Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (29 page)

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.”
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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 Free-Soil movement. What Polk called “foolish,” what historians call the Wilmot Proviso, what Wilmot called the “white man’s proviso,” never passed.
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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 self-interest, 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.
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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 western-marching 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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 rapid-fire 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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, fifty-something-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.
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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.”
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