Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (27 page)

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 non-Black 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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
”
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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.
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