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Review Essay


Imagining Emancipation
Recent Writings on American Antislavery

DEE E. ANDREWS



Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780–1860. [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998.] 320 pp.

Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Phillip Lapsansky, eds., Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African American Protest Literature, 1790–1860. [New York and London: Routledge, 2000.] 320 pp.

Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. [Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.] 384 pp.

John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. [Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2002.] 367 pp.

Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten. [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.] 384 pp.


ABOLITIONISTS HAVE NEVER lacked for chroniclers. For a group that comprised at most 1 percent of the American population on the eve of the Civil War, they have attracted the attention of a remarkable number of serious scholars for the better part of a century, and intensively since the Civil Rights movement renewed Americans' consciousness of our own national apartheid. Every angle of the movement, seemingly, has been explored: its legislative and political implications, social and economic underpinnings, intellectual and religious dimensions, trans-Atlantic context, and temporal and regional variations. The links between abolitionism and other reform movements—particularly Temperance (from whence so many reformers came) and Woman Suffrage (where a handful of reformers ultimately found their home)—have undergone thorough examinations. Major biographies and documentary editions have brought into general circulation the writings and life stories of the movement's leading figures. William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and—above all—John Brown became household names long ago, and more recently some fine narratives have focused on several of the lesser-known players, such as fugitive slaves Shadrach Minkins and Anthony Burns. The dramatic court case of the Amistad rebels also has a newfound currency with the American public, thanks to the major motion picture by Steven Spielberg.1 1
      Is there anything left to be said about this most famous of American radical movements? Judging by these five recent works, the answer is a resounding yes. Like any other historical subject, antislavery appears differently when examined through different lenses, and contemporary scholars are using important new theoretical and empirical instruments to shed further light on the abolitionists and their times. 2
      Most provocative of these is Joanne Pope Melish's Disowning Slavery, a brilliant and theoretically charged reexamination of gradual emancipation in New England. Previously, historians have credited gradual emancipationists with attempting to resolve the essential contradictions between the American Revolutionary creed of liberty and equality with the maintenance of slavery not only in state law and practice but also in various key provisions of the U.S. Constitution. The "first" antislavery movement, emerging in the 1770s and operating well into the 1820s, attempted to resolve the conflict between two natural rights: the right to liberty, understood as inherent to all humans; and the right to property, understood as inherent to the slaveholder as the owner of his or her slaves. The result was a well-intentioned but flawed system whereby ambivalent judges and state legislatures throughout the North reserved slaveholders' rights to slaves held before the passage of the new emancipation laws while granting liberty to their children only upon reaching adulthood. A number of historians have taken an increasingly jaundiced view of these efforts. As one study has put it: the first gradual emancipation law, passed by Pennsylvania in 1780, "freed not a single slave."2 3
      Melish argues that gradual emancipation, placing free people on a par with whites as it ultimately would, prompted a cultural transformation in New England that "interrogated the stability of social identity and the meaning of citizenship for whites as well as people of color" (1). For at the same time that New Englanders aimed to end slavery in their region, they aimed to end the presence of black people there as well. In this way, New Englanders reconceived the history of their region as one where slavery had barely existed. 4
      Employing poststructuralist insights and theoretical constructs, Melish investigates New Englanders' use of racial imagery, role reversal stories about albino Africans and white slaves in Algiers, and graphic racist caricatures. Many New Englanders' efforts to expunge African Americans from their daily contact and historical consciousness paralleled white Americans' determination to remove Indians to the trans-Mississippi West. And these imaginings of the absence of color had literal manifestations in the American Colonization Society (which sought to send free blacks to Liberia in West Africa) and Indian Removal (which achieved the exile of the southwestern tribes to Oklahoma in the 1820s and 1830s). 5
      Melish does not so much provide new findings on gradual emancipation as she re-sees the ending of slavery in New England in symbolic and cultural terms. She underscores her commanding prose with axiomatic paradoxes—"Being a perfect slave was inherently impossible, but failing to try could be fatal" (27); "These children of slaves were a kind of oxymoron: they were born free into servitude" (76); "[The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850] theoretically required people to be able to prove not that they were free but that they were white" (269). At times, however, she also undermines her thesis with fragilely supported leaps of interpretation and reliance on a deconstructionist jargon of "inscriptions," "mappings," and "imaginings"—the last in the sense of the construction of collective cultural assumptions. 6
      Ironically, we hear very little from African Americans in Disowning Slavery. The main focus remains on white New Englanders and the remaking of a collective memory that served to bolster their self-image as a righteous people. Not until the end of the study does Melish return to the words and imaginings of African Americans themselves, concluding with a harrowing synopsis of Harriet Wilson's novel, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. 7
      It is a relief, in turning to Pamphlets of Protest, to discover that African Americans in the North were well aware of designs to remove them not only cognitively but physically from the United States and that they protested this and other threats to their freedom and dignity within a few years of the closing of the Revolutionary War. Pamphlets of Protest is deftly edited and introduced by two young academics, Richard Newman and Patrick Rael, along with Phillip Lapsansky, the black history specialist at the Library Company of Philadelphia who may know more about this literature than any other American scholar. This volume reproduces twenty-five pamphlets, a form of bound print literature longer than a broadside but shorter than a book that Americans read by the thousands in the years before widespread magazine circulation. Many started life as speeches and addresses, making them indispensable artifacts for tracing the development of black rhetoric. In print, they "carried black voices through space and time: space, so that a broader national community of black leaders and white citizens could see African-American arguments; and time, so that subsequent generations of black as well as white readers could refer back to African American documents" (introduction, 4). One has only to think of Thomas Paine's Common Sense to comprehend the impact that pamphlets once had on American public opinion. For black Americans and their white supporters a number of the offerings in this collection were as compelling as Paine's call to resist the British. 8
      The collection falls roughly into three sections. The first begins in 1794, the year of the first polemic in this tradition: "A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia," which defended with stunning documentary precision the actions of blacks during an outbreak of yellow fever in America's largest city. The last item in this section, part four of David Walker's justly famous "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World," was published in Boston in 1829. The second section of Pamphlets of Protest covers the 1830s and 1840s, a time when free blacks struggled with unprecedented outbreaks of anti-black violence in the North and ongoing pressures to leave the country. It includes two items by women, Elizabeth Wicks and Maria W. Stewart, as well as Henry Highland Garnet's call to slaves to rise against their bondage, which was rejected as incendiary by the black national convention meeting in Buffalo in 1843. 9
      The collection concludes with representative pamphlets from the 1850s, when opposition to slavery faced the potentially lethal challenges of the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott Decision. It includes outstanding selections from the works of Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany (an early black nationalist) as well as a poignant reflection by Alexander Crummell on the beauty of the English language, written on the coast of Liberia, far from Crummell's native English-speaking home. 10
      Pamphlets of Protest provides invaluable documentation of a rising black intelligentsia's public voice in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War. Only two of its contents appear in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and only one in the major documentary collection, The Black Abolitionist Papers.3 Inevitably, as in any collection focusing on protest, Pamphlets of Protest includes repeated demands for change. The anger of many of these early and in some cases brilliant polemicists is palpable, sometimes to great effect. Here is the path-breaking Maria Stewart, making historical connections that contemporary scholars are only just coming to:
The unfriendly whites first drove the native American from his much loved home. Then they stole our fathers from their peaceful and quiet dwellings ...; they have obliged our brethren to labor, kept them in utter ignorance, nourished them in vice, and raised them in degradation; and now that we have enriched their soil, and filled their coffers, they say that we are not capable of becoming like white men, and that we can never rise to respectability in this country. They would drive us to a strange land. But before I go, the bayonet shall pierce me through. (127)
 Some readers will find others of these writings slow going, particularly in the first half of the volume, which certifies just how profoundly religious educated black Americans were, and how thoroughly biblical their discourse. The editors are also sometimes too loyal to the concerns of their writers. There is some question, for example, whether the second half of the volume needed two extended expositions on the Haitian Revolution (one by William Wells Brown, the novelist, the other by J. Theodore Holly, an early black nationalist).		 11
      Pamphlets of Protest is far more than a catalog of protonationalist outrage and biblical exegesis, however. It reveals the deep roots of the oppositional questions that have informed black culture and power in America, as well as the construction of race relations: Should black Americans identify themselves as Americans or Africans? Was Africa a homeland or a place of exile? Was respectability a suitable goal or a sell-out? How closely should blacks associate with whites in their struggle for freedom? What is the place of black women in black society (the argument most often documented here favors equality with men)? Should color feature into any debate about American morals? What exactly was the legacy of slavery for Americans as a whole? As these black writers "took up their pens to record a critical version of American history and society" (introduction, 24), they re-imagined—in the universal sense of envisioning—an alternative history. The same touchstones appear time and again: the Declaration of Independence (the fundamental charter), the U.S. Constitution (problematically proslavery), the Haitian Revolution (a harbinger of black freedom), the ending of the slave trade (cause for annual celebration), the Fugitive Slave Law (a profound threat), and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry (the emblematic beginning of the end of slavery). 12
      Re-imagining history, particularly antislavery history, also undergirds the purpose of three new studies: Julie Roy Jeffrey's The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, John Stauffer's The Black Hearts of Men, and Julie Winch's A Gentleman of Color. Although these books are fundamentally different, each highlights how opposition to slavery defined the lives of many thousands of antebellum Northerners, including a critical few who tried with varying success to cross the color line. 13
      Women were powerful movers and shakers in the antislavery movement, particularly in the heyday of antislavery organization from the 1830s through the Civil War. The names of leading abolitionists—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Lucy Stone, the former slaves Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, and the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe—are nearly as familiar as their male counterparts. It is the beauty of Jeffrey's approach that these formidable figures make relatively few appearances in her book. Her point is instead to demonstrate how "ordinary" white women sustained antislavery through high points and low, and her larger purpose is "to show the ways in which female abolitionism contributes to our understanding of white middle-class women in the antebellum period and to the debate over the meaning of private and public in middle-class life" (6). 14
      The title of the book, derived from a comment by William Lloyd Garrison, is something of a misnomer, for these women were anything but silent. In fact, their determined efforts to find a public voice led to conflicts with family members, churches, and public agencies, as well as other antislavery activists. The term "middle-class" may also be misleading: most of Jeffrey's activists were rural farm women, living in the hinterlands of New England and Pennsylvania and in the revival hotbeds of upstate New York and the new Midwest. 15
      Antislavery women were, of course, not perfect, however much they sought religious and reforming transcendence. Often the very groups that sought to liberate slaves excluded free black women from holding office or required them to occupy segregated seating during meetings—thereby thwarting the aspirations of a black middle class. Jeffrey's explanation of why Northern women were attracted to abolition is perfunctory at best. Joanne Pope Melish and other poststructuralist scholars would make much of how female abolitionists imagined—created a useful fiction around—slavery. From Jeffrey's fleeting references to some women's fantasies of the slave South—often derived from antislavery doggerel and block-printed almanacs—it's evident that many had little acquaintance with black people and, until the Underground Railroad was fully underway, most had never met a slave. Instead, Jeffrey fails to observe that the visions of suffering slaves dressed in loincloths and turbans and subject to repeated corporal punishments permitted once sheltered women to come to terms with the unthinkable: human physical difference, sexuality, and domestic violence.4 16

 
Figure 1
    Female slave, chained and kneeling. Engraving by Patrick Reason, "A Colored Young Man of the City of New York, 1835."
    Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
 
 
      Nonetheless, Jeffrey's abolitionists were uncommon and often heroic women, comprising fully two generations of activists, the second raised on the milk of antislavery rhetoric and organizing. Many, such as Sallie Holley, an Oberlin student, and Mary Still, an African American missionary, ultimately served as teachers in the Reconstruction South, carrying their calling to its logical conclusion. The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism brings home how unpopular abolitionism was in most Northern communities, not least of all for the way in which it challenged women's conventional roles and encouraged their public confidence. 17
      No amount of deconstruction can minimize the enormous moral, intellectual, and constitutional problem that abolitionists took it upon themselves to solve and that so many of their contemporaries—among them two generations of otherwise gifted politicians—tried repeatedly to ignore. And well they might evade the subject: for once the legitimacy of slavery within the nation was questioned, the very groundwork of the national compact appeared to unravel. William Lloyd Garrison famously rejected the U.S. Constitution as a "covenant with death" because of its numerous protections of slavery.5 He and his allies, black and white, refused to engage with a party politics that they considered hopelessly corrupt and beholden to a Southern slaveocracy. John Stauffer's The Black Hearts of Men, a vivid journey into the intersecting lives of four abolitionist men in the crisis years of the 1840s and 1850s, illuminates how some abolitionists' attempts to imagine an end to the agonies of slavery—for slaves, for the republic, and for themselves—drove them into the political and millennial maelstrom of the 1850s. 18
      The first two, Frederick Douglass and John Brown, need no introduction, though Stauffer's book sheds new light on them. Stauffer reconsiders Douglass's change of heart regarding the use of violence to overthrow slavery—by the mid 1850s Douglass had become an advocate. Similarly, Stauffer provides a fresh look at John Brown's remarkable respectability among New York's abolitionist grandees despite having admitted to personally assassinating—with broadswords—a pro-slavery family in Kansas. 19
      Although they are less well known today, Gerrit Smith and James McCune Smith nearly equaled Douglass and Brown in stature and fame during their lifetimes. Gerrit Smith was one of the richest men in America—his father had been John Jacob Astor's partner—and he dutifully managed his father's wealth, even while he gave great portions of it away. He and his wife, Nancy (featured prominently here), contributed an estimated $600 million to $1.1 billion in today's monetary values to their favored causes. Among these gifts were 200,000 acres of land to indigent black and white settlers, chiefly in upstate New York (128). James McCune Smith, born a statutory slave, earned his M.D. at the University of Glasgow and became a leading black intellectual. He is in some ways the most tragic figure in Stauffer's narrative, as his hopes for the meeting of black and white hearts and minds was destroyed by Gerrit Smith's and John Brown's individual rendezvous with destiny. 20
      Stauffer's title needs some explanation for readers familiar with Joseph Conrad's heart of darkness: more than anything, these activists longed to accept blackness in a deeply positive sense. As Stauffer writes at the very start of the story, James McCune Smith believed that whites "had to learn how to view the world as if they were black, shed their 'whiteness' as a sign of superiority, and renounce their belief in skin color as a maker of aptitude and social status. They had to acquire, in effect, a black heart" (1). Admirers of Byron and contemporaries of Whitman and Emerson, Stauffer's four protagonists were able to cross racial boundaries in unprecedented ways. The author features prominently the abolitionists' efforts to come to term with racial stereotyping, notions of savagery, and male and female role reversal. They espoused a "Bible politics" by supporting the Radical Abolition Party, which attempted to harmonize politics with an increasingly (and dangerously) millennial enthusiasm. 21
      It ended badly, of course, with John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry at the end of 1859. Two of Brown's sons died in the raid, and Brown was captured, tried by a Virginia court, and hanged. Douglass fled the country as a fugitive, returning only after authorities withdrew the warrant for his arrest. Gerrit Smith literally if temporarily lost his mind—his "black heart"—and came to blame black people for all that had gone wrong with the ending of slavery. And James McCune Smith almost literally died of a broken heart when it became clear that Gerrit Smith had abandoned their friendship. 22
      What had gone wrong? Stauffer delivers an eloquent moral critique on the dangers of advocating violence in times of heated political and moral contests. His is a welcome corrective of the too frequent glorification of the Civil War wherein the 620,000 war dead are forgotten in debates over the conflict's necessity or inevitability. But Stauffer credits his players with greater influence than they had. Great moral and constitutional problems engender great crises, whatever the choices of the individuals swept up in them. Without serious political leadership, or, in the case of Lincoln, leadership that comes too late, they resolve themselves into tragedy. 23
      James Forten had greater hopes for his country than this. In a magnificent biography, A Gentleman of Color, Julie Winch recovers the life and times of this black Philadelphia artisan and abolitionist. She has accomplished what no other historian of antislavery has: a fully realized portrait of a black American who was an extraordinary advocate of his people, yet whose rise to wealth and influence must often be deduced from the actions and words of those who knew him. Forten, Winch writes, "was everywhere, speaking, drafting petitions, writing to the press, contacting anyone he thought might help his community" (7). Her method is to document, in amazing detail, that "everywhere," while at the same time bringing to her task an expert familiarity with Philadelphia and the greater Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 24
      Winch writes with the assurance of a storyteller. And a great story it is: of Forten's Franklinesque rise from poor free apprentice to Revolutionary patriot and master sailmaker, business genius, abolitionist, and family patriarch—all the while never granted the right to vote. Like so many abolitionist men, he appears to have been particularly fortunate in his wife, Charlotte Vandine Forten. Her portrayal is the one weak aspect of Winch's narrative, as she was an active female abolitionist in her own right and undoubtedly an inspiration for her husband's support for women's rights.6 In many respects a deeply conservative man, Forten was appalled by bad manners and bad morals, and like so many of his black contemporaries, he immersed himself in Bible culture. His personal respectability—and personal wealth—may have permitted him to cross the color line more easily, and he formed enduring friendships with white activists, particularly William Lloyd Garrison and the Quakers Lucretia and James Mott. 25
      Winch does not evade the issues raised by the potential conflict between Forten's radicalism and his conservatism so much as she assumes the reader can sort these out for her- or himself. She has a more important task to carry out: to reclaim from obscurity a powerful black figure and the consequences that his life had for his community and his dearly loved children and grandchildren. The 1878 marriage of his granddaughter Charlotte Forten to Francis J. Grimké, a nephew of the Grimké sisters, brought the abolitionist network full circle. 26
      Despite Winch's frequent reliance on what others said about Forten, he is no figment of her in-the-pejorative-sense imagination. His voice rings loudly and clearly from pamphlets (one of which appears in Pamphlets of Protest), letters, and the proceedings of black conventions. Everywhere he expresses his determination to resolve the contradiction between American patriotism and racism. As he wrote to William Lloyd Garrison in a homely metaphor, "To separate the blacks from the whites is as impossible as to bale out the Delaware [River] with a bucket" (242). Like so many antislavery activists, however, he was exasperated by the all-too-common inability of white Americans to recognize black claims to freedom. In 1831, he wrote again to Garrison:
When we ... hear of almost every nation fighting for its liberty, is it to be expected that the African race will continue always in the degraded state they are now? No. The time is fast approaching when the words "Fight for liberty, or die in the attempt" will be sounded in every African ear ... and when he will throw off his fetters, and flock to the banner ... with the following words inscribed upon it—"Liberty or Death." (245)
 		27
      Recent work on American antislavery demonstrates that much remains to be said about this most American of radical movements and the rhetoric, actions, and human relationships it produced. Readers can be confident that none of these books repeats an old story: each instead asks the reader to truly comprehend—imagine in the fullest sense—the complex history of a vital part of the American saga. They remind us that the challenges we face in our own time are matched in scope and sorrow by the dilemmas of those who came before us. 28


DEE E. ANDREWS teaches history at California State University, Hayward. She is the author of The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (2000) and co-convener of the Bay Area Seminar in Early American History and Culture.


NOTES

1. Gary Collinson, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge and London, 1997); Albert J. von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston (Cambridge and London, 1998). See also the recent study by Iyunolu Folayan Osagie: The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone (Athens, Ga., and London, 2000).

2. Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York and Oxford, 1991), 111.

3. Henry Louis Gates et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York and London, 1997), 201–207; C. Peter Ripley et al., eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill and London, 1985–1992), 3:403–412.

4. These cultural concerns are taken up in Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven and London, 1989), 3–26, and in Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York and London, 1996).

5. See Paul Finkelman's bracing "Making a Covenant with Death: Slavery and the Constitutional Convention," in his Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, 2d ed. (New York, 2001), 3–36.

6. Jean R. Soderlund and Emma Jones Lapsansky describe the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in separate essays in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca and London, 1994).

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