’s founding document.
By September 17, 1787, delegates in Philadelphia had extracted “slave” and “slavery” from the signed US Constitution to hide their racist enslavement policies. These policies hardly fit with securing “the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Then again, for the delegates, slavery brought freedom. And other policies of the US Constitution, such as empowering federal troops to suppress slave revolts and deliver up runaways like “criminals,” ensured slavery’s continuance. The language was taken from the Northwest Ordinance, which had been issued earlier in the year. It forbade Blacks, slave or free, in territories north of Ohio and east of Mississippi. After a bitter debate, the delegates in Philadelphia put in place provisions for eliminating the slave trade in twenty years, a small triumph, since only Georgia and North Carolina allowed slave imports in the summer of 1787.
25
ON JULY 15, 1787, eight-year-old Polly Jefferson and fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings reached Jefferson’s Paris doorstep. Sally Hemings had come to Monticello as an infant in 1773 as part of Martha Jefferson’s inheritance from her father. John Wayles had fathered six children with his biracial captive Elizabeth Hemings. Sally was the youngest. By 1787, she was reportedly “very handsome, [with] long straight hair down her back,” and she accompanied Polly to Paris instead of an “old nurse.” 26 As his peers penned the US Constitution, Jefferson began a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings. Her older brother James, meanwhile, was training as a chef in Paris to satisfy Jefferson’s gustatory desires. Hemings was more or less forced to settle for the overtures of a sexually aggressive forty-four-year-old (Jefferson also pursued a married local Frenchwoman at the time). Jefferson pursued Hemings as he arranged for the publication of Notes in London. He did not revise his previously stated opinions about Blacks; nor did he remove the passage about Whites being more beautiful than Blacks.
27 Jefferson had always assailed interracial relationships between White women and Black or biracial men. Before arriving in Paris, he had lobbied, unsuccessfully, for Virginia’s White women to be banished (instead of merely fined) for bearing the child of a Black or biracial man. Even after his measure was defeated, even after his relations with Hemings began, and even after the relations matured and he had time to reflect on his own hypocrisy, Jefferson did not stop proclaiming his public position. “Amalgamation with the other color, produces degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent,” he wrote in 1814, after he had fathered several biracial children. Like so many men who spoke out against “amalgamation” in public, and who degraded Black or biracial women’s beauty in public, Jefferson hid his actual views in the privacy of his mind and bedroom.
28 In 1789, Jefferson had a front-row seat to the anti-royal unrest in Paris that launched the French Revolution. He assisted his friend the Marquis de Lafayette in writing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted in August, weeks before his departure. But while putting the starting touches on the French Revolution and the finishing touches on the American Revolution, Jefferson had to deal with a revolt from sixteen-year-old Sally Hemings. She was pregnant with his child, refused to return to slavery, and planned to petition French officials for her freedom. Jefferson did the only thing he could do: “He promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed,” according to an account Hemings told their son Madison. “In consequence of his promise, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia,” Madison wrote in his diary. Hemings gave birth to at least five and possibly as many as seven children from Jefferson, a paternity confirmed by DNA tests and documents proving they were together nine months prior to the birth of each of Sally’s children. Some of the children died young, but Jefferson kept his word and freed their remaining children when they reached adulthood.
29 Upon his return from Paris, Jefferson agreed, after some wavering, to become the first US secretary of state in George Washington’s inaugural administration. Beginning his tenure on March 22, 1790, Jefferson quickly felt uncomfortable surrounded by all those aristocratic, anti-republican cabinet members in America’s first political party, the Federalists. Vice President John Adams was questioning the effectiveness of “equal laws.” Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton was quietly calling for a monarchy; he wanted to hand control of the economy over to financiers, and he pushed for close (or, in Jefferson’s conception, subordinate) economic ties to Britain. Jefferson took solace watching the French Revolution. That is, until it spilled over into Haiti. In 1790, Haiti’s enslavers saw the Declaration of the Rights of Man (Article 1: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights”) as a green light for their independence drive and for their demands for new trade relations to increase their wealth. Free and affluent biracial activists numbering almost 30,000 (slightly less than the White population) started driving for their civil rights. Close to half a million enslaved Africans, who were producing about half the world’s sugar and coffee in the most profitable European colony in the world, heard these curious cries for rights and liberty among the island’s free people. On August 22, 1791, enslaved Africans revolted, inspired in more ways than one by Vodou priest Dutty Boukman.
They emerged as the fourth faction in the civil war between White royalists, White independence seekers, and free biracial activists.
30 It was a civil war that no slaveholder, including Thomas Jefferson, wanted enslaved Africans to win. If these Black freedom fighters could declare their independence and win it on the richest soil of the Americas, then their nation would become the hemispheric symbol of freedom, not Jefferson’s United States. Enslaved peoples everywhere would be inspired by that symbol and fight for their freedom, and there was nothing that racist ideas could do anymore to stop them. CHAPTER 10 Uplift Suasion
AS FREED PEOPLE in Haiti were warring against French re-enslavers, a prominent free Black man in Maryland sat down to write to Thomas Jefferson. The man’s grandmother, Mary Welsh, had come to Maryland in the 1680s as an indentured servant. After finishing her indenture, she acquired some land and two Black captives, freed them, and married one, named Bannaka. This interracial family defied White males’ insistence that White women not marry Black men. Their biracial daughter, Mary, married an enslaved man named Robert. Mary and Robert birthed a free son in 1731 and named him Benjamin. As Benjamin came of age, “all he liked was to dive into books,” remembered an observer. Friendly White neighbors were constantly loaning him books. Proceeds from growing tobacco on his inherited farm—he was as adept a farmer as anything else—gave Benjamin Banneker the time to read and think and write.
1 Few free Blacks had the leisure time to read and write in Banneker’s day.
As soon as they shook off slavery’s shackles, the shackles of discrimination clamped down on them. Northern states, in gradually eliminating slave labor during the Revolutionary era, made almost no moves—gradual or otherwise —to end racial discrimination and thereby racist ideas. Proposals to ensure the manageability of African people by former masters, as if they were more naturally slave than free, shadowed abolition proposals. Discriminatory policies were a feature of almost every emancipation law.
2 Debates about the future of slavery and the characteristics of enslaved Blacks, both in Congress and between prominent intellectuals, only reinforced the climate of racism and discrimination that plagued free Blacks like Banneker. Benjamin Franklin, who had become head of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, spent some of his last days trying to resolve the world’s greatest political contradiction: America’s freedom and slavery. In early 1790, the eighty-four-year-old trudged before Congress to give what one narrator called “a memorial.” Christianity and the “political creed of Americans” demand the removal of this “inconsistency from the land of liberty,” Franklin implored. He conceded that Blacks too often fell below “the common standard of the human species,” but he urged his peers to “step to the very verge of the power vested in you.” Franklin’s speech and a torrent of Quaker emancipation petitions aroused a bitter boxing match over slavery in the First US Congress. It carried on for months after Franklin’s death on April 17, 1790. Black people were “indolent, improvident, averse to labor; when emancipated, they would either starve or plunder,” one congressman argued, defending the interests of southern planters who were dependent on slave labor. Blacks were “an inferior race even to the Indians,” another insisted. A northern congressman held that southerners would never submit to a general emancipation without civil war.
As they argued over slavery, congressmen paused to unite for the first Naturalization Act on March 26, 1790, which limited citizenship to “free white persons” of “good character.” 3 The congressional slavery debate dribbled into the rest of society.
Assimilationists challenged segregationists, stressing Black capability for equality if Blacks were not under the imbruting boot of slavery. Critiquing David Hume, citing Samuel Stanhope Smith, and parading out a line of Black exhibits, from Sancho to Phillis Wheatley, Pennsylvania abolitionist Charles Crawford asserted that the “Negro is in every respect similar to us.” In 1791, Quaker Moses Brown pointed to Black exhibits from his Providence school as proof of “their being Men capable of Every Improvement with ourselves where they [are] under the Same Advantages.” Benjamin Rush, perhaps the nation’s leading abolitionist after Franklin’s death, presented adult exhibits: New Orleans physician James Derham and Thomas “Negro Calculator” Fuller of Maryland. Legend has it that it took Fuller only a few minutes to calculate the number of seconds a man aged seventy years, seventeen days, and twelve hours had lived. But these remarkable exhibits of remarkable Black adults and children did little to sway the proslavery mind. Enslavers probably knew more than anyone about Black capabilities in freedom. But they only cared about Black capabilities to make them money.
4 As quite possibly the most remarkable exhibit of them all, Benjamin Banneker was literally in the middle of these debates between assimilationist abolitionists and segregationist enslavers. And so was Thomas Jefferson, agreeing and disagreeing with both sides. Early in 1791, months before writing to Jefferson, Banneker had helped survey the nation’s new capital, Washington, DC.
Banneker began his letter “freely and cheerfully” acknowledging that he was “of the African race.” If Jefferson was flexible in his sentiments of nature, friendly to Black people, and willing to aid in their relief, Banneker wrote, then “I apprehend you will embrace every opportunity, to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions.” Jefferson and his slaveholding countrymen who were “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren,” but who assailed against British oppression, were walking, talking contradictions. Banneker closed the letter by introducing his enclosed unpublished almanac, “in my own hand writing.” Banneker’s letter was staunchly antiracist, a direct confrontation to the young country’s leading disseminator of racist ideas.
5 Nearly two weeks later, on August 30, 1791, Thomas Jefferson sent Banneker his standard reply to antislavery and antiracist letters. “No body wishes more than I,” he said, to see the end of prejudice and slavery. He informed Banneker that he had sent the almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet, the secretary of the Academy of Science in Paris, because “your whole colour had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them.” Jefferson sidestepped his contradiction. But what could he say? In his letter to Condorcet, Jefferson called Banneker a “very respectable mathematician.” In Notes, he claimed that Black people did not think “above the level of plain narration.” Did Banneker change Jefferson’s mind? Yes and no. Jefferson branded Banneker an extraordinary Negro. “I shall be delighted to see these instances of moral eminence so multiplied,” he told Condorcet.
6
FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of the enslaved, the most profound instance of moral eminence was evolving in Haiti. Jefferson learned of the Black revolt on September 8, 1791. Within two months, a force of 100,000 African freedom-fighters had killed more than 4,000 enslavers, destroyed almost 200 plantations, and gained control of the entire Northern Province. As historian C. L. R. James explained in the 1930s, “they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much.” 7 What Jefferson and every other holder of African people had long feared had come to pass. In response, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, bestowing on slaveholders the right and legal apparatus to recover escaped Africans and criminalize those who harbored them. Thomas Jefferson, for one, did not view the Haitian Revolution in the same guise as the American or French Revolutions. “Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man,” he wrote in July 1793. To Jefferson, the slave revolt against the enslavers was more evil and tragic to the feelings of man than the millions of African people who died on American plantations. Jefferson would soon call General Toussaint L’Ouverture and other Haitian leaders “Cannibals of the terrible Republic.” 8 That year, Jefferson’s troubles over revolting Haitians also hit closer to home. A ship or two of distressed masters and slaves from Haiti arrived in Philadelphia in late July. Philadelphians started dying a week later. By August 20, 1793, Benjamin Rush had fatefully noticed the pattern of the contagion of yellow fever. But it was not yet an epidemic, so Rush had time in the late summer to attend to other matters. He possibly sent off letters to abolitionists around the nation. The next year, he welcomed to Philadelphia twenty-two delegates from abolitionist societies across the United States as they arrived for the “American Convention for promoting the Abolition of Slavery and Improving the Condition of the African Race.” The convention met over the next few years and then sporadically over the next three decades, pressing for gradual emancipation, anti-kidnapping legislation, and civil rights for alleged runaways.
As freed Blacks proliferated in the 1790s and the number of enslaved Blacks began to decline in the North, the racial discourse shifted from the problems of enslavement to the condition and capabilities of free Blacks. The American Convention delegates believed that the future advance of abolitionism depended on how Black people used their freedom. Periodically, the convention published and circulated advice tracts for free Blacks.
Abolitionists urged free Blacks to attend church regularly, acquire English literacy, learn math, adopt trades, avoid vice, legally marry and maintain marriages, evade lawsuits, avoid expensive delights, abstain from noisy and disorderly conduct, always act in a civil and respectable manner, and develop habits of industry, sobriety, and frugality. If Black people behaved admirably, abolitionists reasoned, they would be undermining justifications for slavery and proving that notions of their inferiority were wrong.
9 This strategy of what can be termed uplift suasion was based on the idea that White people could be persuaded away from their racist ideas if they saw Black people improving their behavior, uplifting themselves from their low station in American society. The burden of race relations was placed squarely on the shoulders of Black Americans. Positive Black behavior, abolitionist strategists held, undermined racist ideas, and negative Black behavior confirmed them.
Uplift suasion was not conceived by the abolitionists meeting in Philadelphia in 1794. It lurked behind the craze to exhibit Phillis Wheatley and Francis Williams and other “extraordinary” Black people. So the American Convention, raising the stakes, asked every free Black person to serve as a Black exhibit. In every state, abolitionists publicly and privately drilled this theory into the minds of African people as they entered the ranks of freedom in the 1790s and beyond.
This strategy to undermine racist ideas was actually based on a racist idea: “negative” Black behavior, said that idea, was partially or totally responsible for the existence and persistence of racist ideas. To believe that the negative ways of Black people were responsible for racist ideas was to believe that there was some truth in notions of Black inferiority. To believe that there was some truth in notions of Black inferiority was to hold racist ideas.
From the beginning, uplift suasion was not only racist, it was also impossible for Blacks to execute. Free Blacks were unable to always display positive characteristics for the same reasons poor immigrants and rich planters were unable to do so: free Blacks were human and humanly flawed.
Uplift suasion assumed, moreover, that racist ideas were sensible and could be undone by appealing to sensibilities. But the common political desire to justify racial inequities produced racist ideas, not logic. Uplift suasion also failed to account for the widespread belief in the extraordinary Negro, which had dominated assimilationist and abolitionist thinking in America for a century. Upwardly mobile Blacks were regularly cast aside as unique and as different from ordinary, inferior Black people.
Still, from the perspective of White and Black abolitionists alike, uplift suasion seemed to be working in the 1790s. It would always seem to be working. Consumers of racist ideas sometimes changed their viewpoints when exposed to Black people defying stereotypes (and then sometimes changed back when exposed to someone confirming the stereotypes). Then again, upwardly mobile Blacks seemed as likely to produce resentment as admiration. “If you were well dressed they would insult you for that, and if you were ragged you would surely be insulted for being so,” one Black Rhode Island resident complained in his memoir in the early 1800s. It was the cruel illogic of racism. When Black people rose, racists either violently knocked them down or ignored them as extraordinary. When Black people were down, racists called it their natural or nurtured place, and denied any role in knocking them down in the first place.
10
UPLIFT SUASION MOVED neither segregationist enslavers nor assimilationist abolitionists away from their racist ideas. Not even Benjamin Rush, the scion of abolitionism, could be moved. By the end of August 1793, he was up to his neck in yellow fever cases and using racist ideas to solicit assistance. Rush inserted a note in Philadelphia’s American Daily Advertiser in September telling Black people they had immunity to yellow fever, a conclusion he had reached based on his belief in their animal-like physical superiority. Quite a few Black nurses suffered horribly before Rush realized his gross error. In all, 5,000 people perished before the epidemic subsided in November and federal officials returned to the city.
11 Thomas Jefferson used his time away from Philadelphia during the epidemic to spend money on scientific devices that he planned to use in retirement. His agony over Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s wheeling toward monarchy and financial speculation had set him to packing.
We are “daily pitted in the Cabinet like two cocks,” Jefferson sobbed. In one of his last days as secretary of state, Jefferson received a patent application from Eli Whitney, a Yale-educated Massachusetts native looking for his fortune in Georgia. Whitney had invented a high-quality cotton gin that quickly separated cotton fibers from their seeds. Jefferson knew about the growing demand for American cotton abroad and the costly, labor-intensive process of manually removing the seeds. The introduction of steam power in England and waterpower in the northeastern United States drastically lowered the cost of making cotton into yarn and making yarn into fabric. Forward us a model of the gin and you will receive your patent “immediately,” Jefferson wrote to Whitney. Jefferson had retired by the time Whitney received his patent in 1794.
12 Enthroning King Cotton, the cotton gin made the value of southern lands skyrocket and quickly dethroned rice and tobacco. King Cotton incessantly demanded more and more to stabilize its reign: more enslaved Africans, more land, more violence, and more racist ideas. Annual cotton production slammed through the ceiling of about 3,000 bales in 1790, reaching 178,000 bales in 1810 and more than 4 million bales on the eve of the Civil War.
Cotton became America’s leading export, exceeding in dollar value all exports, helping to free Americans from British banks, helping to expand the factory system in the North, and helping to power the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Cotton—more than anyone or anything else—economically freed American enslavers from England and tightened the chains of African people in American slavery. Uplift suasion had no chance of dethroning King Cotton.
13
IN 1796, BEFORE the cotton gin had taken hold—feeding cotton production and the demand for more enslaved Africans—Benjamin Rush thought he had found the ultimate abolitionist cure. The good doctor believed he had found a way to cure captives of their abnormal Blackness. The two presidential candidates—Thomas Jefferson and incumbent vice president John Adams— shared the Philadelphia sunlight that summer with a free “white black man.” Henry Moss, unbeknownst to Americans, was suffering from vitiligo, a skin disease that causes the loss of skin color, making one’s dark skin lighten.
Moss exhibited his forty-two-year-old whitened body in Philadelphia taverns and before members of the American Philosophical Society. Long before “Black-faced” White entertainers enthralled Americans, “White-faced” Blacks enthralled American believers and skeptics of the theory that Black skin could change to White. Moss became “almost as familiar to the readers of newspapers and other periodicals . . . as . . . John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, or Madison,” according to one observer. Like John “Primrose” Boby, who showcased his whitening body in the United Kingdom around the same time, Moss was a freak to some, but to others, such as Benjamin Rush, he was the future of racial progress. After 1796, history loses Henry Moss until 1803, when Providence abolitionist Moses Brown carefully examined him and saw “evidence of the sameness of human nature.” In 1814, Moss resurfaced again in the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, where he is described as a Black man “whose skin has nearly lost its native colour and become perfectly white.” 14 President George Washington, Samuel Stanhope Smith, Benjamin Rush, and other dignitaries viewed Moss in the summer of 1796. “The parts that were covered and sweated advanced most rapidly in whiteness, his face slowest,” Rush jotted down in his notes. “His skin was exactly like a white man. No rubbing accelerated it. The black skin did not come off, but changed.” Thomas Jefferson, apparently, did not see Moss. Jefferson did own a few “white Negroes,” and he called them an “anomaly of nature” in Notes on the State of Virginia. They were all “born of parents who had no mixture of white blood,” Jefferson wrote, careful to exonerate his peers and uphold his false stand against interracial sex. Jefferson probably knew the term “albino” came from the Latin albus, meaning an animal, plant, or person lacking pigment. But their skin color—“a pallid cadaverous white”—was different, Jefferson wrote, and their “curled” hair was “that of the negro.” No wonder Jefferson never took aim at physical assimilationists. He did not even concede the color change from Black to White.
15 To Jefferson’s dismay, other American intellectuals did take whitening Blacks very seriously. On February 4, 1797, Benjamin Rush, the APS’s vice president, informed Jefferson that he was “preparing a paper in which I have attempted to prove that the black color . . . of the Negroes is the effect of a disease in the skin.” Rush gave the paper at a special APS meeting on July 14, 1797. He praised the “elegant and ingenious Essay” of fellow assimilationist Samuel Stanhope Smith, given a decade prior. Rush, however, disagreed with Smith on how to make Black people White again. He rejected climate theory and proclaimed that all Africans were suffering from leprosy. This skin disease explained why they all had ugly Black skin, Rush told APS members.
And the whiter their skins became, the healthier they became.
16 This skin disease was brought on by poor diet, he theorized, along with “greater heat, more savage manners, and bilious fevers.” He then listed other side effects of the skin disease: Blacks’ physical superiority, their “wooly heads,” their laziness, their hypersexuality, and their insensitivity to pain.
“They bear surgical operations much better than white people,” Rush quoted a doctor as saying. “I have amputated the legs of many negroes, who have held the upper part of the limb themselves.” Benjamin Rush projected himself as a friend of the Philadelphia Negro, a racial egalitarian, and an abolitionist. He attempted to uphold his persona at the end of his address. “All the claims of superiority of the whites over the blacks, on account of their color, are founded alike in ignorance and inhumanity,” he stressed. “If the color of the negroes be the effect of a disease, instead of inviting us to tyrannise over them, it should entitle them to a double portion of our humanity.” Rush was upbeat about Black capability, about the future, and about potential remedies: Nature had begun to cure Black people. The famous assimilationist mentioned Henry Moss and his glorious “change from black to a natural white flesh color.” His “wool,” Rush announced with satisfaction, “has been changed into hair.” 17 Benjamin Rush’s leprosy theory and Samuel Stanhope Smith’s climate theory were as popular among northern assimilationists and abolitionists as Thomas Jefferson was unpopular. Jefferson had lost the presidential election to Adams in 1796, but ran for president again in 1800. Federalist operatives and journalists tried to convince voters of Jefferson’s atheism and anti-Black views, using his Notes as evidence, just as they had done during the previous election. “You have degraded the blacks from the rank which God hath given them in the scale of being!” wrote one Federalist pamphleteer. Some of Jefferson’s defenders during the campaign were jailed by the Adams administration under the 1798 Sedition Act—namely, James Callender.
Pardoned by Jefferson when he won the presidency in 1800, Callender apparently requested patronage as retribution for his services. President Jefferson refused. Incensed, Callender exposed Jefferson’s secret.
18 On September 1, 1802, Richmond’s Recorder readers learned about the relationship between President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. “By this wench Sally, our president has had several children,” Callender wrote. The arrangement had begun in France, “when he endeavored so much to belittle the African race.” (Callender, ironically, belittled the African race too.
“Wench” oftentimes meant a promiscuous woman, connoting the common idea that African women pursued White men.) 19 If Callender thought his series of articles would destroy Jefferson’s political fortunes, then he was wrong. Callender’s reports did not surprise many White male voters, either in Virginia or around the nation. If anything, Callender upset them, because some of them were having their own secretive affairs with Black women—or raping them—and they did not want such things publicly aired. Nationally, White male voters bolstered Jefferson’s party in Congress in the 1802 midterm elections, and they overwhelmingly supported his presidential reelection in 1804.
When Jefferson’s daughter Patsy showed him Callender’s article, Jefferson laughed. No words came from his lips to give the matter any credence. John Adams privately called it a “blot on his character” and the “natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character, Negro slavery.” Jefferson may have privately justified his relations with Sally Hemings by reminding himself that everyone did it, or tried to do it. From teens ending their (and their victims’) virginity, to married men sneaking around, to single and widowed men having their longtime liaisons—master/slave rape or intercourse seemed “natural,” and enslaving one’s children seemed normal in slaveholding America.
Even Jefferson’s old law teacher, his “earliest and best friend,” engaged in an interracial liaison. Widower George Wythe had lived for some time in Williamsburg with the young, biracial Michael Brown and a Black “housekeeper,” Lydia Broadnax. Wythe willed his house to Broadnax, and he asked Jefferson to oversee Brown’s education. Perhaps angry about this arrangement, Wythe’s White grandnephew, George Sweeney, probably poisoned Wythe, Broadnax, and Brown one day in 1806. Only Broadnax survived. In his second presidential term, Jefferson publicly avoided the Wythe scandal, trying to create as much “imaginative distance,” to use his biographer’s term, as possible.
20 Master/slave sex fundamentally acknowledged the humanity of Black and biracial women, but it simultaneously reduced that humanity to their sexuality. In the Christian world, sexuality was believed to be the animal trait of humans. Fast becoming the iconic image of a Black woman at this time was the 1800 Portrait d’une negresse (Portrait of a Negress) by French painter Marie-Guillemine Benoist. An African woman sits staring at the viewer with her head wrapped and breast exposed. The white cloth wrapping her head and lower body contrasts vividly with the darkness of her skin. The portrait is thought to be the first painting of a Black woman by a European woman.
21 It is not surprising that Jefferson’s career survived Callender’s scandalous revelation. During his presidency, many Americans came to understand slavery (and its sexual politics) as an immutable fact of their lives and their economy. The nation that Jefferson had called “the world’s best hope” and “the strongest government on earth” in his First Inaugural Address in 1801 was not hopefully anticipating the end of slavery. The antislavery refrains first heard from the mouths of the Germantown Petitioners reached a crescendo during the American Revolution, but then started to trail off. And the remaining abolitionists, such as Benjamin Rush and company, who were urging uplift suasion hardly had as large an audience as John Woolman and Samuel Hopkins had enjoyed a generation prior. King Cotton was on the march. And the slaveholding producers of racist ideas had convinced legions of Americans to see slavery as a necessary evil to pay off their debts and build their nation. Besides, it seemed better than the supposed horrific barbarism bound to arise, they argued, from Black freedom.
22 More than anything else, the Haitian Revolution and the slave rebellions it inspired across the Americas made White Americans fearful of race war and, even more worrying, a potential Black victory. Southern congressmen and newspaper editors did what they could to silence dissent and stoke White fears, claiming that public discussion of slavery and the presence of free Blacks were inciting slaves to rebel. And there were more free Blacks than ever before, because of wartime runaways and the outbreak of manumissions following the Revolution. The free Black population in Virginia, for instance, leaped from 1,800 in 1782 to 12,766 in 1790 and then to 30,570 in 1810.
23 Then there was the sudden expansion of the cotton kingdom. Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of Haitian revolutionaries—free Black Haiti declared independence in 1804—required him to reimagine the French Empire.
Holding and defending faraway colonies had become too costly and too bothersome. The vast Louisiana Territory did not fit in his new leaner, stronger empire. “I renounce Louisiana,” Napoleon said on April 11, 1803.
By April 30, the Jefferson administration had purchased the territory from France for $15 million, or three cents per acre. Jefferson learned of the purchase on the eve of Independence Day. “It is something larger than the whole U.S.,” he wrote with happiness.
Over the next few decades, slaveholders marched their captives onto the new western lands, terrorizing them into planting new cotton and sugar fields, sending the crops to northern and British factories, and powering the Industrial Revolution. Southern planters and northern investors grew rich.
With so much money to make, antislavery and antiracist ideas were whipped to the side like antislavery, antiracist Africans.
24
THE NEW LIFE and lands of slavery, and the new crops and cash from slavery, sucked the life out of the antislavery movement during Jefferson’s presidency in the early 1800s. Assimilationist ideas, especially monogenesis, also faded. Theologians like Princeton’s president, Samuel Stanhope Smith, the most eminent scholar on race in the United States in that era, seeing the loss of their cultural power, grew to hate Jefferson’s disregard for religious authority. Jefferson questioned the orthodox Christian belief that all humans descended from Adam and Eve, and articulators of separately created human species nagged Smith like an incessantly barking dog.
25 English physician Charles White, the well-known author of a treatise on midwifery, entered the debate over species in 1799. Unlike Scotland’s Lord Kames, White circled around religion and employed a new method of proving the existence of separate race species—comparative anatomy. He did not want the conclusions in his Account on the Regular Gradation in Man to “be construed so as to give the smallest countenance to the pernicious practice of enslaving mankind.” His only objective was “to investigate the truth.” White disputed Buffon’s legendary contention that since interracial unions were fertile, the races had to be of the same species. Actually, orangutans had been “known to carry off negro-boys, girls, and even women,” he said, sometimes enslaving them for “brutal passion.” On the natural scale, Europeans were the highest and Africans the lowest, approaching “nearer to the brute creation than any other of the human species.” Blacks were superior in areas where apes were superior to humans—seeing, hearing, smelling, memorizing things, and chewing food. “The PENIS of an African is larger than that of an European,” White told his readers. Most anatomical museums in Europe preserved Black penises, and, he noted, “I have one in mine.” 26 Science had been too religious in the days of Voltaire for discussions of separate species to catch on. Too much freedom and Revolutionary rhetoric clouded the words of Edward Long and Lord Kames. By the period of Charles White’s publication, the debate was on. In 1808, New York physician John Augustine Smith, a disciple of Charles White, rebuked Samuel Stanhope Smith as a minister dabbling in science. “I hold it my duty to lay before you all the facts which are relevant,” John Augustine Smith announced in his circulated lecture. The principal fact was that the “anatomical structure” of the European was “superior” to that of the other races. As different species, Blacks and Whites had been “placed at the opposite extremes of the scale.” The polygenesis lecture launched Smith’s academic career: he became editor of the Medical and Physiological Journal, tenth president of the College of William & Mary, and president of the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons.
27 The advance of slavery, possibly more than the persuasive arguments of Lord Kames, Charles White, and John Augustine Smith, caused intellectuals long committed to monogenesis to start changing their views. Watching the Christian world unravel, Samuel Stanhope Smith made one last intellectual stand for theology, for assimilationists, and for monogenesis. He released an “enlarged and improved” second edition of Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species in 1810, pledging to appeal “to the evidence of facts.” Nothing in the past twenty years had changed his position: racial difference resulted from climate and the state of a society. If anything, Smith asserted it more forcefully. And he introduced “another fact” in the climate section: Henry Moss’s skin had changed, and his new “fine, straight hair” had replaced “the wooly substance.” In a hard-hitting appendix, Smith responded to “certain strictures made on the first edition of this essay,” the polygenesis of Charles White, Thomas Jefferson, and John Augustine Smith. “Let infidels appear in their true form,” Smith roared in closing. “If they seek the combat, we only pray, like Ajax, to see the enemy in open day.” 28 Thomas Jefferson did not publicly respond to Samuel Stanhope Smith in 1810. He refused to come out into open day altogether. He had retired from public life. CHAPTER 11
Big Bottoms
LESS THAN THIRTY years earlier, Thomas Jefferson had been anxious to leave Monticello and to be free from the sorrow of his wife’s passing. After France, three years as US secretary of state, four years as vice president, and eight years as president, he wanted to return to his home in Virginia. “Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power,” he informed a French businessman on March 4, 1809, days before his release from the presidency.
After rooming for years in earsplitting Washington, Jefferson longed for quiet seclusion to read, write, and think in private. “But the enormities of the times in which I have lived,” he said, “have forced me to take part in resisting them.” No foreign enormity was greater than the wars raging in the early 1800s between France and England. Jefferson kept the United States neutral, ignoring war hawks, but he could not ignore the violations on the high seas of American neutrality. He proposed (and Congress adopted) a general embargo of US trade with France and England in 1807. Congress repealed the controversial embargo during the final days of Jefferson’s presidency on March 1, 1809. Jefferson’s neutral doctrine delayed the inevitable. Three years after he had left the presidency, the United States faced off with England in the War of 1812.
1 Presiding over the American Philosophical Society from 1797 to 1815, Jefferson did remain neutral in the war between monogenesis and polygenesis. He rarely even struck back at the Federalist offensive against his Notes on the State of Virginia in the presidential campaigns. In 1804, printer William Duane offered Jefferson the opportunity to respond in a new edition.
Jefferson balked. He did not have time. But he did plan to revise and enlarge Notes when he left Washington in 1809.
2 Weeks before leaving office, Jefferson thanked abolitionist and scientist Henri Gregoire for sending him a copy of An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes on February 25.
Gregoire offered travel “testimony” of glorious Black nations to refute what “Jefferson tells us, that no nation of them was ever civilized,” he wrote. “We do not pretend to place the negroes on a level” with Whites, Gregoire explained in assimilationist form, but only to challenge those who say “that the negroes are incapable of becoming partners in the store-house of human knowledge.” 3 After years of apologizing for American slavery, Jefferson probably finally felt good about responding to Henri Gregoire. He was in a better position now to write to the famed abolitionist. In his Annual Message to Congress three years earlier, Jefferson had condemned the “violations of human rights” enabled by the slave trade and urged Congress to abolish it.
Congress followed his lead in 1807, after a contentious debate over how illegal slave traders would be punished. Traders, they decided, would be fined under the Slave Trade Act of 1807. But Congress did nothing to ensure the act’s enforcement.
It was an empty and mostly symbolic law. The act failed to close the door on the ongoing international slave trade while flinging open the door to a domestic one. Violations of human rights continued when children were snatched from parents, and slave ships now traveled down American waters in a kind of “middle passage” from Virginia to New Orleans, which took as many days as the transatlantic “middle passage” had. Jefferson and likeminded planters of the Upper South started deliberately “breeding” captives to supply the Deep South’s demand. “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm,” Jefferson once explained to a friend. A year after the Slave Trade Act, a South Carolina court ruled that enslaved women had no legal claims on their children. They stood “on the same footings as other animals.” 4 Ending the international slave trade was in reality a boon for the largest American slave-owners, as it increased the demand and value of their captives. And so the largest slave-owners and the gradual-emancipation advocates joined hands in cheering on the legal termination of the international slave trade on January 1, 1808. Massachusetts clergyman Jedidiah Morse deemed it a victory. He spoke for most northern assimilationist evangelicals when he proclaimed that since Christianity was finally lighting up the “heathenish and Mahometan darkness” of Africa, “its natives have no need to be carried to foreign lands.” Morse believed that slavery would be gradually abolished, too.
5 Thomas Jefferson must have relied on this widespread support for the Slave Trade Act when he finally replied to Henri Gregoire in stock fashion in 1809. “No person living wishes more sincerely than I do,” he said, to see racial equality proven. “On this subject [Black people] are gaining daily in the opinions of nations,” Jefferson wrote, “and hopeful advances are making towards their re-establishment of an equal footing with the other colors of the human family.” 6 In fact, Black people were losing ground daily in the opinions of European nations. Not long after Gregoire and Jefferson exchanged letters, London was blitzed with a broadsheet picturing a seminude African woman standing sideways to the viewer, her oversized buttocks exposed on one side, the unseen side draped in animal skin. A headband wraps her forehead, and she holds a body-sized stick. Whitening Blacks, Black exhibits, and “converted Hottentots,” sharing their supposed journeys from savagery to civilization, were becoming less remarkable with each passing year. But Londoners were captivated by Sarah Baartman, or rather, her enormous buttocks and genitalia.
Baartman’s Khoi people of southern Africa had been classified as the lowest Africans, the closest to animals, for more than a century. Baartman’s buttocks and genitals were irregularly large among her fellow Khoi women, not to mention African women across the continent, or across the Atlantic on Jefferson’s plantation. And yet Baartman’s enormous buttocks and genitals were presented as regular and authentically African. She was billed on stage in the fashionable West End of London as the “Hottentot Venus,” which tightened the bolt on the racist stereotype linking Black women to big buttocks. Polygenesist Charles White had already tightened the bolt linking Black men with big genitalia.
Retiring colonial official Alexander Dunlop and Baartman’s South African master Hendrik Cesars brought Baartman to London in July 1810.
Upon Dunlop’s death in 1814, exhibiter Henry Taylor brought the thirty-six or thirty-seven-year-old Baartman to Paris for another round of shows. Papers rejoiced over her arrival. She appeared in the grand Palais-Royal, the centerfold of Parisian debauchery, where prostitutes mixed with printers, restaurants with gambling houses, coffee gossipers with drunk dancers, beggars with elites. On November 19, 1814, Parisians strolled into the Vaudeville Theater across from the Palais-Royal to view the opening of La Venus Hottentote, ou Haine aux Francais (or the Hatred of French Women).
In the opera’s plot, a young Frenchman does not find his suitor sufficiently exotic. When she appears disguised as the “Hottentot Venus,” he falls in love.
Secure in his attraction, she drops the disguise. The Frenchman drops the ridiculous attraction to the Hottentot Venus, comes to his senses, and the couple marries. The opera revealed Europeans’ ideas about Black women.
After all, when Frenchmen are seduced by the Hottentot Venus, they are acting like animals. When Frenchmen are attracted to Frenchwomen, they are acting rationally. While hypersexual Black women are worthy of sexual attraction, asexual Frenchwomen are worthy of love and marriage.
In January 1815, animal showman S. Reaux obtained Baartman from Henry Taylor. Reaux paraded her, sometimes with a collar around her neck, at cafés, at restaurants, and in soirées for Parisian elites—wherever there was money. One day in March 1815, Reaux shepherded Baartman to the Museum of Natural History in Paris, which housed the world’s greatest collection of natural objects. They had a meeting with Europe’s most distinguished intellectual, the comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier.
That rare segregationist who rejected polygenesis, Cuvier believed that all humans descended from Europe’s Garden of Eden. A catastrophic event 5,000 years earlier had sent the survivors fleeing to Asia and Africa; three races had emerged and had started passing on unchangeable hereditary traits. “The white race” was the “most beautiful of all” and was “superior,” according to Cuvier. The African’s physical features “approximate[d] it to the monkey tribe.” In his lab, Cuvier asked Baartman to take off her long skirt and shawl, which she had worn to ward off the March wind. Baartman refused. Startled, Cuvier did all he could to document her with her clothes on over the next three days, measuring and drawing her body.
Sometime in late December 1815, Baartman died, perhaps of pneumonia.
No Black woman was the subject of more obituaries in Parisian newspapers in the nineteenth century than Sarah Baartman. Cuvier secured her corpse and brought her to his laboratory. He removed her clothes, cracked open her chest wall, removed and studied all of her major organs. Cuvier spread her legs, studied her buttocks, and cut out her genitals, setting them aside for preservation. After Cuvier and his team of scientists finished their scientific rape, they boiled off the rest of Baartman’s flesh. They reassembled the bones into a skeleton. Cuvier then added her remains to his world-famous collection.
In his report, he claimed to have “never seen a human head more resembling a monkey’s than hers.” The Khoi people of South Africa, he concluded, were more closely related to the ape than to the human.
7 Parisians displayed Baartman’s skeleton, genitals, and brain until 1974.
When President Nelson Mandela took office in 1994, he renewed South Africans’ calls for Baartman’s return home. France returned her remains to her homeland in 2002. After a life and afterlife of unceasing exhibitions, Baartman finally rested in peace.
8 Baartman’s fate was particularly horrific in the early 1810s, and Cuvier’s conclusions about Black bodies were consumed with little hesitation by those seeking evidence of Black inferiority to justify their commerce on both sides of the Atlantic, a commerce taking root in the wombs of Black women.
NO MATTER WHAT Thomas Jefferson said to Henri Gregoire in 1809, Black people were not gaining daily in the opinions of those Choctaws and Chickasaws who started acquiring them (or were re-enslaving runaways).
While these indigenous southern slaveholders rejected ideas of White superiority and Native American inferiority, they embraced associations of Blackness with slavery. Enslaved Africans in Jefferson’s Louisiana Territory were not gaining daily in the opinions of their French and American masters, either. And these captives refused to wait until their French and American masters gained an emancipatory opinion of them, knowing they could be waiting forever for their freedom. On January 8, 1811, about fifteen captives on a sugar plantation in an area known as the German Coast wounded a planter, Major Manuel Andry, and killed his son. Bearing military uniforms and guns, cane knives, and axes while beating drums and waving flags, they started marching from plantation to plantation, swelling their numbers and the dead bodies of enslavers. In time, between two hundred and five hundred biracial and African people had joined the thirty-five-mile freedom march to invade New Orleans. Led by Asante warriors Quamana and Kook, along with biracial men Harry Kenner and Charles Deslondes—and inspired by the Haitian Revolution—these revolutionaries waged the largest slave revolt in the history of the United States.
9 On January 10, 1811, the poorly armed band of freed people was defeated by a well-armed band of four hundred militiamen and sixty US army troops.
In the end, almost one hundred former captives were killed or executed.
Louisiana provided reparations for the planters—$300 (about $4,200 in 2014) for each captive killed. Authorities whacked off their heads and strung them up for all to see at intervals from New Orleans to Andry’s plantation.” 10 Hoping for assurances of federal protection in case of future rebellions, Louisiana sugar planters voted to join the union in 1812. With the addition of Louisiana, another slave state, it became clear that slavery was expanding, not contracting, as Jefferson left office. The number of enslaved Africans swelled 70 percent in twenty years, increasing from 697,897 in the first federal census of 1790 to 1,191,354 in 1810, before tripling over the next fifty years. The escalation of slavery and the need to defend it against anti-American abolitionists in Europe generated one of the first waves of proslavery thought after the Revolution. Even northerners, or native northerners living in the South, defended it. In 1810, future Pennsylvania congressman Charles Jared Ingersoll released Inchiquin, the Jesuit’s Letters, refuting the aspersions cast upon slavery “by former residents and tourists.” A few years later, New York antislavery novelist James Kirke Paulding tried to defend his nation and the slow pace of change. Freeing happy Africans could endanger the community, undermine property rights, and render them “more wretched” than they already were, Paulding wrote.
11 Philadelphia Federalist Robert Walsh published An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America in 1819.
“Your work will furnish the first volume of every future American history,” Thomas Jefferson accurately predicted. Though Walsh blamed the British for slavery, he said the institution endeared masters with “sensibility, justice and steadfastness.” For the African, whose “colour is a perpetual momento of their servile origin,” their enslavement is “positively good.” The slave was “exempt from those racking anxieties” experienced by the English.
12 If Jefferson truly desired to see a refutation of his racist ideas in Notes, as he told Gregoire, then he had made no moves in that direction during his presidency, neither politically nor in print. His most pressing personal concern in 1809 was moving back home, to the comfort of Monticello and Sally Hemings, and away from the ongoing political parade in Washington.
Jefferson left Washington a week after his close friend and mentee James Madison was installed as the fourth president of the United States on March 4, 1809. Jefferson’s presidential reign did not end with his departure from Washington. Until 1841, a series of self-described disciples of Jefferson served as US presidents, the lone exception being John Quincy Adams in the late 1820s.
13 In 1809, Jefferson estimated his net worth to be $225,000 (roughly $3.3 million in 2014) based on 10,000 acres of land, a manufacturing mill, 200 slaves, and a mountain of debt. Whether he was proslavery or antislavery, Jefferson needed slavery in 1809 to maintain his financial solvency and life of luxury. In the initial years of his retirement, Jefferson finally finished his 11,000-square-foot, 33-room mansion displaying all the things he had collected: the animal specimens and Native American objects, the medals and maps, the portraits and sculptures of Jesus, Benjamin Franklin, John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, Christopher Columbus, and Voltaire, and the painting of himself, drawn by Boston painter Mather Brown, a descendant of Cotton Mather.
14 Loving retirement, Jefferson placed books on top of newspapers. He did not have to leave Monticello, and he rarely did. He had a plantation to run, which relied on slave labor to pay off his debts, or rather, pay for the luxuries he loved. He put science, not politics, at the center of his affairs, emerging as America’s celebrity scholar in the 1810s. The requests for advice and data and the reviewing of manuscripts seemed endless. “From sunrise to one or two o’clock, and often from dinner to dark, I am drudging at the writing table,” Jefferson complained to John Adams. He was not updating Notes, though. By 1813, he had lost all drive to reproduce his ideas.
15 Jefferson had also lost all drive to support the cause of antislavery. In 1814, Edward Coles, the personal secretary of President James Madison, asked Jefferson to arouse public sentiment against slavery. Jefferson balked, using the excuse of old age. The seventy-one-year-old advised Coles to reconcile himself with enslavement and only promote emancipation in a way that did not offend anyone.
16 Ironically, the inoffensive solution that Jefferson offered in Notes, and that he tried to execute once as president, was about be adopted by a new generation. CHAPTER 12
Colonization
ONE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON’S most enduring legacies was a race relations effort that spanned the course of the nineteenth century. It all began in the spring of 1800 in Jefferson’s home state. Two captives, Gabriel and Nancy Prosser, were organizing a slave rebellion. Standing well over six feet tall, with dark skin, penetrating eyes, and bulging scars, the twenty-four-yearold Gabriel Prosser caught people’s attention wherever he went. He won converts by reminding them of the Haitian armies that had turned back the armies of Spain, England, and France. The Prossers planned to have hundreds of captives march on Richmond, where they would seize 4,000 unguarded muskets, arrest Governor James Monroe, hold the city until reinforcements arrived from surrounding counties, and negotiate the end of slavery and equal rights. The lives of friendly Methodists, Quakers, and French people were to be spared, but racist Blacks would be killed. Allies were to be recruited among Virginia’s poor whites and Native Americans.
The revolt failed to materialize on the planned date of Saturday, August 30, 1800. Two cynical slaves begging for their master’s favor betrayed what would have been the largest slave revolt in the history of North America, with as many as 50,000 rebels joining in from as far as Norfolk, Virginia. Given notice that afternoon, Governor James Monroe dispatched Richmond’s defenses and informed every militia commander in Virginia. Wind and rain stormed through the Virginia Tidewater. A capsized bridge halted the march of a thousand armed rebels into the city. The liberating army disbanded, dripping in disgust. The enslaving army stayed intact, over the next few weeks invading communities and arresting rebel leaders. Gabriel Prosser fled to Norfolk, where he was betrayed and captured on September 25. Dragged back to Richmond, he was hanged along with his comrades, but they appeared defiant until the end. “The accused have exhibited a spirit, which, if it becomes general, must deluge the Southern country in blood,” said an eyewitness.
1 A rebellious slave was extraordinary—real, but not really representative.
During the final months of 1800, enslavers blasted this racist mantra of contented slaves and then hypocritically demanded more weapons, more organization, and more sophisticated laws to restrain them. On December 31, 1800, the Virginia House of Delegates secretly instructed Governor James Monroe to correspond with the incoming President Jefferson on finding lands outside of Virginia where “persons . . . dangerous to the peace of society may be removed.” Jefferson requested clarity on their desires on November 24, 1801. He suggested colonization in the Caribbean or Africa to the Virginia delegates, expressing the improbability of securing lands within the continental United States.
2 Virginia lawmakers again gathered in secret in 1802 to respond to their native son. Slavery had to continue, and its natural by-product—resistance— had to stop. So Virginia lawmen took Jefferson up on his proposal, asking him to find a foreign home for the state’s free Blacks. Jefferson went to work, inquiring through intermediaries about West Africa’s Sierra Leone, England’s colony for freed people since 1792. England spurned Jefferson, as did other European nations. Breaking the bad news to Monroe on December 27, 1804, Jefferson assured him he would “keep it under my constant attention.” 3 Virginia lawmakers swore themselves to secrecy, agreeing to never reveal their maneuvers for colonization; they did not even inform the next generation of lawmakers. But in 1816, Charles Fenton Mercer, a member of the House of Delegates since 1810, learned of Jefferson’s plan. He uncovered the correspondence between Monroe and Jefferson, and he was inspired by the Jeffersonian rationale for sending Blacks abroad. Mercer was an antislavery, anti-abolitionist slaveholder like Jefferson. Although “slavery is wrong,” he later wrote, emancipation “would do more harm than good.” 4 Mercer wanted to remake his region’s agrarian, slave-labor economy into a free-labor, industrial economy. He dreaded the working-class revolts that were picking up steam in Western Europe, but had faith in the ability of a public education system to placate lower- and middle-income Whites. Yet he recognized that the rampant racial discrimination in America would fashion free Blacks into a perpetually rebellious working class. He wanted to expel Blacks from the United States before it was too late.
Colonization seemed like a godsend to Mercer. It also appealed to Robert Finley, who learned about the cause from his brother-in-law, Mercer’s old friend Elias B. Caldwell, the longtime clerk of the US Supreme Court. An antislavery clergyman, Finley had already taken an interest in the plight of low-income free Blacks, and to him, colonization seemed to be the perfect solution to their problems. Mercer, Finley, and the colonizationists they inspired ended up being the ideological children of an odd couple who had disliked each other: Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith. The latter endorsed the cause before his 1819 death. While Smith believed that Black people were capable of Whiteness, Jefferson insisted that they were incapable of achieving Whiteness in the United States. Colonization offered an alternative that both men could embrace.
5 In 1816, Finley sat down and wrote the colonization movement’s manifesto, Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks. “What shall we do with the free people of color?” he began the pamphlet. Free Blacks must be trained “for self-government” and returned to their land of origin, he wrote.
For the enslaved, “the evil of slavery will be diminished, and in a way so gradual as to prepare the whites for the happy and progressive change.” 6 Carrying this literary cannonball of racist ideas, Finley invaded Washington, DC, in late November 1816. He lobbied journalists, politicians, and President James Madison, whose views on Blacks mirrored Jefferson’s.
Finley and his powerful associates called an organizational meeting for colonizationists on December 21, 1816. Presiding was Kentucky representative Henry Clay, whose early life had resembled Thomas Jefferson’s. Born to Virginia planters, Clay had become a lawyer, a Kentucky planter, and then a politician. He had expressed an early abolitionism that had faded with time. Clay had just finished his second stint as Speaker of the House when he presided over the colonization meeting that birthed the American Colonization Society. Slaveholder and Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington—the nephew of George Washington—was elected president of the society, and the vice presidents included Finley, Clay, General Andrew Jackson, and Mercer’s Princeton schoolmate Richard Rush, the son of Benjamin Rush, who had pledged his support for colonization before his death in 1813.
At the inaugural meeting, Finley’s gradual abolitionism took a back seat to the demands of the slaveholders. The society would ignore the “delicate question” of abolition and only promote the deportation of free Blacks, Henry Clay said. “Can there be a nobler cause than that which, whilst it proposed to rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population, contemplates the spreading of the arts of civilized life, and the possible redemption from ignorance and barbarism of a benighted quarter of the globe?” Newspapers around the nation reprinted his words.
In Philadelphia, at least 3,000 Black men packed into Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church on January 15, 1817, to discuss the ACS’s formation.
Longtime colonization supporter James Forten, A.M.E. church founder Richard Allen, and two other Black ministers pledged their support for colonization and its missionary potential. Speeches concluded, Forten stepped to the pulpit to gauge the crowd. Those in favor? Forten asked. No one spoke.
No one raised a hand. Nothing. All opposed? Forten nervously asked.
Everything. A booming “no” rang out, shaking the walls of the church.
These Black men had walked into the church fuming. Their wives, girlfriends, sisters, and mothers were probably angry, too (but were disallowed from proclaiming it at the male-only meeting). The meeting attendees audaciously denounced the “unmerited stigma” that Henry Clay had “cast upon the reputation of the free people of color.” They did not want to go to the “savage wilds of Africa,” the attendees resolved, demonstrating that they had already consumed those racist myths. But at the same time, they were expressing their commitment to enslaved people and America and demanding recognition for their role in the nation’s growth. It was “the land of our nativity,” a land that had been “manured” by their “blood and sweat.” “We will never separate ourselves voluntarily from the slave population of this country,” they resolved.
7 American-born descendants of Africa judged the continent based on the standards they had learned from the very people who were calling them inferior and trying to kick them out of the United States. Africans in America had received their knowledge of Africa and their racist ideas from White Americans. And White Americans’ racist ideas had been procured from a host of European writers—everyone from Sarah Baartman’s dissector, Georges Cuvier of France, to philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel of Germany.
Around the time of the American Colonization Society’s founding, European nations were increasingly turning their capital and guns from the slave trade to the cause of colonizing Africa (as well as Asia). English, French, German, and Portuguese armies fought African armies throughout the nineteenth century, trying to establish colonies in order to exploit Africa’s resources and bodies more systematically and efficiently. This new racist drive required racist ideas to make sense of it, and Hegel’s pontifications about backward Africans arrived right on time. Racist ideas always seemed to arrive right on time to dress up the ugly economic and political exploitation of African people.
Ironically, back in 1807, Hegel had expressed a very antiracist idea in his classic book Phenomenology of Spirit, condemning “the overhasty judgement formed at first sight about the inner nature and character” of a person. He revolutionized European philosophy and history in many important matters in the nineteenth century. Legions of philosophy chairs across Europe became Hegelians, and the philosophers he influenced—including men like Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels—constitute a who’s who of European intellectuals. But before his death in 1831, Hegel failed to free himself and Europe from the Enlightenment era’s racist ideas. “It is . . . the concrete universal, self-determining thought, which constitutes the principle and character of Europeans,” Hegel once wrote. “God becomes man, revealing himself.” In contrast, African people, he said, were “a nation of children” in the “first stage” of human development: “The negro is an example of animal man in all his savagery and lawlessness.” They could be educated, but they would never advance on their own. Hegel’s foundational racist idea justified Europe’s ongoing colonization of Africa. European colonizers would supposedly bring progress to Africa’s residents, just as European enslavers had brought progress to Africans in the Americas.
8
IN THEIR RESOLUTION against the American Colonization Society, Philadelphia Blacks noted the “unmerited stigma” that had been “cast upon the reputation of the free people of color.” The death of Robert Finley later in the year strained the ACS, and it struggled to attract federal funding and the support of slaveholders, especially in the Deep South. The slaveholders would never accept colonization unless they were convinced that it would allow slavery to endure. Free Blacks would never sign on unless emancipation was promised. Neither group was satisfied.
9 Still, the society was persistent. In terms of federal funding, Charles Fenton Mercer steered the next offensive after joining the House of Representatives. On January 13, 1819, Mercer introduced the Slave Trade Act, which allocated $100,000 to send “negroes” back to Africa. Signing the bill into law was the old Virginia governor sympathetic to colonization: James Monroe, who had been elected to the US presidency weeks before the formation of the ACS. Almost immediately, debates sprang up as to whether the bill authorized Monroe to acquire land in Africa. By 1821, Monroe had dispatched US naval officer Robert Stockton, as an agent of the society, to West Africa. With a drawn pistol in one hand and a pen in the other, Stockton embezzled—some say for $300—a strip of Atlantic coastal land south of Sierra Leone from a local ruler, who probably did not hold title to his people’s land. The United States thus joined the growing band of nations seeking to colonize Africa. By 1824, American settlers had built fortifications there.
They renamed the settlement “Liberia,” and its capital “Monrovia,” after the US president. Between 1820 and 1830, only 154 Black northerners out of more than 100,000 sailed to Liberia.
10 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY had begun with a slave rebellion plot that had caused Virginia enslavers and President Jefferson to think seriously of sending free and enslaved Blacks back to Africa. The slave rebellions kept coming, and nothing accelerated enslavers’ support for the colonization movement more than actual or potential slave rebellions.
In 1818, a fifty-one-year-old free carpenter named Denmark Vesey started recruiting the thousands of slaves in and around Charleston that would form his army—one estimate says 9,000. Vesey was well known locally as one of the founders of Emmanuel A.M.E. Church, the first African Methodist Episcopal church in the South. Before receiving his freedom in 1800, Vesey had traveled the Atlantic with his seafaring owner, acquiring a tremendous pride in the agency, culture, and humanity of African people. He had also been inspired by the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Vesey likely spent time teaching, motivating, and encouraging fellow enslaved Blacks and challenging the racist ideas they had consumed, perhaps regularly reciting the biblical story of the Israelites’ deliverance from Egyptian bondage. He set the revolt for July 14, 1822, the anniversary of the French Revolution. Trusted house servants were to assassinate top South Carolina officials as they slept.
Six infantry and cavalry companies were to invade the city and kill every White and Black antagonist they encountered on sight. Arsonists were to burn the city to the ground. Spared captains of ships were to bring the rebels to Haiti or Africa—not as colonizers, but as immigrants.
House slave Peter Prioleau betrayed the plot in late May; he received a reward of freedom and later became a slaveholder himself. Prioleau had no desire to abolish slavery, and he probably did not question the racist ideas behind it. In four long years of recruiting thousands of rebels, no mistakes had been made by Vesey’s lieutenants; no one betrayed the plot—an amazing organizational feat—until Prioleau opened his mouth. By late June, South Carolina authorities had destroyed Vesey’s army, banished thirty-four of Vesey’s soldiers, and hanged thirty-five men, including Denmark Vesey himself, who was defiant to the very end.
11 The vast Vesey conspiracy provoked fear in Charleston and beyond.
Slaveholders began to contemplate the end of slavery, and ejecting the Black people seemed like an attractive option. In the words of one writer, “the whole United States [should] join in a Colonization Society.” Another Charleston essayist who endorsed colonization pledged that he was ready to help “free the country of so unwelcome a burden.” Instead, new laws tightening the noose on enslaved Blacks soothed the raw fear. Officials stipulated that enslaved Blacks should only wear “negro cloth,” a cheap, coarse cotton sometimes mixed with wool. “Every distinction should be created between the whites and the negroes,” a jurist said, “ . . . to make the latter feel the superiority of the former.” 12 Until 1822—until Denmark Vesey—northerners had produced most of the racist books and tracts defending slavery. Writers like Charles Jared Ingersoll, James Kirke Paulding, and Robert Walsh—all from the North—defended slavery from British onslaughts in the 1810s. On October 29, 1822, Charleston Times editor Edwin Clifford Holland released the first proslavery treatise by a native southerner. Enslaved Africans, he said, could never “affect any revolution” because of “their general inferiority in the gifts of nature.” He was trying to calm his worried fellows. But they could disrupt society, he said, and Whites should always be on guard. “Let it never be forgotten, that our NEGROES . . . are the anarchists and the domestic enemy; the common enemy of civilized society, and the barbarians who would, IF THEY COULD, become DESTROYERS OF OUR RACE.” Holland did not include the “industrious, sober, hardworking,” and free biracial people in this denunciation. In the event of a rebellion, Holland believed they would form “a barrier between our own color and that of the black,” because they were “more likely to enlist themselves under the banners of the whites.” 13
THOMAS JEFFERSON PROBABLY expected rebellions like Denmark Vesey’s, and he probably expected grandiose betrayals like Peter Prioleau’s.
He did not expect the Missouri Question. Weeks after Charles Fenton Mercer introduced the Slave Trade Act, which led to America’s first colony in Africa, his New York colleague James Tallmadge Jr. tacked an amendment onto a bill admitting Missouri to the Union that would have barred the admission of enslaved Africans into the new state. The Tallmadge Amendment sparked a smoldering fire of debate that burned for two years. Ultimately, it was tempered—but not extinguished—by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
Congress agreed to admit Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, and to prohibit the introduction of slavery in the northern section of the vast Louisiana Territory, which Jefferson had purchased from France.
Thomas Jefferson did not make much of the early Missouri Question debate. He expected it to pass “like waves in a storm pass under the ship.” When the storm did not pass, he became worried, and he soon described the storm as “the most portentous one which ever yet threatened our Union.” By 1820, he was warning of a civil war that could become a racial war, and that could then develop into “a war of extermination toward the African in our land.” The Missouri Question had roused Jefferson “like a fire bell in the night,” as he told Massachusetts congressman John Holmes on April 22, 1820. “I considered it at once,” he wrote, “the knell of the union.” He gave Holmes his stump speech on emancipation: no man wanted it more than him, but no workable plan for compensating owners and colonizing the freed had been put forth. “As it is,” he said, “we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” What could be done? “Justice is in one scale and self-preservation in the other.” Jefferson, the nation’s most famous antislavery anti-abolitionist, longed for the Louisiana Territory, which he purchased in 1803, to become the republic’s hospital, the place where the illnesses of the original states could be cured—most notably, the illness of slavery. Enslaved Africans would be spread out in the vast Louisiana Territory (if not sent to Africa). The “diffusion [of enslaved Africans] over a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burden on a great number of coadjutors.” Jefferson dreamed that the vast Louisiana Territory could swallow slavery.
Spread enslaved Africans out, and they will go away?
14 Jefferson adamantly came to believe that Black freedom should not be discussed in the White halls of Congress, and that southerners should be left alone to solve the problem of slavery at their own pace, in their own way. In his younger years, he had considered gradual emancipation and colonization to be the solution. His gradualism turned into procrastination. In his final years, Jefferson said that “on the subject of emancipation I have ceased to think because [it is] not to be the work of my day.” Slavery had become too lucrative, to too many slaveholders, for emancipation to be Jefferson’s work of those days.
15 For Jefferson, the Missouri Question was personal. If slavery could not continue its western expansion, his finances might be affected by the decreased demand for enslaved Africans in the domestic slave trade. As he agonized over the future livelihood of the United States and his own economic prospects, Jefferson could not have helped but think of the nation’s past and his own past—and how both had reached this point of no return.
Seventy-seven years old in 1821, Jefferson decided to “state some recollections of dates and facts concerning myself.” The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson runs less than one hundred pages and ends when he becomes US secretary of state in 1790. In this work, Jefferson attempted once again to secure his antislavery credentials, after training for a lifetime as a slaveholder: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” he wrote. “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” In forty years, nothing had diminished his need to produce racist ideas—not the Black exhibits, uplift suasion, letters from abolitionists, Sally Hemings, or the loyalty or the resistance of enslaved Africans. Jefferson shared the same view in his Autobiography in 1821 that he had in Notes in 1781. He promoted the colonization idea, that freed Blacks be hauled away to Africa in the same manner that enslaved Blacks had been hauled to America.
16
IN THE 1820S, the American Colonization Society grew into the preeminent race-relations reform organization in the United States. Jefferson was again endorsing colonization, and calculating segregationists were beginning to see it as a solution to Black resistance. Altruistic assimilationists figured that it was a way to develop Black people in both America and Africa. In 1825, a twenty-eight-year-old Yale alumnus, Ralph Gurley, became the new ACS secretary. He held the position until his death in 1872, while also serving twice as the chaplain of the House of Representatives. Gurley had a vision: he believed that to win the minds and souls of Americans to the colonization cause, it had to be linked to the Protestant movement. His timing was good, because the Second Great Awakening was at hand as he began his ACS post.
The American Bible Society, the American Sunday School Union, and the American Tract Society were all established in this period, and they each used the printing press to besiege the nation with Bibles, tracts, pictures, and picture cards that would help to create a strong, unified, Jesus-centered national identity. A good tract “should be entertaining”, announced the American Tract Society in 1824. “There must be something to allure the listless to read.” Allurement—those pictures of holy figures—had long been considered a sinful trick of Satan and “devilish” Catholics. No more.
Protestant organizations started mass-producing, mass-marketing, and massdistributing images of Jesus, who was always depicted as White. Protestants saw all the aspirations of the new American identity in the White Jesus—a racist idea that proved to be in their cultural self-interest. As pictures of this White Jesus started to appear, Blacks and Whites started to make connections, consciously and unconsciously, between the White God the Father, his White son Jesus, and the power and perfection of White people. “I really believed my old master was almighty God,” runaway Henry Brown admitted, “and that his son, my young master, was Jesus Christ.” 17 As the revived Protestant movement ignited the enthusiasm of students, professors, clergymen, merchants, and legislators in New England, the American Colonization Society drew more people into its fold. While southern colonizationists sought to remove free Blacks, northerners sought to remove all Blacks, enslaved and freed. Northern race relations had grown progressively worse since the 1790s, defying uplift suasion. Each uplifting step of Black people stoked animosity, and runaways stoked further animosity. Race riots embroiled New York City, New Haven, Boston, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh in the 1820s. As racial tensions accumulated, the ACS continued to gain adherents to the cause. Its agents argued forcefully that White prejudice and Black slavery would be eternal, and that freed Blacks must use the talents they had acquired from Whites to go back and redeem unenlightened Africa. By 1832, every northern state legislature had passed resolutions of endorsement for the colonization idea.
18 Free Blacks remained overwhelmingly against colonization. Their resistance to the concept partly accounted for the identifier “Negro” replacing “African” in common usage in the 1820s. Free Blacks theorized that if they called themselves “African,” they would be giving credence to the notion that they should be sent back to Africa. Their own racist ideas were also behind the shift in terminology. They considered Africa and its cultural practices to be backward, having accepted racist notions of the continent. Some lightskinned Blacks preferred “colored,” to separate themselves from dark-skinned Negroes or Africans.
19 For many, the colonization movement gave a new urgency to the idea of uplift suasion. Racist free Blacks thought uplift suasion offered Black people a way to prove their worthiness to White elites. In 1828, Boston preacher Hosea Easton urged a Thanksgiving Day crowd of Rhode Island Black folk to “come out of this degrading course of life.” By uplifting themselves, they would “demand respect from those who exalt themselves above you.” 20 As part of the renewed effort to promote uplift suasion, a group of free Blacks established the nation’s first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, with its headquarters in New York City. The two editors were both biracial: Samuel Cornish, a Presbyterian preacher, and John Russwurm, the third African American college graduate in the United States. Their mission was to chronicle the uplift of the North’s 500,000 free Blacks in order to reduce prejudice. “The further decrease of prejudice, and the amelioration of the condition of thousands of our brethren who are yet in bondage greatly depend on our conduct,” the Freedom’s Journal said in its opening editorial on March 16, 1827. “It is for us to convince the world by uniform propriety of conduct, industry and economy, that we are worthy of esteem and patronage.” 21 The editors and the elite Blacks they represented often focused, however, on the conduct of the “lower classes of our people,” whom they blamed for bringing the race down. Class racism dotted the pages of the Freedom’s Journal, with articles pitting lower-income Blacks against upper-income Blacks, and the former being portrayed as inferior to the latter. Cornish and Russwurm did sometimes defend low-income Blacks. As New York planned to emancipate its remaining captives on July 4, 1827, the mainstream newspapers announced their disapproval. Freed Africans would “increase” the city’s “criminal calendar, pauper list and dandy register,” stammered the Morning Chronicle. Cornish and Russwurm admonished the newspaper for its “vulgar” attack while agreeing with much of the reasoning behind it. The Africans about to be freed were “an injured people,” the editors pleaded, “and we think it beneath the character of a public Editor, to add insult to injury.” 22 Cornish and Russwurm eventually split on colonization, prompting Cornish’s resignation. Russwurm decided to endorse the American Colonization Society in 1829, dooming his newspaper in anti-colonizationist Black America. After putting the first Black newspaper to bed, Russwurm departed for Liberia, convinced that he had given his all, but he nevertheless had lost the battle against America’s racist ideas. He failed to realize that he had contributed to the racist ideas. He had used the first African American periodical to circulate the ideas of class racism. He had said that lowerincome Blacks had an inferior work ethic, inferior intelligence, and inferior morality compared to White people and Black elites like him. One reason poor Blacks were discriminated against, he expressed, was that they were inferior. Russwurm had used his paper to circulate the enslaving strategy of uplift suasion, a strategy that compelled free Blacks to worry about their every action in front of White people, just as their enslaved brethren worried about their every action in front of their enslavers.
23
THE AGENTS OF the American Colonization Society practically ignored the ire of most free Blacks, and they could afford to do so. Donations streamed into the national office. The society’s annual income leaped from $778 in 1825 (about $16,000 in 2014) to $40,000 a decade later (about $904,000 in 2014). State colonization societies sprang up in nearly every western and northern state. But the ACS never attracted its greatest patron saint: Thomas Jefferson. The former president only tracked the development of the ACS from afar. He was suspicious of the organization because he could not stand the Federalists and the Presbyterians behind it.
24 Jefferson may not have supported the ACS, but he never wavered in his support for the colonizationist idea during his final years. Establishing a colony in Africa “may introduce among the aborigines the arts of cultivated life, and the blessing of civilization and science,” he wrote to historian and future Harvard president Jared Sparks on February 4, 1824. Apparently, Black Americans would civilize the continent under the tutelage of those White Americans who had civilized them. It would compensate for “the long course of injuries” they had endured, Jefferson said, such that in the end, America “[would] have rendered them perhaps more good than evil.” 25 A string of illnesses slowed Jefferson down in 1825. He still read, and he may have perused the first issue of the society’s African Repository and Colonial Journal in March. The issue opened with a history of the ACS, which gave a nod to Jefferson, and ended by speaking of the four hundred settlers in Liberia “standing in lonely beauty.” In another piece, entitled “Observations on the Early History of the Negro Race,” a writer identified as “T.R.” took aim at polygenesists who spoke of Black people as a separate species, incapable of civilization, or “the connecting link between men and monkies.” The polygenesists must not know, T.R. wrote, “that the people who they traduce, were for more than a thousand years . . . the most enlightened on the globe.” T.R. cited Jefferson’s old friend Count Constantine Volney, the French historian who forty years earlier had said the ancient Egyptians were of African descent. After several pages passionately demonstrating that the ancient Egyptians were African, T.R. declared that America should “carry back by colonies to Africa, now in barbarism, the blessings which . . . were received from her.” Civilization was supposedly exhausted in Africa, but awakened in Europe, T.R. stated. But how did the originators of civilization produce such a region of ignorance and barbarism? How did they forget the arts and sciences? These questions were not asked, and they went unanswered. As assimilationists, the only point colonizationists like T.R. tried to make was that since Africans had been civilized in an earlier time, they could be civilized once again.
26 By the time the ACS released the second volume of its periodical in the spring of 1826, Jefferson’s health had deteriorated to the point that he could not leave home. By June, he could not leave his bed. Late that month, writer Henry Lee IV—known to Jefferson as the grandson of a Revolutionary War hero—desired a meeting with him. When the bedridden Jefferson learned of Lee’s presence, he demanded to see him. The half-brother of future Confederate general Robert E. Lee was Jefferson’s last visitor.
Jefferson had to decline an invitation to Washington to attend the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He sent a celebratory statement to Washington instead, saying: “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” His last public words—so sweet to every free person, so bitter to the enslaved.
27 Aside from his Hemings children (and Sally Hemings), Jefferson did not free any of the other enslaved people at Monticello. One historian estimated that Jefferson had owned more than six hundred slaves over the course of his lifetime. In 1826, he held around two hundred people as property and he was about $100,000 in debt (about $2 million in 2014), an amount so staggering that he knew that once he died, everything—and everyone—would be sold.
On July 2, 1826, Jefferson seemed to be fighting to stay alive. The eightythree-year-old awoke before dawn on July 4 and beckoned his enslaved house servants. The Black faces gathered around his bed. They were probably his final sight, and he gave them his final words. He had come full circle. In his earliest childhood memory and in his final lucid moment, Jefferson rested in the comfort of slavery.
28 PART III
William Lloyd Garrison CHAPTER 13 Gradual Equality
IT WAS THE STORY of the age—Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dying on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
No other headline had ever before caused such amazement. Many thought the twin deaths on Freedom Day must have been an act of divine will, an undeniable sign that the United States had the blessing of God Almighty.
Newspapers could not print enough eulogies, anecdotes, letters, statements, and biographical pieces on the two men whom Benjamin Rush had once called “the North and South Poles of the American Revolution.” 1 John Adams died in his home in Quincy, due south of the overgrown maritime city of Boston. By the time of Adams’s death, Boston had grown to nearly 60,000 people and was fully immersed in New England’s industrial revolution, which ran on the wheels of southern cotton. The odd collection of philosophies, business dealings, denominations, interest groups, and moral movements visitors encountered in the seaside city might have been enough to make them dizzy. But none of the moral movements were trying to stamp out the nation’s most immoral institution. The Revolutionary-era abolitionist movement was pretty much dead. Jefferson’s fatalism about the difficulty of solving the problem of evil slavery, and his habit of deflecting blame for it onto the British, had become entrenched across the nation. The convention of abolitionist societies that Benjamin Rush had gathered together in 1794 still existed, but it was no longer much of a force for change. Tiny antislavery societies in the Upper South and in the North were being swallowed up by colonizationists and their racist ideas.
2 Every moral cause seemed to have its day on the annual giving schedule for New England philanthropists. The American Colonization Society imprinted its cause onto America’s greatest national holiday, Independence Day. On July 4, 1829, the ACS invited a young newcomer to give the Fourth of July Address at the distinguished Park Street Church in Boston. Since arriving in the city in 1826, the twenty-three-year-old William Lloyd Garrison had amassed a reputation as a reform-minded, pious, and passionate editor, the usual characteristics of a forthright champion of colonization. His mother, Frances Maria Lloyd, was the source of his piety. She had raised him and his two siblings as a single mother in Newburyport, Massachusetts. They had been poor, but her Baptist faith had brought them through the rough times. He remembered the poverty and her maternal lessons like it was yesterday. When he and his older brother had come home carrying food from their mother’s employers or the town’s soup kitchen, they had endured a gauntlet of taunts from the richer kids on the street. But Frances Maria Lloyd preached to them about human worth: though they were low on funds, they were not low as people.
His older brother had been a difficult boy to raise, but William Lloyd was a model child, seeking only to please his mother. In 1818, when he was twelve, he had begun a seven-year indenture to Ephraim W. Allen, the talented editor of the Newburyport Herald. When he was not busy learning the printing trade or writing letters to his mother, who had moved to Baltimore, he was usually intent on educating himself through reading. He devoured the works of Cotton Mather and tracts by politicians and other clergyman proclaiming New England’s peculiar destiny to civilize the world.
He especially enjoyed the novels of Sir Walter Scott, whose heroes changed the world through the might of their character and their readiness to sacrifice their blood for human justice. He also admired the work of the English poet Felicia Hemans, which was praised for its moral purity.
William Lloyd Garrison’s mother died before his indenture ended in 1825.
In one of her final requests to her son that did not involve religion, Frances pleaded with him to “remember[,] . . . for your poor mother’s sake,” the Black woman, Henny, who had kindly cared for her. “Although a slave to man,” Frances wrote her son, she is “yet a free-born soul by the grace of God.” Freed of his indenture, and now skilled in the printing trade, Garrison moved to Boston and secured an editorship at a temperance paper. He had a personal interest in the temperance movement. His absent father had never left liquor, and his older brother had been seduced by it. Garrison probably would have become one of the most notable voices for temperance of the age.
But a year before his Independence Day Address for the American Colonization Society, an itinerant abolitionist came along to change the course of his life.
3 Garrison first met the Quaker founder and editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation on March 17, 1828. He sat next to eight esteemed Boston clergymen listening to Benjamin Lundy in the parlor of his boardinghouse, which was owned by a local Baptist minister. Up from Baltimore, Lundy was in town raising money for his newspaper and raising support for emancipation. The wrongs of enslavement Lundy spoke about that night wrenched Garrison’s heart. And Lundy’s activist’s life, no doubt inspired by John Woolman, thrilled Garrison. The man seemed to be straight out of a Walter Scott novel—he had given speeches in nineteen of the twentyfour states, traveled 12,000 miles, engaged in marathon debates with slave owners, been beaten in Baltimore for his beliefs. Authorities had attempted to suppress his paper, but he had kept saying what he believed: “Nothing is wanting . . . but the will.” He had continued to publish his crude sketches of slave coffles under the title “Hail Columbia!” and a stinging demand: “LOOK AT IT, again and again!” While Garrison sat on the edge of his seat, the eight ministers sat back. They politely listened, but only one offered to help. The others saw nothing to gain and a lot to lose in the cause of emancipation.
They feared that a push for emancipation would only cause social disorder.
Before the meeting, Garrison—like the lazy ministers sitting beside him— probably thought nothing could be done about the evil institution of slavery.
It’s not that they were in favor of it, but that they thought trying to abolish it was a hopeless cause. As Garrison listened to Lundy, everything changed.
Garrison crawled into bed that night enthusiastic about working toward Lundy’s aim of provoking “gradual, though total, abolition of slavery in the United States.” Soon after Lundy’s visit, Garrison resigned from his temperance newspaper and thrust himself into the antislavery cause. Little did he know that almost four decades would pass before he could stop pressing America to free itself of slavery.
4
ALMOST FROM HIS first words in 1829, agents of the American Colonization Society knew they had selected the wrong Independence Day speaker. “I am sick of . . . our hypocritical cant about the rights of man,” Garrison bellowed, making the church crowd uncomfortable. We should be demanding “a gradual abolition of slavery,” not promoting colonization. It was a “pitiful subterfuge” to say that liberation would hurt the enslaved. If enslavement had reduced Blacks to “brutes,” then was it “a valid argument to say that therefore they must remain brutes?” Freedom and education would “elevate [Blacks] to a proper rank in the scale of being.” 5 Ten days later, Garrison attended a Black Baptist church and participated in the annual celebration of England’s abolition of the slave trade. A White clergyman addressed the largely Black crowd, lecturing them that emancipation was neither wise nor safe without a long period qualifying Blacks for freedom. A murmur of disgust shot from the crowd, and an ACS agent leaped to the speaker’s defense. The murmur rang in Garrison’s ears as he walked home that night. In the Independence Day Address, he had called immediate emancipation a “wild vision.” But was it really wild? Or was it wilder to stand on some middle ground between sinful slavery and righteous freedom? “I saw there was nothing to stand upon,” Garrison admitted. In August, Garrison moved to Baltimore to join Benjamin Lundy and co-edit the Genius of Universal Emancipation.
6
FROM THE EDITORIAL page of the Genius of Universal Emancipation, Garrison called for immediate emancipation in September 1829. This new position was not only a change from his own view of two months earlier, but a stance more bold than even Benjamin Lundy’s. “No valid excuse can be given for the continuance of the evil [of slavery] a single hour,” he wrote— not even colonization. Colonization could be used to relieve some enslaved Africans, of course, but as a solution to the problem of slavery it was “altogether inadequate.” 7 A disciple of Denmark Vesey agreed, and he let the world know it about two months later, in November, when he published his Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World. Antislavery activist David Walker was part of the Black community in Boston, and Garrison may have already crossed paths with him. The Whites, raged Walker in the pamphlet, were “dragging us around in chains” to enrich themselves, “believing firmly” that Black people had been made to serve them forever. “Did our Creator make us to be slaves?” he asked. “Unless we try to refute Mr. Jefferson’s arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.” Walker appealed for Black people to refute and resist racism, and he had the antiracist foresight to see that racism would only end when slavery ended. Walker told enslaved Blacks to mobilize themselves for the second American revolutionary war.
No Black person could have read Walker’s intoxicating Appeal without being moved. And yet Walker watered down his appeal by disparaging the very people he was calling upon to resist. Blacks were “the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began,” he proclaimed. He cited the “inhuman system of slavery,” Black ignorance, preachers, and colonizationists as all being responsible for their present plight. In doing so, he regurgitated the theory of how slavery had made Black people inferior. Walker repeated popular racist contrasts of “enlightened Europe” and wretched Africa, contrasts that had been reproduced by the gradual abolitionists, colonizationists, and the very enslavers he so fervently opposed. Walker did not, however, share his opponents’ imaginative version of how enlightened Europe had civilized Africa. He spoke instead of “enlightened . . . Europe” plunging the “ignorant” fathers of Black people into a “wretchedness ten thousand times more intolerable.” In Walker’s historical racism, Africa was the place where “learning [had] originated” in antiquity. It had become a land of “ignorance” since that time, however, because African people had been disobedient to their Maker. Cursed by God, Black people lacked political unity, and that lack of unity had enabled their “natural enemies” in the United States “to keep their feet on our throats.” David Walker was hardly the first, and he was certainly not the last, Black activist to complain about political disunity as a uniquely Black problem—as if White abolitionists were not betraying White enslavers, and as if White people were more politically unified, and therefore superior politically and better able to rule. Voting patterns never did quite support complaints of Black disunity and White unity. In the late 1820s, Black male voters in the Northeast typically supported the fading Federalists, while White male voters were split between the two major parties. (Although the parties have changed, similar voting patterns persist today.) These racist ideas diluted Walker’s message, and yet it was still intoxicatingly antiracist. Walker identified and decried America’s favorite racist pastime: denying Blacks access to education and jobs and then calling their resultant impoverished state “natural.” In closing, Walker addressed enslaving America, courageously booming that he was prepared to die for the “truth”: “For what is the use of living, when in fact I am dead.” Give us freedom, give us rights, or one day you will “curse the day that you ever were born!” He then reprinted parts of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, imploring Americans to “See your Declaration!” Finally, he asked Americans to compare the “cruelties” England had inflicted on them to those they had inflicted on Black people.
8 Walker’s Appeal spread quickly, forcing racial commentators like Garrison to respond to its arguments. Garrison’s philosophical commitment to nonviolence caused him to deplore it as a “most injudicious publication.” But he did concede in early 1830 that the Appeal contained “many valuable truths and seasonable warnings.” By then, the South had begun a dogged political and legal battle to suppress the pamphlet. The North Carolina governor called the Appeal “totally subversive of all subordination in our slaves”—a proclamation Walker enjoyed reading. In the midst of (and probably because of) the commotion over Walker’s pamphlet, Baltimore authorities jailed Garrison on April 17, 1830. Garrison did not seem to mind his seven weeks of imprisonment. “A few white victims must be sacrificed to open the eyes of this nation,” he declared upon his release in June, when a wealthy abolitionist paid his fine.
David Walker died weeks later of tuberculosis. But the force of his opposition to racism and slavery—save the part about violent resistance— lived on in the pens and voices of his friends, especially the firebrand abolitionist and feminist Maria Stewart. “It is not the color of the skin that makes the man or the woman, but the principle formed in the soul,” Stewart told Bostonians. Stewart’s four public lectures in 1832 and 1833 are known today as the first time an American-born woman addressed a mixed audience of White and Black men and women. And she was a pioneering Black feminist, at that. But some called the idea of a mixed audience “promiscuous.” 9 Lundy continued to publish the Genius, though irregularly, after that, but he and Garrison parted ways. Garrison needed a new medium to continue his antislavery advocacy. He headed north on an antislavery lecture tour, where his opponents denigrated him as “a second Walker,” and where he encountered “prejudice more stubborn” than anywhere else. It was a sentiment Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville would echo after he toured the United States in 1831. “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists,” Tocqueville shared in his instant political-science classic, Democracy in America (1835). Tocqueville described the vicious cycle of racist ideas, a cycle that made persuading or educating racist ideas away nearly impossible.
In “order to induce whites to abandon” their opinions of Black inferiority, “the negroes must change,” he wrote. “But, as long as this opinion persists, to change is impossible.” The United States faced two options: colonization or the eradication or extinction of African Americans—since uplift suasion, Tocqueville felt, would never work. Tocqueville labeled colonization a “lofty” idea, but an impractical one. Extinction remained the only option.
10 Garrison had a different option in mind when he settled back in Boston: immediate abolition and gradual equality. On Saturday, January 1, 1831, he published the first issue of The Liberator, the organ that relaunched an abolitionist movement among White Americans. In his first editorial manifesto, “To the Public,” Garrison made a “full and unequivocal” recant of the “popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition.” 11 For the rest of his abolitionist life, Garrison never retreated on immediate emancipation. He rebuked any talk of gradual abolition—of preparing society and enslaved Africans for emancipation one day. But he did make clear his preference for gradual equality, retreating on immediate equality and outlining a process of civilizing Black people to be equal one day. Garrison and his band of assimilationists would stridently fight for gradual equality, calling antiracists who fought for immediate equality impractical and crazy— just as segregationists called him crazy for demanding immediate emancipation.
Black subscribers were the early lifeblood of The Liberator. Garrison spoke to Black people in his newspaper and in speeches in New York and Philadelphia. He pressed for free Blacks to challenge “every law which infringes on your rights as free native citizens,” and to “respect yourself, if you desire the respect of others.” They had “acquired,” and would continue to acquire, “the esteem, confidence and patronage of the whites, in proportion to your increase in knowledge and moral improvement.” Garrison urged Blacks to acquire money, too, because “money begets influence, and influence respectability.” Garrison believed that the nearer Blacks “approached the whites in their habits the better they were,” according to an early biographer. “They always seemed to him a social problem rather than simply people.” When Blacks were seen as a social problem, the solution to racist ideas seemed simple. As Blacks rose, so would White opinions. When Blacks were seen as simply people—a collection of imperfect individuals, equal to the imperfect collection of individuals with white skins—then Blacks’ imperfect behavior became irrelevant. Discrimination was the social problem: the cause of the racial disparities between two equal collections of individuals.
12 In emphasizing Black self-improvement to ward off racism, Garrison was reflecting the views of the elite Black activists who invited him to their cities and subscribed to his newspaper. Black activists in many cases saw each other as social problems that needed to be fixed. “If we ever expect to see the influence of prejudice decrease and ourselves respected, it must be by the blessings of an enlightenment education,” resolved the attendees of Philadelphia’s Second Annual Convention for the Improvement of Free People of Color in 1831.
13
GARRISON WAS WRITING in response to the racial disparities and discrimination he witnessed in the North, where Blacks were free. His calls for an “increase in knowledge and moral improvement” among free Blacks was an effort in uplift suasion not unlike the avowals of the editors of the first Black newspaper, the Freedom’s Journal. Of course, recent history had not shown a proportional relationship between Black uplift and White respect. The existence of upwardly mobile Blacks did not slow the colonization movement, the spread of enslaved Africans into the southwestern territories, or the unification of White commoners and enslavers in the new anti-Black Democratic Party. When Tennessee enslaver and war hero Andrew Jackson became the new president as the hero of democracy for White men and autocracy for others in 1829, the production and consumption of racist ideas seemed to be quickening, despite recent Black advances. When Kentucky senator Henry Clay organized aristocrats, industrialists, moralists, and colonizationists into the Whig Party in 1832 to oppose Jackson’s Democratic Party, racist ideas were spreading on pace within the United States.
In the early 1830s, the new urban penny press turned away from the “good” news and printed more eye-catching “bad” news, sensationalizing and connecting crime and Blackness and poverty. Free Blacks had been forced into the shacks, cellars, and alleys of segregated “Nigger Hill” in Boston, “Little Africa” in Cincinnati, or “Five Points” in New York—“the worst hell of America,” wrote a visitor. Black behavior—not the wrenching housing and economic discrimination—was blamed for these impoverished Black enclaves. As early as 1793, a White minister protested that “a Negro hut” had depreciated property values in Salem. Similar protests surfaced in New Haven and Indiana, and they had become commonplace in Boston by the time Garrison settled there. The vicious housing cycle had already begun. Racist policies harmed Black neighborhoods, generating racist ideas that caused people not to want to live next to Blacks, which depressed the value of Black homes, which caused people not to want to live in Black neighborhoods even more, owing to low property values.
14 Millions of the poor European immigrants pouring into northern port cities after 1830 further amplified the housing discrimination and threatened free Blacks’ hold on menial and service jobs. Native Whites swung their rhetorical tools, long used to demean Blacks, and hit Irish immigrants, calling them “white niggers.” Some Irish struck back at this nativism. Others channeled—or were led to channel—their economic and political frustrations into racist ideas, which then led to more hatred of Black people.
It was in this environment of entrenched racism that America’s first minstrel shows appeared, and they began attracting large audiences of European immigrants, native Whites, and sometimes even Blacks. By 1830, Thomas “Daddy” Rice, who learned to mimic African American English (today called “Ebonics”), was touring the South, perfecting the character that thrust him into international prominence: Jim Crow. Appearing in blackface, and dressed in rags, torn shoes, and a weathered hat, Jim Crow sang and danced as a stupid, childlike, cheerful Black field hand. Other minstrel characters included “Old darky,” the thoughtless, musical head of an enslaved family, and “Mammy,” the hefty asexual devoted caretaker of Whites. The biracial, beautiful, sexually promiscuous “yaller gal” titillated White men.
“Dandy,” or “Zip Coon,” was an upwardly mobile northern Black male who mimicked—outrageously—White elites. Typically, minstrel shows included a song-and-dance portion, a variety show, and a plantation skit. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, blackface minstrelsy became the first American theatrical form, the incubator of the American entertainment industry.
Exported to excited European audiences, minstrel shows remained mainstream in the United States until around 1920 (when the rise of racist films took their place).
15 Amid the illogic and perpetual challenges to racist ideas over the course of the nineteenth century, superior Whiteness found a normalizing shield in blackface minstrelsy. In 1835 and 1836, those who did not like minstrel shows could see the “Greatest Natural and National Curiosity in the World.” A bankrupt twenty-five-year-old, P. T. Barnum, started showing off Joice Heth, who he claimed was 161 years old. What’s more, he said, she was the former mammy of George Washington. And she looked the part, with her skeletal frame, paralyzed arm and legs, deeply wrinkled skin, toothless grin, “talons” for nails, and nearly blind eyes. Most of all, Heth’s dark skin made her longevity believable. Longevity was common in Africa, the Evening Star told its readers. P. T. Barnum, of course, would go on to become one of the greatest showmen in American history, exhibiting all kinds of “freaks,” including whitening Blacks. Physical assimilationists continued to view them with pleasure, declaring that skin-color change was what would eventually cure the nation’s racial ills.
16 In addition to minstrel shows and “freak” shows, a series of novels and children’s books produced racist ideas to inculcate younger and younger children. John Pendleton Kennedy’s novel Swallow Barn (1832) inaugurated the plantation genre that more or less recycled minstrel-show mammies and Sambos as characters in inebriating novels. Boston-born South Carolina enslaver Caroline Gilman wrote the plantation genre into The Rose Bud, the South’s first weekly magazine for children, established in 1832. Reading Gilman (but more often, simply observing their parents), southern White children played master, or worse, overseer, with enslaved Black playmates, ordering them, ridiculing them, and tormenting them. Enslaved children took solace in outwitting their free playmates in physical games, such as anything involving running, jumping, or throwing. “We was stronger and knowed how to play, and the white children didn’t,” recalled one ex-slave. In slavery, both Black and White children were building a sense of self on a foundation of racist ideas.
17 This was the America that The Liberator entered in the 1830s, a land where Black people were simultaneously seen as scary threats, as sources of comedy, and as freaks. In their totality, all these racist ideas—emanating from minstrel shows, from “freak” shows, from literature, from newspapers, and from the Democrats and Whigs—looked down upon Black people as the social problem. Garrison loathed the shows and the literature, and he loathed those politicians, too. And yet he also crafted Black people as the social problem.
ONE ENSLAVED VIRGINIAN did not share Garrison’s view that enslaved Africans should wait while White abolitionists and refined free Blacks solved the problem through nonviolent tactics of persuasion. This preacher rejected uplift suasion, and he rejected racist talk of Black behavior as part of the problem. On the evening of August 21, 1831, Nat Turner and five of his disciples, believing they had been given a task by God, began their fight against the problem in Southampton County. Turner killed his master’s family, snatched arms and horses, and moved on to the next plantation.
Twenty-four hours later, about seventy freed people had joined the crusade.
After two days, seventy Black soldiers had killed at least fifty-seven enslavers across a twenty-mile path of destruction before the rebellion was put down. Panic spread as newspapers everywhere blared the gory details of the “Southampton Tragedy.” Before his hanging, Turner shared his liberation theology with a local lawyer named Thomas Gray. “I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching, when the first should be the last and the last should be the first.” “Do you find yourself mistaken now?” Gray had flatly asked. “Was not Christ crucified?” Turner replied.
18 “We are horror-struck,” Garrison wrote of the rebellion. In America’s “fury against the revolters,” who would remember the “wrongs” of slavery?
Garrison would, and he listed them. But he could not condone the strategy of violence. He did not realize that some, if not most, enslavers would die rather than set their wealth free. Garrison pledged his undying commitment to his philosophy: that the best way to “accomplish the great work of national redemption” was “through the agency of moral power,” that is, of moral persuasion.
If Blacks did not violently resist, then they were cast as naturally servile.
And yet, whenever they did fight, reactionary commentators, in both North and South, classified them as barbaric animals who needed to be caged in slavery. Those enslavers who sought comfort in myths of natural Black docility hunted for those whom they considered the real agitators: abolitionists like Garrison. Georgia went as far as offering a reward of $5,000 (roughly $109,000 today) for anyone who brought Garrison to the state for trial. But the ransom did not stop Garrison from issuing weekly reports and antislavery commentary in The Liberator on the debates that raged in response to the Nat Turner Rebellion.
The newspaper had just expanded its number of pages, thanks to funds from the newly formed New England Anti-Slavery Society, the first nonBlack organization committed to immediate emancipation. In response to The Liberator’s expansion, a Connecticut editor scoffed, Georgia legislators ought “to enlarge their reward” for Garrison’s head “accordingly.” Georgia legislators ought to put out rewards for Virginia’s legislators, Garrison shot back. They were “seriously talking of breaking the fetters of their happy and loving slaves.” 19 After Turner’s rebellion, Virginians started seriously contemplating the end of slavery. It was not from the moral persuasion of nonviolent abolitionists, but from the fear of slave revolts, or the “smothered volcano” that could one day kill them all. During the winter of 1831–1832, undercover abolitionists, powerful colonizationists, and hysterical legislators in Virginia raised their voices against slavery. In the end, proslavery legislators batted away every single antislavery measure, and ended up pushing through an even more harrowing slave code than the one that had been in place.
Proslavery legislators repressed the very captives they said were docile, and restricted the education of the very people they argued could not be educated.
Racist ideas, clearly, did not generate these slave codes. Enslaving interests generated these slave codes. Racist ideas were produced to preserve the enslaving interests.
20 William Lloyd Garrison did not realize this. But he did realize that these enslaving interests were, in fact, not emancipation’s greatest foe. On June 1, 1832, Garrison offered his thoughts on the matter in his first and only book.
“Out of thine own mouth will I condemn thee,” he wrote, and he went on to lace the book with quotations from colonizationists proving that they were proslavery, enemies of “immediate abolition” who aimed “at the utter expulsion of the Blacks,” and who denied “the possibility of elevating the blacks in this country.” Garrison concluded with seventy-six pages of anticolonization proclamations from “people of color.” The book, entitled Thoughts on African Colonization, was a devastating assault on what had become one of the country’s most powerful racial reform organizations. With Garrison’s book in hand, abolitionists declared war on the American Colonization Society. It was an assault from which the society never recovered.
21 It was not the only devastating assault the society bore in 1832.
Representing southern slaveholders opposed to colonization, College of William & Mary professor Thomas Roderick Dew released his Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 within a month of Thoughts. Dew was the child of Virginia planters and had been profoundly influenced by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. “The plantations at the south” should “be cultivated” by enslaved Africans who can “resist the intensity of a southern sun” and “endure the fatigues attendant on the cultivation of rice, cotton, tobacco and sugar-cane, better than white labourers.” Therefore, the “banishment of one-sixth of our population . . . would be an act of suicide.” Thomas Roderick Dew—actually William Lloyd Garrison wrote this bigoted statement in Thoughts on African Colonization. Dew agreed in his book.
These antislavery and proslavery advocates agreed on much more. Like Garrison, Dew considered colonization to be an evil and impractical idea.
Black people, “though vastly inferior in the scale of civilization,” and though unable to work “except by compulsion,” still constituted the cheap labor force that the southern economy needed, Dew wrote.
22 The US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee had offered the same reasoning in rejecting the American Colonization Society’s latest plea for funds in 1828. Since Blacks performed “various necessary menial duties,” the committee members concluded, colonization would create a vacuum in cheap labor in seaboard cities, thus increasing labor costs. These various menial and service duties included the work done by day laborers, mariners, servants, waiters, barbers, coachmen, shoe-shiners, and porters for men, and washers, dressmakers, seamstresses, and domestics for the women. “We see them engaged in no business that requires even ordinary capacity,” a commentator from Pennsylvania observed. “The mass are improvident, and seek the lowest avocations.” Racist policies forcing free Blacks into menial jobs were being defended by racist claims that lazy and unskilled Black people were best for those positions. Racial discrimination was off the hook, and cities received the assurance that their menial labor pools, which the US Senate found so essential to the economy, were safe.
23 Thomas Roderick Dew’s Review accomplished in enslaving circles what Garrison’s Thoughts accomplished in abolitionist circles. “After President Dew,” who became president of the College of William & Mary in 1836, “it is unnecessary to say a single word on the practicability of colonizing our slaves,” said one South Carolinian. The ACS did its best to fight back. In November 1832, ACS secretary Ralph Gurley argued that “it is not right that men should possess freedom, for which they are entirely unprepared, [and] which can only prove injurious to themselves and others.” Gurley’s piece, in the ACS’s journal, was the opening volley in a nasty ACS counteroffensive against immediate abolitionists that took place on the lecture circuit, from the pulpits, in the colleges, in the newspapers, and in the streets with mobs. Still trying to woo enslavers over to the cause, the ACS did not wage a similar offensive against Thomas Roderick Dew or the slaveholders he represented.
24 While White mobs made some hesitate, sixty-six abolitionists, fearing only the threat of apathy, gathered in Philadelphia on December 4, 1833, to form the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). They believed in the radical idea of “immediate emancipation, without expatriation.” The AASS was led by America’s most illustrious philanthropist, New Yorker Arthur Tappan, and his rich brothers, future Ohio US senator Benjamin Tappan and abolitionist Lewis Tappan, best known for working to free the illegally enslaved Africans on the Amistad ship. The impracticable strategy of uplift suasion was written into the AASS constitution. “This Society shall aim to elevate the character and conditions of the people of color, by encouraging their intellectual, moral and religious improvement, and by removing public prejudice.” 25 Garrison received a minor AASS post, as the relatively cautious Tappan brothers and their friends were attempting to wrest control of the abolitionist movement from Bostonians. More paternalistically and brazenly than Garrison, the Tappan brothers instructed AASS agents to instill in free Blacks “the importance of domestic order, and the performance of relative duties in families; of correct habits; command of temper and courteous manners.” Their mission: uplift the inferior free Blacks to “an equality with whites.” And yet, AASS agents and supporters were cautioned not to adopt Black children, encourage interracial marriages, or excite “the people of color to assume airs.” Blacks were to assume “the true dignity of meekness” in order to win over their critics.
At the annual meeting of the AASS in May 1835, members resolved to use new technologies to spread their gospel to potential abolitionist converts. They relied on the mass printing machinery of stereotyped plates, on cheap rag paper, on steam presses, and on new railroads and an efficient postal service to overwhelm the nation with 20,000 to 50,000 copies a week of abolitionist tracts. The aim: “to awaken the conscience of the nation to the evils of slavery.” Slaveholders had no clue what was coming.
26 CHAPTER 14
Imbruted or Civilized
AS ENSLAVERS CALMLY discussed profits, losses, colonization, torture techniques, and the duties of Christian masters, they felt the spring drizzle of abolitionist tracts. By the summer of 1835, it had become a downpour—there were some 20,000 tracts in July alone, and over 1 million by the year’s end.
Presenting slaveholders as evil, the literature challenged some racist ideas, such as the Black incapacity for freedom, yet at the same time produced other racist ideas, such as Africans being naturally religious and forgiving people, who always responded to whippings with loving compassion. The movement’s ubiquitous logo pictured a chained African, kneeling, raising his weak arms up in prayer to an unseen heavenly God or hovering White savior.
Enslaved Africans were to wait for enslavers to sustain them, colonizationists to evacuate them, and abolitionists to free them.
1 Enraged enslavers viewed the American Anti-Slavery Society’s postal campaign as an act of war. Raging to defend “our sister states” against abolitionists, White male thugs roamed northern Black neighborhoods in the summer and fall of 1835, looting and destroying homes, schools, and churches. They shouted about their mission to protect White women from the hypersexual Black-faced animals that, if freed, would ravage the exemplars of human purity and beauty. In fact, after 1830, young, single, and White working-class women earning wages outside the home were growing less dependent on men financially and becoming more sexually free. White male gang rapes of White women began to appear around the same time as the gang assaults by White men on Black people. Both were desperate attempts to maintain White male supremacy.
2 The most fearless and astute defender of slavery to emerge in the wake of abolitionist pressures was Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the son of rich planters who had served as vice president under two presidents, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Even those who hated him could not deny his brilliance as a strategist and communicator. Calhoun shared his latest and greatest proslavery strategy on the Senate floor on February 6, 1837.
Agitated by a Virginia senator’s earlier reference to slavery as a “lesser evil,” Calhoun rose to “take higher ground.” Once and for all, Calhoun wanted to bury that old antislavery Jeffersonian concept. “I hold that . . . the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two [races], is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good,” he said. Calhoun went on to explain that it was both a positive good for society and a positive good for subordinate Black people. Slavery, Calhoun suggested, was racial progress.
3 In a way, William Lloyd Garrison respected Calhoun, preferring him and his bold proslavery candor over politicians like the timid Henry Clay, who still believed in gradual abolitionism and colonization. Nevertheless, he said Calhoun was “the champion of hell-born slavery”: “His conscience is seared with a hot iron, his heart is a piece of adamant.” For advocates of gradual emancipation, Garrison was a radical because of his belief in immediate emancipation, whereas Calhoun was a radical for his support of perpetual slavery. Both Garrison and Calhoun regarded the other as the fanatical Devil Incarnate, the destroyer of America, the decimator of all that was good in the world and the keeper of all that was evil. Garrison needed more courage than Calhoun. While Calhoun was the loudest voice in a national choir of public figures shouting down Garrison, Garrison was nearly alone among White public figures shouting down Calhoun.
4 But neither Calhoun’s claims about slavery as a positive good nor the threat of roving White mobs could stop the growing appeal of abolitionism.
Garrison had responded to a Boston mob in October 1835 with majestic nonviolent resistance, and his conduct had pushed thousands of northerners toward his personage and the cause of antislavery. As many as 300,000 had joined the movement by the decade’s end.
As new converts rushed into the movement in the late 1830s, abolitionist splits widened. There were the Garrisonians, who refused to participate in the “corrupt” political parties and churches, and the abolitionists, trying to bring the cause into these parties and churches. Splits had grown apparent among Black abolitionists as well. No longer would antiracists calmly listen to people call Black behavior a source of White prejudice. Peter Paul Simons, known for criticizing the Colored American editor for believing that biracial people had “the most talent,” became one of the first African Americans to publicly attack the idea of uplift suasion. Before the African Clarkson Society in New York City on April 23, 1839, Simons said the strategy reeked of a conspiracy that put “white men at the head of even our private affairs.” The “foolish thought of moral elevation” was “a conspicuous scarecrow.” Blacks were already a moral people, the antiracist said. “Show up to the world an African and you will show in truth morality.” Simon demanded protest, calling for “ACTION! ACTION! ACTION!” 5 But antiracists had to contend against both powerful antislavery assimilationists and the even more powerful proslavery segregationists. Whig evangelist Calvin Colton demanded action against antislavery in Abolition a Sedition and A Voice from America to England in 1839. “There is no such thing as equality among men, nor can there be,” Colton wrote. “Neither God nor man ever instituted equality.” Science affirmed Colton’s view. There was a virtual consensus among scholars—from Cambridge in Massachusetts to Cambridge in England—that racial equality did not exist. The debate in 1839 still swirled around the origin of the races: monogenesis versus polygenesis.
6
THE FOUNDER OF anthropology in the United States, Dr. Samuel Morton, jumped into the origins debate on September 1, 1839, when he published Crania Americana. He had made use of his famous “American Golgotha” at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, the world’s largest collection of human skulls. Morton wanted to give scholars an objective tool for distinguishing the races: mathematical comparative anatomy. He had made painstaking measurements of the “mean internal capacity” of nearly one hundred skulls in cubic inches. Finding that the skulls from the “Caucasian Race” measured out the largest in that tiny sample, Morton concluded that Whites had “the highest intellectual endowments” of all the races. He relied on an incorrect assumption, however: the bigger the skull, the bigger the intellect of the person.
7 Loving reviews from distinguished medical journals and scientists came pouring into Philadelphia about Morton’s “immense body of facts.” Not from everyone, though. German Friedrich Tiedemann’s skull measurements did not match Morton’s hierarchy. So Tiedemann concluded there was racial equality.
Like the Germantown petitioners in the 1600s, and John Woolman in the 1700s, Tiedemann showed that racists were never simply products of their time. Although most scholars made the easy, popular, professionally rewarding choice of racism, some did not. Some made the hard, unpopular choice of antiracism.
8 One of the first major scientific controversies in the United States began with what seemed like a simple observation. Harvard-trained, antislavery psychiatrist Edward Jarvis reviewed data from the 1840 US Census and found that northern free Blacks were about ten times more likely to have been classified as insane than enslaved southern Blacks. On September 21, 1842, he published his findings in the New England Journal of Medicine, which was and remains the nation’s leading medical journal. Slavery must have had “a wonderful influence upon the development of the moral faculties and the intellectual powers” of Black people, Jarvis ascertained.
9 A month later, in the same journal, someone anonymously published another purportedly scientific study, “Vital Statistics of Negroes and Mulattoes.” Biracial people had shorter life spans than Whites and “pure Africans,” the census apparently also showed. The writer called for an investigation into “the cause of such momentous effects.” Dr. Josiah C. Nott of Mobile, Alabama, came to the rescue in the American Journal of Medical Science in 1843. In “The Mulatto—A Hybrid,” the distinguished surgeon contended that biracial women were “bad breeders,” because they were the product of “two distinct species,” the same way the mule was “from the horse and the ass.” Nott’s contention was as outrageous as the insanity figures, but scientists reproduced it.
10 When Jarvis looked more closely at the 1840 census data, he found errors everywhere. Some northern towns reported more Black lunatics than Black residents. Jarvis and the American Statistical Association asked the US government to correct the census. On February 26, 1844, the House of Representatives asked Secretary of State Abel Upshur to investigate. He never had the opportunity. Two days later, Upshur was among the six people killed on the warship USS Princeton. President John Tyler named none other than John C. Calhoun as Upshur’s replacement. Calhoun saw two matters on Upshur’s desk: the census issue and an antislavery letter from the British foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen. The Brit expressed hope for universal emancipation and a free and independent Texas.
11 Slaveholders’ pursuit of Texas’s annexation as a slave state was guiding the 1844 election. Tennessee slaveholder James K. Polk, a Democrat, narrowly defeated Whig Henry Clay, who lost swing votes to James Birney of the new antislavery Liberty Party. Refusing to vote, Garrison leaned on the American Anti-Slavery Society to adopt a new slogan: “NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS!” He was trying—and failing—to stop the drift of the movement toward politics. Antislavery voting blocs had arisen in the 1840s.
They were sending antislavery congressmen to Washington—from John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts to Joshua Reed Giddings of Ohio, and soon Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Owen Lovejoy of Ohio, and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. These congressmen were openly debating slavery and emancipation after 1840, to the horror of John C. Calhoun.
12 In April 1844, months after withdrawing his own presidential candidacy, Secretary Calhoun informed the British foreign secretary that the treaty of annexation was a done deal. Slavery in Texas was a concern of neither England nor the US government. The United States must not emancipate its slaves because, as the census had proved, “the condition of the African” was worse in freedom than in slavery.
Needing more data to defend US slavery before Western Europe, Calhoun sought out the latest scientific information on the races. He summoned pioneering Egyptologist George R. Gliddon, who had just arrived in Washington as part of his national speaking tour on the wonders of ancient “White” Egypt. Gliddon sent Calhoun copies of Morton’s Crania Americana and Morton’s newest, acclaimed bombshell, Crania Aegyptiaca, which depicted ancient Egypt as a land of Caucasian rulers, Hebrews, and Black slaves. Morton’s research, Gliddon added in a letter to Calhoun, proved that “Negro-Races” had always “been Servants and Slaves, always distinct from, and subject to, the Caucasian, in the remotest times.” Bolstered by Gliddon’s “facts,” Calhoun defended American domestic policy before antislavery Europe. The “facts” of the 1840 census were never corrected—and slavery’s apologists never stopped wielding its “unquestionable” proof of slavery’s positive good. They continued to assert that slavery brought racial progress— almost certainly knowing that this proof was untrue. “It is too good a thing for our politicians to give [up],” a Georgia congressman reportedly confessed. On the eve of the Civil War, a Unitarian clergyman said it best: “It was the census that was insane, and not the colored people.” 13
THE FIRM POLITICAL and scientific support for slavery made it all the more difficult for the abolitionists to change the minds of the consumers of slavery’s “positive good.” Would the voice of a runaway, expressing his or her own horrific experience, be more convincing? In 1841, William Lloyd Garrison spent three joyous days with abolitionists on the nearby island of Nantucket. As the August 11 session came to a close, a tall twenty-three-yearold runaway mustered the courage to request the floor. This was the first time many White abolitionists had ever heard a runaway share his experience of the grueling trek from slavery to freedom. Impressed, the Massachusetts Antislavery Society (MAS) offered Frederick Douglass a job as a traveling speaker. Douglass then emerged as America’s newest Black exhibit. He was introduced to audiences as a “chattel,” a “thing,” a “piece of southern property,” before he shared the brutality of slavery. Though he understood the strategy of shocking White Americans into antislavery, Douglass grew to dislike the regular dehumanization. Whether enslaved or free, Black people were people. Although their enslavers tried, they had never been reduced to things. Their humanity had never been eliminated—a humanity that made them equal to people the world over, even in their chains. Douglass was and always had been a man, and he wanted to be introduced as such.
Douglass also grew tired of merely telling his story over and over again.
He had honed his speaking ability and developed his own ideas. Whenever he veered off script into his philosophy, he heard a whisper: “Tell your story, Frederick.” Afterward, White abolitionists would say to him, “Give us the facts, we will take care of the philosophy.” And do not sound like that when you give the facts: “Have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not; ’tis not best that you seem too learned.” Douglass knew exactly why they said that. Usually, minutes into his speeches, Douglass could hear the crowd grumbling, “He’s never been a slave.” And that reaction made sense. Racist abolitionists spoke endlessly about how slavery had made people into brutes.
Douglass was clearly no brute.
14 When Douglass was finally able to tell his story and philosophy in full in his own words, it offered perhaps the most compelling counterweight yet to the 1840 census and the positive good theory. In June 1845, Garrison’s printing office published The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. In five months, 4,500 copies were sold, and in the next five years, 30,000. The gripping best seller garnered Douglass international prestige and forced thousands of readers to come to grips with the brutality of slavery and the human desire of Black people to be free. No other piece of antislavery literature had such a profound effect. Douglass’s Narrative opened the door to a series of slave narratives. For anyone who had the courage to look, they showed the absolute falsity of the notion that enslavement was good for Black people.
William Lloyd Garrison penned the preface to Douglass’s 1845 Narrative.
Enslavement had “degraded” Black people “in the scale of humanity,” Garrison claimed. “Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind.” Though starting at different places and taking different conceptual routes, Garrison kept arriving in the same racist place as his enslaving enemies—subhuman Black inferiority. But if you let Garrison tell it in Douglass’s preface, antislavery had “wholly confounded complexional differences.” Garrison chose not to highlight the chilling physical battle with a slave-breaker that thrust Douglass on his freedom course. Garrison enjoyed presenting two types of Black people: degraded or excelling. He hoped the narrative elicited White “sympathy” and “untiring” efforts “to break every yoke.” The narrative did do that, and the many slave narratives that followed it attracted White antislavery sympathy, too, especially in New England and Old England. But these narratives did not attract nearly as much White antiracist sympathy. After all, Garrison had packaged the book in his assimilationist idea of the enslaved or free African as actually subpar, someone “capable of high attainments as an intellectual and moral being—needing nothing but a comparatively small amount of cultivation to make him an ornament to society and a blessing to his race.” 15 Garrison’s own preface—though powerfully persuasive, as his readers expected—was a compellingly racist counterweight to Douglass’s Narrative.
Another compelling counterweight was Alabama surgeon Josiah Nott’s Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races in 1845.
He had moved from racist biracial theory to polygenesis, once again using the faulty census data as evidence. As a separate species, “nature has endowed” Black people “with an inferior organization, and all the powers of earth cannot elevate them above their destiny.” Nott’s polygenesis had become “not only the science of the age,” declared one observer, but also “an America science.” Popular northern children’s books were speaking of the “capacity of the cranium.” Best-selling New England author Samuel Goodrich wrote, in The World and Its Inhabitants, that “Ethiopians” ranked “decidedly lowest in the intellectual scale.” 16 Douglass’s Narrative had to contend with the rapidly changing news media as well. In early 1846, the newly formed Associated Press used the newly invented telegraph to become the nation’s principal filter and supplier of news. The rapid speed of transmission and monopoly pricing encouraged shorter and simpler stories that told and did not explain—that sensationalized and did not nuance, that recycled and did not trash stereotypes or the status quo. News dispatches reinforcing racist ideas met these demands. In January 1846, New Orleans resident James D. B. De Bow met the demand for a powerful homegrown southern voice, launching De Bow’s Review. It struggled early on, but by the 1850s it had become the preeminent page of southern thought—the proslavery, segregationist counterpoint to the antislavery, assimilationist The Liberator.
17 Regular contributors drove the expansion of De Bow’s Review, writers like Louisiana physician Samuel A. Cartwright, a former student of Benjamin Rush. Cartwright wrote about healthy Black captives laboring productively and loving enslavement. Whenever they resisted on the plantation, Cartwright wrote in 1851, they were suffering from what he called dysesthesia. “Nearly all” free Blacks were suffering from this disease, because they did not have “some white person” to “take care of them.” When enslaved Blacks ran away, they were suffering from insanity, from what he called drapetomania. “They have only to be . . . treated like children,” Cartwright told slaveholders, “to prevent and cure them” of this insane desire to run away.
18 Southern medical experiments found an airing in De Bow’s Review.
Researchers routinely used Black subjects. In 1845, Alabama’s J. Marion Sims horrifically started experimenting on the vaginas of eleven enslaved women for a procedure to heal a complication of childbirth called vesicovaginal fistula. The procedures were “not painful enough to justify the trouble” of anesthesia, he said. It was a racist idea to justify his cruelty, not something Sims truly knew from his experiments. “Lucy’s agony was extreme,” Sims later noted in his memoir. After a marathon of surgeries into the early 1850s—one woman, Anarcha, suffered under his knife thirty times —Sims perfected the procedure for curing the fistula. Anesthesia in hand, Sims started healing White victims, moved to New York, built the first woman’s hospital, and fathered American gynecology. A massive bronze and granite monument dedicated to him—the first US statue depicting a physician —now sits at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street, across from the Academy of Medicine.
19
VULNERABLE NOW TO recapture by his former master as a publicly known runaway, Frederick Douglass embarked in 1845 on an extended lecture tour in Great Britain. John O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, was irate that the “black vagabond Douglass” was spending “his time in England propagating his filthy lies against the United States.” Douglass sent a crushing reply. Like other followers of national politics in America, Douglass probably knew O’Sullivan as a rabid fan of the annexation of Texas (and all points west). Texas had been admitted as a slave state on December 29, 1845. Expansionists—and especially slavery’s expansionists—were clamoring for more: for California, for New Mexico, for Oregon. As the first copies of the Narrative went out, O’Sullivan wrote of White Americans’ “manifest destiny . . . to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us.” 20 In May 1846, President James K. Polk ordered troops over the disputed Texas boundary. When Mexican troops defended themselves, Polk painted Mexicans as the aggressors and publicized his war cause. The ploy worked.
The fight against Mexico helped rally North and South alike to the cause of national expansion. But the question of whether the expansion of the nation would mean an expansion of slavery divided northerners and southerners. In August 1846, Democratic representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania stapled onto an appropriations bill a clause barring slavery in any territory Polk obtained from the Mexican-American War. Wilmot represented the newest political force in the United States: the antislavery, anti-Black FreeSoil movement. What Polk called “foolish,” what historians call the Wilmot Proviso, what Wilmot called the “white man’s proviso,” never passed.
21 Over the years, William Lloyd Garrison and John C. Calhoun had done their best to polarize the United States into rival camps: those favoring immediate emancipation versus those insisting on permanent slavery. The colonizationists’ middle ground of gradual emancipation had capsized by the late 1830s. In 1846, the new Free Soilers rebuilt that middle ground, primarily, but not exclusively, in the North. When Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works placed enslaved Blacks in skilled positions to cut labor costs, White workers protested. In the only protracted urban industrial strike in the pre– Civil War South, they demanded pay raises and the removal of “the negroes” from skilled work. If the striking ironworkers thought enslavers really cared more about racism than profit, or that they would not abandon, out of selfinterest, their promotions of a unified White masculinity, then they were in for a long and tortured lesson about power and profit and propaganda. Richmond elites banded together. They viewed the anti-Black strikers as being equivalent to abolitionists because they were trying to prevent them “from making use of slave labor,” as the local newspaper cried. In the end, the White strikers were fired.
22
THE “SLAVE POWER” had declined in the past ten years, leading to a “gradual abatement of the prejudice which we have been deploring,” William Lloyd Garrison wrote in The Liberator in the summer of 1847. But it remained a “disgusting fact, that they who cannot tolerate the company or presence of educated and refined colored men, are quite willing to be surrounded by ignorant and imbruted slaves, and never think of objecting to the closest contact with them, on account of their complexion! The more of such the better!” Though Garrison was constrained by the bigoted idea of “ignorant and imbruted slaves,” and was completely wrong that the westernmarching slave power had declined, he had a point. “It is only as they are free, educated, enlightened, that they become a nuisance,” he wrote. He realized why uplift suasion was unworkable, but nothing would shake his faith in the strategy.
23 When General Zachary Taylor began his tenure as the twelfth US president in 1849, Free Soilers were demanding slavery’s restriction; abolitionists were demanding the closure of the slave market in Washington, DC; and enslavers were demanding the expansion of slavery and a stricter fugitive slave law to derail the Underground Railroad and its courageous conductors, such as Harriet “Moses” Tubman. Henry Clay, the old architect of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, came out of the gloom of his failed presidential runs to engineer a “reunion of the Union.” In January 1850, he proposed satisfying enslavers by denying Congress jurisdiction over the domestic slave trade and instituting a stronger Fugitive Slave Act. To satisfy antislavery or Free Soil northerners, slave trading would be banned in the nation’s capital, and California would be admitted to the Union as a free state.
Admitting California as a free state gave the balance of power to the North.
And with that power, the North could eradicate slavery. Calhoun and teeming numbers of southerners balked at submitting, or even at compromising for a second. Calhoun fumed, and he mustered the forces of secession.
24 In March 1850, a horde of northern scientists trotted onto Calhoun’s turf to attend the third meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Charleston. Samuel Morton, Josiah C. Nott, and Harvard polygenesist Louis Agassiz were some of the association’s first members. Charleston prided itself on its nationally lauded scientists, its natural history museum, and a medical school that boasted plenty of available cadavers and “interesting cases.” Weeks before the conference, Charleston’s own John Bachman, the undisputed king of southern Lutherans, issued The Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race and an article in the highly respectable Charleston Medical Journal. Noah’s son Shem was the “parent of the Caucasian race—the progenitor of . . . our Savior.” Ham was the parent of Africans, whose “whole history” displayed an inability to self-govern.
Bachman’s monogenesis made a controversial splash at the meeting. But northern and southern minds were made up for polygenesis in 1850.
25 Louis Agassiz and Josiah Nott came and gave their papers on polygenesis on March 15, 1850. Philadelphian Peter A. Browne, who helped found the science-oriented Franklin Institute in honor of Benjamin Franklin, presented his comparative study of human hair. Not far from the world’s largest collections of skulls, Browne showed off the world’s largest collection of hair, a collection he studied to pen The Classification of Mankind, By the Hair and Wool of Their Heads in 1850. Since Whites had “hair” and Blacks “wool,” Browne had “no hesitancy in pronouncing that they “belong[ed] to two distinct species.” As for the hair properties, Browne declared that “the hair of the white man is more perfect than that of the negro.” According to Browne’s study, in which he deemed Blacks a separate and inferior animal-like species, straight hair was “good hair” and the “matted” hair of African people was bad. But he was hardly saying something new. So many Black people, let alone White people, had consumed this assimilationist idea that in 1859 an Anglo-African Magazine writer complained of Black parents teaching their children “that he or she is pretty, just in proportion as the features approximate to the Anglo-Saxon standard.” Black parents must, the writer pleaded, stop characterizing straight hair as “good hair” or Anglo-Saxon features as “good features.” 26 Proud of its scientists, the city of Charleston picked up the tab for the AAAS meeting and the publication of the proceedings. Entire families in all of their gentility attended the sessions. The meeting diverted them from rapidfire telegraphic news reports on the frenzied debate over the Compromise of 1850. The AAAS conference in the home of proslavery thought demonstrated the crossroads of American science and politics. As enslavers angrily followed northern political developments, Charleston’s scientists eagerly followed northern scientific developments, especially the development of polygenesis as the mainstream of racial science.
Days after the AAAS conference ended in Charleston, South Carolina’s “town bell” toiled “with sad news.” After a long battle with tuberculosis, John C. Calhoun died on March 31, 1850. The hard-lined anti-secessionist President Taylor died months later. Millard Fillmore, an intuitive compromiser, took the presidential office in the aftershock of the deaths of these two rigid giants. By September, Henry Clay’s Compromise of 1850 had passed. “There is . . . peace,” Clay happily announced. “I believe it is permanent.” 27 The compromise’s signature measure, the Fugitive Slave Act, handed enslavers octopus powers, allowing their tentacles to extend to the North. The Act criminalized abettors of fugitives, provided northerners incentives to capture them, and denied captured Blacks a jury trial, opening the door to mass kidnappings. To William Lloyd Garrison, the act was “so coldblooded, so inhuman and so atrocious, that Satan himself would blush to claim paternity to it.” 28 CHAPTER 15
Soul
THERE WAS NO customary public outlet for a Maine woman’s rage against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This daughter of a famous clergyman, who was also the wife of a famous professor, knew men made the laws, and she knew men reacted publicly to laws. But Harriet Beecher Stowe was not a man, so her choices were limited. She was not the only woman who was frustrated. As Stowe’s biographer explained, “The political impotence Stowe felt in the face of unjust laws was building up like water behind a dam for many middle-class women.” 1 The first major collective strike against the dam had come two years earlier at the first women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19 and 20, 1848. Local Quaker women organized the convention alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who penned the meeting’s Declaration of Sentiments. The declaration pleaded for gender equality and women’s suffrage, desires considered as radical as racial equality and immediate emancipation. Many of the early White women suffragists had spent years in the trenches of abolitionism, oftentimes recognizing the interlocking nature of American racism and sexism.
The Seneca Falls Convention set off a series of local women’s rights conventions over the next few years, especially along the northern abolitionist belt from New England to upstate New York and to the state where Harriet Beecher Stowe had lived before moving to Maine: Ohio. Suffragist and abolitionist Frances Dana Gage, one of the first Americans to call for voting rights for all citizens regardless of gender or race, helped organize women’s rights conferences across Ohio during the early 1850s.
Gage’s most memorable conference took place at a church in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. But she was not the only celebrity there. A tall, thin, fiftysomething-year-old lady adorned by a gray dress, white turban, and sunbonnet walked into the church “with the air of a queen up the aisle,” an observer recorded. As White women buzzed for her to turn back around and leave, Sojourner Truth defiantly took her seat and bowed her head in disgust.
She may have thought back to all the turmoil she had experienced, which she had described in The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, printed by Garrison the year before.
On May 29, 1851, day two of the meeting, men came in full force to berate the resolutions. The convention turned into a bitter argument over gender. Male ministers preached about superior male intellect, the gender of Jesus, Eve’s sin, the feebleness of women, all to counter the equal rights resolutions. The women were growing weary when Sojourner Truth, who had kept her head bowed almost the whole time, raised her head up. She lifted her body slowly and started walking to the front. “Don’t let her speak!” some women shouted.
Before the audience now, she laid her eyes on the convention organizer.
Gage announced her and begged the audience for silence. Quiet came in an instant as all the eyes on White faces became transfixed on the single dark face. Truth straightened her back and raised herself to her full height—all six feet. She towered over nearby men. “Ain’t I a Woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!” Truth showed off her bulging muscles. “Ain’t I a Woman? I can outwork, outeat, outlast any man! Ain’t I a Woman!” Sojourner Truth had shut down and shut up the male hecklers.
As she returned to her seat, Truth could not help but see the “streaming eyes, and hearts beating with gratitude” from the women, the muddled daze from the men. Truth imparted a double blow in “Ain’t I a Woman”: an attack on the sexist ideas of the male disrupters, and an attack on the racist ideas of females trying to banish her. “Ain’t I a Woman” in all of my strength and power and tenderness and intelligence. “Ain’t I a Woman” in all of my dark skin. Never again would anyone enfold more seamlessly the dual challenge of antiracist feminism.
2 Harriet Beecher Stowe no doubt heard about Sojourner Truth’s speech in Garrison’s The Liberator, or through correspondence with Ohio suffragists and abolitionists. But the attention of this gifted writer was not on the awakening suffrage movement. It was on the outrages of the Fugitive Slave Act, which was sending fugitives and free Blacks to the cotton fields. And Stowe learned about these outrages from letters that her younger sister, Isabella, was sending her from Connecticut. The letters were often read aloud in the parlor for Harriet’s seven children to hear. “Now Hattie,” Isabella wrote her big sister in one such letter, “if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” Harriet Beecher Stowe rose from her chair. “I will write something,” she declared. “I will write if I live.” 3 Titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s “living dramatic reality” entered bookstores on March 20, 1852. “The scenes of this story,” she opened the novel’s preface, “lie among . . . an exotic race, whose . . . character” was “so essentially unlike the hard and dominant Anglo-Saxon race.” In Black people’s “lowly docility of heart, their aptitude to repose on a superior mind and rest on a higher power, their childlike simplicity of affection, and facility of forgiveness,” she wrote, “[i]n all these they will exhibit the highest form of the peculiarly Christian life.” Only enslavement was holding them back.
4 In one novel, Stowe ingeniously achieved what Garrison had been trying to do for roughly two decades in article after article in The Liberator. For the cosmic shift to antislavery, Stowe did not ask Americans to change their deepseated beliefs. She asked only for them to alter the implications, the meaning of their deep-seated beliefs. Stowe met Americans where they were: in the concreteness of racist ideas. She accepted the nationally accepted premise of the enslaver. Naturally docile and intellectually inferior Black people were disposed to their enslavement to White people—and, Stowe crucially tacked on—to God. Stowe inverted Cotton Mather and all those preachers after him who had spent years trying to convince planters that Christianity made Blacks better slaves. She claimed that since docile Blacks made the best slaves, they made the best Christians. Since domineering Whites made the worst slaves, they made the worst Christians. Stowe offered Christian salvation to White America through antislavery. In order to become better Christians, White people must constrain their domineering temperament and end the evil outgrowth of that temperament: slavery.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a powerfully effective tool for Stowe’s racist abolitionism because it was such an awesome page turner. An indebted Kentucky slaveholder plans to sell the enslaved religious leader Uncle Tom and the young son of Eliza Harris. Eliza grabs her son, flees, and reunites in northern freedom with her fugitive husband, George Harris. Tom stays and is sold South. Heading downriver on a boat, Tom saves a pious little White girl, Eva, who had fallen in the river. Grateful, her father, Augustine St. Clare, buys Tom.
The relations of Tom and Eva sit at the novel’s thematic center. Stowe created the double-character—the naturally Christian Tom/Eva—to highlight her conception of Blacks being more feminine, “docile, child-like and affectionate,” which allows Christianity to find a “more congenial atmosphere” in Black bodies. In a major proselytizing battle, Stowe pits the soulful Christian Black slave, Tom, against the mindful un-Christian White master, St. Clare. “Thou hast hid from the wise and prudent, and revealed unto babes,” Tom says in biblical style. Blacks were spiritually superior because of their intellectual inferiority, Stowe maintained. This spiritual superiority allowed Blacks to have soul.
5 Stowe’s popularization of spiritually gifted Black people quickly became a central pillar of African American identity as Black readers consumed the book and passed on its racist ideas. Racist Whites, believing themselves to be void of soul, made it their personal mission to find soul through Black people.
Racist Blacks, believing themselves to be void of intellect, made it their personal mission to find intellect through White people. Black Americans almost immediately made Uncle Tom the identifier of Black submissiveness, while accepting Stowe’s underlying racist idea that made Uncle Tom so submissive: Blacks were especially spiritual; they, especially, had soul.
And these Black people were inferior to biracial people, in Stowe’s reproduction of biracial racism. The only four adult characters who run away are the novel’s four biracial captives, the “tragic mulattos.” Though appearing and acting White, they are tragically imprisoned by Blackness. And yet in their intellectual and aesthetic superiority, in their active resistance to enslavement, Stowe distinguishes the mulattos from the “full black.” 6 In the novel’s “concluding remarks,” Stowe called for northerners to teach Blacks until they reached “moral and intellectual maturity, and then assist them in their passage” to Africa, “where they may put into practice the lessons they have learned in America.” Her call was a godsend to the vanishing American Colonization Society. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Blacks fed up with the United States revitalized the colonization movement in the 1850s.
President Fillmore intended to endorse colonization in his 1852 Message to Congress. “There can be no well-grounded hope,” he was going to say, “for the improvement of either [Blacks’] moral or social condition, until they are removed from a humiliating sense of inferiority in the presence of a superior race.” Although they were omitted in the speech itself, these remarks found their way into newspapers.
7 Garrison revered Uncle Tom in his book review of March 26, 1852. But he was virtually alone in his antiracist questioning of Stowe’s religious bigotry. “Is there one law of submission and non-resistance for the black man, and another law of rebellion and conflict for the white man? Are there two Christs?” Garrison also regretted seeing the “sentiments respecting African colonization.” His antiracist religiosity hardly made waves like his critique of Stowe’s endorsement of colonization.
8 Frederick Douglass was also wary of Stowe’s embrace of colonization, though he did not criticize her portrait of the “soulful” Uncle Tom. He sent off an assimilationist, anti-Indian letter to Stowe explaining why Blacks would never accept colonization. “This black man (unlike the Indian) loves civilization,” Douglass wrote. “He does not make very great progress in civilization himself, but he likes to be in the midst of it.” In not totally rebuking Stowe and her novel, the most influential Black man in America hardly slowed the consumption of the novel’s racist ideas.
9 No one came closer to totally trashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin than a Black writer and physician named Martin R. Delany. He had become disillusioned about abolitionism because its proponents had not come to his aid when he had been ejected from Harvard Medical School in 1850. He had been accepted, along with two other Black students, but when they arrived, White students had called for their dismissal. In 1852, Delany released his largely antiracist The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered. Antislavery societies, Delany charged, “presumed to think for, dictate to, and know better what suited colored people, than they know for themselves.” Black people had two choices: continued degradation in the United States, or establishment of a prosperous community elsewhere—meaning colonization on Black terms.
Even on Black terms, Black people still mostly opposed colonization.
10 While splitting on colonization in the 1850s, Black male activists seemingly united in their distaste of Uncle Tom for disseminating the stereotype of the weak Black male. For some time, racist Black patriarchs had been measuring their masculinity off of the perceived controlling masculinity of White men, and they found Black masculinity to be lacking. They demanded control of Black women, families, and communities to redeem their masculinity from the “weak Black male” stereotype. As antislavery Black patriarchs petitioned in 1773, in Massachusetts, “How can the wife submit themselves to [their] husbands in all things” if Blacks remained enslaved? And then, at the male-dominated National Convention of Colored Citizens in Syracuse in 1864, they complained, “We have been denied ownership of our bodies, our wives, home, children and the products of our own labor.” These Black men resolved to “vindicate our manhood,” as if it needed any vindication. It could not have been a coincidence that while women like Sojourner Truth were asserting their right to gender equity in the 1850s and early 1860s, Black (and White) men were asserting their right to rule women.
11 The sexist opposition seemed wrapped up in the proslavery opposition, especially since a woman had penned Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Southerners hailed the publication of Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride, and William Gilmore Simms’s The Sword and the Distaff, the most prominent of the more than twenty plantation-school novels published in the reactionary aftermath of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In these books, professorial planters, and their pure and upright wives, civilized their animal-like or childlike contented captives on their family farms. These plantation novelists could write up some fiction. Although Uncle Tom’s Cabin may not have spread among southerners as widely as the plantation-school books, a large number of southerners did get their hands on it. “Mrs. Stowe says that the . . . chief wrong in the catalogue of sins against the negro, is the prejudice of caste, the antipathy of race, the feeling we crush into their souls that they are ‘nothing but niggers,’” wrote a Georgia “lady” in De Bow’s Review. But Mrs. Stowe was forgetting, she said, “the fact that their Maker created them ‘nothing but niggers.’” 12
NEITHER THE FREE-SOIL upsurge nor the antislavery upsurge from the Fugitive Slave Act and Uncle Tom’s Cabin could overcome the political parties’ overwhelming propaganda or the sectional and slavery tensions during the presidential election of 1852. New Hampshire’s flamboyant Mexican-American War general, Franklin Pierce, ready to turn the nation’s attention from slavery toward national expansion, won in a rout for the Democrats. “The question is at rest,” Pierce proclaimed in his First Inaugural Address in 1853. Abolitionists will never rest until “the eternal overthrow” of slavery, the forty-seven-year-old Garrison shot back.
13 In 1853, the American Anti-Slavery Society refused to admit defeat in the wake of Franklin Pierce’s victory. Members celebrated their twentieth anniversary by celebrating Garrison, in order to put him before as many eyes as possible. It mirrored the international effort in 1853 to put the recently deceased University of Pennsylvania polygenesist Samuel Morton before the public and hail him as the exemplary pioneer. Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon published, on April 1, 1853, the monumental Types of Mankind, eight-hundred pages of polygenesis, dedicated “to the Memory of Morton.” For visual learners, they inserted an illustration of two columns of faces adjoining skulls: the “Greek” at the top, the “ape” at the bottom, the “Negro” in the middle. The debate over “the primitive origin of the races” was the “last grand battle between science and dogmatism.” Who would win? “Science must again, and finally, triumph!” 14 Types of Mankind appeared during a crowded 1853, a critical year for segregationist ideas making the case for permanent Black inferiority while assimilationist abolitionists advanced. Democrats welcomed the publication of New York editor John H. Van Evrie’s Negroes and Negro Slavery. Van Evrie ran at the front of a stampede of northern pro-slavery, pro-White pamphleteers chasing down the abolitionist movement in the 1850s. “God has made the negro an inferior being not in most cases, but in all cases,” Van Evrie declared. “The same almighty creator made all white men equal.” Over in France in 1853, aristocratic royalist Arthur de Gobineau released his fourvolume Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races). Gobineau’s demand for France’s return to aristocracy included an analysis of the “colossal truth” of racial hierarchy, of polygenesis.
The intelligent White lovers of liberty were at the top; the yellow race was the “middle class”; and at the bottom were the greedy, sexual Black people.
Blacks’ abnormal physical traits had developed to compensate for their stupidity, Gobineau wrote. Within the White species, the Aryan was supreme —and was the supreme maker of all great civilizations in history the world over. Germans embraced Gobineau, especially since he said Aryans were “la race germanique.” In 1856, Josiah C. Nott arranged for the translation of Gobineau’s book into English.
15 Though the book was expensive and had a lot of competition for readers’ attention, Types of Mankind sold out almost immediately. It was “handsomely welcomed” in Europe, and well regarded as an excellent treatment of the “pre-eminently . . . American science” of polygenesis, as the New York Herald wrote. The reviewer for Putnam’s Monthly accepted polygenesis, too, explaining that “the nations are of one blood, therefore, not genealogically, but spiritually.” Cotton Mather’s old case of spiritual equality (and bodily inequality) to square slavery and Christianity was now squaring polygenesis and Christianity.
In Putnam’s competitor, Harper’s Magazine, Herman Melville, who had just authored Moby-Dick, issued “The ‘Gees.” The antiracist satire relentlessly mocked the contradictions of polygenesis. The fictional ‘Gees are a people “ranking pretty high in incivility, but rather low in stature and morals.” They have “a great appetite, but little imagination; a large eyeball, but small insight. Biscuit he crunches, but sentiment he eschews.” Meanwhile, the character of Queequeg in Moby-Dick gave Melville a chance to challenge racial stereotypes.
16 Types of Mankind was so popular and so influential that it compelled the first major response to polygenesis by an African American. The Reverend Martin B. Anderson, the first president of the University of Rochester, loaned the book to his friend Frederick Douglass. Anderson also handed over works by Nott, Gliddon, and Morton. Douglass used his first formal address before a college audience—Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve on July 12, 1854—to mount a spirited rebuttal. The address was published that year in Rochester, and Douglass recycled the message in other speeches for years.
17 “Before the Notts, the Gliddens, the Agassiz, the Mortons made their profound discoveries,” speaking “in the name of science”, Douglass said, humans believed in monogenesis. Nearly all advocates of polygenesis “hold it be the privilege of the Anglo-Saxon to enslave and oppress the African,” he went on. “When men oppress their fellowmen, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.” Douglass, amazingly, summed up the history of racist ideas in a single sentence.
After effortlessly proving the ancient Egyptians were Black, labeling Types of Mankind the most “compendious and barefaced” attempt ever to “brand the negro with natural inferiority,” and rooting all human differences in environment, Douglass turns from his antiracist best to his racist worst. He references the work of biracial physician James McCune Smith of New York, who had the single greatest influence on Douglass’s life—more than Garrison.
At Scotland’s University of Glasgow in the 1830s, Smith had earned bachelor’s, master’s, and medical degrees—the first American of African descent to do so. The hair of Black people was “growing more and more straight,” Smith once rejoiced. “These influences—climate and culture—will ultimately produce a uniform” American of White skin and straight hair.
18 Leaning on Smith’s climate theory and cultural racism, Douglass asked the students in Cleveland, “Need we go behind the vicissitudes of barbarism for an explanation of the gaunt, wiry, apelike appearance of some of the genuine Negroes? Need we look higher than a vertical sun, or lower than the damp, black soil [of West Africa] . . . for an explanation of the Negro’s color?” While Douglass beat the vicissitudes of barbarism into Africa, he ascribed “the very heart of the civilized world” into England. He had emerged as the most famous Black male abolitionist and assimilationist in the United States.
19 The cutting up of the Bible, “root and branch,” in Gobineau’s Types of Mankind did not sit well with the most famous White male abolitionist and assimilationist either. William Lloyd Garrison reviewed the segregationist book on October 13, 1854, in his first bout, too, with polygenesis. Garrison took aim, in particular, at Josiah C. Nott, who had said that he “looked in vain, during twenty years for a solitary exception” to Jefferson’s verdict of never finding “a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narrative.” This is “something extraordinary,” said Garrison sardonically, “that Jefferson should beget so many stupid children.” 20 THOUGH THEY WERE firmly united against Types of Mankind, against segregationist ideas, and against slavery, Douglass and Garrison eventually grew apart. When Frederick Douglass attacked the paternalism of White abolitionists and recognized the need for Black organizing, interracial organizers lashed back, Garrison included. By the summer and fall of 1853, invective filled the pages of Frederick Douglass’ Paper and The Liberator.
Garrison issued his most damning comment in The Liberator on September 23, 1853: “The sufferers from American slavery and prejudice, as a class,” were unable “to perceive” the demands of the movement “or to understand the philosophy of its operations.” 21 All along, mutual friends tried to stop the quarrel. Before the year expired, Harriet Beecher Stowe stepped between Douglass and Garrison. She achieved what others could not. After all, the best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin had catapulted Stowe to the pinnacle of the abolitionist movement overlooking both Douglass and Garrison. Her novel was drawing more northerners to the movement than the writings and speeches of Douglass and Garrison— especially, and crucially, the women who were firing the nation up for their rights. Stowe’s letters to both men held them back. The bitter warfare tailed off and stopped. They each forgave, but did not forget. They each turned their attention to the controversy that undermined the “finality” platform of the Pierce administration in 1854.
22 CHAPTER 16 The Impending Crisis
US SENATOR STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS of Illinois desired to give statehood to the territories of Nebraska and Kansas in order to build through these states a transcontinental railroad. Douglas and his benefactors envisioned this railroad transforming the flourishing Mississippi Valley into the nation’s epicenter. To secure crucial southern support, the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 left the slavery question to be settled by the settlers, thus repealing the Missouri Compromise.
Stephen Douglas knew the bill would produce “a hell of a storm,” but his forecast underestimated northern ire. Slavery seemed officially on the national march, and the days of Free Soil seemed numbered. And fears of this future caused northerners to speak out against the march of slavery, including a politically ambitious Illinois lawyer who had served one term, from 1847 to 1849, as an Illinois congressman. Abraham Lincoln took an antislavery stand, reviving his dead political career as he vied for Illinois’s second US Senate seat across from Stephen Douglas in 1854. He scolded the “monstrous injustice” in a long speech in Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854. But he did not know what to do “as to the existing institution,” adding, “My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia.” But that was impossible. “What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? . . . Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feeling will not admit this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.” 1 Abraham Lincoln was a political disciple of Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser, who had just engineered compromises of 1820 and 1850. One of the great causes of Clay’s political life was colonization. He spoke at the founding meeting of the American Colonization Society and presided over the organization from 1836 to 1849. When Henry Clay died in 1852, he became the first American to lie in state at the US Capitol. Not many abolitionists joined in the mourning. No man was a greater enemy to Black people, William Lloyd Garrison insisted. Lincoln called Clay “my ideal of a great man.” 2 Abraham Lincoln gave Clay’s eulogy in the Illinois capitol in 1852, and for the first time in his public life endorsed returning both free and freed Blacks to their “long-lost fatherland” in Africa. Lincoln hailed from Kentucky like Clay, and some of his relatives owned people. His parents did not, showing an aversion to slavery. Lincoln did not like the domestic slave trade, and yet he had no problem advocating against Black voting rights early in his career as an Illinois state legislator. In 1852, the forty-three-year-old had settled for practicing law, believing his political career in the Whig Party had ended before he resurfaced to run for a Senate seat in 1854.
3
THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT split open Abraham Lincoln’s Whig Party along regional lines and killed Henry Clay’s baby. Two new parties emerged in time for the 1856 presidential election: the Know-Nothings, calling immigrants and Catholics the enemy, and the Republican Party, calling the expanding “slave power” the enemy. Neither could outduel the Democrats, who united in opposition to abolitionism. On March 4, 1857, Democrat James Buchanan took the presidential oath of office as the fifteenth president of the United States. The “difference of opinion” in Congress and in America over slavery’s expansion should and would be “speedily and finally settled” by the US Supreme Court, he announced. Buchanan had insider information of the Supreme Court’s impending decision on the differences, but he feigned ignorance. “All good citizens” should join him, Buchanan said, in “cheerfully” submitting to the Court’s decision.
4 All of two days later, on March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court submitted its decision, but not many antislavery northerners cheerfully submitted. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Court rejected the freedom suit of Dred Scott, who had been taken to free states and territories. Five southerners (Democrat and Whig) and two northerners (both Democrats) had ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, questioned the constitutionality of northern abolition, stripped Congress of its power to regulate slavery in the territories, and stated that Black people could not be citizens. An Ohio Republican and a New England Whig had dissented.
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney issued the stingingly controversial majority opinion. A steadfast Jacksonian Democrat from Maryland who had emancipated his captives long ago, he had made a career out of defending the property rights of slaveholders, his right to emancipate, and his friends’ rights to enslave. About to turn eighty years old, Taney refused to bury slavery (as it turned out, Taney died the day Maryland abolished slavery in 1864). When he finished his fifty-five-page majority opinion, Taney hoped that Blacks, Free Soilers, and abolitionists would have no constitutional life to fortify their freedom fights against slaveholders. Since Black people had been excluded from the American political community when the nation was founded, the United States could not now extend them rights, Taney reasoned. “They had for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” 5 Although Taney was absolutely right about the founding fathers regarding Blacks as inferior, he was absolutely wrong that Black men had been excluded from the original political community. Dissenting Justice Benjamin Curtis revealed that upon the nation’s founding, Black men had possessed voting rights in at least five states—almost half the Union—sinking Taney’s argument against Black citizenship rights. But Curtis’s history lesson made no headway upon Taney, his other colleagues on the Court, or the residents of the White House or the US Capitol, who applauded the Dred Scott decision. They probably already knew the history. They seemed not to care about the crippling effects of the Court’s racist decision. All they seemed to care about was maintaining their nation’s enriching economic interests. And nothing enriched northern investors and factory owners and southern landowners and slaveholders in 1857 as much as the nation’s principal export: cotton.
6 Democratic senator Stephen Douglas rejoiced over the Taney decision, speaking for enslavers and their northern defenders alike. Abraham Lincoln, who was now campaigning for Douglas’s Senate seat in 1858, opposed the decision, speaking for the Free Soilers and abolitionists in the fledgling Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas agreed to a series of seven debates from late August to mid-October 1858 in Illinois. Thousands showed up to watch them, and millions read the transcripts. The candidates became household names. The tall, slight, poorly dressed, and unassuming Lincoln quietly arrived alone to the debates, ready to stand on the defensive.
The short, stocky, custom-suit-clad, and arrogant Douglas arrived with his young wife, Adele, in a private railcar to the firing of cannons, ready to go on the offensive. The visual and audio contrasts were tailor-made for a technology that did not yet exist.
“If you desire negro citizenship,” said Douglas, “then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party.” Douglass kept race baiting, manipulating the racist ideas of voters to turn them off of Republicans. In the decades before the Civil War, race baiting had become a crucial campaign ploy, especially for the dominant Democratic Party. Douglas went on to say that America “was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever,” warning that a Lincoln presidency would lead to integrated communities. As the race baiting from Douglas intensified, the stream of letters urging Lincoln to separate Republicans from racial equality intensified, too. By the fourth debate in Charleston in central Illinois, Lincoln had had enough. “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making [Black people] voters or jurors,” or politicians or marriage partners, Lincoln insisted. “There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” Abraham Lincoln threw Stephen Douglas on the defensive. Douglas charged Lincoln with changing his views on race to fit the audience: “jet black” in the northern abolitionist part of the state, the “color of a decent mulatto” in the antislavery, anti-abolitionist center, and “almost white” in proslavery southern Illinois. Douglas wanted to keep the discussion on race.
Putting race behind him, Lincoln went on the offensive in the last three debates and steered the discussion toward slavery. In the final debate, in Alton, Illinois, the home of assassinated abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy, Lincoln declared that a vote for Douglas was a vote for expanding slavery, and a vote against “free white people” finding homes and improving their lives by moving west.
7 Illinois Democrats won control of both houses and reelected Douglas in the 1858 midterm elections. Illinois Republicans learned that being branded pro-Black was more politically crippling than being branded proslavery. But in the rest of the North, Republicans did much better. Abraham Lincoln, in Springfield, Illinois; William Lloyd Garrison one thousand miles away in Boston; and other watchers of American politics saw the same obvious results of the elections. In addition to seizing power in the swing states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, Republicans had won big in abolitionist country: small-town New England, “the Yankee West,” and the northern counties along the Great Lakes. They had differing vantage points, differing ideologies, and differing personal and national ambitions, so it is not surprising that Lincoln and Garrison responded differently to the same results.
8 Garrison tamed his criticism of a major political party for the first time in almost thirty years, recognizing that America’s antislavery voters had flocked to the Republican fold. He envisioned its coalition of “incongruous elements” breaking up after losing the 1860 election and the genuinely antislavery politicians taking over. In the meantime, it was his job—it was the job of the movement—to “distinguish the shortcomings of the Republican platform from the promise of the Republican constituency,” that is, to persuade this constituency that there could be no compromise with slavery, and no union with slaveholders. Garrison’s biographer termed this new strategy “political suasion.” Old friends committed to keeping the movement out of politics admonished him, generating heated debates at abolitionist meetings in the late 1850s.
9 In contrast, Lincoln turned away from the Republicans’ anti-slaveryexpansion base and reached for the independents. Republicans in swing states like Illinois started focusing on the much more popular rights of “free labor,” a topic inspired by the 1857 best seller The Impending Crisis of the South by North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper. Slavery needed to end because it was retarding southern economic progress and the opportunities of nonslaveholding Whites, who were oppressed by wealthy enslavers. Helper didn’t “believe in the unity of races.” But he refused to accept the doctrine of polygenesis as a justification to continue slavery. Emancipated Africans, he wrote, should be sent to Africa.
10 Horace Greeley, the nation’s most famous editor, promoted Helper’s book in the nation’s leading newspaper, the New York Tribune. Helper and Greeley partnered in soliciting funds and Republican endorsements to produce a small, more inexpensive Compendium version of The Impending Crisis of the South to distribute during the upcoming election. Widely endorsed and published in July 1859, the Compendium became an instant best-seller in Republican circles, but an instant dartboard in enslaving circles. Helper’s free White labor, antislavery message was everything the Republicans—and Lincoln— were looking for: a way to oppose slavery without being cast as pro-Black.
11 Enslavers were furious about the implications of Helper’s book, which practically called for a united front made up of Free Soilers, abolitionists, and former slaves. That unholy alliance became a reality in October 1859, when abolitionist John Brown and his nineteen-man interracial battalion captured the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, sixty miles northwest of Washington, DC. “General” Harriet Tubman was unable to come as planned, probably because she was suffering one of her recurring fevers. Brown could have used her ingenuity. He selected an area of small-scale farms instead of massive gang-scale plantations, where he could have armed thousands and plotted the next stage of his revolt. Marines led by Colonel Robert E. Lee crushed the rebellion instead and apprehended Brown. Seventeen people perished.
Although enslavers had fought off larger Black slave revolts throughout the tumultuous 1850s, Brown’s revolt affected them deeply. The growing breach in White unity unsettled them into delirium. William Lloyd Garrison initially described the revolt as an “insane,” though “well-intended,” attempt.
But in the weeks after the conflict, he joined with abolitionists in transforming John Brown in the eyes of antislavery northerners from a madman to a “martyr.” Countless Americans came to admire his David-like courage to strike at the mighty and hated Goliath-like slave power. The disdain for violent Black revolutionaries lurked in the shadow of the praises for John Brown, however. Black slave rebels never became martyrs and remained madmen and madwomen. Never before had the leader of a major slave uprising been so praised. Not since Bacon’s Rebellion had the leader of a major antislavery uprising been White.
Millions read John Brown’s final court statement. Brown presented himself as a righteous Christian shepherd who was willing to follow the Golden Rule—willing to lead the dependent sheep out of slavery. On the day of his hanging, December 2, 1859, White and Black northerners mourned to the sounds of church bells for hours.
12
ON FEBRUARY 2, 1860, Jefferson Davis, a senator from Mississippi, presented the southern platform of unlimited states’ rights and enslavers rights to the US Senate. The South needed these resolutions to be passed if they were going to remain in the Stephen Douglas–led Democratic Party and in the Union. Davis could have easily added that southerners believed the federal government should not use its resources to assist Black people in any way. On April 12, 1860, Davis objected to appropriating funds for educating Blacks in Washington, DC. “This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes,” he said, but “by white men for white men.” The bill was based on the false assertion of racial equality, he stated. The “inequality of the white and black races” was “stamped from the beginning.” Adam had driven away the first White criminal, his son Cain, who was “no longer the fit associate of those who were created to exercise dominion over the earth,” Davis lectured the senators. Cain had found in the “land of Nod those to whom his crime had degraded him to an equality.” Apparently, Blacks had lived in the Land of Nod among the “living creatures” God had created before humans. Blacks were later taken on Noah’s ark with other animals. Their overseer: Ham.
13 On the lips of one of America’s most renowned politicians, it looked as if polygenesis had finally become mainstream. In actuality, the days of the notion of separately created human species were numbered. Another pernicious theory of the human species was about to take hold, one that would be used by racist apologists for the next one hundred years.
In August 1860, polygenesist Josiah C. Nott took some time away from raising Alabama’s first medical school (now in Birmingham). He skimmed through a five-hundred-page tome published the previous November in England. It had a long title, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Nott probably knew the author: the eminent, antislavery British marine biologist Charles Darwin.
“The view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained—namely, that each species has been independently created—is erroneous,” Darwin famously declared. “I am fully convinced that species are not immutable.” Recent discoveries were showing, he explained, that humans had originated much earlier than a few thousand years ago. Darwin effectively declared war on biblical chronology and the ruling conception of polygenesis, offering a new ruling idea: natural selection. In the “recurring struggle for existence,” he wrote, “all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.” Darwin did not explicitly claim that the White race had been naturally selected to evolve toward perfection. He hardly spent any writing time on humans in The Origin of Species. He had a grander purpose: proving that all living things the world over were struggling, evolving, spreading, and facing extinction or perfection. Darwin did, however, open the door for bigots to use his theory by referring to “civilized” states, the “savage races of man,” and “half-civilized man,” and calling the natives of southern Africa and their descendants “the lowest savages.” 14 Over the course of the 1860s, the Western reception of Darwin transformed from opposition to skepticism to approval to hailing praise. The sensitive, private, and sickly Darwin let his many friends develop his ideas and engage his critics. The mind of English polymath Herbert Spencer became the ultimate womb for Darwin’s ideas, his writings the amplifier of what came to be known as Social Darwinism. In Principles of Biology in 1864, Spencer coined the iconic phrase “survival of the fittest.” He religiously believed that human behavior was inherited. Superior hereditary traits made the “dominant races” better fit to survive than the “inferior races.” Spencer spent the rest of his life calling for governments to get out of the way of the struggle for existence. In his quest to limit government, Spencer ignored the discriminators, probably knowing they were rigging the struggle for existence. Longing for ideas to justify the nation’s growing inequities, American elites firmly embraced Charles Darwin and fell head over heels for Herbert Spencer.
15 Charles Darwin’s scholarly circle grew immeasurably over the 1860s, encircling the entire Western world. The Origin of Species even changed the life of Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton. The father of modern statistics, Galton created the concepts of correlation and regression toward the mean and blazed the trail for the use of questionnaires and surveys to collect data.
In Hereditary Genius (1869), he used his data to popularize the myth that parents passed on hereditary traits like intelligence that environment could not alter. “The average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own,” Galton wrote. He coined the phrase “nature versus nurture,” claiming that nature was undefeated. Galton urged governments to rid the world of all naturally unselected peoples, or at least stop them from reproducing, a social policy he called “eugenics” in 1883.
16 Darwin did not stop his adherents from applying the principles of natural selection to humans. However, the largely unknown co-discoverer of natural selection did. By 1869, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace professed that human spirituality and the equal capacity of healthy brains took humans outside of natural selection. Then again, as Wallace made a name for himself as the most egalitarian English scientist of his generation, he still professed European culture to be superior to any other.
17 Darwin attempted to prove once and for all that natural selection applied to humans in Descent of Man, released in 1871. In the book, he was all over the place as he related race and intelligence. He spoke about the “mental similarity between the most distinct races of man,” and then claimed that “the American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans differ as much from each other in mind as any three races that can be named.” He noted that he was “incessantly struck” by some South Americans and “a full-blood negro” acquaintance who impressed him with “how similar their minds were to ours.” On racial evolution, he said that the “civilized races” had “extended, and are now everywhere extending, their range, so as to take the place of the lower races.” A future evolutionary break would occur between “civilized” Whites and “some ape”—unlike like the present break “between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” Both assimilationists and segregationists hailed Descent of Man. Assimilationists read Darwin as saying Blacks could one day evolve into White civilization; segregationists read him as saying Blacks were bound for extinction.
18
IN APRIL 1860, De Bow’s Review printed the results of a “search [for] a moral, happy, and voluntarily industrious community of free negroes.” The reporter apparently surveyed Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad, British Guiana, Antilles, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Thomas, St. John, Antigua, Peru, Mexico, Panama, Mauritius, England, Canada, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, but found that “no such community exists upon the face of the earth.” 19 The proslavery magazine’s lead story that April 1860 spoke of “the Secession of the south and a new confederation necessary to the preservation of constitutional liberty and social morality.” Not yet ready to secede from the Union, southern Democrats seceded from the Democratic Party and fielded Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky as their presidential nominee for the 1860 election.
20 Northern and southern Democrats came to their nominating conventions unwilling to moderate their views for the sake of victory, but moderation for victory headlined the Republican convention. Delegates came ready to erase the “Black Republican” label once and for all. Abraham Lincoln helped them do just that. His humble life appealed to working-class voters, his principled stance against slavery appealed to radicals, and his principled stance against Black voting and racial equality appealed to anti-Black Free Soilers. With their man in place, Republicans passed a platform that pledged not to challenge southern slavery. The pavement of the platform, what the Republicans intended to run on, was the declaration of freedom as “the normal condition of all the territories.” Praising Lincoln as “a man of will and nerve,” Frederick Douglass refused to vote for him, knowing his horrible Illinois record on Black rights. William Lloyd Garrison ignored the promoters playing up Lincoln’s antislavery credentials. Lincoln would “do nothing to offend the South,” Garrison scoffed.
21 Days before the November 1860 election, 30,000 Democrats processed through New York City carrying torches, placards, and banners that blared: “No Negro Equality” and “Free Love, Free Niggers, and Free Women.” But the Republicans managed to convince enough northerners that the party stood against extending slavery and Black civil rights. Garrison spoke for many when he hoped that the election of Abraham Lincoln as the sixteenth president of the United States signified a “much deeper sentiment” in the North, which “in the process of time must ripen into more decisive action” against slavery. It was exactly what enslavers feared.
22 In an open letter to a southerner on December 15, 1860, Lincoln tried to stop the secession talk. There was only one “substantial difference” between the North and the South, Lincoln wrote. “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted.” Proslavery southerners were unlikely to listen to Lincoln on this question. They heard the secessionist talk from their preachers, from their church bodies, from their periodicals, from their politicians—nowhere more so than in South Carolina, the only state with a Black majority. Enslavers knew that abolitionism—and the loss of federal power, White proslavery unity, and the ability to spread out their enslaved population—all hindered their ability to control the teeming slave resistance that had not relented in 1860. South Carolina secessionists only had to utter one word to induce fear—Haiti—its meaning well known.
While Garrison considered secession to be suicidal, some enslavers considered remaining in the Union to be suicidal. In the final week of 1860, South Carolina enslavers took drastic steps to ensure their safety.
23 CHAPTER 17
History’s Emancipator
ON DECEMBER 24, 1860, South Carolina legislators alluded to the Declaration of Independence when stating their reasons for secession.
Abolitionists were “inciting” contented captives to “servile insurrection,” and “elevating to citizenships” Blacks who constitutionally were “incapable of becoming citizens.” South Carolina’s secession from the United States did not just mean the loss of a state, and soon a region, but the loss of the region’s land and wealth. The South had millions of acres of land that were worth more in purely economic terms than the almost 4 million enslaved human beings who were toiling on its plantations in 1860. With their financial investments in the institution of slavery and their dependence on its productivity, northern lenders and manufacturers were crucial sponsors of slavery. And so, they pushed their congressmen onto their compromising knees to restore the Union. Garrison called all the “Union-saving efforts” of December 1860 and January 1861 “simply idiotic.” Whether smart or idiotic, they failed. The rest of the Deep South seceded in January and February 1861.
Florida’s secessionists issued a Declaration of Causes maintaining that Blacks must be enslaved because everywhere “their natural tendency” was toward “idleness, vagrancy and crime.” 1 In February 1861, Jefferson Davis took the presidential oath of the new Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Alabama. In his Inaugural Address in March, Lincoln did not object to the proposed Thirteenth Amendment, which would make slavery untouchable and potentially reunite the union. But Lincoln did swear that he would never allow the extension of slavery. On March 21, the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens, responded to Lincoln’s pledge in an extemporaneous speech. The Confederate government, he declared, rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” This “great . . . truth,” Stephens said, was the “corner-stone” of the Confederacy. The speech became known as his “Cornerstone Speech.” 2 In the new literature or propaganda for southern adults and children, Confederates built upon this cornerstone with two stock characters: returning runaways who realized slavery was better than freedom; and heroic Black Confederates defending slavery. There have always been individual truths to support every generalized racist lie. It is true that some Black opportunists sought favor if slavery persisted by supporting the Confederate cause. It is true that some starving free Blacks supported the rebels for lifesaving provisions. It is true that Black racists who believed that Black people were better off enslaved sometimes voluntarily aided the Confederacy. The number of voluntary Black Confederates? Probably not many. But no one can say for sure.
3 Three weeks after Alexander Stephens laid the cornerstone, the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. On April 15, 1861, Lincoln raised the Union Army to put down the “insurrection,” which, by the end of May, included Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. No matter what Lincoln did not say about slavery, and no matter what blame the Democrats put on abolitionists, to Black people and to abolitionists the Civil War was over slavery and enslavers were to blame. On the Fourth of July at the annual abolitionist picnic in Framingham, Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison repudiated “colorphobia” for holding back northerners from supporting a war of emancipation. “Let us see, in every slave, Jesus himself,” Garrison cried out.
4 The Weekly Anglo-African forecasted that the millions of enslaved Africans would not be “impassive observers.” Lincoln might deem it “a white man’s war,” but enslaved Africans had “a clear and decided idea of what they want—Liberty.” 5 The Weekly Anglo-African was right. First dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of runaways fled to Union forces in the summer of 1861. But Union soldiers enforced the Fugitive Slave Act with such an iron fist that, according to one Maryland newspaper, more runaways were returned in three months of the war “than during the whole of Mr. Buchanan’s presidential term.” Northerners listened uneasily to these reports of returning runaways side by side with reports of southern Blacks being thrust into work for the Confederate military.
6 After the Confederates humiliated Union soldiers in the First Battle of Bull Run in northern Virginia on July 21, 1861, proposals about enslaved Africans’ potential war utility besieged Congress and the Lincoln administration. Initially, Congress passed a resolution emphatically declaring that the war was not “for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights and or established institutions of these states.” But war demands soon changed their calculations. In early August, the Republican-dominated Congress was forced to pass the Confiscation Act over the objections of Democrats and border-state Unionists. Lincoln reluctantly signed the bill, which said that slaveholders forfeited their ownership of any property, including enslaved Africans, used by the Confederate military. The Union could confiscate such people as “contraband.” Legally, they were no longer enslaved; nor were they freed. They could, however, work for the Union Army for wages and live in the abysmal conditions of the contraband camps.
One out of every four of the 1.1 million men, women, and children in the contraband camps died in one of the worst public health disasters in US history. Only 138 physicians were assigned to care for them. Some physicians called contrabands “animals” and blamed their mass deaths on inherent Black debilities, not the extreme inadequacies of sanitation, food, and medical care.
7 Despite the horrendous conditions, the number of Black contrabands increased every month. Slaves were running from the abysmal conditions of the plantations, particularly after Union soldiers moved into the more densely populated Deep South. The New York Times reported at the end of 1861 that enslaved Africans were “earnestly desirous of liberty.” The growing number of runaways proved that Confederate reports of contented captives was mere propaganda. This form of Black resistance—not persuasion—finally started to eradicate the racist idea of the docile Black person in northern minds.
President Lincoln did not encourage the runaways in his December 1861 Message to Congress. But he did request funding for colonizing runaways and compensating Unionist emancipators to ensure that the war did not “degenerate” into a “remorseless revolutionary struggle.” Furious, Garrison shrieked in a letter that Lincoln did not have “a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins.” 8 Every week in the spring of 1862, thousands of fugitives were cutting through forests, reaching the southern Union lines, and leaving behind paralyzed plantations and an increasingly divided Confederacy. Some soldiers deserted the Confederate Army. Some of the Confederate deserters joined enslaved Africans to wage revolts against their common enemies: wealthy planters. And some upcountry non-slaveholding Whites had already become disillusioned fighting this slaveholders’ war. Alexander H. Jones of eastern North Carolina helped organize the 10,000-man Heroes of America, which laid an “underground railroad” for White Unionists in Confederate territories to escape. “The fact is,” Jones wrote in a secret antiracist circular, referring to the rich planters, that “these bombastic, highfalutin aristocratic fools have been in the habit of driving negroes and poor helpless white people until they think . . . that they themselves are superior; [and] hate, deride and suspicion the poor.” 9 Up north, Radical Republicans pushed through a horde of antislavery measures that southerners and their northern defenders had opposed for years.
By the summer of 1862, slavery was prohibited in the territories, the ongoing transatlantic slave trade had been suppressed, the United States recognized Haiti and Liberia, abolition had arrived in Washington, DC, and the Union Army was forbidden from returning fugitives to the South. The Fugitive Slave Act had been effectively repealed. And then came the kicker: the Second Confiscation Act, passed and sent to Lincoln on July 17. The bill declared all Confederate-owned Africans who escaped to Union lines or who resided in territories occupied by the Union to be “forever free of their servitude.” The Springfield Republican realized the bill’s power, stating that enslaved Africans would become free “as fast as the armies penetrate the South section.” But they were not penetrating the South fast enough, and Union casualties were piling up. Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson appeared to be headed for sparsely defended Washington, DC, scaring Lincoln to death.
The Second Confiscation Act was a turning point, setting Union policy on the road leading to emancipation. The war and the failure to convince border states about the benefits of a gradual, compensated emancipation had sapped Lincoln’s patience and the patience of Congress. Lincoln had finally opened up to the idea of proclaiming emancipation because it would save the Union (not because it would save Black people). Cries of Unionist planters to salvage slavery amid the war increasingly rankled him. “Broken eggs cannot be mended,” he snapped to a Louisiana planter.
On July 22, 1862, five days after signing the Second Confiscation Act, Lincoln submitted to his cabinet a new draft order, effective January 1, 1863.
“All persons held as slaves within any state [under rebel control] shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free.” Lincoln’s staff was stunned and became quickly divided over the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The cabinet made no immediate decision, but word got out. Not many Americans took the proclamation seriously.
10 Talk of runaways and contrabands and emancipation in the spring and summer of 1862 invariably led to talk about colonization. Northern racists started looking to colonization as the only possibility for freed Blacks. They feared Black people sprinting north, invading their communities and becoming “roaming, vicious vagabonds,” as the Chicago Tribune put it.
Colonization provisions were stapled onto the Second Confiscation Act and the 1862 decree abolishing slavery in the nation’s capital. Colonization designs were behind the United States opening diplomatic relations with Haiti and Liberia that year. In their allocation measures in 1862, Congress set aside $600,000 (about $14 million today) to eject Black people from the country.
Black people made their opposition to colonization loud and clear in the summer of 1862. Lincoln, desiring their support, welcomed five Black men to the President’s House on August 14, 1862. The delegation was led by the Reverend Joseph Mitchell, the commissioner of emigration for the Interior Department. The discussion quickly turned into a lecture. The Black race could never “be placed on an equality with the white race” in the United States, Lincoln professed. Whether this “is right or wrong I need not discuss,” he said. Lincoln then blamed the presence of Blacks for the war. If Blacks leave, all will be well, Lincoln touted. “Sacrifice something of your present comfort,” Lincoln advised, asking the group to press their fellow Blacks to make the trek to Liberia and start anew. To refuse would be “extremely selfish.” Although the five Black men apparently found Lincoln’s views persuasive, Lincoln could not persuade the women and men who read his lecture in the nation’s newspapers. William Lloyd Garrison angrily tossed Lincoln’s words into The Liberator’s “Refuge of Oppression” section, where he often put the words of slaveholders. It was not their color that made “their presence here intolerable,” Garrison declared. It was “their being free!” To Frederick Douglass, Lincoln showed “his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy!” 11
SIX DAYS AFTER meeting with the Black delegation, Lincoln gained an opportunity to emphatically declare his views on war, emancipation, and Black people. The nation’s most powerful editor, Horace Greeley, inserted an open letter to the president in his leading New York Tribune on August 20, 1862. Greeley had been as responsible for Lincoln’s election as anyone. He urged Lincoln to enforce the “emancipation provisions” of the Second Confiscation Act.
12 “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” Lincoln replied in Greeley’s rival paper, Washington’s National Intelligencer. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” In the New York Tribune, rising abolitionist Wendell Phillips hammered Lincoln’s remarks as “the most disgraceful document that ever came from the head of a free people.” 13 With the war looking like a never-ending highway, the midterm elections approaching, and runaways crippling Confederates faster than Union bullets, Lincoln gathered his cabinet on September 22, 1862. After laying his poker face on Americans for months, he finally showed his cards—cards William Lloyd Garrison never believed he had. Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. For slaveholding Union states and any rebel state wishing to return, Lincoln once again offered gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization. For those states remaining in rebellion on January 1, 1863, Lincoln proclaimed that “all persons held as slaves . . . shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” 14 “Thank God!” blared the Pittsburgh Gazette. “We shall cease to be hypocrites and pretenders,” proclaimed Ralph Waldo Emerson. William Lloyd Garrison enjoyed the sound of “forever free,” but little else. Lincoln, he fumed in private, could “do nothing for freedom in a direct manner, but only by circumlocution and delay.” 15 In his Message to Congress on December 1, 1862, Lincoln laid out a more detailed plan for gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization. Any slave state could remain or return to the Union if it pledged loyalty and a willingness to abolish slavery at any time before January 1, 1900. The US government would compensate such states for freeing their human property, but if they decided to reintroduce or tolerate enslavement, they would have to repay the emancipation compensation. “Timely adoption” of gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization “would bring restoration,” Lincoln pleaded. The Confederate leaders largely rejected Lincoln’s proposals, emboldened by their stunning war victories in mid-December.
16 Abraham Lincoln retired to his office on the afternoon of January 1, 1863.
He read over the Emancipation Proclamation, “a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion,” as he termed it, that emancipated “all persons held as slaves” and allowed Black men to join the Union Army. As Lincoln read the final statement, his abolitionist treasury secretary, Salmon B.
Chase, suggested that he add some morality. Lincoln acquiesced, adding, “Upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.” In the next two years, Lincoln made himself available to writers, artists, photographers, and sculptors who memorialized him for the historical record as the Great Emancipator. With his proclamation, Lincoln emancipated about 50,000 Black people in the Union-occupied Confederate areas that January.
He kept enslaved the nearly half-million African people in border states, in order to maintain their owners’ loyalty. He also kept enslaved the roughly 300,000 African people in the newly exempted formerly Confederate areas, in order to establish their owners’ loyalty. More than 2 million African people on Confederate plantations remained enslaved because Lincoln had no power to free them. Democrats mocked Lincoln for “purposefully” making “the proclamation inoperative in all places where . . . the slaves [were] accessible,” and operative “only where he has notoriously no power to execute it,” as the New York World put it.
But enslaved Africans now had the power to emancipate themselves. By the end of 1863, 400,000 Black people had escaped their plantations and found Union lines, running toward the freedom guaranteed by the proclamation.
17
SOME BLACK CHRISTIANS had long prayed for a Great Emancipator, and they believed they had found him in Abraham Lincoln. Upper-crust Bostonians erupted in pandemonium when news of Lincoln’s signature reached the afternoon Grand Jubilee Concert at Music Hall on January 1, 1863. After the hat throwing, the handkerchief waving, the hugging, the shouting, the stomping, the crying, the smiling, and the kissing, the attendees began their own jubilee concert. “Three cheers for GARRISON!” someone roared. Six thousand eyes turned and searched out the fifty-seven-year-old editor who had prayed so many times for this day to come. He leaned over the balcony wall, waved, and beamed a smile that warmed New England.
Garrison praised the Emancipation Proclamation as a “turning point.” From that day forward, Garrison became a “tenacious Unionist,” as ardent a defender and deifier of Abraham Lincoln as any Republican. Whereas before he had slammed Lincoln for his sluggishness and indecision, Garrison now began to praise Lincoln’s “cautious” and “considerate” manner.
18 Some people did not worship Lincoln that night, and were especially critical of the very same cautiousness that Garrison praised. The Black-owned San Francisco Pacific Appeal detested this “halfway measure,” insisting that “every bondsman” should have been emancipated, and “every chain . . .
broken.” 19 CHAPTER 18 Ready for Freedom?
IN LATE APRIL 1863, Willie Garrison, the editor’s second-oldest son, brought home an acquaintance: German immigrant Henry Villard, one of the war’s most talented young journalists. Villard had just come from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, where he had observed the war’s first emancipated people and the first regiments of Black troops. Villard shared with the Garrisons his racist observations of the “half-heathenish blacks” in coastal South Carolina. As he did so, he condemned the Blacks’ “savage superstitions” and described their “fetish worship” in ways that showed he did not understand their African religions or the ways in which they were remolding Christianity to suit their cultures. Villard derisively called their Gullah language “jargon” and looked down on them for not comprehending “our English.” Using the same line of thinking, the Sea Island Blacks could have called Villard’s language “jargon” and his religion “savage” and looked down on him for not comprehending their “Gullah” or their gods.
Nevertheless, Villard’s observations confirmed what Garrison had long believed, that “nothing else could be expected, indeed, from creatures who had been purposely kept in the conditions of brutes,” as Villard said.
1 For years, northern racists had agreed, almost religiously, that enslaved Africans were like brutes. They disagreed, among themselves, about the capacity of Black people for freedom, independence, and civilization. This racist northern debate—segregationists adamant about Black brutes’ incapacity, assimilationists like Garrison and Villard adamant about Black brutes’ capacity—became the primary conversation in the wake of emancipation. Hardly anyone in a position of authority—whether in the economic elite, the political elite, the cultural elite, or the intellectual elite— brought antiracist ideas of equal Black people into this conversation.
2 During his Boston stay, Villard accompanied the Garrisons about thirteen miles south to watch the drilling exercises of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. In January 1863, Lincoln had asked the Massachusetts governor to organize a Black regiment. “Men of Color, to Arms!” became the rallying point for Black male leaders. By fighting in the army, Black men were made to believe that they could earn their right to citizenship—as if Black men had to—or could—earn their rights. Black male leaders spoke endlessly of soldiers vindicating Black manhood, which itself rested on the racist assumption that there was something truly lacking in Black manhood that could only be ameliorated by killing or being killed by Confederates. At the same time, some White Unionists posed having to fight “shoulder to shoulder, with this seething, sooty negro,” as a threat to their superior manhood, as New York City’s Democratic congressman James Brooks complained. It was a nasty convergence of racist and sexist ideas on the part of both Black and White men. By the war’s end, almost 200,000 Black men had served in the war. They had been killed by the thousands and had killed thousands of Confederates. So much death as the weak Black male stereotype lived on.
3 When Indiana’s governor commended Black troops for bringing back their equipment when White troops did not, the Indianapolis State Sentinel registered an all-out effort to “disparage the white soldiers and elevate the negro soldiers.” White soldiers never reported to Black officers, they faced more combat, were rarely enslaved or killed when captured, and were paid more money. Still, the accusation of Black favoritism was unending.
Racist ideas were easy to revise, especially as the demands of discriminators changed. Democrats changed their racist ideas to properly attack Black soldiers. While before the war they had justified slavery by stressing Black male physical superiority, during the war they promoted White soldiers and stressed White male physical superiority. While before the war they had justified slavery by deeming Blacks naturally docile and well equipped to take orders, during the war they stressed that Blacks were uncontrollable brutes, arguing against the Republicans, who said that naturally docile Blacks made great soldiers. Republicans often credited superb Black performances on the battlefield to their superb submissiveness and to their excellent White commanders. Both sides used the same language, the same racist ideas at different points, to make their case, reinforcing the language and ideas with plausible examples on the battlefield.
4 After the Union’s excitement over winning at Gettysburg in early July 1863, and the success at Vicksburg, which divided the Confederacy into two, depressing war news came from South Carolina. On July 18, 1863, almost half of the Black 54th Massachusetts had been killed, captured, or wounded while leading the failed assault on Fort Wagner. The beachhead fortification defended the southern approach to the citadel of the South, Charleston. Six hundred tired and hungry Blacks had sprinted in a twilight of bullets and shells toward “maddened” Confederates and engaged in ferocious hand-tohand combat. The stories of this battle shot through the North almost as quickly as the Confederacy murdered the captured. The New York Tribune accurately predicted that the battle would be the decisive turning point in the northern debate over Blacks’ capacity to fight. As it turned out, the battle was decisive in more ways than one.
5 Catholic publicist Orestes A. Brownson had been one of many powerful Americans advocating emancipation as a war measure and colonization as a postwar measure, and he had advised Lincoln accordingly in 1862. After Fort Wagner, Brownson had to admit that the “negro, having shed his blood in defense of the country, has the right to regard it as his country. And hence deportation or forced colonization is henceforth out of the question.” 6 President Lincoln still held out hope for colonization early in 1863. He advanced money to a Black minister establishing a settlement in Liberia, and he complained to an Ohio congressman that he did not “know what we should do with these people—Negroes—after peace came.” War demands for ablebodied soldiers, and the postwar demands for able-bodied and loyal southern labor and voters, had begun to shift public opinion away from colonization.
The debacle of the Lincoln administration’s colonization schemes sealed the movement’s fate. By July 1863, Lincoln was speaking about the “failure” of colonization. In 1864, Congress froze its appropriation for colonization, and Lincoln abandoned it as a potential postwar policy. The Chicago Tribune confidently declared “The End of Colonization.” But it was not the end of racism. The Lincoln administration’s progression of racism meant confining these loyal Black voters and laborers to the South, away from the northern and western free White soil.
7 The reconstruction of the Union seemed to be on everyone’s mind, including abolitionists. In late January 1864, Garrison challenged an antiLincoln resolution at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society meeting.
Garrison’s longtime friend Wendell Phillips, primed to take the helm of abolitionism from his old friend and mentor, labeled Lincoln “a halfconverted, honest Western Whig, trying to be an abolitionist.” As Garrison stared down emancipation, Phillips looked past emancipation at the reconstruction of the United States. Back in December 1863, Lincoln had announced his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which offered restoration of rights (except slaveholding) to all Confederates taking the loyalty oath. When loyalty levels reached 10 percent, states could establish governments that restricted civil rights for Black residents, Lincoln had proposed. But this proposal “frees the slave and ignores the negro,” Phillips snapped. The sizable free biracial community of New Orleans snapped, too, demanding voting rights. These biracial activists separated “their struggle from that of the Negroes,” said an observer. “In their eyes, they were nearer to the white man; they were more advanced than the slave in all respects.” Overtures to Louisiana Whites failed, and biracial activists had no choice but to swallow their racist pride and ally with emancipated Blacks by the end of 1864.
8 Garrison’s principled courage, which had made him a legend when emancipation seemed so far away, had been replaced by practical fear in 1864 when abolition seemed so close. Garrison feared Democrats gobbling up enough war-weary and anti-emancipation voters to seize presidential power, negotiate a war settlement, and maintain slavery. “Let us possess our souls in patience,” he wrote. William Lloyd Garrison—the longtime evangelist of immediate emancipation—counseled patience.
9 Maryland Unionists went ahead with plans to reconstruct their state without slavery. To encourage them, Lincoln made the short trip to Baltimore and gave one of the most insightful abolitionist speeches of his career on April 18, 1864. He answered the enduring American paradox: How could the land of freedom also be the land of slavery? “With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor,” he said, “while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.” Lincoln used an analogy for clarification. “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one,” he said. “Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty.” Lincoln’s freedom analogy, vividly evocative of his self-identity as the Great Emancipator, rewrote current events. Most enslaved Africans were hardly sheep, waiting on the Union shepherds to come to their plantations and lead them to freedom. The Union lines proved, if anything in this analogy, to be the stable of freedom. While Lincoln emancipated a minority of sheep, most fought off or slipped away from the Confederate wolves on their plantations on their own, and then ran to freedom on their own, and then into the Union Army on their own to put down the Confederate wolves.
10 Since issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had begun to imagine himself (as Garrison long had) as the liberating shepherd of Black people, who were in need of civilizing direction. On November 1, 1864, Maryland’s emancipation day, the freed people paraded to the President’s House. Lincoln addressed them, urging them to “improve yourself, both morally and intellectually,” while supporting Maryland’s new constitution, which prevented them from improving themselves socioeconomically.
Maryland’s constitution barred Blacks from voting and from attending public schools. The constitution also sent thousands of Black children into long-term indentures to their former masters, against their parents’ objections. Lincoln seemed to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Jefferson. Pay lip service to the cause of Black uplift, while supporting the racist policies that ensured the downfall of Black people.
11 In setting out the terms of emancipation, Maryland (and Louisiana) ignored the recommendations of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (AFIC), which had been authorized by the War Department at the request of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner. In its widely publicized final report in May 1864, the commission called for equal rights, laws allowing Blacks to purchase land, and the creation of a temporary Bureau of Emancipation to shepherd freed people toward self-reliance. One commissioner, Boston abolitionist James McKaye, advocated redistributing confiscated Confederate land to landless Whites and emancipated people.
In promoting equal rights, McKaye and the other two commissioners, Indiana reformer Robert Dale Owen and New England abolitionist Dr.
Samuel Gridley Howe, never entertained the idea that Blacks and Whites were truly equal. They had been charged with answering questions regarding the “condition and capacity” of Blacks for freedom and free labor, a task whose real aim was assuaging Whites who feared the effects of emancipation.
Are Blacks naturally lazy? Would Blacks invade and ruin the North? Could Black labor be more profitable in freedom than in slavery? In his AFIC report on runaways in Canada, Howe forecasted that Blacks “will co-operate powerfully with whites from the North in re-organizing the industry of the South.” However, “they will dwindle,” this Social Darwinist made sure to note, “and gradually disappear from the peoples of this continent.” Commissioner Owen eased fearful northerners’ anxieties by speaking more to the potential contributions of African Americans in AFIC’s final report. Their “softening influence,” drawn from their “womanly” disposition, would one day improve the hardened “national character.” The Anglo-Saxon “head predominates over the heart,” he wrote. “The African race is in many respects the reverse of this.” A decade after Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, abolitionists still viewed Black people through its racist lens.
12 The AFIC reports were the most popular works to appear amid the sudden rush of emancipation literature about the future of Black people. Observations noting that slavery had not turned Blacks into brutes had a home in the postemancipation reports, for anyone willing to wade through all of the racist testimonies to reach them. Before supervising the contrabands of Virginia, one Union Army captain, C. B. Wilder, admitted, “I did not think [Black people] had so much brain.” His experiences had taught him that “they have got as many brains as you or I have, though they have an odd way of showing it.” At the end of 1864, 78 percent of the contrabands under Wilder’s supervision were “independent of assistance.” A superintendent of contrabands in the Mississippi Valley described Black intelligence to be “as good as that of men, women & children anywhere, of any color, who cannot read.” 13 William Lloyd Garrison was not among those who questioned the brutishness of former slaves. For thirty years, Garrison had moved northerners toward abolitionism by sensationalizing the idea that slavery made people into brutes. Like any racist, he dismissed the evidence that undermined his theory, and hardened his theory with evidence that supported it. In July 1864, Garrison defended Lincoln’s support of laws that restricted the citizenship rights of Blacks. “According to the laws of development and progress, it is not practicable,” Garrison said, to give undeveloped Black men the vote.
14
GARRISON HAD A difficult time defending Lincoln in the summer of 1864.
Democratic editors and politicians were blitzing voters on the dangers of continued war, emancipated Black people invading the North, and Republican-supported miscegenation. War morale had dropped to its lowest level. A Confederate regiment neared Washington, DC, and Union armies were hardly winning battles. The war news got so bad that on August 22, 1864, the Republican National Committee determined that Lincoln could not be reelected. No one had to tell that to Lincoln.
“I am a beaten man, unless we can have some great victory,” Lincoln reportedly said on August 31. Two days later, General William T. Sherman sacked Atlanta. Subsequent victories boosted voter support for the Republicans, and they consolidated their support by matching the Democrats’ anti-Black ire. Repulsed, Black Americans came together for their first national convention in a decade. They blasted Republicans for remaining “largely under the influence of the prevailing contempt for the character and rights of the colored man.” In spite of—or maybe because of—Black Americans’ rebuke of Republicans, roughly 55 percent of Unionist Americans voted for Lincoln, and his party claimed three-quarters of the Congress.
Forty-five percent of Unionist Americans voted for the Democrats to restore a union with slaveholders.
15 A week after Lincoln’s reelection, General Sherman departed captured Atlanta and steered 60,000 Union soldiers in the fabled March to the Sea.
Sherman put his total war policies into full effect. The soldiers scorched the Confederate earth—the military installments, communications networks, plantations—everything in their path. Twenty thousand runaways joined the March to the Sea. Reporters telegraphed news of his successful victories to thoroughly pleased Unionist northerners. By Christmas, Sherman and his tens of thousands of soldiers and runaways had entered Savannah—and the hearts of millions.
Secretary of War Edwin McMasters Stanton arrived in Savannah after the New Year and urged General Sherman to meet with local Blacks over their future. Meeting with twenty leaders, mostly Baptist and Methodist ministers, on January 12, 1865, General Sherman received a crash course on their definitions of slavery and freedom. Slavery meant “receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent,” said the group’s spokesman, Garrison Frazier (The Liberator editor’s name was everywhere).
Freedom was “placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor.” To accomplish this—to be truly free—we must “have land.” When asked whether they desired interracial communities, Frazier shared their preference “to live by ourselves.” There was “a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over.” Black people all over the South were saying this to Union officials: Do not abolish slavery and leave us landless. Do not force us to work for our former masters and call that freedom. They distinguished between abolishing slavery and freeing people. You can only set us free by providing us with land to “till . . . by our own labor,” they declared. In offering postwar policy, Black people were rewriting what it meant to be free. And, in antiracist fashion, they were rejecting integration as a race relations strategy that involved Blacks showing Whites their equal humanity. They were rejecting uplift suasion— rejecting the job of working to undo the racist ideas of Whites by not performing stereotypes. Racist ideas, they were saying, were only in the eyes of the beholder, and only the beholders of racist ideas were responsible for their release.
16 Savannah Blacks did not mention this, but millions of White settlers who had acquired western land, confiscated from rebel native communities over the years, had been freed. These Savannah Blacks—their peers across the South—were only asking for the same from rebel Confederate communities.
But racist ideas rationalized the racist policy. White settlers on governmentprovided land were deemed receivers of American freedom; Black people, receivers of American handouts. Whenever talks earlier in the war touched on distributing land to Black people, Americans showed a respect for the landed rights of warring Confederates that they rarely showed for the landed rights of peaceful Native Americans. Since the federal government had started selling confiscated and abandoned southern land to private owners in 1863, more than 90 percent had gone to northern Whites over the widespread protests of local Blacks.
17 Four days after he met with Savannah Blacks, General Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 to rid his camps of runaways and punish Confederates. He opened settlements for Black families on forty-acre plots of land on the Sea Islands and a large slice of the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia. By June 1865, 40,000 people had been settled on the plots and had been given old army mules. Sherman’s field order was not the first of its kind. Black squatters on the Mississippi land of Jefferson Davis’s family had formed their own government and swung a cotton profit of $160,000. “Davis Bend” became a testament of what Savannah Blacks were saying in those days: all Black people needed was to be left alone, secure on their own lands and guaranteed their own rights.
And yet, for so many racist Americans, it was inconceivable that Black people had not been damaged by slavery: that Black people could dance into freedom without skipping a beat. General John C. Robinson worried about landowning “sluggish” Blacks preventing “the energy and industry of the North” from utilizing the valuable acreage. Assimilationists Frederick Douglass and Horace Greeley rebuked Sherman’s order, calling for interracial communities and ignoring the desires of local Blacks. Greeley wrote in his New York Tribune on January 30, 1865, that southern Blacks, “like their fellows at the North,” must be “aided by contact with white civilization to become good citizens and enlightened men.” 18 President Lincoln did not overturn Sherman’s field order; nor did he offer his public support or disapproval. At the time, Lincoln was busy expending his political energy on the House of Representatives. It paid off. On January 31, 1865, House members passed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. The eruption of Republicans on the House floor—all the hugging, and dancing, and crying, and smiling, and shouting—foreshadowed emancipation parties and meetings across the United States that night and for nights to come.
The Thirteenth Amendment brought comfort to a weary emancipationcentered activist who was bickering with abolitionists pressing for Black civil rights. Days before the amendment’s passage, Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips had passionately objected to readmitting Louisiana at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society meeting. To deny Blacks in Louisiana voting rights was “to brand us with the stigma of inferiority,” Douglass intoned. Defending Louisiana’s readmission and Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison argued back that suffrage was a “conventional right . . . not to be confused with the natural right” to liberty. Political equality was bound to come someday, he explained, but only after Black “industrial and educational development.” 19 On March 3, 1865, Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, or the Freedmen’s Bureau, heeding the principal recommendation of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission.
Quite possibly the most difficult duty the bureau had been given was to establish racial equality before the law in places where “to kill a negro they do not deem murder; to debauch a negro woman they do not think fornication; to take the property away from a Negro, they do not consider robbery,” as one Union colonel observed. Another Union general, Oliver Otis Howard, was given charge of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The New England native believed that emancipated Blacks wished to be dependent on government because they were used to being dependent on their masters. When the bureau was dissolved in 1869, General Howard bragged that his agency had not been a “pauperizing agency,” since so “few” had been assisted. Officials of an assisting agency bragging about not assisting people? It only made sense in the context of racist ideas. But the fact that the bureau did help some people, and created some semblance of equal opportunity, was too much for segregationists like Dr. Josiah C. Nott. In an 1866 open letter to Howard, Nott stammered, “All the power of the Freedmen’s Bureau or ‘gates of hell’ cannot prevail” against the permanent natural laws that kept Black people from creating civilization.
20
ON APRIL 3, 1865, Robert E. Lee’s army stopped defending Richmond. The next day, President Lincoln walked those same streets. Black people who had freed themselves ran up to him, fell on their knees, kissed his hands, and lifted Lincoln up as their “Messiah.” Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner hoped their outpouring of praise would finally convince Lincoln to support Black suffrage. Black people had loftier goals: “All was equal,” someone said. “All the land belongs to the Yankees now and they gwine divide it out among de colored people.” 21 On April 9, Lee’s army surrendered, ending the Civil War. “Slavery is dead,” announced the Cincinnati Enquirer. “The negro is not, there is our misfortune.” On April 11, Lincoln delivered his reconstruction plans before a sizable crowd in front of the President’s House. In defending the readmission of Louisiana, the president recognized that it “was unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored men.” He expressed his preference for bestowing voting rights on “the very intelligent” Blacks and Black “soldiers.” 22 Never before had an American president expressed his preference for even limited Black suffrage. “That means nigger citizenship,” murmured a twenty-six-year-old actor, from a family of famous thespians in Maryland.
John Wilkes Booth and his Confederate conspirators had planned to kidnap Lincoln and demand the release of Confederate troops. “Now, by God,” Booth reportedly said, staring savagely at Lincoln, “I’ll put him through.” On April 14, Mary and Abraham Lincoln took in a play, Our American Cousin, from his presidential booth at Ford’s Theatre. When Lincoln’s bodyguard stepped away sometime after 10 p.m., Booth crept up behind Lincoln and shot a bullet into Lincoln’s skull.
23 It was Good Friday, 1865, and Lincoln passed the next morning as the crucified Great Emancipator. “Lincoln died for us,” remarked a Black South Carolinian. “Christ died for we, and me believe him de same mans.” 24 With emancipation assured, William Lloyd Garrison retired three weeks after Lincoln’s death. “My vocation, as an Abolitionist, thank God, is ended,” he said. Other abolitionists refused to retire with him. American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) members refused Garrison’s request to dissolve, gave his presidential chair to Wendell Phillips, and remade their new slogan: “No Reconstruction without Negro Suffrage.” AASS members had high expectations for Lincoln’s replacement: a Tennessee Democrat born into poverty, who had once signaled to Blacks, “I will indeed be your Moses,” and who had once stammered to planters, “Tall poppies must be struck down.” 25 CHAPTER 19 Reconstructing Slavery
PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON issued his Reconstruction proclamations on May 29, 1865, deflating the high hopes of civil rights activists. He offered amnesty, property rights, and voting rights to all but the highest Confederate officials (most of whom he pardoned a year later). Feeling empowered by President Johnson, Confederates barred Blacks from voting, elected Confederates as politicians, and instituted a series of discriminatory Black codes at their constitutional conventions to reformulate their state in the summer and fall of 1865. With the Thirteenth Amendment barring slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” the law replaced the master. The postwar South became the spitting image of the prewar South in everything but name.
Of course, lawmakers justified these new racist policies with racist ideas.
They proclaimed that the Black codes—which forced Blacks into labor contracts, barred their movement, and regulated their family lives—were meant to restrain them because they were naturally lazy, lawless, and oversexed. “If you call this Freedom,” a Black veteran asked, “what do you call Slavery?” Southern Blacks defended themselves in the war of re-enslavement, lifted up demands for rights and land, and issued brilliant antiracist retorts to the prevailing racist ideas. If any group should be characterized as “lazy,” it was the planters, who had “lived in idleness all their lives on stolen labor,” resolved a Petersburg, Virginia, mass meeting. It had always been amazing to enslaved people how someone could lounge back, drink lemonade, and look out over their fields, and call the bent-over pickers lazy. To the racist forecasts that Blacks would not be able to take care of themselves, one emancipated person replied, “We used to support ourselves and our masters too when we were slaves and I reckon we can take care of ourselves now.” When President Johnson evicted Blacks from their forty-acre plots in the summer and fall of 1865, Black people protested. “We has a right to the land we are located,” Virginia’s Bayley Wyatt griped. “Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon.” 1 In September 1865, Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens, arguably the most antiracist of the “Radical Republicans” favoring civil rights, proposed (and did not get approval for) the redistribution of the 400 million acres held by the wealthiest 10 percent of southerners. Every adult freedman would be granted forty acres, and the remaining 90 percent of the total would be sold in plots to the “highest bidder” to pay for the war and retire the national debt. Congress forced only one group of slaveholders to provide land to their former captives—the Confederacy’s Native American allies.
The most popular defense against land redistribution was that it would “ruin the freedmen” by leading them to believe they could acquire land without “working for it,” as the antislavery cotton manufacturer Edward Atkinson suggested. Did Atkinson really believe his own argument? This rich entrepreneur knew more than anyone that many rich men had not been ruined when they had inherited land without “working for it.” Most Republicans wanted the government to create equality before the law, with all men having the same constitutional and voting rights. After that, they believed the government was finished. “The removal of white prejudice against the negro, depends almost entirely on the negro himself,” declared The Nation, a periodical devoted to equal rights founded in July 1865, with Garrison’s thirdoldest son, Wendell, as assistant editor.
2 William Lloyd Garrison and so many of the abolitionists he inspired chose not to engage in the political struggle against racial discrimination. Garrison failed to realize that it was his genius that had transformed abolitionism from a complex, multi-issue political project with unclear battle lines and objectives into a simple, single-issue moral project: slavery was evil, and those racists justifying or ignoring slavery were evil, and it was the moral duty of the United States to eliminate the evil of slavery. Garrison did not use his genius again for antiracism, in declaring that racial disparities were evil, and that those racists justifying or ignoring disparities were evil, and that it was the moral duty of the United States to eliminate the evil of racial disparities. He was too bogged down by the assimilationist idea that Black people needed to be developed by northerners. In the final months of The Liberator, Garrison allocated substantial space and praise to the northern missionaries’ project of building southern schools for emancipated people.
Never mind that the northern missionaries were not just handling the building and fund-raising but also planning to control and staff the schools and “civilize” the students.
Antiracist southern Blacks were not waiting on northern assimilationists.
“Throughout the entire South an effort is being made by the colored people to educate themselves,” reported the Freedmen’s Bureau’s superintendent of schools, John W. Alvord, in early 1866, after touring the South. These emancipated people were neither looking at the White missionaries as superior nor considering them their saviors. Black Georgia educators, for instance, said in February 1866 that they hoped White teachers were not in the South “in any vain reliance on their superior gifts . . . or in any foolish self-confidence that they have a special call to this office, or special endowments to meet its demands.” 3 On December 18, 1865, the United States officially added the Thirteenth Amendment to its Constitution. “At last, the old ‘covenant with death’ is annulled,” Garrison wrote in the second-to-last issue of the voice of abolitionism. The Liberator had been established to destroy chattel slavery, he said in the final issue, on December 29, 1865. Now that slavery was dead and buried, it seemed only fitting to let The Liberator’s “existence cover the historic period of the great struggle.” 4 Without The Liberator, Garrison soon felt “like a hen plucked of its feathers.” After two bad falls in early 1866 took him out of commission, he largely watched Reconstruction from the sidelines. He watched Frederick Douglass head a delegation of Black male suffragists into the President’s House on February 7, 1866. The meeting quickly turned combative when President Andrew Johnson said state majorities should decide voting rights.
When someone retorted that Blacks were a majority in South Carolina, a miffed Johnson elaborated on his true fear: that Black voters looked down on poor Whites and would forge a political alliance with planters to rule them.
When Douglass proposed “a party . . . among the poor,” Johnson was disinterested.
5 Whether Douglass admitted it or not, some—perhaps most—Blacks did look down on poor Whites. They denigrated the Whites who did not enslave them as “White trash.” Actually, some uncorroborated reports suggest that enslaved Blacks created that term. Blacks had seen poor Whites doing the master’s dirty work, as overseers, or on slave patrols, while clinging to the stinking fallacy that the lowest of them was still better than the highest Black person. And if poor Whites were “White trash,” then what were elite Whites?
Black consumers of racist ideas had come to associate Whiteness with wealth and power, and education and slaveholding. Only through the “White trash” construction could ideas of superior Whiteness be maintained, as it made invisible the majority of White people, the millions in poverty, by saying they were not ordinary Whites: they were “White trash.” Similarly, the upwardly mobile Blacks were not really Black: they were extraordinary. At some point, racist and classist White elites started embracing the appellation to demean low-income Whites. “White trash” conveyed that White elites were the ordinary representatives of Whiteness.
6
AS IT WAS, Black people no longer needed Andrew Johnson to secure some of their postwar rights. Republican senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois stayed true to his 1862 Free Soil word: “Our people want nothing to do with the negroes.” He felt the fervid panic that Blacks would flood the North in reaction to the violence, the Black codes, and the reelection of Confederates in 1865. To secure Black people in the South, Senator Trumbull and his antiBlack Republican comrades allied with the Radical Republicans in February 1866 to extend the Freedmen’s Bureau. The “immense patronage” would hinder the “character” and “prospects” of emancipated Blacks who caused the South’s problems by desiring to lead a “life of indolence,” President Johnson argued in his stunning veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau bill on February 19, 1866 (Congress overrode the veto in the summer).
7 Senator Trumbull and company moved on to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866 in March. The bill bestowed citizenship rights on all born in the United States and barred the “deprivation” of “any right secured or protected by this act” on the account of one’s “color or race.” Congress did not consider voting to be an essential right of US citizenship. Though aimed at southern Black codes, the act also invalidated northern Black codes that had discriminated against Blacks for decades. But the bill was limited in that it did not target private, local, or race-veiled laws of racial discrimination. Discriminatory racial language (not racial inequities) became the proof of racism for the federal courts—the apparatus charged with the huge burden of enforcing equal treatment. It was like writing laws for premeditated murders and not writing manslaughter laws for murders that the state could not prove were premeditated. The shrewdest discriminators switched tactics, and simply avoided using racial language to veil their discriminatory intent, to get away with racial murder.
President Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 even in its limited, moderate form. Only from the perspective of someone who refused to acknowledge discrimination in racial disparities, who wanted to maintain White privileges and the power to discriminate, could this bill be seen as “in favor of the colored and against the white race,” to use Johnson’s words.
Johnson came from a Democratic Party busily shouting that to give Blacks voting rights would result in “nigger domination.” If there was any semblance of equal opportunity, these racists argued, then Blacks would become dominators and Whites would suffer. This was—and still is—the racist folklore of reverse discrimination. Andrew Johnson crafted this form of racism. And long after Congress impeached him, he still topped lists of the worst US presidents.
8 In early April 1866, Congress overrode the presidential veto, turned its back on the president, and strode toward the Radical Reconstruction of the South. Southern violence against Blacks made congressmen move more quickly and forcefully to stop Blacks from coming north. In early May 1866, White mobs in Memphis killed at least forty-eight Black people, gang-raped at least five Black women, and looted or destroyed $100,000 worth of Blackowned property. Federal authorities slyly blamed nearby Black troops for provoking the violence, and they used their lies to substantiate redeploying them as “Buffalo Soldiers” out West. As southern Black citizens were killed over the next few decades to make way for Jim Crow, Buffalo Soldiers killed indigenous communities in the West to make way for White settlers.
9 The irony was cruel—as cruel as the elite Blacks who blamed rural migrants for the race riot and urged their removal from Memphis. During and after the war, rural Blacks across the South had fled to southern cities and heard racist southerners—many Black elites included—predicting that the migrants would descend into idleness and criminality. It was said that God had made Black people to cultivate the soil (actually, Black elites diverged on this point). Black urbanites, new and old, were resisting discrimination and building schools, churches, and associations, achieving a modicum of economic security. And yet, their uplift did not improve race relations. Their uplift—and activism and migration—only fueled the violence in Memphis and beyond.
10 As White southern violence spread, Democratic newspapers published stories arguing that masters’ loss of control was energizing the Black crime wave. Southerners also read stories of the “murder and mutilation” of Whites in Jamaica by “infuriated negro savages, bent on destroying the civilization which surrounds and vexes them.” Jamaica’s 1865 revolt was, in fact, a freedom fight against British slavery in everything but name. So it made sense that those who were trying to re-enslave the emancipated in the United States feared another Jamaica. They used any opportunity to attack Black communities to prevent it, and every racist idea to justify their attacks.
11
DAYS BEFORE THE Memphis riot, a compromise proposal appeared before Congress that incorporated all of the divergent postwar issues into a single constitutional amendment, including denying Confederates the ability to hold office and placing Confederate war debt on southern laps. The Fourteenth Amendment’s first clause pleased the Radical Republicans: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” For the sake of the amendment’s passage, most Republicans rejected demands to define this statement’s terms. Republicans did not deny Democrats’ charges that the amendment was “open to ambiguity and . . . conflicting constructions.” The ambiguity effectively ensured that both antiracists and racists would vie for the amendment’s power. Indeed, both the defenders of equal opportunity and the defenders of White “privileges or immunities” would vie for the riches of the Fourteenth Amendment after its passage on June 13, 1866 (and ratification in 1868).
12 For not guaranteeing Black male suffrage, Wendell Phillips blasted the Fourteenth Amendment as a “fatal and total surrender.” Republicans argued that omitting suffrage was strategically necessary. They told Black male suffragists that “‘the negro must vote,’ but the issue must be avoided now so as ‘to keep up a two thirds power in Congress.” 13 Suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed the woman must vote, too, and they joined Black male suffragists in founding the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) in 1866. “I would not trust [a Black man] with my rights; degraded, oppressed, himself, he would be more despotic . . . than ever our Saxon rulers are,” Stanton said at the AERA’s first annual meeting in 1867. With the “elevation of women,” it would be possible to “develop the Saxon race into a higher and nobler life and thus, by law of attraction, to lift all races,” she added. Stanton offered an enduring rationalization for the racist idea of the hypersexist Black male, of Black men being more sexist than White men. It was the consequence of his racial oppression; the abused becoming the abuser.
14 Sojourner Truth rose to defend Stanton’s opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment. “White women are a great deal smarter,” Truth said, “while colored women do not know scarcely anything.” After wielding racist ideas against colored women, the eighty-year-old legend turned her racist ideas onto colored men. Colored women “go out washing . . . and their men go about idle,” she said. “And when the women come home, they ask for money and take it all, and then scold because there is no food.” 15 WHEN MIDTERM ELECTORS in 1866 sent the two-thirds majority of Republicans necessary to override presidential vetoes back to Congress, President Johnson was not dismayed. If Republicans brought Black male suffrage before Americans, a Johnson aide said, then “we can beat them at the next Presidential election.” Republican congressmen and their voters were a motley crew: it included segregationists, who were seeking to confine Black “brutes” to the South by eliminating racial discrimination; assimilationists, who wanted to humanize the “imbruted” Blacks and eliminate racial discrimination; and a handful of antiracists, who wanted to eliminate racial discrimination and afford equal Blacks equal opportunities.
16 Nowhere was opportunity as unequal as in work, where rural Blacks’ desires for secure land and urban Blacks’ desires for secure jobs hardly registered in the political discourse. Every union should promote “one dividing line—that which separates mankind into two great classes,” said labor editor Andrew Carr Cameron at the 1867 convention of the newly founded National Labor Union (NLU). Cameron obscured the color line in the first-ever national labor agenda. From then on, this denial of racism allowed racist laborers to join with racist capitalists in depressing Black wages, in shoving Black workers into the nastiest jobs, in driving up their rates of unemployment, and in blaming the racial disparities they helped create on Black stupidity and laziness.
17 African Americans and their allies tried to create their own opportunities by establishing dozens of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the late 1860s. Antiracist educators and philanthropists who viewed southern Black students as intellectually equal to White students were almost certainly involved, but they were not nearly as numerous or as powerful as the assimilationist educators and philanthropists. These assimilationists commonly founded HBCUs “to educate . . . a number of blacks,” and then “send them forth to regenerate” their people, who had been degenerated by slavery, as one philanthropist stated. Black and White HBCU founders assumed New England’s Latin and Greek curriculum to be the finest, and they only wanted the finest for their students. Many founders assumed “white teachers” to be “the best,” as claimed in the New York National Freedman’s Relief Association in its 1865–1866 annual report.
HBCU teachers and students worked hard to prove to segregationists that Blacks could master the “high culture” of a Greco-Latin education. But the handful of “refined,” often biracial HBCU graduates were often dismissed as products of White blood, or as extraordinary in comparison to the ordinarily “unrefined” poor Blacks. Not all the HBCUs founded in the aftermath of the Civil War adopted the liberal arts curriculum. African Americans “had three centuries of experience in general demoralization and behind that, paganism,” the 1868 founder of the Hampton Institute in Virginia once said. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the former Union officer and Freedmen’s Bureau official, offered teaching and vocational training that tutored acceptance of White political supremacy and Blacks’ working-class position in the capitalist economy. Hampton had a trade component that aimed to work its aspiring teachers hard so that they would come to appreciate the dignity of hard labor and go on to impress that dignity—instead of resistance—onto the toiling communities where they established schools.
18 For all their submission schooling, Hampton-type HBCUs were less likely than the Greco-Roman-oriented HBCUs to bar dark-skinned applicants. By the end of the century, a color partition had emerged: light-skinned Blacks tended to attend the schools with Greco-Roman curricula, training for leadership, and darker-skinned Blacks ended up at industrial schools, training for submission. In 1916, one estimate found that 80 percent of the students at the HBCUs offering a Greco-Roman education were light-skinned or biracial.
The racist colorism separating HBCUs was reflected in Black social clubs, in housing, and in the separate churches being built. Across postwar America, there emerged Black churches subjecting dark-skinned visitors to paper-bag tests or painting their doors a light brown. People darker than the bag or door were excluded, just as light-skinned Blacks were excluded from White spaces.
19
CONGRESS PASSED FOUR Reconstruction Acts between March 2, 1867, and March 11, 1868, that laid the groundwork for the new state constitutions and for readmission of ten of the eleven southern states into the Union.
Confederates were forced to accept Black male suffrage, while northern Free Soilers soundly rejected Black suffrage on their ballots in the fall of 1867.
Confederates roared hypocrisy at these northerners, who were “seeking to fasten what they themselves repudiate with loathing upon the unfortunate people of the South.” Republicans stripping the vote away from “respectable” southern Whites and handing it to the “unrespectable” southern Blacks was “worse than madness,” President Johnson said in his Third Annual Message to Congress on December 3, 1867. “No independent government of any form has ever been successful in [Black] hands,” he added. With voting power, Blacks would cause “a tyranny such as this continent has never yet witnessed.” Johnson engaged in a debate that was over before it began. Since the very presence of Blacks was deemed to be tyrannical, racists would only see tyranny no matter what Black voters and politicians accomplished in the coming years.
20 During the 1868 elections, Democrats pledged to free White southerners from the “semi-barbarous” Black male voters who longed to “subject the white women to their unbridled lust,” as stated by a vice presidential candidate, the fanatical Missouri politician and Union general Francis P. Blair Jr. The Democratic platform attacked Republicans for subjecting the South, “in time of profound peace, to military despotism and negro supremacy.” The Ku Klux Klan, founded originally in 1865 as a social club in Tennessee, made a charade of the “profound peace.” With Johnson’s anti-Black military appointments looking away, the Klan commenced a “reign of terror,” assassinating Republicans and barring Blacks from voting.
Millions of Blacks voted for president for the first time in armed southern Black counties that the Klan would not dare to enter, swinging the 1868 presidential election to a Republican war hero, General Ulysses S. Grant.
Blacks voted into life what segregationists would begin their struggle to kill— the Black politician. “Nigger voting, holding office, and sitting in the jury box, are all wrong,” blared Mississippi’s Columbus Democrat. “Nothing is more certain to occur than these outrages upon justice and good government will soon be removed.” 21 Numerous Republican congressmen, such as Ohio’s James A. Garfield, were privately expressing “a strong feeling of repugnance” about Blacks being “made our political equal.” But when these racist Republicans calculated the serious advantages the “loyal” Black vote could give them in swing states, they finally gave their support to Black suffrage. As with the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, these powerful congressmen had not been morally persuaded to open the door to Black rights. It was about selfinterests. On February 27, 1869, the Republican-dominated Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. It forbade the United States and each state from denying or abridging voting rights “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Congress empowered itself to “enforce this article by appropriate legislation,” but refused to go any further.
Protections for Black politicians, uniform voting requirements, and the prohibition of race-veiled measures to exclude Blacks, however, were denied.
22 Denied, too, was any serious discussion of enfranchising women. This issue caused dissension between White and Black suffragists at the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) meeting on May 12, 1869, weeks after Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment. It stung leading suffragist Susan B. Anthony to think the Constitution had “recognized” Black men “as the political superiors of all the noble women.” They had “just emerged from slavery,” and were “not only totally illiterate, but also densely ignorant of every public question.” Ironically, sexist men were using similar arguments about women’s illiteracy, women’s ignorance of public questions, and noble men—as the natural political superiors of all women—to oppose Anthony’s drive for suffrage rights.
23 For instance, George Downing, a Black activist and businessman who attended the meeting, spoke of women’s obedience being God’s will. The AERA meeting went from bad to worse. Feminists challenged him. Downing and other organizers of the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU) came under fire again for this view at their founding meeting later in the year. A Black woman from Downing’s home state of Rhode Island expressed her disappointment that “poor women’s interests were not mentioned.” In the end, the CNLU admitted its “mistakes.” It would have been wholly hypocritical for the CNLU to refuse to address gender discrimination, after developing in reaction to the National Labor Union’s refusal to address racial discrimination. Then again, hypocrisy had normalized in the American reform movements. Racial, gender, ethnic, and labor activists were angrily challenging the popular bigotry targeting their own groups at the same time they were happily reproducing the popular bigotry targeting other groups.
They did not realize that the racist, sexist, ethnocentric, and classist ideas were produced by some of the same powerful minds.
The National Labor Union welcomed Black delegates to its 1869 convention and proclaimed that it “knew neither color nor sex on the question of the rights of labor.” Antiracists and feminists would have preferred for the NLU to accept neither racism nor sexism on the question of the rights of labor. But that was hardly forthcoming.
24 After George Downing’s debacle, Frederick Douglass tried to smooth things over by suggesting that AERA members support any measure that extended “suffrage to any class heretofore disenfranchised, as a cheering part of the triumph of our whole idea.” Stanton and Anthony rejected the resolution. Poet Frances Harper, representing the guns of Black feminism, chastised “white women” for only going “for sex, letting race occupy a minor position.” Sojourner Truth had come to agree with Harper and Douglass. “If you bait the suffrage-hook with a woman, you will certainly catch a black man,” Truth advised, as only the Truth could. The division over the Fifteenth Amendment dissolved the AERA and severed the suffrage movement. The suffrage struggle limped into the 1870s and would not be resolved for women until nearly half a century later.
If it had been left up to the first generation of Black male politicians, women may have received voting rights in the 1870s. All six Black Massachusetts legislators, and six of seven Black US representatives from South Carolina, for example, supported women’s suffrage. Susan B. Anthony may have privately realized that Black men were not “densely ignorant of every public question,” including her right to vote.
25 Democrats tried to block the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, demeaning it as a “nigger superiority bill” meant to establish horrific and barbaric Black supremacy. They had no luck. The amendment was ratified on February 3, 1870. Black people from Boston to Richmond to Vicksburg, Mississippi, planned grand celebrations after the ratification. For their keynote speaker, several communities invited a living legend.
26 CHAPTER 20 Reconstructing Blame
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON decided to stay home and witness the magnificent two-hour procession of dignitaries, especially the veterans of the 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments. When Garrison stepped to the podium of Faneuil Hall at the close of the celebration of the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, he looked older than his sixty-four years, tired and ready to step fully out of public life. He regarded the Fifteenth Amendment as a “miracle.” The members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, meanwhile, felt that their work was finished. They officially disbanded on April 9, 1870.
“The Fifteenth Amendment confers upon the African race the care of its own destiny. It places their fortunes in their own hands,” imagined Ohio congressman James A. Garfield. An Illinois newspaper proclaimed, “The negro is now a voter and a citizen. Let him hereafter takes his chances in the battle of life.” 1 The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment caused Republicans to turn their backs on the struggle against racial discrimination. After refusing to redistribute land, and giving landless Blacks the ability to choose their own masters, and calling that freedom; after handing poor Blacks an equal rights statement they could use in the expensive courts, and calling that equality; they put the ballot in the Black man’s hand and called that security. “The ballot is the citadel of the colored man’s safety,” parodied one Black southerner, “the guarantor of his liberty, the protector of his rights, the defender of his immunities and privileges, the savior of the fruits of his toil, his weapon of offense and defense, his peacemaker, his Nemesis that watches and guards over him with sleepless eye by day and by night.” As this Black southerner knew so well, the ballot never did stop all those hooded night riders.
2 Klan violence was needed to “keep the niggers in their place,” explained Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Klan’s first honorary “Grand Wizard.” To the Klan, the only thing worse than a Negro was “a white Radical.” But the worst offender was a suspected Black rapist of a White woman. Klansmen glorified White womanhood as the epitome of honor and purity (and asexuality) and demeaned Black womanhood as the epitome of immorality and filth (and sex). Some Black men demeaned Black women, too. “Lord, sar!” said a prosperous Black Kansan. “You not think I marry a black nigger wench?” Klansmen religiously believed that Blacks possessed supernatural sexual powers, and this belief fueled their sexual attraction to Black women and their fear of White women being attracted to Black men. It became almost standard operating procedure to justify Klan terrorism by maintaining that southern White supremacy was necessary to defend the purity of White women. Black women’s bodies, in contrast, were regarded as a “training ground” for White men, or a stabilizing “safety valve” for White men’s “sexual energies” that allowed the veneration of the asexual pureness of White womanhood to continue.
3 The other threat to White male dominance was upwardly mobile Black people. Klan terrorism showed the charade that was always the strategy of uplift suasion. The Klan did “not like to see the negro go ahead,” reported a White Mississippian. Landless Blacks were terrorized by landowners.
Landowning Blacks were terrorized by the Klan. In March 1870, President Grant sent to Congress documentary evidence of more than 5,000 cases of White terrorism. Between May 1870 and April 1871, Congress passed three poorly funded Enforcement Acts that dispatched election supervisors to the South, criminalized interference with Black voting, and turned a wide range of Klan-type terrorist acts into federal offenses. As a result, the Klan had “nominally dissolved” by 1871, but the train of terror still rushed down the tracks under new names. It became clear to all, as a northern transplant explained, that only “steady, unswerving power from without” could guarantee peace and the survival of southern Republicanism. A steady, unswerving Black power from within could have done so, too, but Republicans remained unwilling to fortify Blacks with Buffalo Soldiers and land.
4 The vote was supposed to make miracles, and in some ways it did.
Southern constitutional conventions from 1867 to 1869 were a revolutionary sight to behold. They included northern transplants, southern Republicans, and southern Black delegates, about half of whom had been born in slavery.
For all their lack of political experience, wealth, and schooling—or rather because of it—these delegates produced alluringly democratic constitutions.
They instituted the South’s first publicly funded educational systems, penitentiaries, orphanages, and insane asylums; expanded women’s rights and guaranteed Black rights; reduced the number of crimes; and reorganized local governments to eliminate dictatorships. Initially, however, Black politicians usually stepped aside when the positions of power were divided up because they did not want to lend credibility to persistent Democratic charges of “black supremacy,” as if the charge had some logic to it.
While Blacks rarely benefited from Reconstruction’s economic policies, growing corporations did. Facing war-torn communities and treasuries, the same Reconstruction politicians who refused to hand out land and aid to landless Blacks, on the pretext that it would ruin them, handed millions out to railroad companies, on the pretext that railroads would develop the South by bringing new jobs, factories, and towns; allow for transport of untapped minerals; and extend agriculture. By 1872, most of the South only had debt and poverty to show for the incredible amounts of welfare handed out to railroad corporations. Bribed politicians happily gave away these funds. Only a small number of Black politicians sat in senior positions of power, and thus their share of the corruption paled in comparison to that of White politicians.
5 Every dollar taken from southern treasuries heightened southern reliance on cheap labor. President Grant figured that maybe if Blacks had somewhere else to go, planters would value Black labor more. (Actually, planters did value cheap labor, and they used their guns and racist ideas to keep Black labor as cheap as possible.) In early 1870, Grant began a presidential push for the annexation of the Dominican Republic to provide a haven for “the entire colored population of the United States, should it choose to emigrate.” He sent Frederick Douglass on a fact-finding mission in 1871. The DR could not only become a Black haven, the impressed Douglass reported, but by “transplanting within her tropical borders the glorious institutions” of the United States, the Blacks who moved there could uplift the impoverished and backward Dominican people. Douglass seemed unaware that he was recycling against Dominicans the very same racist ideas that had been used against African Americans. And if the US institutions were so “glorious,” then why did African Americans need a foreign haven?
6 Assimilationists like Douglass encouraged American expansion, while segregationists and antiracists discouraged it, bringing the ongoing racial dispute into foreign policy. The US Senate voted down the annexation treaty in June 1871. Tired of Grant’s preoccupation with annexation, and his openness to using federal power to protect southern Black lives, Republican dissidents broke away. In May 1872, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley and Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull, central forces in the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, headlined an assembly of “Liberal Republicans” in Cincinnati. “Reconstruction and slavery we have done with,” declared E. L. Godkin, the editor of The Nation, speaking for the Liberal Republicans. They pledged amnesty and voting rights for ex-Confederates, the end of federal southern intervention, welfare for the rich in the form of tax breaks, and nothing for the poor.
7 Greeley emerged as their presidential candidate. The arch-enemy of the Confederacy became the arch-friend of the Confederacy, similar to the nation’s most famous preacher, whom Frederick Douglass sarcastically called the “apostle of forgiveness.” Seeking to reunite White northerners and southerners through Christian Whiteness, Henry Ward Beecher published the first American biography of Jesus, The Life of Jesus, the Christ, in 1871.
“There is absolutely nothing to determine the personal appearance of Jesus,” wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother. And yet Beecher included in the book five depictions of the perfect God-man named Jesus, and they all depicted a White man. Henry Ward Beecher gave White Americans a model for embedding Whiteness into their religious worldviews of Jesus Christ without ever saying so out loud, just as southern and northern Whites were doing with their political worldviews. It went without saying for racists that White people were the best equipped to rule the United States under the heavenly guidance of the White Father and Son.
8 Horace Greeley had long been associated with emancipation and equality, but he made himself over in order to campaign as the Democratic candidate for president in 1872. “Political equality is far off,” he lectured Blacks.
“Social equality will remain forever out of reach. Don’t expect free gifts of land. Segregate yourself; employ each other. Who are your best friends?— Sound, conservative, knowing white Southerners.” These “knowing white Southerners” made it known to Black people, as one South Carolinian observed, that “to vote against the wishes of their white employers and neighbors was to risk death.” Congress issued a report in the spring of 1872 condemning southern violence, but it only went so far. The report even adopted the segregationists’ position, arguing that Blacks were the cause. The violence, the report explained, was a response to the “bad legislation, official incompetency, and corruption” of Black politicians. It hardly mattered that southern White politicians sat in the overwhelming majority of the powerful and corruptible positions. The truth hardly mattered to the producers of these racist ideas who were seeking to defend the racist policies of buckling Black political power. Grant’s former secretary of the interior, Jacob Cox, said southerners could “only be governed through the part of the community that embodies the intelligence and the capital.” The Nation put it more bluntly: Reconstruction had “totally failed.” 9 Enough Blacks and Republican Whites risked death to win most of the South and President Grant’s reelection in 1872. On southern streets, armed Republicans had to defend their reelected politicians. In Colfax, Louisiana, sixty-one armed Blacks barricaded themselves inside a courthouse on Easter Sunday, 1873. Democrats shelled the courthouse with artillery, snatched out the thirty-seven survivors, and executed them in the town square. The day after the Colfax Massacre, the US Supreme Court, including Grant’s four corporate lawyer appointees, massacred the civil rights protections of the Fourteenth Amendment in the Slaughterhouse Cases. White New Orleans butchers felt their economic “privileges and immunities” were being denied by the bribe-instigated 1869 Louisiana statute requiring them to do business at the Slaughterhouse Company. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Miller upheld the monopoly on April 14, 1873, distinguishing between national and state citizenship and citing Roger B. Taney’s Dred Scott opinion. The Fourteenth Amendment only protected the relatively few rights of national citizens, Miller stated. Three years later, this doctrinaire split between national and state citizenship allowed a unanimous Supreme Court to reverse the convictions of the perpetrators of the Colfax Massacre (murder prosecutions “rests alone with the States”), thus giving Louisiana the freedom to exonerate them. The Court also voided the Enforcement Acts and encouraged White terrorist organizations just in time for the election of 1876.
10 None of the four Slaughterhouse dissenters objected to the most farreaching part of Justice Miller’s majority opinion: “We doubt very much whether any action of a state not directed by way of discrimination against the negroes as a class, or on account of their race, will ever come within the purview of this provision.” To this day, the Supreme Court still uses Miller’s doctrine to shield private and race-veiled discriminators, those who veil policies intended to discriminate against Black people by not using racial language.
11 Neither ex-Confederates voting again nor the Slaughterhouse ruling could compare to the destructive force of the Panic of 1873. It was the first major economic depression of American industrial capitalism and lasted the rest of the decade. Southern Democrats declared their ability to restore order, just as the oil man John D. Rockefeller and the steel man Andrew Carnegie declared their ability to monitor their industries. By the end of the century, the Rockefeller and Carnegie monopolies reflected the White political monopolies steering the South.
As the poorest of the poor, southern Blacks were the most devastated of the devastated by the Panic of 1873. The Panic halted the modest postwar ascent of Black landowners, snatching their land and their freedom. When legions of small White landowners lost their land, too, they felt as if they were losing their Whiteness and freedom. Whites “must have small plots of land,” one planter complained, “and prefer tending them, poor as may be the return, to lowering themselves, as they think it, by hiring to another.” 12 Holding out hope for redistributed land as long as they could, rural southern Blacks walked backward into sharecropping, meaning they handed the landowner a share of the crop as payment for the ability to farm there.
Crooked landowners maneuvered sharecroppers into debt, and laws prevented sharecroppers from leaving landowners to whom they owed money. Blacks who were able to leave a bad situation took to the road, looking endlessly for ethical landowners. Landowners called this annual movement a sign of Black shiftlessness. Stuck between racist policies and ideas, sharecroppers could not win. Staying often meant servitude, but leaving meant shiftlessness.
13 Nothing seemed to dent racist ideas, not even upwardly mobile urban Blacks. In 1874, Nashville’s White-owned Republican Banner praised the “thrifty and cleanly” Blacks. But they could not “be taken as the representative of the indolent and shiftless hundreds of thousands,” the Banner opined. They were extraordinary.
14
BY THE EARLY 1870s, given the snatching away from Blacks’ civil rights, William Lloyd Garrison had no choice but to make his voice heard once again. He ridiculed the abandonment of Reconstruction in essay after essay in The Independent, and in open letter after open letter in the Boston Journal.
Vice President Henry Wilson complained to Garrison of a “CounterRevolution” overtaking Reconstruction. “Our Anti-slavery veterans must again speak out,” Wilson urged. Some failed to speak out because they were too busy blaming Black people for the failures of Reconstruction. And how could they not? Northern press reports regularly depicted Black voters and politicians as self-destructively stupid and corrupt. The Associated Press relied on anti-Black, anti-Reconstruction southern papers for daily dispatches.
New York Tribune reporter James S. Pike blanketed northerners with racist fairytales of corrupt, incompetent, lazy Black politicians who conquered and deprived White South Carolinians during the “tragedy” of Reconstruction.
These claims were published in his widely circulated newspaper articles in 1873, republished as The Prostrate State, South Carolina Under Negro Government in 1874. Pike’s Democratic sources were happy to blame the southern corruption on Black people, as it diverted attention from their principal role in the corruption. Pike’s well-written novel passed as eyewitness journalism. “In the place of this old aristocratic society stands the rude form of the most ignorant democracy that mankind ever saw,” Pike wrote. “It is barbarism overwhelming civilization” and “the slave rioting in the halls of his master, and putting that master under his feet.” 15 The Prostrate State caused pro-Reconstruction periodicals—Scribner’s, Harper’s, The Nation, and The Atlantic Monthly—to pummel Black legislators even more and demand a national reunion of White rule. A New York Democrat read from The Prostrate State on the House floor. Where’s your book on New York corruption? asked Black South Carolina congressman Robert Small. Though the bribers and the bribed knew corruption was a national affair, primarily among White politicians, racist ideas never did quite subscribe to the magazine of reality. Black corruption was a ready-made excuse to abandon the increasingly difficult, expensive, disordering, and divisive Reconstruction policies. Every time Grant’s administration intervened to protect Black lives, he alienated northern and southern Whites from the Republican Party. During the 1874 midterm elections, Democrats knocked Republicans out of control of the House of Representatives and out of power in every southern state except Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. White terrorist organizations warred with armed and unarmed Black voters across the South. President Grant had to send troops to prevent an army of 3,500 Democrats from forcing out elected Republicans in New Orleans in September 1874. Wendell Phillips was jeered off a Boston stage for trying to defend Grant. The New York Times reported that “Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison are not exactly extinct from American politics, but they represent ideas in regard to the South which the majority of the Republican party have outgrown.” 16 The final bill of Radical Reconstruction was pushed through Congress in early 1875 before the new Democrats took office. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was a legislative memorial to Senator Charles Sumner, who died in 1874 after decades in the antislavery and civil rights trenches. The bill outlawed racial discrimination in jury selection, public transportation, and public accommodations, but it required Blacks to seek redress in the expensive and hostile courts. The bill hardly stopped the terror campaign against Mississippi’s Black voters that allowed Democrats to gain state control in the fall 1875 election. Mississippi’s embattled Republican governor, Adelbert Ames, declared that “a revolution is taking place—by force of arms—and a race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery.” A southern newspaper declared that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments “may stand forever; but we intend . . . to make them dead letters.” 17 With Reconstruction of southern democracy on life support, the United States celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. From May to November 1876, roughly one-fifth of the US population attended the first of the official “world fairs,” Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition. “A band of old-time plantation ‘darkies’” singing songs at the Southern Restaurant was the only display depicting Black people.
In Boston, William Lloyd Garrison gave an Independence Day address for the ages. The shift in public opinion away from Reconstruction was the consequence of emancipating Black people as a military necessity rather than as “an act of general repentance,” he said. In his last major public speech, Garrison recognized racist ideas as the core of the problem. “We must give up the spirit of complexional caste,” Garrison declared, “or give up Christianity.” 18 In Hamburg, South Carolina, the local Black militia celebrated the July 4 centennial with a parade. Area racists hated the militia for maintaining Blacks’ ability to control the majority Black town. During the parade, harsh words were exchanged when a local White farmer ordered militia members to move aside for his carriage. The farmer appealed to former Confederate general Matthew C. Butler, the area’s most powerful Democrat. On July 8, Butler and a small posse ordered the militia head, Union Army veteran Dock Adams, to disarm the Hamburg militia. Adams refused, and fighting broke out. The militiamen retreated to their armory. Butler dashed off for nearby Augusta, but returned with hundreds of reinforcements and cannon. Butler’s contingent executed five militiamen and looted and destroyed the undefended homes and shops of Hamburg.
When southerners complained of their lost cause, an appalled President Grant realized they were complaining of their lost freedom “to kill negroes and Republicans without fear of punishment and without loss of caste or reputations.” General Butler made a mockery of the congressional investigation, capitalizing on the attention by being elected to the US Senate in 1877. He blamed the massacre on innate Black criminality. Blacks, he said, possessed “little regard for human life.” 19 General Butler was invoking Blacks’ natural proclivity for violence and criminality to avoid punishment for the massacre he had carried out. But hardly any congressional investigators questioned his motive for expressing these racist ideas, which at the time were being codified by a prison doctor in Italy. Cesare Lombroso “proved” in 1876 that non-White men loved to kill, “mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.” His Criminal Man gave birth to the discipline of criminology in 1876. Criminals were born, not bred, Lombroso said. He believed that born criminals emitted physical signs that could be studied, measured, and quantified, and that the “inability to blush”—and therefore, dark skin—had “always been considered the accompaniment of crime.” Black women, in their close “degree of differentiation from the male,” he claimed in The Female Offender in 1895, were the prototypical female criminals. As White terrorists brutalized, raped, and killed people in communities around the Black world, the first crop of Western criminologists were intent on giving criminals a Black face and the well-behaved citizen a White face. Lombroso’s student, Italian law professor Raffaele Garofalo, invented the term “criminology” (criminologia) in 1885.
British physician Havelock Ellis popularized Lombroso in the Englishspeaking world, publishing a compendium of his writings in 1890.
20 The Hamburg perpetrators kept shouting: “This is the beginning of the redemption of South!” Indeed, it was. When the election of 1876 came in November, it was war at the polls, and Democrats stuffed ballot boxes across the South. By the morning of November 8, 1876, Democratic New York governor Samuel J. Tilden and Republican Ohio governor Rutherford B.
Hayes were virtually tied in the electoral college. The presidential election’s outcome rested in the contested election returns of Louisiana and South Carolina. When a fifteen-member electoral commission handed Republicans the presidency, Democrats were outraged. In early 1877, both parties, and both regions, began planning for another Civil War.
The parties and regions remained united on one issue. Blacks must quell their “new kindled ambition” and recognize their lack of Whites’ “hereditary faculty of self government,” said former Ohio governor Jacob D. Cox.
Outgoing president Grant privately told his cabinet that giving Black men the ballot had been a mistake, and so did Republican presidential hopeful Rutherford B. Hayes. While a consensus formed on who should govern the South, division intensified over who should govern in Washington, DC.
The nation on the brink, Hayes’s representatives met with Democrats at the Wormly House, a hotel owned by the capital’s richest African American.
No one ever revealed the exact terms of the “Bargain of 1877.” But Democrats handed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency, while Hayes ended Reconstruction for the Democrats. Hayes recognized the stolen Democratic governments in Louisiana and South Carolina. He withdrew federal troops from the South and used those troops to crush the Great Strike of 1877. (As capital regained control of labor, the Knights of Labor materialized as the principal national labor organization. Knights head Terence V. Powderly demanded unions’ desegregation to control the competition. He considered Blacks a “lazy” reservoir of “cheap labor” that could easily be used against White labor.) 21 The Nation made the Bargain of 1877 plain. The time had come for “the negro to disappear from the field of national politics,” said the newsmagazine.
“Henceforth, the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more do with him.” Meanwhile, William Lloyd Garrison labeled the Bargain “an abomination” amounting to the old “covenant with death.” When troops departed Shreveport, Louisiana, a Black man grieved about his people being back in “the hands of the very men that held [them] as slaves,” so that “there was no way on earth they could better [their] condition.” 22 “Not one single right enjoyed by the colored people shall be taken from them,” pledged the new Democratic South Carolina governor, Wade Hampton. “As the negro becomes more intelligent,” Hampton added, “he naturally allies himself with the more conservative whites, for his observation and experience both show him that his interests are identified with those of the white race here.” Hampton opened two doors for Blacks in postReconstruction South Carolina: naturally submissive intelligence, or naturally rebellious stupidity.
23 The Reconstruction era—the dozen or so years following the end of the Civil War in 1865—had been a horrific time for southern White men like Wade Hampton who were used to ruling their Black people and their women.
They faced and beat back with violence and violent ideas a withering civil rights and Black empowerment movement—as well as a powerful women’s movement that failed to grab as many headlines. But their supposed underlings did not stop rebelling after the fall of Reconstruction. To intimidate and reassert their control over rebellious Blacks and White women, White male redeemers took up lynching in the 1880s. Someone was lynched, on average, every four days from 1889 to 1929. Often justifying the ritualistic slaughters on a false rumor that the victim had raped a White woman, White men, women, and children gathered to watch the torture, killing, and dismemberment of human beings—all the while calling the victims savages.
Hate fueled the lynching era. But behind this hatred lay racist ideas that had evolved to question Black freedoms at every stage. And behind these racist ideas were powerful White men, striving by word and deed to regain absolute political, economic, and cultural control of the South.
24
SOUTHERN BLACK PEOPLE felt a range of emotions as they trekked from slavery to war to emancipation to Radical Reconstruction to Black Redemption to White Redemption. Their feelings seem to have resembled the range of emotions a parent might feel living through the exciting birth, hopeful growth, and tragic death of a beloved child. Some Blacks, angry over Reconstruction’s demise, felt the need to run away from their second slavery.
“It is impossible for us to live with these slaveholders of the South,” said one Louisiana organizer, representing more than 60,000 “hard-laboring people” eager to flee the South. Resettlement to Africa or the North or far West was not nearly as popular in the late 1870s as the “Exodus” to Kansas. The “Exodusters” ignored the opposition of Frederick Douglass and increased Kansas’s Black population by 150 percent. Northern allies did all they could to fund-raise for Exodusters. William Lloyd Garrison, at seventy-four years old, exhausted himself raising money for hundreds of Black Exodusters fleeing Mississippi and Louisiana.
On April 24, 1879, Garrison had hoped to address a rally for the Exodusters at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, but he was too weak to attend. Still, he made sure his voice was heard, sending a reverberating statement. “Let the edict go forth, trumpet-tongued, that there shall be a speedy end put to all this bloody misrule; that the millions of loyal colored citizens at the South, now under ban and virtually disfranchised, shall be put in the safe enjoyment of their rights—shall freely vote and be fairly represented—just where they are located. And let the rallying-cry be heard from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, ‘Liberty and equal rights for each, for all, and forever, wherever the lot of man is cast without our broad domains!’” He had hoped for immediate emancipation when all hope had been lost. He now hoped for immediate equality when all hope had been lost. The thrilling statement of hope on April 24, 1879, proved to be the last will and testament of William Lloyd Garrison.
Four weeks later, he was dead.