What Hath God Wrought (96 page)

The evangelical followers of Tappan were not necessarily any less bold than Garrisonians in their condemnation of slavery. Unlike the AASS, the AFASS never gave up all hope of influencing southern public opinion. In the 1840s the Tappanites sent courageous abolitionist missionaries into border and Upper South slave states, where they tried to reach blacks as well as whites, and got around postal censorship by distributing antislavery tracts in person. Although limited, their activity horrified southern politicians. (Into the Deep South, colonizationists might venture, but not abolitionists.)
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Perhaps surprisingly to us, not all abolitionist women joined the wing of their movement that took the strongest stand for women’s rights. Women were accustomed to benevolent activity within their acknowledged “sphere” and did not necessarily rush to expand it. Some abolitionist women thought opposition to slavery a higher priority than the pursuit of their own rights and felt Garrison needlessly tactless. As a result, some local women’s abolition societies affiliated with the evangelical AFASS, and some tried to mediate between the old and the new organizations. Women provided the abolitionist movement with a “great silent army” of volunteers and fund-raisers. But factionalism within the abolition movement did hamper and discourage many of the local women’s societies.
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Actually, a number of abolitionists remained independent of both factions, notably Theodore Dwight Weld and his wife, the feminist-abolitionist Angelina Grimké. Their wedding in May 1838 brought together Garrison, Tappan, and an impressive guest list, including six former slaves of the Grimké family and representatives of all branches of reform.
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Weld, descended from distinguished evangelical forebears including Jonathan Edwards, had agitated for black rights while a student at Lyman Beecher’s Lane Seminary in Cincinnati. Converted by Charles Finney, he applied the evangelical itinerant preaching model to antislavery, recruiting a “holy band” of missionaries, who traveled, as he did, preaching immediate nationwide abolition. With the help of his wife and her sister Sarah, Weld compiled
American Slavery as It Is
(1839), a devastating documentation of the cruelties inflicted by the “peculiar institution” assembled from the testimony of eyewitnesses (sometimes former slaveholders), state legal codes, and the South’s own newspaper accounts and advertisements. Although abolitionists deplored slavery as a denial of human rights, natural and Christian, even when masters behaved decently, they seized opportunities to publicize examples of brutality. Corroborating the narratives of escaped slaves, Weld’s collection fed the growing public revulsion against the infliction of physical pain that manifested itself in the abolition of flogging in the armed forces and the criminal law. Within the year, the book sold one hundred thousand copies at thirty-seven cents.
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By adhering to the healthy diet prescribed by Sylvester Graham, Theodore Weld lived to the age of ninety-two, though his voice, overtaxed by too much public speaking, had given out many years before. In middle age, this man who had been such a firebrand in youth turned his attention away from agitation and toward another of the concerns typical of the American Renaissance, the development of children’s potential. He and his wife founded an academy in 1848, devoted to cultivating the pupils’ “inward unity” and preparing them for lives of service to others.
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Theodore Weld’s collaborators, his wife, Angelina Grimké Weld, and her older sister Sarah Grimké, came from an aristocratic slaveholding family in Charleston. They moved north to join the evangelical orthodox branch of the Philadelphia Society of Friends (Quakers). Later, they embraced postmillennial abolitionism. In 1837, Angelina began to address antislavery audiences of both sexes. She did not actually set out to defy conventional gender roles thus, but men kept showing up to hear her lectures.
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Still, American public opinion was unaccustomed to women speaking in public to “promiscuous” gatherings, the provocative term then used for groups that included both men and women. (Dorothea Dix’s lecture tours yet lay in the future.) The Grimké sisters took considerable criticism for allowing women’s rights to distract them from concentration on antislavery, even from people like Lydia Maria Child who agreed with their feminist principles. But other antislavery women also began to defy public opinion and speak out in public around the same time, among them Abigail Kelley and Lucretia Mott. Even when not pressing for women’s rights per se, their conspicuous activity in the public sphere made an implicit feminist statement. As Angelina wrote to the black abolitionist Sarah Douglass (no relation to Frederick), “We Abolition Women are turning the world upside down.”
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Garrison, who supported linking the causes of women and the slave, focused exclusively on moral and religious agitation and shunned politics. Moral principle took precedence over constitutional law for him, as it did for Henry David Thoreau. The constitutional guarantees for the protection of southern slavery, such as the clause mandating the return of fugitives, he called “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” applying the terms for an unholy alliance between ancient Israel and evil Assyria (Isaiah 28:15). In the existing state of American politics, voting seemed to him not only useless but a degrading participation in an immoral system. Garrison believed women should participate fully in the crusade against slavery. (In 1833 he went so far as to declare that “the destiny of the slaves is in the hands of the American women, and complete emancipation can never take place without their co-operation.”) He feared that to engage in electoral politics would shunt women to the margins, since they did not have the vote.
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But some abolitionists came to believe that it would help their cause to organize a new political party and compete with the major parties in elections. They formed the Liberty Party. As their candidate in 1840 and 1844 they ran James G. Birney, a former Alabama plantation owner who converted to abolitionism in 1833, emancipated his slaves, and endured considerable persecution as well as financial hardship for his views. The Liberty Party’s slogan was “vote as you pray and pray as you vote.” Its program called for emancipation in the territories and the District of Columbia, and termination of the interstate slave trade, all of them measures that the Constitution permitted. Despite his honorable intentions, Birney secured a microscopic percentage of the popular vote in 1840 and but 2.3 percent in 1844. Historical analysis of the Liberty Party indicates that its little band of supporters came from among “middling people,” such as mechanics, shopkeepers, and petty professionals, who had left the semi-subsistence farming of their parents and embraced a new way of life in the emerging commercial areas of the North, usually small towns. These people rejected not only slavery but also patriarchal family relations and valued the autonomy of the individual.
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The Tappanites had no objection to political activity and often enjoyed mutually supportive relations with the Liberty Party. Garrisonians, on the other hand, pointed to the party’s meager achievements as confirming their own view that electoral politics did not constitute a promising arena for abolitionist activity; they also feared lest the Liberty Party be tempted to moderate its stand on slavery in the hope of picking up more votes. Probably most abolitionists drew the conclusion that it made sense to support antislavery candidates from the major parties. These were more often Whigs such as Joshua Giddings of Ohio, though there was the occasional exception like John P. Hale of New Hampshire, expelled from the state’s Democratic Party in 1845 for his antislavery stands.
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Frederick Douglass, along with other black abolitionists, found himself in a difficult position between the quarreling groups of white abolitionists. The African American leadership included former slaves like William Wells Brown, Sojourner Truth, and Douglass himself alongside others born free like James Forten and Robert Purvis. Some had been educated at Finney’s Oberlin, like John Mercer Langston. More came from the clergy than any other profession, Henry Highland Garnet and Samuel Cornish among them. A few prominent African Americans like Alexander Crummell and Martin Delaney continued to consider emigration a serious option. The black abolitionists regretted the division of the antislavery movement. They admired Garrison’s courage. Douglass paid tribute to the contribution of women to abolitionism: “When the true history of the antislavery cause shall be written,” he declared, “women will occupy a large space in its pages, for the cause of the slave has been peculiarly woman’s cause.”
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Nevertheless, the black abolitionists had an agenda of their own, and it included getting involved in politics whenever possible. Most states, even in the North, prohibited them from voting. While black abolitionists continued to endorse self-improvement within their own community, they also turned increasingly to opposing racial discrimination in the free states. White abolitionists joined with them in protests and boycotts that sometimes succeeded in desegregating northern public facilities. The civil rights demonstrators of the 1960s could invoke the example of their antebellum precursors and called themselves “the new abolitionists.”
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The “underground railroad”—a network of safe houses that sheltered escaped slaves—operated mostly through African Americans like William Still, though some white abolitionists participated too. One of the reasons southern members of Congress opposed emancipation in the District of Columbia so strongly was their fear that it would become a hive of rescue activity for the underground railroad—as, to some extent, it became anyway. In 1848, a well-financed mass escape of seventy-six slaves from Washington, all of whom got aboard the steamship
Pearl
bound for Philadelphia, was thwarted and most of the people sent to New Orleans for sale. The ship’s white operators were sentenced to long prison terms but pardoned by Whig president Millard Fillmore in 1852.
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As this episode indicates, slave rescue efforts became bolder as the 1840s went by. At the same time, masters found the recovery of their escapees more difficult. A complicated decision written by Justice Story of the Supreme Court in 1842 (
Prigg v. Pennsylvania
) left northern state officials free to wash their hands of responsibility for returning fugitive slaves, and increasingly northern state legislatures instructed them to do so. Runaways found their safest asylum in Canada, though until 1850 they could feel reasonably secure in the free Negro neighborhoods of northern cities. According to one estimate, about thirty thousand escaped slaves settled in Ontario, the province where most went.
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Southern resentment of this situation led to passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, establishing a federal bureaucracy to enforce rendition. Abolitionists responded to the new legislation with ever more drastic rescue measures. Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor on the underground railroad and a refugee from slavery herself, began her rescue work in the 1850s. The Transcendentalist intellectuals encouraged and endorsed resistance to the hated law. Thoreau succored an escaped slave at Walden Pond and fervently denounced the power of “Slavery in Massachusetts”; Emerson inspired Yankee abolitionists to try to free the fugitive Anthony Burns from custody in 1854; later in the 1850s, Theodore Parker even conspired with the revolutionary antislavery plot of John Brown.
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Slavery was unpopular enough in some parts of the North (such as rural Quaker Pennsylvania and the “burned-over district” of New York) that mobs could be formed to release fugitives whom the authorities had apprehended, although only a handful of people (twenty-six, to be precise) were saved in this manner.
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In 1847 Frederick Douglass moved from New England to the burned-over district, where he edited a newspaper in Rochester called the
North Star
, borrowing its title from the fleeing slave’s nighttime guide. Financial backing for starting up the paper came from the white philanthropist Gerrit Smith, who also donated land in upstate New York for poor black families to form the utopian community called Timbucto. Douglass and Smith associated themselves with the political wing of abolitionism, the Liberty Party.
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Douglass participated forcefully in the severe critique that abolitionists of all factions leveled at the churches for not dissociating themselves unequivocally from slavery. “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ,” he wrote in his autobiographical
Narrative
; “I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” Likening the American churches to the Pharisees whom Jesus denounced for hypocrisy, he quoted, “They bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers” (Matthew 23:4).
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As time went by, Douglass’s estrangement from the mainstream churches only increased, and his personal religion came to approximate that of the Transcendentalists, a celebration of the spiritual and moral potential inherent in the human individual. But his unquenchable optimism about the future continued to manifest a kind of millennialism, such as he had heard from African American preachers. And, to the end of his life, he remained supportive of the black churches “because upon the whole, I think they contribute to the improvement and moral elevation of those who come within the reach of their influence” and advance the cause of “truth.”
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Margaret Fuller admired Frederick Douglass as an exemplar of “the powers of the Black Race.”
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Douglass wished to see himself as a man who transcended racial differences, a “Representative Man” in the Emersonian sense of one who demonstrated the potentialities of human nature. He shared the Transcendentalists’ celebration of a human nature common to all races and nationalities and, like them, hoped America would be the place where this common nature would achieve its fullest expression. As Emerson put it: