Professor David Blight:
In some ways,
the greatest witnesses--there
are many,
many witnesses of the coming of
the Civil War--what caused it,
what's percolating from beneath
the society of the South,
we've looked at,
and the society of the
North--and in so many ways,
of course,
the greatest witnesses--and
their stories have only been
with us, in a serious,
robust way, for the past couple
of decades or so,
a few decades--are those of the
slaves themselves.
If it was somehow all about
them--and in varying kind of
ironic ways folks on both sides
will say that--if it is somehow
all about them,
what did they think?
This week you're reading the
greatest of the slave
narratives.
Frederick Douglass's first
autobiography,
published in 1845,
is, I still would maintain,
the greatest of the slave
narratives, certainly in a
literary sense.
He was an almost mystically
brilliant writer,
for one so young.
He first drafted this when he
was 26.
He escaped from slavery when he
was 20-years-old.
You'll find out in the text how
he learned his literacy.
He learned it first from his
white mistress,
Miss Sophia,
who became like an angelic
mother-figure to him until she
took language away from him.
The book is full of metaphor,
it is full of one kind of tale
and story after another that
Douglass shapes into telling a
free story.
Telling a free story,
as the great literary critic of
this genre, Bill Andrews,
has put it.
For a fugitive slave to emerge
in the Northern states--for that
matter a fugitive slave who goes
to Britain,
like Olaudah Equiano did,
African born,
or so we still think,
and writes his story in
Britain--but for a fugitive
slave to write his or her story
and publish it in English in the
western world was to say:
"I'm a person of letters,
I am somebody,
I have a history,
I am free, but I am not free
until you let me write,
and I will make myself free,
if I must, by telling you who I
am."
When a fugitive slave could go
to England and hold up his book
in front of huge
audiences--Douglass spoke in
London at one point before
10,000 people,
in 1846--and he could hold his
little book up in his hand,
he could probably at that
moment feel freer than he'd ever
felt,
because he could actually say
"this is who I am,
I'm not a manufactured
identity,
I'm not what you necessarily
want me to be.
I won't talk the way you expect
me to talk.
I won't scratch my head when I
tell my story."
But what a story.
When I was a fledgling graduate
student, not knowing what I was
doing and writing a dissertation
on Frederick Douglass,
a couple--a few decades ago,
a new book had come out called
Young Frederick Douglass.
It was a wonderful study of
Douglass's youth.
It had been written by a
journalist, so he was hard to
find--he wasn't an academic.
This is pre-email,
pre-Google, pre-lots of things.
I wrote to his publisher,
Johns Hopkins University Press,
and said can you give me a
phone number for Dick
Preston--Dickson Preston was his
name.
They said, "yes,
here's his phone number."
I was in Washington,
D.C., doing research;
called him.
He lived on the Eastern Shore
of Maryland, that much I knew,
which is where Douglass grew
up.
I didn't know much about Dick
except that he had written this
extraordinary book on Douglass's
youth.
In fact, it was Preston who
actually discovered Douglass's
birth date.
Douglass was one year younger
than he ever knew--wouldn't that
be cool?
I'll take a year back any time
at this point.
Called him, he said,
"Yeah, come on out to the
Eastern Shore,
meet me in the Easton Community
College parking lot at 9
a.m."--on whatever Wednesday
morning it was in July--"I'll
give you a tour of the sites of
Douglass's youth."
And it was one of the most
extraordinary days of my life.
I folded myself into his
station wagon and we drove back
roads all over the Eastern
Shore.
He took me for a walk through a
muddy cornfield,
as I believe it,
out to the back lot of a field,
to a bend in Tuckahoe Creek,
and he said,
"This is where Douglass was
born.
Here's where Grandmother
Betsy's cabin was."
Then he took me down all kinds
of back roads,
then we ended up at the
Freeland Farm.
If you've read the
Narrative you know the
Freeland Farm was--among
Douglass's three or four masters
he had as a youth,
Freeland he admired the most or
respected the most.
And then he said,
"Do you want to see Covey's
Farm?"
Edward Covey,
the so-called slave-breaker
Douglass had been hired out to,
or sent to,
by his master Thomas Auld,
when he was a 17-year-old,
quite rebellious and rather
uncontrollable teenager.
I said, "Sure,
show me Covey's farm."
Then back roads again that I
couldn't find today if my life
depended on it.
We get out of a car and,
in my memory,
we stepped over a fencepost,
we walked out this ridge,
and Dick said something like
"turn around."
And there they were.
He hadn't made it up.
In the narrative,
if you've read far enough,
if you've read to page 83 in my
edition,
you've encountered the most
beautiful metaphor in
anti-slavery literature.
It's Douglass's metaphor of the
white sailing ships on the
Chesapeake that he would see
from Covey's farm for eight
months,
and he would try to dream and
imagine his way onto their
decks, their "gallant decks",
as he called them.
And I realized that day
sometimes metaphor is not just a
metaphor.
"Our house stood within a few
rods of the Chesapeake
Bay"--this is Douglass's
description--"whose broad bosom
was ever white with sails from
every quarter of the habitable
globe.
Those beautiful vessels robed
in purest white,
so delightful to the eye of
freemen"--don't you wish you
could write like this when
you're 26?--"were to me so many
shrouded ghosts,
to terrify and torment me with
thoughts of my wretched
condition.
I have often,
in the deep stillness of a
summer Sabbath,
stood all alone upon the lofty
banks of that noble bay and
traced,
with saddened heart and tearful
eye, the countless number of
sails moving off to the mighty
ocean."
Douglass was fond of adjectives.
"The sight of these always
affected me powerfully.
My thoughts would compel
utterance, and there with no
audience but the Almighty I
would pour out my soul's
complaint"--a phrase right from
the Book of Job--"in my rude
way,
with an apostrophe to the
moving multitudes of ships."
And when you read this,
note what he does then,
he puts his own teenage voice,
or his memory,
in quotation marks,
and he speaks to the ships.
"You are loose from your
moorings and are free.
I am fast in my chains and am a
slave.
You move merrily before the
gentle gale and I sadly before
the bloody whip.
You are freedom's swift winged
angels that fly around the
world.
I am confined in bands of iron.
Oh that I were free.
Oh that I were on one of your
gallant decks and under your
protecting wing.
But alas, betwixt me and you
the turbid waters roll.
Go on, go on.
Oh that I could also go."
And he still goes on for
another paragraph,
milking, if you like,
the sailing ship metaphor for
all it's worth.
How many of us--perhaps all of
us, I think everybody,
has their own Chesapeake.
It may be every morning when
you have to go to class.
We all have our own Chesapeake
Bays we've looked out on and
wondered "wouldn't I rather be
there?"
Or "how can I get out of here?"
Or "is there a sailing ship
that will liberate me?"
Telling a free story is what
the slave narratives were about.
They were acts of telling that
in some ways made the former
slave almost literally free by
an act of language.
Language itself to a former
slave who could write was a form
of liberation.
We tend to take it for granted
today, these books,
language.
Okay, abolitionism, its roots.
Reformers, the barriers they
faced.
I'm going to run through this
with some speed,
and then the stages in the
development of an anti-slavery
impulse--let's call it that to
begin with.
It begins with this idea of
colonization,
colonizing African-American
freed people or former slaves
outside the United States;
an idea that never lost its
kind of beguiling hold on the
American imagination,
even well after the Civil War,
ironically.
And then on to a more
radicalized form of anti-slavery
thinking and action,
exemplified especially by
William Lloyd Garrison,
but by a host of other black
and white abolitionists.
And then I want to work you at
least to the story,
in myth and reality,
of the Underground Railroad,
since it is so much a part of
our imagination of this story,
and it would at least I hope
take us to the point of
understanding why that Fugitive
Slave Act,
that we'll hear about on
Thursday and into next week,
that Fugitive--that Federal
Fugitive Slave Act passed in
1850,
in the compromise of 1850 that
flowed out of the Mexican
War--why that Fugitive Slave Act
was so pertinent,
so divisive,
so significant,
in the kinds of ways Americans
were beginning to divide over
the future of free labor and
slave labor,
whatever.
They may have thought about
African-Americans as their
neighbors.
But permit me to use Emerson
again, at least briefly.
This idea of reform.
I mentioned last time that--and
sort of ended there--that in
American History we've had at
least four major reform eras or
waves of reform.
And certainly this is the first.
In Antebellum America from the
1820s through the 1850s all
kinds of reform ferment came to
the surface.
Sometimes that was against
flogging in the Navy.
Sometimes it was in utopian
experiments and communities.
Sometimes that was in Women's
Rights.
Sometimes that was in
Temperance, which was by
far--that is the anti-alcohol,
anti-booze, anti-demon rum
movement--Temperance was by far
the most widespread American
reform movement in pre-Civil War
times.
It was probably the only major
reform movement that got a hold
in the South.
Personal reform of some sort
was something that that Southern
society we looked at--a slave
society,
a very hierarchical
society--certain kinds of
personal reform that dealt with
personal piety and behavior
could take hold in the South;
broader social reforms that
would challenge the social
order--not so much.
But listen to Emerson.
In his essay called "Man the
Reformer"--and think about our
own times.
"What is man born for?"
said Emerson.
"What is man born for but to be
a reformer?"
Now he may be right or wrong
about this, you can decide.
"A re-maker of what man has
made, a renouncer of lies,
a restorer of truth and good,
imitating that great
Nature"--note the metaphor
here--"which embosoms us all and
which sleeps no moment on an old
past but every hour repairs
herself,
yielding us every morning a new
day, and with every pulsation a
new life.
Let him renounce everything
which is not true to him,
and put all his practices back
on their first thoughts,
and do nothing for which he has
not the whole world for his
reason."
Emerson is arguing,
right or wrong,
that you are a reformer by
nature.
Nature recreates itself daily
and so do humans.
Is he right?
Call home tonight to your
parents and say--you're a
Senior--"I've decided what I'm
going to do, Dad,
I'm going to be a reformer."
If I were your parent I'd say,
"Of what?
For why?
Do they pay you for that?
Will it be safe?
Who you been talking to?
A what?"
"I'm gonna be a reformer."
This was an age,
though, by the 1830s,
for a small group--and rest
assured abolitionists,
in particular,
were never a large group.
They probably were
never--excuse me,
I was in Montana on the weekend
giving lectures,
and the mountains were gorgeous
but it was cold.
Anyway, abolitionists were
never, even at their peak of
organizational action,
were never more than probably,
probably at most,
15% of the population of the
Northern states.
Now in some communities they
might be larger--upstate New
York, parts of Massachusetts and
Connecticut or New
Hampshire--always a small group.
But like most vociferous and,
eventually, highly
organized--operating by the
printing press--reform groups,
their significance is much
greater than their numbers.
Now, what were they up against?
Real quickly let me run through
these.
I may have begun here last time
and had to stop.
The American abolitionists,
or anybody concerned about
slavery--let's just take the
slavery question--has to deal,
by the 1820s now,
with the new generations being
born who did not experience the
Revolution,
and they are inheriting now
this great experience of their
parents, the American
Revolution.
But that revolution had at
least a twofold legacy.
On the one hand,
it was an event that really
ushered those great
Enlightenment ideas into the
world that an anti-slavery
impulse in America is going to
draw upon,
constantly.
Black and white abolitionists,
they're all going to do it.
Those great Enlightenment
ideas--hostility to monarchy,
the growth of Republicanism,
representative government,
the faith in human reason,
the notion of individual
liberty,
that you're born with certain
natural rights.
These are revolutionary ideas.
They hadn't worked them out yet
either.
How about the right of
revolution, one of Jefferson's
four first principles?
The doctrine of consent.
Popular sovereignty--not a
brand new idea--it's all the way
back there in the Epistles of
Paul and even before that in
certain kinds of writings.
But how many times had the
world actually invented
governments truly based on the
doctrine of consent?
And that fledgling idea of
equality, human equality,
had been put in play.
But the other side of the
American Revolution is that it
had also fostered in the South
the necessity of an
intensification of slavery's
defense.
In many ways,
the success of the American
Revolution and putting slavery
on the run in the Northern
states,
where it was gradually
abolished in every
Northern--immediately abolished
in a few but gradually abolished
in most of the Northern States
by the 1820s--the South now had
to have answers,
it had to have justifications.
And we went through a lot of
those defenses and
justifications the other day.
This was what Edmund Morgan,
the great colonial revolution
historian here at Yale for years
argued so brilliantly,
over and over.
It was the American paradox,
this great American
contradiction;
largest slave system in the
world being built by one of its
first functioning,
thriving republics.
Two, anybody trying to work
against slavery,
even in the most gradual,
modest ways,
by the 1820s and the 1830s,
has got to bump his head right
into what we might simply call
the sanctity of the U.S.
Constitution.
The Constitution was revered in
American society,
it was a sacred thing.
And look what it was rooted in.
Now, Garrison's going to call
it a covenant with death,
a deal with the devil,
because of its complicities in
slavery.
But it's also rooted deeply in
Federalism and in what
southerners and northerners
would practice as states rights
doctrine--all that localism that
the Constitution was designed in
Madison's genius to try to
control,
hold together.
Then you take the three-fifths
clause and the fugitive slave
clause and the postponing for 20
years of any consideration of
the banning of the foreign slave
trade.
And you realize that the U.S.
Constitution is morally
complicit in slavery,
even though it never used the
word.
Why did abolitionism in
America--or any kind of
concern--let's just put it that
way--about slavery become more
radical with time?
It is because,
ultimately, an anti-slavery
movement in the United States,
to succeed, had to become extra
legal.
Or, put another way,
it had to break the law.
That's why law breaking is such
a central theme in Harriet
Beecher Stowe's great novel,
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
And then, of course,
anti-slavery activists were up
against the increasingly deep
defense of slavery,
which we've already dealt with.
They were up against an
increasingly highly organized
and widely written racial theory
about black inferiority.
An anti-slavery impulse in the
United States was an impulse,
a set of ideas,
that eventually would have to
call for some form of social
revolution, legal revolution,
and political revolution in a
society that did not want it.
And in a society where
increasingly a tremendous amount
of wealth was of course staked
in slavery, a point we've also
made.
Just a last thought on that.
Think today,
just think around you,
think out of your box for a
moment, of an issue in the world
of great concern that really
affects you,
or most of us;
for that matter the whole
bloody world.
How confident are you in
succeeding in solving it,
in your lifetime?
World poverty,
global warming,
take your pick.
Racism, go end it.
To be an abolitionist in the
1830s was to take on an issue
like this and say,
"Well, you know,
maybe not in our lifetime but
maybe sometime."
It doesn't mean they were
altruistic, I'm not sure there
were any altruistic
abolitionists.
As you'll see when you read
about them in Bruce Levine's
book or any other way we look at
them,
they could be as egotistical
and as vane and as conflicted in
their tactics and their methods
and their personalities as
anybody.
Certainly William Lloyd
Garrison was not an easy guy to
get along with.
Now, as I mentioned earlier,
anti-slavery in America,
though, takes stages,
it goes through periods,
stages.
The first of these is this idea
of colonizing black people
elsewhere.
Now colonization,
as an idea, is not brand new by
1816, when the American
Colonization Society was formed,
but it finally took hold in the
political soil of the United
States, in the wake of the War
of 1812.
The American Colonization
Society was actually founded in
the U.S.
capitol.
This thing had congressional
funding at first.
It was actually founded by some
of the greatest statesmen in
America at the time.
Henry Clay was there at the
original meeting.
James Monroe;
John Marshall--Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court--and many
others, especially border state,
Upper South leaders,
like Clay, from Kentucky,
the great Whig who will become
the kind of father-figure of the
Whig Party.
Many of them slaveholders,
like Clay--owned about 60
slaves on his hemp farms in
Kentucky.
The idea here is that somehow
over time, in that America of
the future--that vast,
infinite, boundless America of
the West--that eventually this
problem of slavery might have to
be faced,
but the way it could be faced
eventually is if you start
gradually removing black people
from the United States.
And you do it first with
volunteer freed people,
free blacks.
They would be asked,
never coerced,
was the theory of the original
Colonization Society.
That Colonization Society,
of course, is the
organization--it had a lot of
money in its first decade or so.
It was such a beguiling idea.
It fit in so many ways this
generation.
And it was actually the
revolutionary generation and the
immediate post-revolutionary
generation who really were
infused with what you might call
a kind of Jeffersonian
idealism--or even a Madisonian
idealism--that somehow this
America,
yes, it had problems--or as
Jefferson said,
we got the wolf by the ears,
with slavery;
you can't get off because the
wolf will devour you;
but if you stay on you got to
ride that damn wolf forever.
But he said that in
private--but this kind of
Jeffersonian idealism that
somehow this grand American
continent with its resources
physically,
and this grand American
Constitution,
this great experiment,
would dissolve this problem,
especially if you helped it.
The American Colonization
Society founded the colony of
Liberia on the West Coast
of--the nation of Liberia was
founded in 1820,
'22, by the ACS,
the American Colonization
Society.
It would ship approximately
1500 free African-Americans to
Liberia--1500,
that's it--between 1821 and
1831,
and they would found its
capital at Monrovia,
named for James Monroe,
the United States President.
Liberia today,
as you may know,
has been through a vicious,
horrifying Civil War.
It's a disaster.
It does have the only African
woman president now.
It's a fascinating story of
what's happening to Liberia.
But its roots are back here,
in the impulse of white
Americans to remove black
Americans from their native
soil.
Now some African-Americans
bought onto this.
It's the immigration impulse,
go elsewhere,
make a new start.
Some of them were even inspired
by this idea of a return to an
ancestral homeland that they
knew so little about.
But colonization had all kinds
of flaws at its roots.
Well, we can call these flaws;
we can call these realities;
we can call them whatever we
want.
Colonization was essentially
rooted in these ideas.
It was first these--or
assumptions we might call them.
The first assumption was that
equality, racial equality in
America was never going to
happen.
Just start there,
is what the colonizationalists
would argue.
"Be real--ain't gonna happen."
There was a fear of the rising
free black population that had
really boomed in numbers in the
wake of the American Revolution,
with all the manumissions that
went on in the Upper South,
and then the emancipations that
had occurred in the north,
where the slave population of a
state like New York had been six
or seven percent.
It was the fear now of the
specter of slave insurrection.
There'd been the Gabriel
Prosser plot in 1800 in
Richmond.
There'd been the Denmark Vesey
insurrectionary plot in
Charleston in 1822,
which brought a lot of converts
to colonization.
And of course Nat Turner's
bloodiest of all insurrections
in 1831 made colonization look
pretty nice to a lot of
Americans.
There was this idea too that
somehow colonization would be a
safety valve.
It might only remove five or
ten percent of American free
blacks and slaves over say a few
decades.
But even that five or ten
percent, the theory was,
would ameliorate conditions in
the south,
it would begin to defuse this
powder keg of a rising slave
population being fueled by the
great cotton boom.
And it had a kind of a strange
attractiveness,
but mostly to white folks.
It was roundly loathed by--make
no mistake--by a majority of
free African-Americans in the
North or Upper South,
and feared--to the extent they
even grasped the idea--by slaves
in the Deep South.
But it was a gradualism that
fueled the idea of colonization
and it was gradualism that a lot
of America's first early
youthful generation of
abolitionists thought might
still be the best way to go,
in the 1820s.
Gradual plans had been used,
for example,
in states like Connecticut.
Connecticut passed a law in the
late-1790s that said that every
slave born in that state,
after that date,
on his or her 21^(st) birthday
would be freed;
that's a very gradual plan.
Abraham Lincoln is still
voicing this very kind of
gradual plan of emancipation at
the outbreak of the Civil War.
He's still going to suggest it
to the states of Kentucky and
Delaware when he calls them in
and asks those states in 1862 to
consider emancipation on a
gradual plan.
And he would even compensate
the slaveholders 600 bucks a
slave or--I forget exactly what
the figure was.
And gradualism,
many people have argued,
is kind of the American way,
a long-term plan,
cushion the change.
But, several things began to
happen, especially in the 1820s
and into the 1830s that
radicalized anti-slavery
thinkers in the United States.
And this is indeed the roots,
if you like,
of a more radical abolitionism,
the roots of what came to be
known among the Garrisonians as
Immediatism.
And those roots are these;
I'm going to give you four.
I wrote an essay,
the first essay I ever
published in graduate school was
on this subject,
and you never quite forget your
argument of your first essay,
even if it wasn't very good.
But what began to radicalize
American anti-slavery activists?
First, it was Evangelical
Christianity.
Some of the radicalism they
took from their faith.
They took from the so-called
Second Great Awakening.
They took from this idea that
somehow, it was their duty,
it was their place in the
world--many of them were the
sons and daughters of
ministers--to save souls.
And if you'd been inspired by
Charles Grandison Finney out in
Oberlin, Ohio,
or--as Theodore Weld had--or a
number of other ministers across
the North, that it was your duty
to go save souls,
it was only one step
further--and Finney told them
that--to save society as well.
And if conversion to Christ or
conversion to faith,
conversion to salvation,
can happen immediately in a
person, why not a whole society?
If you can revolutionize a
single soul, why can't you
revolutionize a hundred,
100,000,1,000,000?
A second source--and I can say
so much more about the
significance of Evangelicalism,
this idea of the rebirth of
faith and rebirth of the soul,
the born-again notion,
in this era at least.
We're living in a different
kind of era of Evangelicalism in
the United States--although some
Evangelicals are indeed
reformers,
they tend to be seen today
largely as political
conservatives,
social conservatives.
Some of the Evangelicalism of
the 1820s in America,
in the 1830s,
became a much more radical kind
of Evangelicalism in terms of
the social changes that they
were advocating.
Having said all that,
that same Evangelical Christian
who becomes an abolitionist may
indeed have been a virulent
Temperance advocate and saw
demon rum as as big a demon as
demon slaveholding.
The second cause of this roots
of radicalism is what we might
call perceptions of southern
intransigence or perceptions of
southern truculence.
In the 1820s a lot of these
early young--they're youthful,
they're only in their
twenties--anti-slavery advocates
are--some of them are--even
William Lloyd Garrison flirted
with colonization at first,
when he was about
23,24-years-old.
They were gradualists at first,
until they began to realize how
deeply committed the South
actually was to slavery,
and that leaving it to them,
leaving it to their own
resources, was never going to
solve anything.
An early, early abolitionist,
in 1818, George Bourne said,
quote, "When Southerners are
challenged on the slavery
question they"--quote--"are
choked,
for they have a Negro stuck
fast in their throats."
The more and more that early
abolitionists began to realize
just how deeply committed the
South was--morally,
biblically, socially,
philosophically--to sustaining
this slave society,
the more they began to realize
that if they were serious about
this,
they had to have much more
radical strategies.
The young William Lloyd
Garrison started by 1829 to use
metaphors in his writings of
cement and icebergs that would
only melt with decades and
decades,
to characterize what he
perceived now as this deep kind
of Southern intransigence.
A third root of American
radical anti-slavery though was
the British influence.
Make no mistake--and I won't go
into any detail here because
time doesn't permit--but these
early American abolitionists
were deeply influenced by the
now decades old--two or three
decades old--anti-slavery
crusade in England,
which at first meant,
of course, a crusade against
the slave trade,
succeeding in that great Act of
Parliament in 1807,
which was just celebrated last
year--it's still being
celebrated in Britain as we
speak,
everywhere.
And then, ultimately,
the movement in England against
slavery itself;
and the British Empire,
of course, will free its slaves
by Act of Parliament in 1833.
And thirdly,
I would argue that immediatism
or a radicalization of
anti-slavery also stems from
events.
I think--very often historians
are asked, "so what was the most
pivotal thing" or "what's the
principle cause of," or "what do
you expect to--?"
You're always asked to predict,
which is the worst thing you
can ask any historian,
because the historian will then
say, "Oh, historians never
predict," and then they'll go on
and do it.
But you know,
I don't know if I'm old enough
to have any wisdom or
conclusions about any of this
yet,
but frankly sometimes people
simply react to events that you
cannot predict.
And there were events in the
teens and 1820s and by the 1830s
that did indeed have a direct
impact on this growth of a more
radical anti-slave--.
Denmark Vesey's insurrection,
aborted insurrection,
in Charleston in 1822 and the
twenty-eight or thirty people
who were executed in its wake
made huge national news.
The Negro Seaman's Act,
passed in South Carolina in
1822, that said that any ship
that came into Charleston Harbor
in South Carolina,
if it had black sailors,
those black sailors would be
jailed in Charleston while the
ship was in harbor.
No white sailors would be
jailed.
There was a thing called the
Ohio Resolutions,
passed in 1824.
Imagine this:
the legislature of the state of
Ohio passed a resolution
suggesting that a gradual plan
of emancipation be put in place
over twenty-five years,
over two generations,
whatever plan they might want
to enact, and they sent this
suggestion--the so-called Ohio
Resolution--to all the southern
state legislatures--ha--thinking
they were going to open the
dialogue.
There was no dialogue.
In effect, Ohio was told where
they could put their resolution.
They got letters from a few
southern governors that said,
in no uncertain terms,
"mind your own bloody business;
this is our society,
this is our system,
we'll do with it as we please."
That massive growth of the
domestic slave trade that I
already talked about--nearly
150,000 slaves moving from east
to west in the decade of the
1820s alone;
and then it's going to double
and triple, in the next decade.
Northerners become aware of
this.
And Nat Turner's Insurrection
in the fall of 1831,
without a question,
had a radicalizing effect on
people like Garrison.
Now, who was William Lloyd
Garrison?
I want to touch on him just at
least briefly;
well, I want to get us to this
story of the Underground
Railroad.
Although, if I save the
Underground Railroad for
Thursday, it still fits,
because it's right there with
the Fugitive Slave Act.
So don't worry if I don't quite
get there.
Garrison was by no means the
whole Abolition movement,
by any means.
He did found,
and edited and published,
the longest lasting
anti-slavery newspaper of all.
First published it January
1^(st) 1831 in Boston,
called The Liberator,
and he would publish it for the
next 35 years.
He would cease publishing it in
December 1865;
about nine months after the end
of the Civil War,
he ceased publication of The
Liberator in the week after
the ratification of the
Thirteenth Amendment.
His life is complicated,
complex--he was one complex
character.
But he is the real thing,
a professional,
radical reformer.
He was born in utter poverty,
in Newburyport,
Massachusetts.
His father went to sea and
abandoned him as a child.
His mother tried to raise he
and his equally ne'er-do-well
older brother on next to
nothing.
At one point,
she apprenticed him out because
she couldn't feed him.
And he was apprenticed out at
the age of twelve to a printer,
and he learned how to make a
printing press work,
and for the rest of his life he
set his own print,
every week he could,
if he was in town,
in Boston, on The
Liberator.
And he prided himself at being
faster at setting print than
anybody he ever hired.
He did start as a kind of a
gradualist.
He went down to Baltimore,
Maryland--here I go,
I'm going to talk too much
about Garrison,
but that's the way it goes--he
went down to Baltimore and he
worked with an anti-slavery
paper there called The Genius
of Universal Liberty,
published by a guy named
Benjamin Lundy,
in Baltimore,
a slave state.
There was a young slave growing
up there named Frederick Bailey,
but they didn't meet,
yet.
Garrison got thrown in jail,
which for him was his
Birmingham Jail--if you remember
Martin Luther King's "Letter
from a Birmingham Jail"--he got
thrown in jail for slandering a
slave ship captain,
whom he accused of murder.
The guy sued him,
he was convicted and he spent
about nine months in jail,
which for Garrison was pride.
It was also the first time he
met and talked at great length
with other blacks,
who were in jail with him.
By the time he got out and came
back North and finally got the
chance, after two other aborted
or failed attempts to create a
newspaper,
he finally got his chance,
and a little bit of money,
and he founded this paper
called The Liberator,
a paper he would publish
without missing an issue--and
write something for every
issue--for thirty-five years.
Now, if you want to understand
William Lloyd Garrison,
you have to understand through
his ideas--and I'll just list
them for you with the briefest
explanation.
But it is here where you see
now the fruition by the 1830s of
an immediatist abolitionism,
a radicalizing form of
anti-slavery--which,
by the way, will develop a
following,
in various forms,
among free blacks in particular
in the North,
but it will also of course
begin to garner widespread
enemies,
widespread enemies.
Garrison and his ilk will come
to be seen as very dangerous
people, these reformers.
But if you can remember these
six ideas of William Lloyd
Garrison's--or do I have seven?
It's seven, sorry--you can have
a handle on what immediatism and
radical anti-slavery became,
in Garrison's hands.
Now, as soon as you get a
leader who goes out and pushes
an idea, pushes an agenda,
pushes a set of moral
principles by which this
movement should be run,
of course he's immediately
begun to develop an opposition
within his own movement.
And people will disagree with
him.
But number one,
his first idea was moral
perfectionism.
A stern, demanding call for
abolitionists to remove
themselves personally from any
corrupting complicity with the
American slave system.
"Be ye perfect,
even as your Heavenly Father is
perfect," said Garrison.
He was not a trained minister,
but he was a deeply Old
Testament biblical Christian.
His second principle was
passivism, what the nineteenth
century called non-resistance.
Garrison rejected all acts of
violence, in any form--well,
until the Civil War broke out.
More on that later.
His third principle was
anti-clericalism or opposition
to what he saw as the hypocrisy
and corruption of the American
churches.
The Protestant clergy was one
of his greatest targets.
And make no mistake,
folks, Frederick Douglass began
his career as an intellectual,
as an orator,
and as a writer,
as a Garrisonian.
It was William Lloyd Garrison
who, in part,
discovered Frederick Douglass
by going down to New Bedford,
Massachusetts and watching this
brilliant, young,
twenty-one-year-old,
twenty-two-year-old black guy
get up and speak at the African
Methodist Episcopal Zion Church
in New Bedford,
and said, "My God,
this kid can speak."
And for the first five,
six years of Douglass's public
life Garrison was like his
mentor, a father-figure,
and an intellectual teacher.
Look for these Garrisonian
tenets when you read the
narrative.
His fourth principle was what
he called dis-unionism.
"No union with the
slaveholders" was his motto or
his statement on the masthead of
The Liberator.
He actually advocated a kind of
personal secession from the
Union.
This was one of those ideas.
He advocated that Northern
states not participate in the
same Constitution--more on that
later when we get to 1854.
And five, he took it one step
further.
He advocated not voting.
To vote in an American
election, he believed,
was to be morally complicit
with slavery.
Until the U.S.
Constitution was ripped up and
rewritten he advocated political
non-participation with it.
Now, how that was supposed to
change the world and save it was
always a bit of a problem,
for some of Garrison's own
admirers.
Sixth, he was an early and
often supporter of women's
rights and women's equality,
which was another form of
radicalism that would make you
lots of enemies in the 1830s,
'40s, and '50s.
And seventh,
he was a tremendous advocate of
African-American civil
rights--early,
in a time when there in effect
weren't any.
Now, I'm going to leave you
here thinking with me just for a
moment--I think I have two
minutes--about what's going to
happen now with this
anti-slavery impulse,
because in part what happened
is that two kinds of
abolitionisms emerged,
one white and one black.
And there were hundreds and
hundreds of white abolitionists,
thousands eventually,
across the North,
who became deeply involved in
organizing anti-slavery
societies and creating
newspapers and running petition
campaigns by the 1830s,
and eventually even beginning
to be involved in the first
fledging anti-slavery political
parties--although Garrison
wouldn't go there.
But there are also lots of
black abolitionists in the
North, free blacks,
many of them,
though, former fugitive slaves
who wore the experience of
slavery on their backs and in
their souls and in their psyche,
and often could not risk the
kind of abstractions,
the kind of theoretical debates
and arguments over tactics and
strategy the white abolitionists
would spend hours on.
A lot of black abolitionists
said" all right already,
what are we doing for the
slaves?"
Or "what are we doing for my
children that don't have a
school?"
"What are we doing for that
child who doesn't have parents?
We need an orphanage."
A real division will evolve by
the 1840s and into the 1850s
between the very real,
practical needs of northern
free blacks and black
abolitionists and white
abolitionists.
But beneath all of this,
the fugitives kept coming.
The fugitive slaves kept coming
out of the south.
They never came in the numbers
that the myth and the legend of
the Underground Railroad teaches
us today.
And I'm going to return to that
myth-and-legend problem when we
begin on Thursday.
And I want to leave you with
this.
This is just a way of thinking
your way to Thursday,
and as you read Douglass.
As you already know sometimes I
think the poets tell us more
than the historians.
I hate to admit it.
Robert Hayden,
the great African-American poet
who wrote mostly in the 1960s,
wrote a magnificent poem about
runaway slaves,
who they were,
what they represent,
the story they help us tell.
He called it "Runagate,
Runagate."
And he rooted it in the refrain
of the great negro spiritual
"Many Thousands Gone."
Just a couple of verses.
We'll return to it on Thursday.
It might be something TAs want
to pick up.
"Runs falls rises stumbles on
from darkness into darkness,
and the darkness thicketed with
shapes of terror,
and the hunters pursuing and
the hounds pursuing,
and the night cold and the
night long and the river,
to cross and the
jack-muh-lanterns beckoning
beckoning beckoning,
and blackness ahead and when
shall I reach that somewhere
morning and keep on going and
never turn back and keep on
going.
Runagate, Runagate, Runagate.
Many thousands rise and go,
many thousands crossing over.
O mythic North,
O star-shaped yonder Bible
city.
Some go weeping and some
rejoice and some in coffins.
And some in carriages,
and some in silks and some in
shackles.
Rise and go, fair you well."
See ya Thursday.
 
