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It is in your power to torment the God-cursed slaveholders, that they would be glad to let you go free. . . . But you are a patient people. You act as though you were made for

the special use of these devils. You act as though your daughters were born to pamper the lusts of your masters and overseers. And worse than all, you tamely submit, while your lords tear your wives from your embraces, and defile them before your eyes. In

the name of God we ask, are you men? . . . Heaven, as with a voice of thunder, calls on you to arise from the dust. Let your motto be Resistance! Resistance! Resistance! no

oppressed people have ever secured their Liberty without resistance.

Henry Highland Garnet, “Address to the Slaves of the United States of America”

When black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet spoke the words printed above at the National Convention of Colored Citizens, held in Buffalo, New York, on August 16, 1843, he caused a tremendous stir among those assembled. In 1824, when he was a boy, Garnet had escaped with his family from slavery in Maryland. Thereafter he received an excellent education while growing up in New York. By the 1840s, he had become a powerful speaker. But some of the delegates in his audience pointed out that he was far away from the slaves he claimed to address. Others believed he risked encouraging a potentially disastrous slave revolt. Therefore, by a narrow margin, the convention refused to endorse his speech.

In fact, Garnet had not called for slave revolt. He had rhetorically told slaves, “We do not advise you to attempt a revolution with the sword, because it would be INEXPEDIENT. Your numbers are too small, and moreover the rising spirit of the age, and the spirit of the gospel, are opposed to war and bloodshed.” Instead, he advocated a general strike. This, he contended, would put the onus of initiating violence on masters. Nevertheless, Garnet’s speech reflected a new militancy among black and white abolitionists that shaped the antislavery movement during the two decades before the Civil War.

This chapter investigates the causes of that militancy and explores the role of African Americans in the antislavery movement from the establishment of the American

9 1833–1850 Listen to Chapter 9 on MyHistoryLab

Let Your Motto Be Resistance

L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S

A group of women and children prepare to ford a river as they escape from slavery. Most escapees were young men, but people of both sexes and all age-groups undertook to reach freedom in the North or Canada. Theodor Kaufmann (1814–1896), “On to Liberty,” 1867, Oil on canvas, 36 × 56 in  (91.4 × 142.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Erving and Joyce Wolf, 1982 (1982.443.3). Photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. /Art Resource, NY.

What roles did black institutions and moral suasion play in the antislavery movement?

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How did the racism and violence of the 1830s and 1840s affect the antislavery movement?

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What was the role of black churches and black newspapers in the abolitionist movement?

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Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 to the Compromise of 1850. Largely in response to changes in American culture, unrest among slaves, and sectional conflict between North and South, the biracial northern antislavery movement during this period became splintered and diverse. Yet it also became more powerful.

A Rising Tide of Racism and Violence

Compromise of 1850 An attempt by the U.S. Congress to settle divisive issues between the North and South, including slavery expansion, apprehension in the North of fugitive slaves, and slavery in the District of Columbia.

9-1 How did the racism and violence of the 1830s and 1840s affect the antislavery movement?

Garnet spoke correctly about the spirit of the gospel but not about the spirit of his time. Militancy among abolitionists reflected increasing American racism and violence from the 1830s through the Civil War. White Americans’ embrace of an exuberant nationalism called Manifest Destiny contributed to this trend. This doctrine, which defined political and economic progress in racial terms, held that God intended the United States to expand its territory, by war if necessary. Another factor was that the American School of Ethnology continued the development of the “scientific” racism that had begun during the late eigh- teenth century (see Chapter 5). According to these pseudoscientists, white people—particularly white Americans—were a superior race culturally, physically, economically, politically, and intellectually. They were, therefore, entitled to rule over other races.

As Manifest Destiny gave divine sanction to imperialism, the American School of Eth- nology justified white Americans in their continued enslavement of African Americans and extermination of American Indians. Prejudice against European immigrants to the United States also increased. By the late 1840s, a movement known as nativism pitted native-born Protestants against foreign-born Roman Catholics, whom the natives saw as competitors for jobs and as cultural subversives.

A wave of racially motivated violence, committed by the federal and state govern- ments as well as by white vigilantes, accompanied these intellectual and demographic developments. Starting in the 1790s, the army waged a systematic campaign to remove American Indians from the states and relocate them west of the Mississippi River (see

Chapter 6). This campaign affected several southeastern In- dian nations. But it is epitomized by the Trail of Tears, when in 1838 the army forced 16,000 Cherokees from Georgia to move to what is now Oklahoma. Many Cherokees died along the way. During the same decade, antiblack riots became com- mon in northern cities. White mobs wreaked havoc in African- American neighborhoods and attacked abolitionist newspaper presses. Wealthy “gentlemen of property and standing,” who believed they defended the social order, led the rioters.

Antiblack and Antiabolitionist Riots Antiblack riots coincided with the start of immediate abolition- ism during the late 1820s. The riots became more common as abolitionism gained strength during the 1830s and 1840s (see Figure 9–1 and Map 9–1). Although few northern cities escaped attacks on African Americans and their property, riots in Cincinnati, Providence, New York City, and Philadelphia were infamous.

In 1829 a three-day riot instigated by local politicians led many black Cincinnatians to flee to Canada. In 1836 and 1841, mob attacks on the Philanthropist, Cincinnati’s white-run aboli- tionist newspaper, expanded into attacks on African-American

Manifest Destiny Doctrine, first expressed in 1845, that the expansion of white Americans across the continent was inevitable and ordained by God.

FIGURE 91 MOB VIOLENCE IN THE UNITED STATES, 18121849 This graph illustrates the rise of mob violence in the North in reac- tion to abolitionist activity. Attacks on abolitionists peaked during the 1830s and then declined as antislavery sentiment spread in the North.

 

 

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homes and businesses. During each riot, black residents defended their property with guns. In 1831 white sailors led a mob in Providence that literally tore that city’s black neighborhood to pieces. With spectators cheering them on, rioters pulled down the chimneys of black residences and then “with a fire hook and plenty of axes and iron bars” wrecked the buildings and dragged the occupants into the streets. The Rhode Island militia finally stopped the mayhem. In New York City in 1834, a mob destroyed 12 houses owned by black residents, a black church, a black school, and the home of white abolitionist Lewis Tappan.

No city had more or worse race riots than Philadelphia— the City of Brotherly Love. In 1820, 1829, 1834, 1835, 1838, 1842, and 1849, antiblack rampages broke out. In 1838 a white mob burned Pennsylvania Hall, which abo- litionists had just built and dedicated to free discussion. The ugliest riot came in 1842 when Irish immigrants led a mob that assaulted members of a black temperance soci- ety, who were commemorating the abolition of slavery in the British colony of Jamaica. When African Americans defended themselves with muskets, the mob responded by looting and burning Philadelphia’s principal black neigh- borhood. Among those who successfully defended their homes was Robert Purvis, the abolitionist son-in-law of James Forten.

Texas and the War against Mexico Not only northern cities experienced violence. Under President James K. Polk, the United States adopted a bel- ligerent foreign policy, especially toward the Republic of Mexico, located on its southwestern border. Mexico had gained its independence from Spain in 1822 and in 1829 had abolished slavery within its bounds. Meanwhile, American slaveholders settled in the Mexican province of Texas. At the time, the gigantic regions then known as California and New Mexico (now comprising the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and part of Colorado) also belonged to Mexico. In 1836 Texas won independence and, as a slaveholding republic, applied for annexation to the United States as a slave state. At first Democratic and Whig politicians, who realized that adding a large new slave state to the Union would divide the country along North–South lines, rebuffed the application. But the desire for new territory, encouraged by Manifest Destiny and an expanding slave-labor economy, could not be denied. In 1844 Polk, then the Democratic presidential candidate, called for the annexation of Texas and Oregon, a huge territory in the Pacific Northwest that the United States and Britain had been jointly administering. After Polk defeated Whig candidate Henry Clay, who favored delaying annexation, Congress in early 1845 annexed Texas by joint resolution as a slaveholding state.

In early 1846 Polk backed away from confronting Britain over Oregon, agreeing to split its territory along the 49th degree of latitude. Then, a few months later, Polk provoked a war against Mexico that by 1848 forced that country to recognize American sovereignty over Texas and to cede New Mexico and California to the United States (see Map 10-1 on page 232 in Chapter 10). Immediately, the major American political question became: Would slavery expand into these territories? If it did, many northerners expected slaveholders to

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MAP 91 ANTIABOLITIONIST AND ANTIBLACK RIOTS DURING THE ANTEBELLUM PERIOD African Americans faced violent conditions in both the North and South during the antebellum years. Fear among whites of growing free black communities and white antipathy toward spreading abolitionism sparked numerous antiblack and antiabolitionist riots.

Why did most of these riots occur in the Northeast?

View on MyHistoryLab Closer Look: Texas: From Mexican Province to U.S. State

 

 

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push for new slave states in the Southwest, use their votes to dominate the federal govern- ment, and enact policies detrimental to northern workers and farmers.

As such fears spread across the North, slaveholders in turn feared that northerners would seek to exclude slavery from the western lands southerners had helped wrest from Mexico. The resulting Compromise of 1850 (see Chapter 10) attempted to satisfy both sec- tions.But it subjected African Americans to additional violence because part of the Compro- mise met slaveholders’ demands for a stronger fugitive slave law. This law provided much more federal aid to masters in recapturing bond people who had escaped to the North than had the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. The new law also encouraged more kidnapping of free black northerners into slavery.

The Antislavery Movement

9-2 What roles did black institutions and moral suasion play in the antislavery movement?

The increase in race-related violence caused difficulties for an antislavery movement that was itself not free of racial strife and officially limited to peaceful means. Even though African Americans found loyal white allies within the movement, interracial understand- ing did not come easily. As white abolitionists assumed they should set policy, their black colleagues became resentful. During the same period, abolitionist opposition to achieving abolition through the use of force weakened. That opposition had arisen as a principled rejection of the violence that pervaded America and as a shrewd response to proslavery charges that abolitionists encouraged slave revolt. Yet rejection of forceful means seemed to limit abolitionist options in a violent environment. By the end of the 1830s, greater au- tonomy for black abolitionists and peaceful versus violent means became contentious issues within the movement.

The American Anti-Slavery Society Before the era of Manifest Destiny, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS)—the most significant abolitionist organization of the 1830s—emerged from a turning point in the abolitionist cause. This was William Lloyd Garrison’s decision in 1831 to create a move- ment dedicated to immediate, uncompensated emancipation and to equal rights for African Americans in the United States (see Chapter 8). To reach these goals, abolitionists organized the AASS in December 1833 at Philadelphia’s Adelphi Hall. Well aware of the fears Nat Turner’s revolt had raised, those assembled declared, “The society will never, in any way, countenance the oppressed in vindicating their rights by resorting to physical force.”

No white American worked harder than Garrison to bridge racial differences. He spoke to black groups, stayed in the homes of African Americans when he traveled, and welcomed them to his home. Black abolitionists responded with affection and loyalty. They provided financial support for his newspaper, The Liberator; worked as subscription agents; paid for his speaking tour in England in 1833; and served as his bodyguards. But Garrison, like most other white abolitionists, remained stiff and condescending in conversation with black col- leagues, and the black experience in the AASS reflected this.

On one hand, it is remarkable that the AASS allowed black men to participate in its meetings without formal restrictions. At the time, no other American organization did so. On the other hand, that black participation was paltry. Three African Americans—James McCrummell, Robert Purvis, and James G. Barbadoes—helped found the AASS, and McCrummell presided at its first meeting. But, among 60 white people attending that meet- ing, these three were the only African Americans. Although three white women also par- ticipated in the meeting, no black women did. Throughout the AASS’s existence, it rarely allowed black people to hold positions of authority.

American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS, 1833–1870) The umbrella organization for immediate abolitionists during the 1830s and the main Garrisonian organization after 1840.

 

 

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As state and local auxiliaries of the AASS organized across the North during the early 1830s, these patterns repeated themselves. Black men participated but did not lead, although a few held promi- nent offices. Among them were Barbadoes and Joshua Easton, who in 1834 joined the board of directors of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Also, in 1837 seven black men, including James Forten, helped organize the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Black and white women—with some exceptions—could observe the pro- ceedings of these organizations but not participate in them. It took a three-year struggle between 1837 and 1840 over “the woman question” before an AASS annual meeting elected a woman to a leadership position, and that victory helped split the organization.

Black and Women’s Antislavery Societies In these circumstances, black men, black women, and white women formed auxilia- ries to the AASS. Often African Americans belonged to all-black and to integrated, predom- inantly white organizations. Black men’s auxiliaries to the AASS formed across the North during the mid-1830s. As mentioned in Chapter 8, the earliest black women’s abolitionist organization appeared in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1832, a year before the AASS formed.

The black organizations arose in part because of racial discord in the predominantly white organizations and because of a black desire for racial solidarity. But, as historian Benjamin Quarles notes, during the 1830s “the founders of Negro societies did not envision their efforts as distinctive or self-contained; rather they viewed their role as that of a true auxiliary—supportive, supplemental, and subsidiary.” Despite their differences, black and white abolitionists belonged to a single movement.

The women’s racially integrated organizations exemplified Quarles’s point. Although these organizations did not overcome antiblack prejudice, they surpassed men’s societies in elevating African Americans to prominent positions. Black abolitionist Susan Paul became a member of the board of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society when it organized in 1833. Later that year, Margaretta Forten became recording secretary of the Female Anti-Slavery So- ciety of Philadelphia, founded by white Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott. In May 1837 black Quaker Sarah M. Douglass of Philadelphia and Sarah Forten—Margaretta’s sister—served as delegates to the First Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in New York City. At the second convention, Susan Paul became a vice president, and Douglass became treasurer.

All of the women’s antislavery societies concentrated on fund-raising. They held bake sales, organized antislavery fairs and bazaars, and sold antislavery memorabilia. The pro- ceeds went to the AASS or to antislavery newspapers. The women’s societies also inspired feminism by creating awareness that women had rights and interests that a male-dominated society had to recognize. By writing essays and poems on political subjects and making public speeches, abolitionist women challenged a culture that relegated respectable women to domestic duties. During the 1850s famous African-American speaker Sojourner Truth emphasized that all black women, through their physical labor and the pain they suffered in slavery, had earned equal standing with men and their more favored white sisters.

Read on MyHistoryLab Document: Elizabeth Margaret Chandler Calls on Women to Become Abolitionists, 1836

Read on MyHistoryLab Document: The American Anti-Slavery Society Declares Its Sentiments, 1833

Wealthy black abolitionist Robert Purvis is at the very center of this undated photograph of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society. The famous Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott and her husband James Mott are seated to Purvis’s left. Equally significant as Purvis’s central location in the photograph is that he is the only African American pictured.

 

 

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moral suasion A tactic endorsed by the American Anti-Slavery Society during the 1830s. It appealed to slaveholders and others to support immediate emancipation on the basis of Christian principles.

sojourner truth does not fit easily into the history of the antislavery movement. She did not identify with a particular group of abolitionists. Instead,

as her biographer Nell Irvin Painter points out,

Truth served the cause by making herself

a symbol of the strength of all black women.

O r i g i n a l l y named Isabella,

Truth was born a slave—probably in 1797—in a Dutch-speaking area north of New York City. She

had several mas- ters, one of whom

beat her brutally. Always a hard worker, she grew into a tall, muscular woman. She had a deep voice, and throughout her career enemies charged she was a man—despite her five children.

In 1827 Truth escaped to an antislavery family that pur- chased her freedom. Two years later, she became a revival- ist preacher in New York City. Later she joined a communal

religious cult, became an ardent millenarian—predicting that Judgment Day was rapidly approaching—and in 1843 took the name Sojourner Truth. A few years later, while working at a commune in Northampton, Massachusetts, she met abolitionists Frederick Douglass and David Ruggles. This meeting led to her career as a champion of abolition and women’s rights.

During the late 1840s and the 1850s, she lectured across the North and as far west as Kansas. Blunt but eloquent, Truth appealed to common sense in arguing that African Ameri- cans and women deserved the same rights as white men be- cause they could work as hard as white men. Truth almost always addressed white audiences and had a strong impres- sion on them. During the Civil War, she volunteered to work among black Union troops, and President Lincoln invited her to the White House in 1864. She continued to advocate black and women’s rights until her death in 1883.

As Painter and others note, Truth probably never used the phrase “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” for which she is most widely re- membered. A white female journalist attributed the phrase to Truth years after the 1851 women’s rights meeting in Akron, Ohio, where Truth was supposed to have used it. Contempo- rary accounts indicate that she did not. Truth did, however, tell those assembled in Akron, “I have as much muscle as any man, and I can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?”

Listen on MyHistoryLab Audio: The Rebirth of Sojourner Truth. Read by Jean Brannon.

PROFILE Sojourner Truth

Black men and women also formed auxiliaries during the early 1830s to the Quaker- initiated Free Produce Association, which tried to put economic pressure on slaveholders by boycotting agricultural products produced by slaves. James Cornish led the Colored Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania, which marketed meat, vegetables, cotton, and sugar pro- duced by free labor. With a similar aim, Judith James and Laetitia Rowley organized the Col- ored Female Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania. Other black affiliates to the Free Produce Association existed in New York and Ohio, and black abolitionist William Whipper oper- ated a free produce store in Philadelphia in 1834. During the 1850s Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, one of the few prominent black female speakers of the time, always included the free produce movement in her abolitionist lectures and wrote newspaper articles on its behalf.

Moral Suasion During the 1830s the AASS adopted a reform strategy based on moral suasion—what we would today call moral persuasion. This was an appeal to Americans North and South to support abolition and racial justice on the basis of their Christian consciences. Slaveholding, the AASS argued, was a sin and a crime that deprived African Americans of the freedom of conscience they needed to save their souls. Slaveholding led masters to damnation through

 

 

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their indolence, sexual exploitation of black women, and brutality. Abolitionists also argued that slavery was an inefficient labor system that enriched a few masters while impoverishing black and white southerners and hurting the American economy.

Abolitionists did not just criticize white southerners. They noted as well that northern industrialists thrived by manufacturing cloth from cotton produced by slave labor. They pointed out that the U.S. government protected the interests of slaveholders in the District of Columbia, in the territories, in the interstate slave trade, and through the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Northerners who profited from slave-produced cotton and supported the national government with their votes and taxes bore their share of guilt for slavery and faced divine punishment.

The AASS sought to use such arguments to convince masters to free their slaves. They also used them to persuade northerners and nonslaveholding white southerners to put pressure on slaveholders. To reach a white southern audience, the AASS in 1835 launched the Great Postal Campaign to send antislavery literature to southern post offices and individual slaveholders. At about the same time, the AASS organized a petitioning campaign aimed to agitate the slavery issue in Congress. Antislavery women led in circulating and signing the petitions. In 1836 over 30,000 petitions reached Washington.

In the North, AASS agents lectured against slavery and distributed antislav- ery literature. Often a pair of agents—one black and one white—traveled together. Ideally, the black agent would be a former slave, so he could testify from personal experience to the brutality and immorality of slavery. During the early 1840s, the AASS paired fugitive slave Frederick Douglass with William A. White, a young white Harvard graduate, in a tour through Ohio and Indiana. In 1843 the Eastern New York Anti-Slavery Society paired white Baptist preacher Abel Brown with “the noble colored man,” Lewis Washington. At first, all the agents were men. Later, abolitionist organizations also employed women.

The reaction to these efforts in the North and the South was not what the leaders of the AASS anticipated. As the story in the Voices box on Frederick Doug- lass relates, by speaking of racial justice and exemplifying interracial cooperation, abolitionists trod new ground. This created awkward situations that are—in ret- rospect—humorous. But their audiences often reacted very negatively. Southern postmasters burned antislavery literature, and southern state governments cen- sored the mail. Vigilantes drove off white southerners who openly advocated aboli- tion. Black abolitionists, of course, did not dare denounce slavery when and if they visited the South.

In 1836 southern representatives and their northern allies in Congress passed the Gag Rule forbidding petitions related to slavery from being introduced in the House of Representatives. In response, the AASS sent 415,000 petitions in 1838, and Congress- man (and former president) John Quincy Adams began his struggle against the Gag. Technically not an abolitionist but a defender of the First Amendment right to petition Congress, Adams succeeded in having the Gag repealed in 1844.

Meanwhile, northern mobs continued to assault abolitionist agents, disrupt their meetings, destroy their newspaper presses, and attack black neighborhoods. In 1837 a proslavery mob killed white abolitionist journalist Elijah P. Lovejoy as he defended his printing press in Alton, Illinois. On another occasion, as Douglass, White, and older white abolitionist George Bradburn held an antislavery meeting in the small town of Pendleton, Indiana, an enraged mob attempted to kill Douglass. Some of the rioters shouted, “Kill the nigger, kill the damn nigger.” Douglass suf- fered a broken hand. A rock hit White’s head. Finally, the two men fled. Years later, Douglass told White, “I shall never forget how like very brothers we were ready to dare, do, and even die for each other. . . . How I looked running you can best describe but how you looked bleeding I shall always remember.”

Read on MyHistoryLab Document: An Abolitionist Lecturer’s Instructions, 1834

In an effort to stir antiabolitionist feelings, this broadside announces an upcoming abolitionist lecture at a local New York church.

Read on MyHistoryLab Document: Excerpt from the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845

An increase in slave escapes helped inspire the more aggressive abolitionist tactics of the 1840s and 1850s. In this 1845 cover illustration for sheet music composed by white antislavery minstrel Jesse Hutchinson Jr., Frederick Douglass is shown in an idealized rendition of his escape from slavery in Maryland.

 

 

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9-3 What was the role of black churches and black newspapers in the abolitionist movement?

Black Community Support

A maturing African-American community undergirded the antislavery movement and helped it survive violent opposition. The free black population of the United States grew from 59,000 in 1790 to 319,000 in 1830 and 434,449 in 1850. Gradual emancipation in the northern states, acts of individual manumission in the Upper South, escapes, and a high birthrate accounted for this sevenfold increase. The concentration of a growing black popu- lation in such cities as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and Cincinnati strength- ened it. These cities had enough African Americans to support the independent churches, schools, benevolent organizations, and printing presses that self-conscious communities required. These communities became bedrocks of abolitionism.

The Black Convention Movement The dozens of local, state, and national black conventions held in the North between 1830 and 1864 helped inspire a larger black community. These conventions also manifested the antebellum American reform impulse. Their agenda transcended the antislavery cause. Nevertheless, they provided a forum for prominent black abolitionist men, such as Garnet, Frederick Douglass, and Martin R. Delany. They provided a setting in which abolitionism could grow and adapt to meet the demands of a sectionally polarized and violent time.

Hezekiah Grice, a young black man who had worked with Benjamin Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison in Baltimore during the 1820s (see Chapter 8), organized the first Black National Convention. It met on September 24, 1830, at the Bethel Church in Philadelphia with the venerable churchman Richard Allen presiding. The national convention became an annual event for the next five years, with all but one held in Philadelphia. During the same period, many state and local black conventions met across the North. All the conventions were small and informal—particularly those at the local level—and had no guidelines for choosing delegates. Still, they were attractive venues for discussing and publicizing black concerns. They called for the abolition of slavery and improving conditions for northern African Americans. Among other reforms, they advocated integrated public schools and the rights of black men to vote, serve on juries, and testify against white people in court.

The conventions also stressed black self-help through temperance, sexual morality, ed- ucation, and thrift. These causes remained important parts of the black agenda throughout the antebellum years. But by the mid-1830s, the national convention movement faltered as black abolitionists placed their hopes in the AASS.

Black Churches in the Antislavery Cause Black churches were more important than black conventions in the antislavery movement. With few exceptions, leading black abolitionists were ministers. Among them were Garnet, Jehiel C. Beman, Samuel E. Cornish, Theodore S. Wright, Charles B. Ray, James W. C. Pennington, Nathaniel Paul, Alexander Crummell, Daniel A. Payne, and Samuel Ringgold Ward. Some of these men led congregations affiliated with African-American churches, such as the African Baptist Church or the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Others preached to black congregations affiliated with predominantly white churches. A few black ministers, such as Amos N. Freeman of Brooklyn, New York, served white antislavery congregations. In either case, they used their pulpits to attack slavery, racial discrimination, proslavery white churches, and the American Colonization Society (ACS). Having covered most of these topics in a sermon to a white congregation in 1839, Daniel Payne, who had grown up free in South Carolina, declared, “Awake! AWAKE! to the battle, and hurl the hot- test thunders of divine truth at the head of this cruel monster [slavery], until he shall fall to rise no more; and the groans of the enslaved are converted into the songs of the free!” Black churches also provided forums for abolitionist speakers, such as Frederick Douglass

 

 

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and Garrison, and meeting places for predominantly white antislavery organizations, which frequently could not meet in white churches.

Black Newspapers Although less influential than black churches, black antislavery newspapers had an im- portant role in the antislavery movement, particularly by the 1840s. Like their white coun- terparts, they almost always faced financial difficulties, and few survived for long. This was because reform—as opposed to commercial—newspapers were a luxury that not many subscribers, black or white, could afford. Black newspapers faced added difficulties finding readers because most African Americans were poor, and many were illiterate. Moreover, white abolitionist newspapers, such as The Liberator, served a black clientele. They pub- lished speeches by black abolitionists and reported black convention proceedings. Some black abolitionists argued, therefore, that a separate black press was unnecessary. An addi- tional, self-imposed burden was that publishers eager to get their message out almost never required subscribers to pay in advance.

Yet several influential black abolitionist newspapers existed between the late 1820s and the Civil War. The first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, owned and edited by Samuel Cornish and John B. Russwurm, lasted from 1827 to 1829. It proved African Americans could produce interesting, competent journalism that attracted black and white subscribers. The Journal also established a framework for black journalism during the antebellum period by emphasizing opposition to slavery, support for racial justice, and devotion to Christian and democratic values.

Philip A. Bell was the most ubiquitous black journalist of the period. Bell published or co-published the New York Weekly Advocate in 1837, the Colored American from 1837 to 1842, and the San Francisco Pacific Appeal and the San Francisco Elevator during the 1860s. But black clergyman Charles B. Ray of New York City was the real spirit behind the Colored American. Aware of the need for financial success, Ray declared in 1838, “If among the few hundred thousand free colored people in the country—to say nothing of the white popula- tion from whom it ought to receive a strong support—a living patronage for the paper can- not be obtained, it will be greatly to their reproach.”

Colored American Published in New York from 1837 to 1842, the leading African- American newspaper of its time.

VOICES Frederick Douglass Describes an Awkward Situation

Frederick Douglass wrote this passage during the mid-1850s. It is from My Bondage and My Freedom, the second of his three autobiographies. It relates with humor not only the racial bar- riers that black and white abolitionists had to break but also primitive conditions they took for granted.

In the summer of 1843, I was traveling and lecturing in company with William A. White, Esq., through the state of Indiana. Anti-slavery friends were not very abundant in Indiana . . . and beds were not more plentiful than friends. . . . At the close of one of our meetings, we were invited home with a kindly-disposed old farmer, who, in the generous enthusiasm of the moment, seemed to have forgotten that he had but one spare bed, and that his guests were an ill-matched pair. . . . White is remarkably fine looking, and very evidently a born gentleman; the idea of putting us in the same bed was hardly to be tolerated; and

yet there we were, and but the one bed for us, and that, by the way, was in the same room occupied by the other members of the family. . . . After witnessing the confusion as long as I liked, I relieved the kindly-disposed family by playfully saying, “Friend White, having got entirely rid of my prejudice against color, I think, as proof of it, I must allow you to sleep with me to-night.” White kept up the joke, by seeming to esteem himself the favored party, and thus the difficulty was removed.

1. What does this passage reveal about American life during the 1840s?

2. What does Douglass tell us about his personality?

source: Michael Meyer, ed., Frederick Douglass: The Narrative and Selected Writings (New York: Modern Library, 1984), 170–71.

 

 

216 PART II Slavery, Abolition, and the Quest for Freedom: The Coming of the Civil War

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Other prominent, if short-lived, black newspapers of the 1840s and 1850s included Garnet’s United States Clarion, published in his home city of Troy, New York; Stephen Myers’s Northern Star and Freeman’s Advocate, published in Albany, New York; Samuel Ringgold Ward’s True American, of Cortland, New York, which in 1850 became the Impar- tial Citizen; Martin Delany’s Mystery, published in Pittsburgh during the 1840s; and Thomas Van Rensselaer’s Ram’s Horn, which appeared in New York City during the 1850s.

Frederick Douglass’s North Star and its successor Frederick Douglass’ Paper were the most influential black antislavery newspapers of the late 1840s and the 1850s. Heavily subsidized by Gerrit Smith, a wealthy white abolitionist, and attracting more white than black subscribers, Douglass’s weeklies gained the support of many black abolitionist organizations. His papers were well edited and attractively printed. They also employed able assistant editors, including Martin R. Delany during the late 1840s, and insightful correspondents, such as William J. Wilson of Brooklyn and James McCune Smith of New York City.

North Star A weekly newspaper published and edited by Frederick Douglass from 1847 to 1851. Fredrick Douglass’ Paper (1851–1860) succeeded it.

American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (AFASS, 1840–1855) An organization of church-oriented abolitionists.

Liberty Party (1840–1848) The first antislavery political party. Most of its supporters joined the Free Soil Party in 1848, although its radical New York wing maintained a Liberty organization into the 1850s.

9-4 What were the reasons for the breakup of the American Anti-Slavery Society and what organizations emerged to replace it?

The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the Liberty Party

In 1840 the AASS splintered. Most of its members left to establish the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (AFASS) and the Liberty Party, the first antislavery political party. In part, the split resulted from long-standing disagreements about the role of women in abolitionism and William Lloyd Garrison’s broadening radicalism. By declaring that slavery had irrevocably corrupted the existing American society, by denouncing organized religion as irrevocably proslavery, by becoming a feminist, and by embracing a form of Christian anarchy that precluded formal involvement in politics, Garrison seemed to have lost sight of abolitionism’s main concern. However, the failure of moral suasion to make progress against slavery—particularly in the South—and the question of how abolitionists should respond to slave unrest also helped fracture the AASS.

Garrison and a minority of New England-centered abolitionists who agreed with his radical critique of America retained control of the AASS, which became known as the “Old Organization.” By 1842 they had de-emphasized moral suasion and begun calling for disunion— the separation of the North from the South—as the only means of ending northern support for slavery. The U.S. Constitution, Garrison declared, was a proslavery document that had to be replaced before African Americans could gain freedom.

Those who withdrew from the AASS took a more traditional stand on the role of women, believed the country’s churches could be converted to abolitionism, and asserted that the Constitution could be used on behalf of abolitionism. Under the leadership of Lewis Tappan, a wealthy white New York City businessman, some of them formed the church-oriented AFASS. Others created the Liberty Party and nominated James G. Birney, a slaveholder-turned-abolitionist, as their candidate in the 1840 presidential election. Birney received only 7,069 votes out of a total cast of 2,411,187, and William Henry Harrison, the Whig candidate, became president. But the Liberty Party began what became an increas- ingly powerful political crusade against slavery.

Black abolitionists joined in the disruption of the Old Organization. As might be ex- pected, most black clerical abolitionists joined the AFASS. Eight, including Jehiel C. Beman and his son Amos G. Beman, Christopher Rush, Samuel E. Cornish, Theodore S. Wright, Stephen H. Gloucester, Andrew Harris, and Garnet helped create the new organization.

 

 

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