blacks as incompetent, but they found it harder to distinguish mere carelessness
from dishonesty. Now they saw blacks as treacherous, shrewd, and secretive—
individuals who only pretended to feel loyalty to white families and affection for the white children they took care of, while awaiting the chance to steal from them or poison them. The writer Herman Melville, a lifelong Democrat who shared little of his compatriots’ racism but who helped codify their fascination with duplicity and deceit, dramatized these fears in Benito Cereno, a novel about slaves who commandeer a sailing ship and its captain and crew, then (with knives secretly at the throats of their captives) act out a servile charade for unsuspecting visitors who come aboard.
Antislavery
Before 1830, few whites opposed slavery politically.
before 1830
Quakers, at their annual meeting in 1758, had condemned
both the slave trade and slavery, and Methodists and some
Baptists had done the same late in the century. Washington, Jefferson, and other
Chesapeake gentlemen doubted the wisdom, if not the morality, of holding slaves.
New England Federalists had condemned slavery in the course of condemning
southern Jeffersonians. But there were too few Quakers to make a difference, and
the movement to free slaves in the Upper South and the antislavery sentiments of
southern evangelicals both died out early in the 19th century. Southerners and
most northerners—when they bothered to think about it at all—tended to accept
slavery as an unchangeable institution that they had inherited, an institution
grounded, ultimately, in human (read “black”) depravity and God’s unknowable
plan. The New England and mid-Atlantic states freed (and then shunned) their
slaves, but seldom argued that the South should do the same.
The biggest organization that addressed questions of slavery and race before
1830 was the American Colonization Society, founded in 1816. This elite orga-
nization of white men never attacked slavery. The rising population of free
blacks was their principal concern. “The rapid increase of the black population
in some parts of our country,” said a Boston Colonizationist in 1822, “is be-
coming every year more serious.” Their answer was to colonize free blacks (but
not slaves) in Liberia, on the west coast of Africa. The Society held its first meeting in the chamber of the House of Representatives, with Bushrod Washington,
stepson of George Washington, as president. Early members included Henry
Clay, John Taylor of Caroline, Andrew Jackson, and other political leaders of
the West, the Middle States, and the Upper South. Blacks, they said, would con-
tinue to suffer from white prejudice and their own deficiencies as long as they
stayed in the United States. They would exercise freedom and learn Christian
and republican ways only if exported to Liberia. Among the favored fund-
raising sites for the ACS were July 4 celebrations—festivities from which blacks
were excluded.
Free blacks had agitated against slavery and legal racism for many years,
demanding both abolition and equal rights. While a few sailed to Liberia, most
insisted that colonization was not an offer of freedom but an attempt to round
up black people and make them disappear. The black abolitionist James Forten
spoke for many when he insisted that colonization “originated more immediately
The Politics of Slavery and Race
431
from prejudice than from philanthropy.” Opposition to colonization created an
immediatist, confrontational black antislavery movement—a movement that deci-
sively shaped the later abolition crusade.
Abolitionists
Few white Americans actively opposed slavery before 1830,
but the writing was on the wall. Emancipation in the North
constituted an implicit condemnation of slavery in the South. So did events
outside the United States. Toussaint L’Ouverture’s successful slave revolution in Haiti threatened slavery everywhere (see Chapter 7). Mexico, Peru, Chile, Gran
Colombia (present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama), and other
new republics carved out of the Spanish mainland empire emancipated their slaves.
The British, whose navy could enforce their dictates at sea, outlawed the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, and the United States followed suit. The most powerful blow
came in 1830, when the British Parliament emancipated the slaves of Jamaica,
Bermuda, and other Caribbean islands ruled by Britain.
Historians usually date American abolitionism from 1831, when the veteran
reformer William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of the Liberator in Boston. Garrison condemned slavery not simply as a social problem or a bad idea but
as America’s great national sin. He demanded immediate emancipation and equal
citizenship for African Americans. “I am in earnest,” he declared in his first editorial. “I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—
and I will be heard!” Garrison opposed discrimination as well as slavery, thus
coupling southern slavery with the national question of race. From the beginning, he enjoyed the support and influence of northern free blacks. In its first year fully three-fourths of the Liberator’s subscribers and one-fifth of its writers were black, and when Garrison and his coworkers formed the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832 blacks made up one-fourth of the membership. Black orators such as
Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth became stars of a well-organized aboli-
tionist lecture circuit, and the heartfelt autobiographies of escaped slaves (many of them “as told to” white abolitionists) were mainstays of abolitionist literature, steering the movement away from the legalism of the colonizationists and toward
personal, emotional appeals. When the wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith harbored
the fugitive slave Harriet Powell on his estate, he invited his friends to meet her.
He told Jacobs to “make good abolitionists of them by telling them the story of
your life.”
Abolitionists proposed not only emancipation but also racial equality. Assum-
ing that God had created blacks and whites as members of one human family, they
opposed the “scientific” racism spouted by Democrats and many Whigs. Moderates
and latecomers to the movement spoke of inherent racial characteristics, but still tended to view blacks in benign (if condescending) ways. Harriet Beecher Stowe,
for instance, portrayed blacks as simple, innocent, loving people who possessed
a capacity for sentiment and emotionalism that most whites had lost. In 1852,
Horace Mann told an audience of blacks in Ohio that “in intellect, the blacks are inferior to the whites, while in sentiment and affections, the whites are inferior to the blacks.” Radical abolitionists, however, remained committed to racial equality.
Lydia Maria Child of New York City declared, “In the United States, colored
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