Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (31 page)

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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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