The Black Experience in America
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Title: The Black Experience in America
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA ***
THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA
Published electronically by its author, Norman Coombs, and Project
Gutenberg.
(C 1993) by Norman Coombs
This text is claimed under copyright to protect its integrity, and
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Neither Prof. Hart nor Project Gutenberg nor Norman Coombs has any
official connection with the University of Illinois.
This text is based on the original publication:
THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA
The Immigrant Heritage of America
By Norman Coombs
Publisher: Twayne, (c 1972)
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction (omitted from electronic version)
PART ONE From Freedom to Slavery
1. African Origins
The Human Cradle
West African Empires
The Culture of West Africa
2. The Human Market
The Slave Trade
Caribbean Interlude
3. Slavery As Capitalism
The Shape of American Slavery
North American and South American Slavery
Slavery and the Formation of Character
Slave Response
4. All Men Are Created Equal
Slavery and the American Revolution
Slave Insurrections
Growing Racism
Part Two. Emancipation without Freedom
5. A Nation Divided
Black Moderates and Militants
White Liberals
Growth of Extremism
6. From Slavery to Segregation
Blue, Gray, and Black
Reconstruction and Its Failure
The New Racism
7. Racism and Democracy
Fighting Jim Crow
Making the World Safe for Democracy
Urban Riots
The Klan Revival
Part Three. The Search For Equality
8. The Crisis of Leadership
The Debate Over Means and Ends
Booker T. Washington: The Trumpet of Conciliation
W. E. B. DuBois: The Trumpet of Confrontation
Marcus Garvey: The Trumpet of Pride
A. Philip Randolph: The Trumpet of Mobilization
9. The New Negro
Immigration and Migration
Harlem: "The Promised Land"
The Negro Renaissance
Black Nationalism
10. Fighting Racism at Home and Abroad
Hard Times Again
The Second World War
The U.S. and the U.N.
11. Civil Rights and Civil Disobedience
Schools and Courts
The Civil Rights Movement
12. The Black Revolt
Civil Disorders
Black Power
Epilogue
Notes and References (omitted from electronic version)
Bibliography (omitted from electronic version)
Index (omitted from electronic version)
Preface
During the last several years, the study of American history has turned a
new direction. Previously, it emphasized how the various immigrant
groups in America shed their divergent heritages and amalgamated into a
new nationality. More recently, scholars and laymen alike have become
more sensitive to the ways in which these newcomers have kept aspects
from their past alive, and there is a new awareness of the degree to
which ethnicity continues as a force within America.
Most of the original settlers were British, Protestant, and white. Many
of the later arrivals differed from them, in one or more ways. History
books usually depicted these new waves of immigrants as assimilating
almost fully into American society. However, recent writings have put
more stress on the ethnic diversities which remain and on the rich
variety of contributions which were made to the American scene by each
new nationality.
This volume depicts the immigrants from Africa as one among the many
elements which created present-day America. On the one hand, they differ
from the other minorities because they came involuntarily, suffered the
cruelties of slavery, and were of another color. All of this made their
experience unique. On the other hand, they shared much in common with the
other minorities, many of whom also felt like aliens in their new land.
Throughout most of American history, political power has been held
tightly by the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant majority. Historical
presentations which stressed the political component, thereby tended to
leave the later immigrants in the background. However, because these
newcomers did not assimilate fully into the mainstream of America, they
maintained some of their ethnic identity and made fresh and unique
contributions to American life. A socio-cultural approach to history,
through highlighting society and culture rather than politics, brings
these minorities into proper focus.
This study of Afro-Americans seeks to describe the character and culture
which they produced for themselves in America. It also points to the many
important contributions which they have made to American cultural life.
The spotlight is on what they felt and thought, on the attitudes they
developed, and on their increasingly vocal protests against the unfair
treatment which they believed was directed at them.
Besides taking a socio-cultural approach to the subject, this book is
deliberately interpretive rather than being merely a narrative of events.
It is reasonably brief in the hope that it will appeal to interested
laymen. At the same time, it contains a number of footnotes so that
either scholars or laymen, wanting to check their thoughts against the
interpretation presented here, can readily use this book as a guide to
further reading. (Note the footnotes are not in this electronic version.)
If at times the treatment of the white majority seems harsh, it is
because, in my opinion, it is still necessary for Americans to take a
long, cold look at the chilling facts which have too often been ignored.
Yet, times and people do change. Race relations in America are not today
what they were a century ago. The progress of history may not be the wide
highway moving steadily and smoothly upward as many have believed, but
the racial picture in America has altered and will continue to do
so--sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Nevertheless, it
is only by knowing ourselves that we can intelligently face our crises. I
hope that this volume will assist the reader as he struggles with this
difficult task.
Norman Coombs
September, 1971
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deep appreciation to the National Endowment
for the Arts and Humanities and to the Rochester Institute of Technology
for providing me with much of the time which made this research possible.
I am also indebted to Professors Benjamin Quarles and Merle Curti for
kindly reading and commenting on the manuscript. My thanks are also
extended to my father, Earl Coombs, for his invaluable assistance in
helping with the hours of painstaking research demanded by such a
project. Miss Dorothy Ruhl provided the detailed, careful labor necessary
to help prepare the manuscript for the printer, and Mrs. Doris Kist
performed the demanding task of proofreading it. I also want to thank
Cecyle S. Neidle, the editor of the Immigrant Heritage of America series,
for her helpful supervision and advice. Finally, I owe a deep debt of
gratitude to my wife, Jean, for typing the manuscript, for a host of
other miscellaneous tasks and, above all, for her forbearance and
encouragement.
N. C.
PART ONE From Freedom to Slavery
CHAPTER 1
African Origins
The Human Cradle
THREE and a half centuries of immigration have injected ever-fresh doses
of energy and tension into the American bloodstream. As diverse peoples
learned to live together, they became a dynamo generating both creativity
and conflict. One of the most diverse elements in American life was
introduced when Africans were forcibly brought to the American colonies.
The American experiment had begun and consisted mainly of white men with
a European heritage. The African was of a different color, had a
different language, a different religion, and had an entirely different
world view. But perhaps the most striking contrast was that, while the
European came voluntarily in search of greater individual opportunity,
the African came in chains. Because the European was the master and
thereby the superior in the relationship, he assumed that his heritage
was also superior. However, he was mistaken, because the African had a
rich heritage of importance both to himself and to mankind. When people
interact intimately over a long period of time, the influences are
reciprocal. This is true even when their relationship is that of master
and slave.
To trace the importance of the African heritage one must go back millions
of years. Evidence is accumulating to the effect that Africa is the
cradle of mankind. Professor Louis Leakey argues that Africa was
important in the development of mankind in three ways. First, some thirty
or forty million years ago, the basic stock which eventually gave rise to
both man and the ape came into existence in the vicinity of the Nile
Valley. Second, some twelve or fourteen million years ago, the main
branch which was to lead to the development of man broke away from the
branch leading to the ape. Third, about two million years ago, in the
vicinity of East Africa, true man broke away from his now extinct manlike
cousins. The present species of man-Homo Sapiens--developed through a
complex process of natural selection from a large number of different
manlike creatures-hominids.
One of the most numerous of the early hominids was Australopithecus
Africanus who originated in Africa. Although he also did some hunting, he
lived mainly by collecting and eating vegetables. One of the things that
identified him as a man was his utilization of primitive tools. He had a
pointed stone which may have been used to sharpen sticks, and these
sticks were probably used for digging roots to augment his food supply.
Leakey believes that Homo Habilis, who lived in East Africa about two
million years ago, was the immediate ancestor of man and the most
advanced of all the hominids. Although the hominids spread far outside of
Africa, it is clear that they originate there and that it was in Africa
that true man first emerged. As Darwin predicted a century ago, Africa
has been found to be the father of mankind.
For many thousands of years, Homo Sapiens and the other hominids lived
side by side in Africa as elsewhere. By ten thousand years ago, however,
all the hominids had disappeared. Scholars believe that this was the
result of the gradual absorption of all the other hominids by the more
biologically advanced Homo Sapiens. This process may explain the
appearance of variations within Homo Sapiens. At various times and
places, as Homo Sapiens absorbed other hominid strains, differences
within Homo Sapiens developed. In any case it is clear that the various
types of man came into existence very early. In Africa, this process led
to the development of three main types: the brownish-yellow Bushmen in
the south, the darker Negroes throughout most of the continent and the
Caucasoid Mediterranean types in the north.
Most of the concepts, held even by scholars about the nature and origin
of races, are being proven inaccurate. Anthropological literature used to
suggest that skin color in some groups was a possible indication of
Mongoloid influences or that the thin, straight lips common in another
group could be envisioned as a Caucasoid feature. However, it has become
increasingly obvious that an analysis based on specific single traits
such as these is always a poor indication of either racial origin or of
racial contact. In fact, they could just as likely be the result of
spontaneous and local variations within a given population grouping. In
contrast, recent anthropological research is putting less emphasis on
bone measurement and shape and, instead, is turning increasingly to
technical analysis particularly through the examination of blood types.
Making and using tools are what differentiate man from animals. The
earliest tools which have survived the wear of time were made of stone.
As man's techniques of handling stone improved, so did his tools. The
hand axe, a large oval of chipped flint varying in size and weight, came
into common usage about half a million years ago, and it has been found
in much of Europe, Asia, and Africa. This too seems to have had an
African origin. While scholars are not certain about its use, it was
probably used for killing animals and for chopping meat.
The first achievement which radically altered man's condition was the
invention of tools. The second achievement was his learning of primitive
agriculture which transformed the hunter into the farmer. The
domestication of animals and the planting and cultivating of crops had
begun in the Near East, but the practice shortly spread to the Nile
Valley in Northeast Africa. At the same time, farming communities sprang
up throughout the Sahara which, at that time, was going through one of
its wet phases. This made it well-suited to early agriculture. Farming
permitted men to live together in communities and to pursue a more
sedentary way of life. Actually, some Africans had already adopted a
sedentary community life before the arrival of farming. Making hooks from
bones led to the development of a few fishing communities near
present-day Kenya.
As the communities along the Nile grew in size and number, society began
to develop a complex urban civilization. By 3,200 B.C. the communities
along the Nile had become politically united under the first of a line of
great pharaohs. These early Egyptians undoubtedly were comprised of a
racial mixture. The ancient Greeks viewed the Egyptians as being dark in
complexion, and it has been estimated that the Egyptian population at the
beginning was at least one-third Negro. Herodotus says that it was
impossible to tell whether the influence of the Egyptians on the
Ethiopians was stronger than that of the Ethiopians on the Egyptians.
What Herodotus and the Greeks referred to as Ethiopia was, in fact, the
kingdom of Kush. It was located up the Nile from Egypt. As the Egyptian
empire grew in strength and wealth, it strove to expand its power over
its neighbors. Egypt sent several military expeditions south along the
Nile to try to conquer the black people of Kush. They failed and the
Kushites, in turn, endeavored to extend their power over Egypt. In 751
B.C., Kush invaded Egypt and, shortly thereafter, conquered it. This
occupation of Egypt lasted for over a hundred years, until both the
Kushites and the Egyptians were defeated by an invading army from Assyria
in 666 B.C. At that point, the Kushites returned to the safety of their
homeland.
The Kushites and the Egyptians had been defeated by a superior
technology. While they were fighting with weapons made of copper and
bronze, the Assyrians fought with iron. Methods of smelting and working
iron had been developed centuries before by the Hittites who lived in
Asia Minor. The use of iron spread across the Near East, becoming the
basis for the Assyrian power. After their defeat in 666 B.C., the
Kushites and the Egyptians rapidly adopted the new iron technology. The
coming of the Iron Age to Africa meant the production of better weapons
and tools. Better weapons provided safety from hostile foes and
protection from ferocious beasts. Better axes meant that man could live
in densely forested regions where he had not been able to live before.
Better farm implements meant that more food could be grown with less
work, this again encouraged the development of denser population centers.
By 300 B.C., Kush had become an important iron-producing center. Its
capital, Meroe located on the upper Nile, developed into a thriving
commercial and industrial city. Archeological diggings have unearthed the
remains of streets, houses, sprawling palaces, and huge piles of slag
left from its iron industry. When scholars are able to decipher the
Kushitic writings much more will be known about the culture and way of
life of this early black empire. In the first century A.D. a Kushite
official, whom the Bible refers to as the Ethiopian eunuch, was converted
to Christianity by the apostle Philip while returning from a visit to
Jerusalem. Shortly, Christianity spread throughout the entire kingdom.
When Kush was defeated by the Axumites, founders of modern Ethiopia,
several smaller Nubian, Christian kingdoms survived. Not until the
sixteenth century, after almost a thousand years of pressure, did Islam
gain supremacy in western Sudan. Ethiopia, shortly after defeating Kush,
also became Christianized, and survived as a African only Christian
island in a Moslem sea. In fact, Ethiopia has remained an independent,
self-governing state until the present, with the brief exception of the
Italian occupation between 1936 and 1941.
The development of man and civilization in Africa was not limited merely
to the area in the Northeast. There is much evidence of cultural contact
between people in all parts of the continent. When the Sahara began to
dry out about 2000 B.C., the population was pushed out from there in all
directions, thereby forcing the spread of both people and cultures. Even
then, the Sahara did not become a block to communication as has been
thought. There is clear evidence that trade routes continued to be used
even after the Sahara became a desert. Scholars also have found that,
shortly after the Iron Age reached North Africa, iron tools began to
appear throughout the entire continent, and, within few centuries, iron
production was being carried on at a number of different locations. At
about the same time, sailors from the far East brought the yam and the
banana to the shores of Africa. These fruits spread rapidly from the
east coast across most of the continent, becoming basic staples in the
African diet. New tools and new crops rapidly expanded the food supply
and thereby provided a better way of life.
West African Empires
Although West Africa had been inhabited since the earliest times, about
two thousand years ago several events occurred which injected new vigor
into the area. The first event had been the drying of the Sahara, which
had driven new immigrants into West Africa and, from the admixture of
these new people with the previous inhabitants, a new vitality developed.
Then, the introduction of the yam and the banana, as previously noted,
significantly increased the food supply. Finally, the developments of
iron tools and of iron work further increased the food supply and also
provided better weapons. This permitted increased military power and
political expansion. These were the necessary ingredients that led to the
building of three large and powerful empires: Ghana, Mali and Songhay.
Commerce was another factor which contributed to their development.
Governmental control of a thriving trade in both gold and salt provided
the wealth and power necessary for establishing these large empires.
Unfortunately, our knowledge about West Africa's early history is
severely limited by the lack of written records from that period. In
recent years, archaeologists have been unearthing increasing amounts of
material which contribute to our knowledge of early Africa. West Africans
tended to build their cities from nondurable materials such as wood, mud,
and grass. The area does have a rich oral tradition, including special
groups of trained men dedicated to its development and maintenance. As
oral history is always open to modification and embellishment, with no
means available for checking the original version, this material must be
used cautiously. Nevertheless, when employed in conjunction with other
sources, it does provide a rich source of information.
The earliest written records were provided by the Arabs who developed
close contact with West Africa by 800 A.D. After that, West Africans
began using Arabic themselves to record their own history. In the middle
of the fifteenth century, Europeans began regular contact with West
Africa, and they left a wide variety of written sources. While most of
these early Europeans were not men of learning, many of their records are
still valuable to the student of history.
Ghana was already a powerful empire, with a highly complex political and
social organization, when the Arabs reached it about 800 A.D. An Arabic
map of 830 A.D. has Ghana marked on it, and other contemporary Arabic
sources refer to Ghana as the land of gold. From this time on, a thriving
trade developed between Ghana and the world of Islam, including the
beginnings of a slave trade. However, this early slave trade was a
two-way affair. Al-Bakri, a contemporary Arab writer, was impressed with
the display of power and affluence of the Ghanaian king. According to
him, the king had an army of two hundred thousand warriors which included
about forty thousand men with bows and arrows. (Modern scholars know that
the real power of the Ghanaian army was due not to its large numbers as
much as to its iron-pointed spears.) Al-Bakri also described an official
audience at the royal palace in which the king, the Ghana, was surrounded
by lavish trappings of gold and silver and was attended by many pages,
servants, large numbers of faithful officials, provincial rulers, and
mayors of cities. On such occasions, the king heard the grievances of his
people and passed judgment on them. Al-Bakri also describes lavish royal
banquets which included a great deal of ceremonial ritual.
The power of the king, and therefore of the empire, was based on his
ability to maintain law and order in his kingdom. This provided the
development of a flourishing commerce, and it was by taxing all imports
and exports that the king was able to finance his government. The key
item in this financial structure was the regulation of the vast gold
resources of West Africa, and it was by controlling its availability that
the king was also able to manipulate its value. However, after the
eleventh century, the Ghanaian empire was continually exposed to
harassment from a long series of Arabic holy wars. Over a long period of
time, the power of the king was reduced until the empire of Ghana finally
collapsed. From its ashes emerged the basis for the creation of a new and
even larger empire: the empire of Mali.
Mali, like Ghana, was built on gold. While Ghana had been under attack by
the Arabs from outside, various peoples from within struck for their own
freedom. The Mandinka people, who had been the middlemen in the gold
trade and who had received protection from the king of Ghana, achieved
their independence in 1230 A.D. They went on to use their position in
the gold trade to build an empire of their own. The peak of their
influence and power was achieved in the early fourteenth century under
Mansa Kankan Musa who ruled Mali for a quarter of a century. He extended
its boundaries beyond those of Ghana to include such important trading
cities as Timbuktu and Gao, encompassing an area larger than that
controlled by the European monarchs of that day. This empire also was
based on its ability to provide stable government and a flourishing
economy. An Arab traveler, Ibn Batuta, shortly after Musa's death, found
complete safety of travel throughout the entire empire of Mali.
Mansa Musa and, for that matter, the entire ruling class of Mali had
converted to Islam. This intensified the contacts between West Africa and
the Islamic world. Although several of these kings made pilgrimages to
Mecca, the most spectacular was the one by Mansa Musa in 1324. On his way
there, he made a prolonged visit to Cairo. While there, both his
generosity in giving lavish gifts of gold to its citizens and his
extravagant spending poured so much gold into the Cairo market that it
caused a general inflation. It was estimated by the Arabs that his
caravan included some sixty thousand people and some five hundred
personal slaves. Mansa Musa took a number of Arabic scholars and skilled
artisans back to West Africa with him. These scholars enhanced the
university of Timbuktu which was already widely known as a center of
Islamic studies. Now, besides exchanging material goods, West Africa and
the Arabs became involved in a steady exchange of scholars and learning.
The success of Mali in bringing law and order to a large portion of West
Africa was responsible for its decline. Having experienced the advantages
of political organization, many localities sought self-government. In
fact, Mansa Musa had overextended the empire. A skilled ruler like
himself could manipulate it, but those who followed were not adequate to
the challenge. Movements for self-government gradually eroded central
authority until by 1500 Mali had lost its importance as an empire.
Although the period of its power and prosperity was respectable by most
world empire standards, it was short-lived compared to the history of the
previous empire of Ghana. Again, a new empire was to emerge from the
ruins of the previous one.
The Songhay empire was based on the strength of the important trading
city of Gao. This city won its independence from Mali as early as 1375,
and, within a century, it had developed into an empire. Songhay carried
on a vigorous trade with the outside world and particularly with the
Arabic countries. The ruling class, in particular, continued to follow
the religion of Islam, but it is generally believed that the masses of
the population remained faithful to the more traditional West African
religions based on fetishism and ancestor worship. Two of the more
powerful rulers were Suni Ali, who began his 28-year reign in 1464, and
Askia Mohammed, who began his 36-year reign in 1493. Askia Mohammed was
also known as Askia the Great. The security of Songhay was undermined
when Arabs from Morocco invaded and captured the key trading city of
Timbuktu in 1591. Thus ended the last of the three great empires of West
Africa.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that those parts of West Africa
which remained outside of these three empires fulfilled the usual
European image of primitive savagery. On the contrary, a number of other
small yet powerful states existed throughout the entire period. If this
had not been so, the Europeans, as they arrived in the fifteenth century,
could have pillaged West Africa at will. Instead, the Europeans were only
able to establish trading stations where local kings permitted it. With
the exception of a few raiding parties which seized Africans and carried
them off as slaves, most slave acquisition was done through hard
bargaining and a highly systematized trading process. The Europeans were
never allowed to penetrate inland, and they found that they always had to
treat the African kings and their agents as business equals. Many of the
early European visitors, in fact, were impressed by the luxury, power,
trading practices, skilled crafts, and the complex social structure which
they found in Africa. Only in some parts of East Africa, where the states
were unusually small, were the Portuguese able to pillage and conquer at
will. While many Europeans may have thought of Africa as being filled
with ignorant savages, those who reached its shores were impressed
instead with its vigorous civilization.
The Culture of West Africa
An African should not have to find it necessary to make apologies for his
civilization. However, Europeans and Americans have come to believe, at
least in their subconscious minds, that civilization can be equated with
progress in science and technology. Because the Africans lagged far
behind the Europeans in the arts of war and of economic exploitation, the
Europeans believed at the Africans must be uncivilized savages. Africa,
like the rest of the world outside Europe, had not made the break-through
in science, technology, and capitalism which had occurred in Europe.
Nevertheless, they had their own systems of economics, scholarship, art,
and religion as well as a highly complex social and political structure.
There are common elements which run throughout the entire continent of
Africa, but to gain the best insight into the background of the American
slaves, West African culture can be isolated and studied by itself.
The West African economy was a subsistence economy, and therefore people
were basically satisfied with the status quo and saw no point in
accumulating wealth. Also in a subsistence economy, there is little need
for money, and most trade was done through barter. Because there was no
money, there was no wage labor. Instead, labor was created either
through a system of domestic slavery or through a complex system of
reciprocal duties and obligations. However, West African slavery was more
like the European system of serfdom than it was like modern slavery.
Within this subsistence economy, each tribe or locality tended to
specialize in certain fields of agriculture or manufacture which
necessitated a vigorous and constant trade between all of them. However,
within the trading centers, money had come into regular use. It usually
took the form of cowrie shells, iron bars, brass rings, or other standard
items of value. Systems of banking and credit had also been developed,
but even those involved in money, banking, and trade had a noncapitalist
attitude towards wealth. They enjoyed luxury and the display of
affluence, but they had no concept of investing capital to increase
overall production.
West Africa also carried on a vigorous trade with the outside world.
When the Europeans arrived, they discovered, as had the Arabs before
them, that the West Africans could strike a hard bargain. They had
developed their own systems of weights and measures and insisted on using
them. Europeans who failed to treat the king or his agent fairly, found
that the Africans simply refused to deal with them again. Trade was
always monopolized by the king, and he appointed specific merchants to
deal with foreign businessmen. As previously noted, it was by the control
and taxation of commerce That the king financed his government and
maintained his power.
The strength and weaknesses of the West African economy can be seen by a
cursory glance at a list of its main exports and imports. West African
exports included gold, ivory, hides, leather goods, cotton, peppercorn,
olive oil, and cola. While some of these items were only exported for
short distances, others found their way over long distances. West African
gold, for example, was exported as far away as Asia and Northern Europe.
Some English coins of the period were minted with West African gold. West
African imports included silks from Asia, swords, knives, kitchen-ware,
and trinkets from the primitive industrial factories of Europe as well as
horses and other items from Arabia. Two other items of trade became all
important for the future--the exportation of slaves and the importation
of guns and gunpowder.
West African manufacturing demonstrated a considerable amount of skill in
a wide variety of crafts. These included basket-weaving, pottery making,
woodworking and iron-working. Archeological evidence shows that West
Africans were making pottery and terracotta sculpture as much as two
thousand years ago. Three-dimensional forms seem to have held a
particular interest for West African artists. During the last century,
art critics have gone beyond considering this art as "primitive" and
have begun to appreciate its aesthetic qualities. In fact, in recent
years, African art has had considerable influence on contemporary artists.
The two forms of African art best known outside Africa are music and the
dance. African music contrasts with European music in its use of a
different scale and in concentrating less on melodic development and more
on the creation of complex and subtle rhythmic patterns. Musicians used
to view African music as simple and undeveloped, but now musicologists
admit that African rhythms are more complex and highly developed than
rhythms in European music. Africans like to sing and to develop songs for
all occasions: religious songs, work songs, and songs for leisure.
African singing is also marked by the frequent use of a leader and a
chorus response technique. African dance, like its music, builds on
highly complex rhythmic patterns. It too is closely related to all parts
of the African's daily life. There are dances for social and for ritual
occasions. The most common use of the dance was as an integral part of
African religious rites.
African religion has usually been defined as fetish worship-the belief
that specific inanimate objects are inhabited by spirits endowed with
magical powers. While this view of African religion is partly true, it
obscures more than it clarifies. The fetish is believed to have some
powers of its own, but, in general, it derived them from its close
association with a dead ancestor. Behind the fetish was the religion of
ancestor worship, and the fetish is better understood as a religious
symbol. Ancestor worship was also part of the African's strong family
ties and his powerful kinship patterns. Behind the realm of this fetish
and ancestor worship lay another world of distant and powerful deities
who had control over the elemental natural forces of the universe. While
this religion might be described as primitive, it cannot be viewed as
simplistic. It involved a series of complex ideas about fetishes,
ancestors, and deities which required a high degree of intelligence.
The intricacies of theology, law, medicine, and politics made it
necessary to develop a complex system of oral education. Europeans, who
tended to identify knowledge with writing, had long assumed that, because
there was no written language in early Africa, there could be no body of
knowledge. After the arrival of Islam, Arabic provided a written form
within which West African ideas could be set down.
Only recently have scholars become aware of the libraries and the many
publications to be found in West Africa. Two of these books were
responsible for providing historians with detailed information about the
customs and social structure of the area. One was the Tarikh al-Fattiish,
the chronicle of the seeker after knowledge, written by Mahmud Kati in
the early fifteenth century. The other was the Tarikh al-Sudan, the
chronicle of the Western Sudan, written by Abd al-Rahman as-Sadi about
the beginning of the seventeenth century.
The society of West Africa was stratified in several different ways. It
was divided in terms of differing occupations: farmers, merchants,
priests, scholars, laborers, and a wide variety of craftsmen. The social
ranking assigned to these occupation divisions varied according to the
importance of each occupation.
Society was also divided in terms of clans, families, and villages. At
the same time, there was a hierarchical division based on the varying
degrees of political power each group exercised within its society. Some
had the power to become chiefs and rulers. Some had the right to choose
and depose rulers, and others could limit and define the rights of the
rulers. However, almost everywhere there was a clear trend toward
increasing centralized authority and decreasing popular participation.
The centralization of power in West Africa never reached the extremes of
absolute monarchy which occurred in Europe, and there was never the same
need for revolutionary social changes to revive democratic participation
within African society.
In an old Asante ritual, connected with the enthronement of a ruler, the
people pray that their ruler should not be greedy, should not be hard of
hearing, should not act on his own initiative nor perpetuate personal
abuse nor commit violence on his people, While the right to rule was
generally passed on from generation to generation within a single family,
the power did not immediately and automatically fall on the eldest son
within that family. Instead, another family had the power to select the
next ruler from among a large number of potential candidates within the
ruling family. If the ruler who was selected ruled unwisely and unfairly,
he could also be deposed. Here was a distinct limitation on royal
absolutism.
In a similar way, there were limitations on the centralization of
economic power. While valuable land in Europe had been captured and
controlled by private ownership and was the possession of a powerful
minority, land in West Africa still belonged to the community. A powerful
family had the right to control and supervise the use of the land for the
welfare of the community, and, undoubtedly, this power could be misused.
Such a family assigned land to its users along with certain tenure
safeguards which operated to limit even the power of the family. Those
using the land who did not fulfill their obligations to the community by
utilizing it properly and wisely, could have the land taken away from
them. It might then be given to someone else. Both in economics and in
politics, historical custom and precedent has limited minority power and
has protected the welfare of the community. Nevertheless, community
power and wealth has come to be divided into two major divisions: the
rich and powerful few and the poor and powerless majority. Though the
elite ruled and the masses served, rights and obligations which limited
the amount of exploitation were always in existence.
One of the signs of the trend toward the increasing centralization of
power within the society of West Africa was the development of a
professional army. The gigantic armies of Ghana had been conscripted from
the common citizenry. As the ruling class in West Africa adopted Islam
and as its desire to increase its power continued to undermine local
tradition and custom, there was more need for a professional army which
would owe its total allegiance to the ruler.
Also, changes in military technology required a skilled and carefully
trained army. Horses were expensive and could only be used efficiently by
men who were expert riders and who knew how use a horse in a combat
situation. Even more, with the arrival the Europeans in the fifteenth
century, West Africa was introduced to guns and gunpowder. These, too,
were expensive required trained soldiers to make good use of them.
While the new military technology had increased the ruler's freedom from
popular control, it made him increasingly dependent on and subject to
European interests. The African ruler's desire for guns and the
European's desire for slaves went hand in hand.
CHAPTER 2
The Human Market
The Slave Trade
Neither slavery nor the slave trade came to West Africa with the arrival
of the Portuguese in the middle of the fifteenth century. To the
contrary, both institutions had a very long history. A two-way slave
trade had existed between the West Africans and the Arabs for centuries.
In view of the social structure of both societies, sociologists believe
that the Arabs could make use of more slaves than could the West
Africans. Therefore, West Africa probably exported more slaves than it
imported.
Slaves, besides being common laborers, were often men of considerable
skill and learning, Slavery was not a badge of human inferiority. Thus,
the first slaves procured by the Europeans from Africa were displayed as
curiosities and as proof of affluence. While, especially at the
beginning, some slaves were taken by force, most of the African slaves
acquired by the Europeans were obtained in the course of a peaceful and
regular bargaining process.
When the Portuguese arrived in West Africa, they found a thriving economy
which had already developed its own bustling trading centers. Before
long, a vigorous trade opened up between the Portuguese and the West
Africans. Slaves were only one of a great variety of exports, and guns
were only one of a large variety of imports. One of the ways in which the
slave trade came to cripple the West African economy was that slaves
became almost the exclusive African export. The more the Africans sought
to fulfill the Europeans' thirst for slaves, the more they needed guns
with which to procure slaves, and to protect themselves from being
captured and sold into slavery. Therefore, the Euro-African trade,
instead of further stimulating the African economy, actually limited
production of many items and drained it of much of its most productive
manpower.
The rulers, who had voluntarily and unwittingly involved themselves in
this gigantic trade, soon found themselves trapped. Those who wanted to
eliminate or reduce the trade in slaves and who preferred to develop
other aspects of a trading economy, found themselves helpless. A ruler
who would not provide the Europeans with the slaves they desired was then
bypassed by all the European traders. Besides losing the revenue from
this trade, his own military position was weakened. Any ruler who did not
trade slaves for guns could not have guns. Without guns, he would have
difficulty in protecting himself and his people. Any ruler or people who
could not provide adequate self-defense could be captured and sold into
slavery. Once begun, the Africans found themselves enmeshed in a vicious
system from which there seemed to be no escape. The only possibility for
escape would have been the development of some kind of African coalition,
but each petty ruler as too concerned with his own power to be able to
contemplate federated activity. European greed fed African greed, and
vice a versa.
In the beginning, African slaves were carried back to Portugal and other
parts of Europe to be used as exotic domestic servants. In some cases,
they were also used as farm laborers. Parts of Portugal were suffering
from a distinct shortage of farm laborers, and Africans filled the void.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, in some sections of rural
Portugal as much as one third of local population was African in origin.
Even so, European labor needs could not support much of a slave trade for
long. The enclosure system was under way, changing farming techniques,
and it had created a labor surplus. However, at the same time, emerging
capitalism financed explorations in Africa, Asia, and the western
hemisphere. African sailors were involved in most of these explorations
including Columbus's voyage in 1492. New World gold provided the economic
basis for even more rapid European expansion. When the New World came to
be viewed by the hungry capitalists as having a potential for
agricultural exploitation, New World labor needs expanded astronomically.
At first these needs were filled by surplus labor from Europe or by
exploiting the local Indian populations. When these labor sources proved
to be inadequate, the exploitation of slave labor from Africa was the
obvious answer.
While the Portuguese were the first to reach the shores of West Africa
and the first to bring African slaves back to Europe, neither they nor
the Spaniards ever dominated the slave trade which followed. In 1493, as
European exploration of the world moved into high gear, the Pope
published a Bull dividing the world yet to be explored into two parts.
His intention was to limit competition and conflict between the rulers of
Spain and Portugal and to prevent undue hostility between his two main
supporters.
However, this left the other European powers, officially, with no room
for overseas expansion. While these powers refused to acknowledge the
legality of the Bull and soon became involved in exploration and
colonization in spite of it, they also tended to become more involved
than did Portugal or Spain in some of the by-products of colonization,
such as the slave trade. When the Spaniards began to use slaves in their
American colonies, the Dutch, French, and British were only too eager to
provide the transportation. Before long, they too had colonies and slaves
of their own.
The triangular trade between Europe, Africa, and the New World, was one
of the most lucrative aspects of the mercantile economy. Mercantilism
sought to keep each country economically self-sufficient. Within this
framework the role of the colony was to provide the mother country with
raw materials which it could not produce for itself and to be a market
for the consumption of many of the manufactured goods produced within the
mother country.
This triangular trade began in Europe with the purchase of guns,
gunpowder, cheap cotton, and trinkets of all kinds. These were shipped
to the coast of West Africa and unloaded at a trading station. At key
points along the coast, the European nations had made treaties with the
local rulers allowing them to set up trading stations and slave
factories. At this point, the European traders entered into hard
bargaining sessions with the representatives of the local ruler in which
the manufactured goods from Europe, especially guns, were traded for
African slaves. When the deal was completed, the slaves were loaded on
the ship, and the captain set sail for the New World.
Upon arrival in the West Indies, another bargaining process was begun.
Here the slaves were traded for local agricultural products which were
wanted in Europe. Then the ships were loaded with tobacco, sugar, and
other West Indian produce and returned to Europe for still another sale
and another profit. At every point along the route, large sums of money
were made. A profit of at east one hundred percent was expected. Vast
wealth was obtained through the slave trade, and this money was
reinvested in the developing industrial revolution. Thereby the Africans
unwittingly helped to finance the European industrial revolution which
widened the technological gap between Africa and Europe.
The African slave was sometimes a criminal, but, more often than not, he
was captured in battle. As the slave trade grew and with it the need for
more slaves, the number of these battles increased. Clearly, many battles
were being fought solely for the purpose of acquiring slaves who could
then be sold to the European traders. Sometimes, too, the slave might
have been the political enemy of the ruler or of some other powerful
person.
The slaves were then marched to trading stations along the coast where a
European agent, who resided at the station, inspected them and negotiated
their purchase. The inspection was humiliating and degrading procedure.
Men, women, and children usually appeared stark naked and underwent the
close scrutiny of the agent and sometimes a physician. After the trauma
of capture and the shame of inspection, the slaves were regimented into
crowded quarters at the trading station or "factory" to wait for the next
shipment to leave. They had to be supervised very closely as many tried
to escape and others tried to commit suicide.
When a ship was ready to sail, the slaves were chained together and
marched down to the shore. There they were bundled into large canoes and
were paddled through the crashing breakers to where the slave ship was
waiting. Slaves have told how they began the voyage in trepidation, being
frightened by the sight of the "white devils" who, they had heard, liked
to eat Africans. Then the long voyage commenced. Conditions here were
even more crowded than at the "factory." Slaves were generally kept below
deck with no sunshine or fresh air. They were crowded so close together
that there was never any standing room and often not even sitting room.
Again, they had to be supervised closely as many tried to starve
themselves to death or to jump overboard. However, the greatest loss of
slave property was due to disease, The ship's captain feared that disease
would whittle away his profits, and, even more, he worried that it would
attack him and his crew. When the passage was completed, and the West
Indies had been safely reached, the slave again had to undergo the same
kind of degrading inspection and sale which had occurred in Africa, but
this time he had to experience the torment in a strange and distant land.
While the economic profits in the slave trade were great, so were the
human losses. Statistics concerning the slave trade are often inaccurate
or missing. However, it is generally agreed that at least fifteen million
Africans, and perhaps many more, became slaves in the New World. About
nine hundred thousand were brought in the sixteenth century, three
million in the seventeenth century, seven million in the eighteenth
century, and another four million in the nineteenth century.
The mortality rate among these new slaves ran very high. It is estimated
that some five percent died in Africa on the way to the coast, another
thirteen percent in transit to the West Indies, and still another thirty
percent during the three-month seasoning period in the West Indies. This
meant that about fifty percent of those originally captured in Africa
died either in transit or while being prepared for servitude.
Even this statistic, harsh as it is, does not tell the whole story of the
human cost involved in the slave trade. Most slaves were captured in the
course of warfare, and many more Africans were killed in the course of
this combat. The total number of deaths, then, ran much higher than those
killed en route. Many Africans became casualty statistics, directly or
indirectly, because of the slave trade. Beyond this, there was the untold
human sorrow and misery borne by the friends and relatives of those
Africans who were torn away from home and loved ones and were never seen
again.
Statistics concerning profits in the slave trade are also difficult to
obtain. Profits often ran as high as two or three hundred percent, and
were an important part of the European economy. These profits provided
much of the capital which helped to spur on the industrial revolution.
When Queen Elizabeth, in 1562, heard that one of her subjects, John
Hawkins, had become involved in the slave trade, she was very critical
and commented that he would have to pay a very high price for dealing in
human lives. However, when she was confronted with a copy of his profit
ledger, her moral indignation softened, and she quickly became one of the
members of the corporation. Some merchants were hit hard by the risks
accompanying the slave trade and suffered financial disaster. The
possible profits were so high, however, that other merchants were always
eager to venture into this field and new capital was ever lacking.
The industrial revolution, which was partly financed by the slave trade,
eventually abolished the need for slavery. The humanitarian outcry
against both the slave trade and slavery which occurred at the end of the
eighteenth century and swelled in the early nineteenth century, became a
significant force as the need for slave labor diminished. In the
beginning, as previously noted, the Europeans were not powerful enough to
seize slaves at will or to invade the African kingdoms. But the
industrial revolution had immeasurably widened the power gap between
Europe and Africa. By the time the slave trade ended, and European
adventurers had found new ways to achieve gigantic capital gains, Europe
had achieved a power advantage sufficient to invade Africa at will.
As European interests in colonizing Africa increased, the European
powers, at the middle of the nineteenth century, were also tearing one
another apart in the process of this competitive expansion, In order to
avoid further misfortune, the great powers of Europe met at the
conference of Berlin in 1885. Without troubling to consult with any
Africans, they drew lines on a map of Africa dividing it among
themselves. It took only a very few years for a map drawing to become a
physical reality. When the Europeans had finished exploiting Africa
through the slave trade and had greatly weakened its societies, they
invaded Africa in order to exploit its nonhuman material resources.
Caribbean Interlude
Most of the Africans, who were enslaved and brought to the New World,
came to the American colonies after a period of seasoning in the
Caribbean islands. To the Europeans who had settled in America the
Colonies were their new home and they strove to develop a prosperous and
secure society in which to live and raise their families. They hesitated
to bring their slaves directly from Africa as they believed that Africans
were brutal, barbaric savages who would present a real danger to the
safety and security of their new homes. Instead, they preferred to
purchase slaves who had already been tested and broken.
In contrast to this, Europeans who had gone to the Caribbean islands did
not consider the New World as their new home. The island plantations were
to be exploited to provide the wealth with with which their owners could
return to Europe and live like gentlemen. Many of them did not bring
their families to the islands, or, when they did, their stay was a
temporary one. Therefore, they were more willing than were the Americans
to purchase slaves directly from Africa. Moreover, because their sole
interest in the islands was economic profit, they could make a double
profit by selling their seasoned slaves as well as selling their
plantation produce. While the Africans' stay in the Caribbean, obviously,
was not part of their African heritage, it was part of the experience
which they brought with them to the Colonies. Many of the events which
occurred in the Caribbean islands had important repercussions in the
American Colonies.
A quarter of a century after Columbus had discovered the New World, the
first African slaves were brought to the West Indies to supplement the
inadequate labor supply. The Indians who lived on the islands were few in
number and had had no experience in plantation agriculture. As the
shortage of labor became severe, the plantation owners began to import
criminals and were willing to accept the poor and the drunks who had been
seized from the streets of European ports.
There was also a continual stream of indentured servants, but this influx
was nowhere nearly large enough to fill the growing labor demands. The
advantage of African slaves over indentured servants was that they could
be purchased outright for life. Moreover, the Africans had no contacts
in the European capitals through which they could bring pressure to bear
against the abuses of the plantation masters. In fact, African slaves
really had no rights which the master was obliged to respect. The supply
of African labor seemed to be endless, and many masters found it cheaper
to overwork a slave and to replace him when he died, rather than take
care of him while he lived. In short, the plantation experience was a
brutalizing one.
In the beginning, the major plantation crop had been tobacco, It could be
grown efficiently on small plantations of twenty or thirty acres. The
tobacco plant needed constant, careful attention throughout the season,
and this meant that the number of raw, unskilled laborers that was needed
was relatively small.
However, when the new colony of Virginia entered the tobacco field in the
early seventeenth century, it was able to produce larger quantities of
tobacco at a lower price. The Caribbean islands were hit by a severe
economic depression. The Dutch came with a solution. They had previously
conquered parts of northern Brazil from the Portuguese, and there they
had learned the techniques of plantation sugar production. It could only
be carried on efficiently with plantations of two or three hundred acres,
and it required large numbers of unskilled laborers both to plant and
harvest the crop and to refine the sugar. The Dutch, then, brought sugar
cane to the West Indies. This gave them a new plantation crop, and it
also gave them a new outlet for the slave trade which, at that point in
history, they had come to dominate.
The development of the sugar cane economy in the West Indies produced a
basic social revolution. The small tobacco farmers did not have the
capital to develop the large sugar plantations. Some of them went into
other occupations, but most of them returned to Europe. The new labor
needs were filled by a gigantic increase in the importation of African
slaves. The ratio of whites to blacks within the islands changed markedly
within a matter of one or two decades. The white population consisted of
a handful of exceedingly wealthy plantation owners and another handful of
white plantation managers. Many of the slaves soon learned new skills
associated with sugar manufacturing, thus reducing the need for white
labor even further. The rising demand for slaves meant an expansion of
the slave trade, and, as West Indian slaves had a high mortality rate and
a low birthrate, this meant a continually thriving slave trade.
As the ratio between whites and blacks widened, the problem of
controlling the slaves grew more serious. Brute force was the only
answer. The European governments had tried to solve the problem by
requiring the plantation owners to hire a specified number of white
workers. However, many owners found it cheaper to pay the fine than to
comply with this regulation.
In 1667, the British Parliament passed a series of black codes intended
to control the slaves in the Caribbean colonies. Other colonial powers
followed their example. The law stated that a slave could not be away
from the plantation on a Sunday and that he was not permitted to carry
any weapons. It also specified that, if he were to strike a Christian, he
could be whipped. If he did it a second time, he could be branded on the
face. However, if a master, in the process of punishing a slave,
accidentally beat him to death, this master could not be fined or
imprisoned.
Because the Europeans did not view the islands as their home, there was
always a shortage of white women. One of the results of this was the
development of an ever-growing class of mulattoes. More and more of them
were granted their freedom. While these freedmen did not receive equal
treatment with the whites, they were careful to preserve the advantages
they held over the slaves. Many of them served in the militia to help
keep the slaves under control. However, the threat of slave revolts
continued. The greater the possibility of success, the greater the
probability that slaves would take the risk of starting a revolt. All of
the islands in the West Indies had a history of slave rebellion.
Undoubtedly, the most outstanding slave revolt in the western hemisphere
took place in Haiti. During the French revolution, concepts of the rights
of man spread from France to her colonies. In Haiti, the free mulattoes
petitioned the French revolutionary government for their rights. The
Assembly granted their request. However, the French aristocrats in Haiti
refused to follow the directives of the Assembly. At this point, two
free mulattoes, Vincent Oge and Jean Baptiste Chavannes, both of whom had
received an education in Paris, led a mulatto rebellion. The Haitian
aristocrats quickly and brutally suppressed it.
By this time, however, the concepts of the rights of man had spread to
the slave class. In 1791, under the leadership of Toussaint l'Ouverture,
the slaves began a long and bloody revolt of their own. Slaves flocked
to Toussaint's support by the thousands until he had an army much larger
than any that had fought in the American revolution, This revolt became
entangled with the French revolution and the European wars connected with
it. Besides fighting the French, Toussaint had to face both British and
Spanish armies. None of them was able to suppress the revolt and to
overthrow the republic which had been established in Haiti.
After Napoleon came to power in France, he sent a gigantic expedition
under Leclerc to reestablish French authority in Haiti. While he claimed
to stand for the principles of the revolution, Napoleon's real interest
in Haiti was to make it into a base from which to rebuild a French empire
in the western hemisphere. Toussaint lured this French army into the
wilderness where the soldiers, who had no immunity to tropical diseases,
were hit very hard by malaria and yellow fever.
Toussaint was captured by trickery, but his compatriots carried on the
fight for independence. Finally, Napoleon was forced to withdraw from the
struggle. One of the results of his failure to suppress the slave revolt
in Haiti was his abandonment of his New World dreams and his willingness
to sell Louisiana to the United States. Unfortunately, this meant new
areas for the expansion of the plantation economy and slavery. In other
words, the Haitian revolution was responsible for giving new life to the
institution of slavery inside America.
American plantation owners were faced with a dilemma. The Louisiana
Purchase, resulting from the revolution in Haiti, greatly expanded the
possibilities of plantation agriculture. This meant a greater need for
slave labor. However, they were not sure from which source to purchase
these slaves. They hesitated to bring new slaves directly from Africa.
They were also loath to bring seasoned slaves from the Caribbean. Events
in Haiti had demonstrated that these Caribbean slaves might not be as
docile as previously had been believed. Certainly, Americans did not want
repetition of the bloody Haitian revolt within their own borders. Greedy
men still bought slaves where they could, but many American slave owners
were deeply disturbed and began to give serious thought to terminating
the importation of African slaves to America.
CHAPTER 3
Slavery as Capitalism
The Shape of American Slavery
The slave system in America was unique in human history. Sometimes
slaves were treated cruelly; at other times with kindness. They were more
often used as a sign of affluence, a way of displaying one's wealth and
of enjoying luxury, rather than as the means for the systematic
accumulation of wealth. Previously, slavery had existed in hierarchical
societies in which the slave was at the bottom of a social ladder, the
most inferior in a society of unequals. While each society normally
preferred to choose its slaves from alien people, it did not limit its
selection exclusively to the members of any one race. Slave inferiority
did not lead necessarily to racial inferiority. In contrast to this,
slavery in America was set apart by three characteristics: capitalism,
individualism, and racism.
Capitalism increased the degree of dehumanization and depersonalization
implicit in the institution of slavery. While it had been normal in other
forms of slavery for the slave to be legally defined as a thing, a piece
of property, in America he also became a form of capital. Here his life
was regimented to fill the needs of a highly organized productive system
sensitively attuned to the driving forces of competitive free enterprise.
American masters were probably no more cruel and no more sadistic than
others, and, in fact, the spread of humanitarianism in the modern world
may have made the opposite true. Nevertheless, their capitalistic
mentality firmly fixed their eyes on minimizing expenses and maximizing
profits. Besides being a piece of property, the American slave was
transformed into part of the plantation machine, a part of the
ever-growing investment in the master' mushrooming wealth.
The development of slavery in America resulted from the working of
economic forces and not from climatic or geographic conditions. When the
first twenty Africans reached Virginia in 1619, the colony was comprised
of small plantations dependent on free white labor. While some historians
believe that these immigrants were held in slavery from the beginning,
most think they were given the status of indentured servants. English
law contained no such category as slavery, and the institution did not
receive legal justification in the colony until early in the 1660s.
Although the fact of slavery had undoubtedly preceded its legal
definition, there was a period of forty years within which the Africans
had some room for personal freedom and individual opportunity. Rumors of
deplorable working conditions and of indefinite servitude were reaching
England and discouraging the flow of free white labor. To counter this, a
series of acts were passed which legally established the rights of white
labor, but they did nothing to improve the status of the African. In
fact, their passage pushed them relentlessly towards the status of slave.
The price of tobacco declined sharply in the 1660s and drove the small
white farmer to the wall. Only those with enough capital to engage in
large-scale operations could continue to make a profit. In order to fill
the need for the huge labor supply required large-scale agriculture, the
colonial legislature passed laws giving legal justification to slavery.
At the same time, Charles II granted a royal charter establishing a
company to transport African slaves across the ocean and thereby
increasing the supply of slaves available to the colonial planter.
Until this time, the number of Africans in the colony had been very
small, but thereafter their numbers grew rapidly. The African slaves
provided the large, dependable, and permanent supply of labor which these
plantations required. The small white planter and the free white laborer
found the road to economic success had become much more difficult. To be
a successful planter meant that he had to begin with substantial capital
investments. Capitalist agriculture substantially altered the social
structure of the colony. On one hand, it created a small class of rich
and powerful white planters. On the other, it victimized the small white
planters, or white laborers, and the ever-growing mass of African slaves.
The second unique factor in American slavery was the growth of
individualism. While this democratic spirit attracted many European
immigrants, it only served to increase the burden of slavery for the
African. Instead of being at the bottom of the social ladder, the slave
in America was an inferior among equals. A society which represented
itself as recognizing individual worth and providing room for the
development of talent, rigidly organized the entire life of the slave and
gave him little opportunity to develop his skills. In America, a person's
worth became identified with economic achievement. To be a success in
Virginia was to be a prosperous planter, and white individualism could
easily become white oppression leaving no room for black individualism.
The existence of slavery in a society which maintained its belief in
equality was a contradiction which men strove diligently to ignore.
Perhaps this contradiction can be partly understood by seeing the way in
which individual rights had come into being in English society. Instead
of springing from a belief in abstract human rights, they were an
accumulation of concrete legal and political privileges which had
developed since Magna Charta. Viewing it in this light, it may have been
easier for the white colonists to insist on their rights while denying
them to the slaves. Nevertheless, the existence of slavery in the midst
of a society believing in individualism increased its dehumanizing
effects.
The third characteristic which set American slavery apart was its racial
basis. In America, with only a few early and insignificant exceptions,
all slaves were Africans, and almost all Africans were slaves. This
placed the label of inferiority on black skin and on African culture. In
other societies, it had been possible for a slave who obtained his
freedom to take his place in his society with relative ease. In America,
however, when a slave became free, he was still obviously an African. The
taint of inferiority clung to him.
Not only did white America become convinced of white superiority and
black inferiority, but it strove to impose these racial beliefs on the
Africans themselves. Slave masters gave a great deal of attention to the
education and training of the ideal slave, In general, there were five
steps in molding the character of such a slave: strict discipline, a
sense of his own inferiority, belief in the master's superior power,
acceptance of the master's standards, and, finally, a deep sense of his
own helplessness and dependence. At every point this education was built
on the belief in white superiority and black inferiority. Besides
teaching the slave to despise his own history and culture, the master
strove to inculcate his own value system into the African's outlook. The
white man's belief in the African's inferiority paralleled African self
hate.
Slavery has always been an evil institution, and being a slave has always
been undesirable. However, the slave in America was systematically
exploited for the accumulation of wealth. Being a slave in a democracy,
he was put outside of the bounds of society. Finally, because his
slavery was racially defined, his plight was incurable. Although he
might flee from slavery, he could not escape his race.
North American and South American Slavery
Slavery, as it existed in British North America, contained interesting
points of comparison and contrast with the slave system existing in
Portuguese and Spanish South America. Although both institutions were
geared to the needs of capitalistic agriculture, the rights and
privileges of the South American planter were restricted and challenged
at many points by the traditional powers the Crown and the Church. On one
hand, capitalism, unimpeded by other powerful institutions, created a
closed slave system which regimented the totality of the slave's life. On
the other hand, through the clash of competing institutions, the slave as
been left with a little opportunity in which he could develop as a person.
In the seventeenth century, while the British colonies were being
established in North America and their slave system was being created,
the English Crown underwent a series of severe shocks including two
revolutions. Although it eventually emerged secure, the monarchy managed
to survive only by making its peace with the emerging commercial and
industrial forces. These same crises undermined the authority of the
Church as a powerful institution in society. The nonconformist sects were
the stronghold of the merchant class and spread rapidly in the American
colonies. There, instead of being a check on the commercial spirit, the
Church itself had become dominated by the middle class. Equally important
is the fact that in colonial America the level of religious life was very
low. Most colonists, with the exception of the original founders who had
fled religious persecution, did not come for religious freedom but for
economic advancement. When some Virginians at the end of the seventeenth
century, petitioned the government to build a college for the training of
ministers, they were told to forget about the cure of souls and instead
to cure tobacco. The result was that the planter class, unchallenged by
any other powerful institutions, was free to shape a slave system to meet
its labor needs. In any conflict which arose between personality rights
and property rights the property rights of the master were always
protected.
In contrast, the South American planter would not have such a free hand
in shaping his own affairs. The Renaissance and Reformation had not made
the same impact on Spain and Portugal as they did on the rest of Western
Europe. Consequently, secularization and commercialization had not
progressed as far in eroding the traditional power and prestige of the
Crown and the Church. Although both institutions readily compromised with
capitalist interests and strove to develop a working alliance with them,
neither the Crown nor the Church in Spain and Portugal had ever been
taken over by the commercial interests.
Both Spain and Portugal had had continuous contact with slavery extending
back into ancient times. Roman law as well as the Church fathers had
concerned themselves with it, and these concepts had been incorporated
into Spanish and Portuguese law. Also, slaves continued to exist in both
countries down to modern times. Therefore, when Portugal began importing
slaves from West Africa in the fifteenth century, the institution of
slavery was already in existence. Before long, significant numbers of
African slaves were to be found in both Portugal and Spain. When the
South American planters began importing slaves, slavery already had a
framework and a tradition within which the planter had to operate.
The Spanish Crown devoted a great deal of time and energy to the
supervision of its overseas possessions. Instead of permitting
considerable local autonomy as the British did, the Spanish Council of
the Indies in Madrid assumed a stance of illiberal, paternal,
bureaucratic control. From the point of view of the colonial capitalists,
the cumbersome royal bureaucracy was always involved in troublesome
meddling which impeded their progress. As part of the careful management
of its colonies, the Crown strove to control the operation of the slave
trade. Similarly, it was concerned with the treatment of the African
slaves within the colonies. The Spanish Crown included the slaves as
persons instead of relegating them solely to the status of property at
the disposal of their owners.
The Church, as a powerful institution, jealously guarded its right to be
the guardian and protector of social morality. Besides being concerned
with influencing individual behavior, the Church insisted that it was a
social institution with the right to interfere in matters relating to
public morals. In fact, it was through this role that the Church was able
to exercise its worldly powers. While condemning slavery as an evil and
warning that it endangered those who participated in it, the Church found
it expedient to accept slavery as a labor system. However, it insisted
that the African slaves must be Christianized. Missionaries were sent to
the trading stations on the African coast where the captives were
baptized and catechized. The Church feared that the purity of the faith
might be undermined by the infusion of pagan influences. Then, when a
slave ship reached the New World, a friar boarded the ship and examined
the slaves to see that the requirements had been met. The Church also
insisted that the slaves become regular communicants, and it liked to
view itself as the champion of their human rights.
The degree to which the individual rights of the slave were either
protected or totally suppressed provides a clearer insight to the
differences between North American and South American slavery. The laws
outlining the rights of slaves have been traditionally placed into four
categories: term of servitude, marriage and the family, police and
disciplinary powers, and, finally, property and other civil rights.
In both systems the term of servitude was for life, and the child's
status was inherited from its mother. Children of slave mothers were
slaves, and children of free mothers were free regardless of the status
of the father. Inherited lifetime slavery was the norm.
Manumission--granting freedom--was infrequent in British North America.
Occasionally, masters who had fathered slave children would later give
them their freedom. A few other slaves were able to purchase their own
freedom although, strictly speaking, this was a legal impossibility. The
slave was not able to own property according to the law, and this meant
that the money with which he purchased his freedom had always belonged to
his master. Obviously, he could only do this with his master's fullest
cooperation.
In South America, however, manumission was much more frequent. This
practice received highly favorable social sanction, and masters often
celebrated national holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, and other special
events by manumitting one or more of their favorite slaves.
The law also defended the right of the slave to purchase his own freedom.
He had the right to own property and could accumulate funds with which he
might eventually achieve his dream. He also had the right to demand that
his master or the courts set a fixed price for his purchase which he
could then pay over a period of years. Sundays and holidays were for the
slave to use as he saw fit, and, in some cases, he was also guaranteed a
couple of hours every day for his own use. During this time he could
sell his services and save the proceeds. The law also stated that parents
of ten or more children were to be set free. Finally, slaves could be
freed by the courts as the result of mistreatment by their masters.
While there was much sentiment in North America supporting marriages
among slaves, and there was much animosity against masters who separated
families through sale, the law was unambiguous on this point. Slaves
were property, and therefore could not enter into contracts including
contracts of marriage. Jurists also noted that to prevent the sale of
separate members of a family would lower the sale price, and this was to
tamper with a man's property. Therefore, property rights had to be placed
above marriage rights. In contrast, in South America the Church insisted
that slave unions be brought within the sacrament of marriage. The Church
also strove to limit promiscuous relationships between slaves as well as
between masters and slaves, and it encouraged marriage instead of
informal mating. Also, the law forbade the separate sale of members of
the family, husband, wife, and children under the age of ten.
The general thrust of the laws outlining police and disciplinary powers
in North America was to entrust complete jurisdiction to the master. One
judge had laid down the law that the master's power must be absolute in
order to render slave obedience perfect, and, although the courts were
empowered to discipline slaves in certain situations, the masters
generally acted as judges, juries, and dispensers of punishments. In
those rare cases where the law did protect the slave against extreme
mistreatment, its protection was nullified by the universal proscription
against any slave or Black person testifying in court against any white.
The court also had assumed that it was irrational for a man to destroy
his own property, and, therefore, it was impossible for a master to
commit premeditated murder against one of his own slaves.
However, in South America the court exercised much more Jurisdiction over
the slave. Crimes comitted by a slave were prosecuted by the court, and,
if a slave was murdered, this case was prosecuted by the court as if the
victim had been a free man. The law also made a more concerted attempt
to protect the slave against mistreatment by his master. A certain type
of state lawyer was an official protector of the slaves; he received
regular reports on slave conditions from priests as well as from special
investigative officials who had been appointed by the state for this
purpose. Mistreatment could lead both to the freedom of the slave and to
the imprisoning of the master. The law had devised an ingenious system
whereby the fine was divided equally between the judge, the informer, and
the state treasury.
Finally, the slave in North America could not own property and had
absolutely no civil rights. The law clearly stated that he could neither
own, inherit, or will property nor engage in buying and selling except at
the pleasure of his master. In contrast, the slave in South America could
own property, could engage in buying and selling, and was guaranteed
Sundays, holidays, and other times which to work for his own advancement.
In short, the law implied that while the master could own a man's labor,
he could not own the man as a person.
It is not easy to make a final comparison between these two slave
systems. South American masters often evaded the law and would be
exceedingly brutal, and North American masters were often much more
lenient than the law required. Conditions moreover, were usually more
severe in South America, and this fact may have worsened the actual
material situation of South American slave. Nevertheless, in North
America the slave was consistently treated as a "thing." In South America
there was some attempt to treat him as a man. This fact made a profound
difference in the way in which the two systems affected the slave as an
individual, and in the way in which they impinged upon the development of
his personality.
Slavery and the Formation of Character
The study of American slavery, frequently consisting of a heated debate
concerning the institution's merits, has, in recent years, branched into
new directions. Scholars have become engaged in the comparative
examination of differing slave systems such as those of North and South
America. More recently, Stanley M. Elkins has begun an inquiry into the
impact of a slave system in forming the individual character of the
slaves within that system. In his provocative study, Slavery: A Problem
in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, he has made some
interesting comparisons between the American slave system and the German
concentration camps and has endeavored to account for their respective
impacts on character formation through the social-psychological theories
of personality formation.
In Elkins's thinking, the concentration camps were a modern example of a
rigid system controlling mass behavior. Because some of those who
experienced them were social scientists trained in the skills of
observation and analysis, they provide a basis for insights into the way
in which a particular social system can influence mass character. While
there is also much literature about American slavery written both by
slaves and masters, none of it was written from the viewpoint of modern
social sciences. However, Elkins postulates that a slave type must have
existed as the result of the attempt to control mass behavior, and he
believes that this type probably bore a marked resemblance to the
literary stereotype of "Sambo." Studying concentration camps and their
impact on personality provides a tool for new insights into the working
of slavery, but, warns Elkins, the comparison can only be used for
limited purposes. Although slavery was not unlike the concentration camp
in many respects, the concentration camp can be viewed as a highly
perverted form of slavery, and both systems were ways of controlling mass
behavior.
The "Sambo" of American slave literature was portrayed as being docile
but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying
and stealing. He was a child figure, often demonstrating infantile
silliness and exaggeration, exasperating but lovable and, above all,
utterly dependent on and attached to his master. The master explained
this behavior as the result of the slave's race or of his primitive
African culture.
While assuming that many slaves did approximate the character of "Sambo,"
Elkins absolutely rejects any racial or cultural explanation. Modern
African studies have not led to any evidence of a "Sambo" type in Africa.
Similarly, the literature of South America does not contain any figure
comparable to him. Apparently, "Sambo" was not merely the result of
slavery, but he was the result of the unique form of slavery which
developed in North America. Unrestricted in his powers by institutions
such as the crown and the Church, the American slave master had gained
total control of his slave property. In a desire to maximize the profits
of his investment, he strove to develop the perfect slave. Although the
slave might endeavor to conform externally while maintaining his inner
integrity, eventually his performance as an ideal slave must have
affected the shape of his personality. Modern existentialism has argued
that how we behave determines what we are, and it is in this sense that
the controlled behavior in the concentration camp and its impact on
personality formation provide an illuminating parallel to the study of
American slavery.
The experienced gained in the German concentration camps during the
Second World War showed that it was possible to induce widespread
infantile behavior in masses of adults. Childlike action extended
beyond obedience to the guards and showed that a basic character
transformation had occurred. Previous social-psychological theory
stressed the ways in which an individual's personality was shaped
during his earliest childhood years and emphasized the tenacity with
which these early traits resisted attempt at alteration. Personality
theory was not adequate to what occurred in the camps.
The concentration camp experience began with what has become labeled as
shock procurement. As terror was one of the many tools of the system,
surprise late-night arrests were the favorite technique. Camp inmates
generally agreed that the train ride to the camp was the point at which
they experienced the first brutal torture. Herded together into cattle
cars, without adequate space, ventilation, or sanitary conditions, they
had to endure the horrible crowding and the harassment of the guards.
When they reached the camp, they had to stand naked in line and undergo a
detailed examination by the camp physician. Then, each was given a tag
and a number. These two events were calculated to strip away one's
identity and to reduce the individual to an item within an impersonal
system.
One's sense of personhood was further undermined by the fact that there
was never any privacy. The individual had lost both his identity and his
power. Everything was done to him or for him, but nothing was ever done
by him. The guards had the power to dispense food, clothing, shelter,
punishment, and even death Prisoners had to request permission to use the
sanitary facilities, and permission was not always forthcoming. As the
inmates were not sentenced for specified periods of time, they tended to
view camp life as having a limitless future.
In a relatively short time, this experience of total dependence developed
characteristics of infantile behavior in those prisoners who managed to
avoid the extermination chambers. A childish humor and infantile giggling
were common. Boasting and lying were widely practiced. Patterns of hero
worship emerged, and the guards became the heroes. The prisoners came to
accept their values including their German nationalism and anti-Semitism.
Some even altered their uniforms to resemble those of the guards, and
they slavishly followed orders beyond necessity. Attempts at resistance
were very rare, and, when the liberating American forces arrived at the
end of the war, they were surprised that there was not some attempt at
mass revenge.
In comparison, the African who became an American slave underwent an
experience which had some marked similarities to those of the German
concentration camp. He too underwent a kind of shock procurement.
Although millions of men became slaves, the event was unique to each man.
Usually, he had been captured in the course of warfare which, in itself,
was a humiliation. After being chained together and marched to the coast,
his horror must have increased when he realized that he was being sold to
Europeans. It was widely believed by Africans that white men were
cannibals. At the coastal station, he also had to endure the humiliation
of a naked inspection by a physician. This was followed by a lengthy
transoceanic trip which must have exceeded the horrors of the train ride
to the concentration camp. The crowded unsanitary conditions in the slave
ships were at least as bad as those in the cattle cars, and the Africans
also were beaten and harassed to keep them docile.
Moreover, the trip itself was much rougher and longer. After undergoing
another inspection, the African was purchased and had to face lifetime of
bondage in an alien environment. He was stripped of identity, given a new
name, and he was taught to envision himself and his African heritage as
inferior and barbaric. The White master insisted on total obedience and
created a situation of utter dependence. He supplied food, clothing,
shelter, discipline, and he was in a position to control the slave's
friends and mating. The "Sambo" of literature mirrored reality, this
life of dependency created infantile characteristics in many of the
slaves and taught them to reject their past while adopting the values of
their masters. The American slave system, besides exploiting the Africans
labor, possessed and violated his person.
Three schools of mass behavior have been suggested as explanations:
Freudian psychology, the interpersonal theories of Henry Stack Sullivan,
and role psychology. Freudian psychology has put total emphases on early
childhood experiences and is the least suited for this purpose. It could
be argued that the shock procurement and the total detachment from
previous life which it achieved both in the concentration camps and in
American slavery emptied the super-ego or conscience of its contents.
Then, the creation of total dependence which followed could have resulted
in infantile regression. This would account for the childlike behavior of
both "Sambo" and the camp inmates. The slave master the camp guard, each
in his own way, became a father figure, and the respective victims
internalized the value system of this symbolic father.
The interpersonal school of psychology states that the determining factor
in influencing personality development can be found in the estimation and
expectation of "significant others." Those responsible for the physical
and emotional security of an individual are his "significant others." For
a child these are his parents. As he matures, the number of "significant
others" in one's experience increases. This permits one to make decisions
of one's own and to develop some individuality.
However, the child has already internalized the estimations and
expectations of his parents, and this tends to shape his personality for
rest of his life. Still, acquiring new "significant others" as adult can
be important in reshaping the adult personality. Both the American slaves
and the camp prisoners were thrust into situations in which they had a
new single "significant other." This was a situation similar to that of
childhood, and it could have had the same impact in shaping personality.
All previous "significant others" had been made insignificant, and, in
each case, the estimations and expectations of this new "significant
other" became internalized into the personality of the victims.
Role psychology holds the most promise for explaining the impact of a
social situation in determining the development of individual
personality. In role psychology the individual and society can be
compared to the actor and the theater. Society provides the individual
with a number of roles, and the individual's behavior is his performance,
the way in which he plays them.
Normally, each individual plays a number of roles simultaneously. While
some are pervasive and extensive in scope, others are limited and
transitory, The role of man or woman is extensive, but that of customer
or student is transitory. Society also endows some roles with
considerable clarity, while leaving others open to individual
interpretation, The roles people play and the way in which they play them
determine personality. Within American slavery as well as within the
German concentration camps, the number of roles available were severely
limited, and both the slave master and the camp guard defined them very
clearly. Both demanded a precise and careful performance. There were
those whose performance was faultless in playing their roles. While the
concentration camp guard guaranteed its performance through terror and
torture, the slave master usually used more subtle means. Besides
punishment for missed cues, masters displayed considerable fondness for
slaves who played their part well. By restricting role availability and
by carefully defining the performance, society could create a group
personality type, and, through changing roles, society could change
personality.
Although the innovative use of personality types has further illuminated
the nature of the American slave system, it has tended to blur the
individual experiences and contributions of millions of Africans into a
vague amorphous abstraction. The technique has provided important
insights into the plight of the slave as the victim of a dehumanizing
system, but it tends to obscure the active participation of Africans in
American life. Further, it is a crude generalization which, in fact,
included many types within it. While most slaves were plantation field
hands, there were many whose lives followed different lines and for whom
slavery was a very different experience. Some slaves departed sharply
enough from the "Sambo" image to become leaders in insurrections. These
men were usually urban slaves possessing unusual talents, and thereby
escaping much of the emasculation which the typical slave had to endure.
Emphasizing the slave as the victim of the slave system further reduces
him to a passive object by insisting that the slave was effectively
detached from his African heritage. Many scholars, including Elkins,
believe that the attempt to discover Africanisms in America by
researchers such as Melville J. Herskovits has led to trivial and
insignificant results. This belief is reinforced by the example of the
German concentration camps. There, people from wide variety of social and
educational backgrounds reacted in highly similar ways. Apparently the
individual had been detached from his prior life, and his reactions to
the camp were shaped in standardized manner. Similarly, it is argued,
the slave was stripped of his heritage, so that none of his African
background could influence his life in America. His personality and
behavior were shaped exclusively by the unique form of American slavery.
However, if we apply the experiences gained in the Chinese
prisoner-of-war camps during the Korean War, some doubts on this point
can be raised. While Americans from a wide variety of social and
educational backgrounds behaved with a marked similarity to each other,
thereby appearing to prove that their previous experiences were
irrelevant to their reactions to the camp, there was, to the contrary, a
significant difference between the behavior the American and Turkish
prisoners who had both been fighting the Korean War. The morale of the
American prisoners was easily broken, and each one strove to look out for
himself even at expense of his comrade's life. In contrast, the Turks
maintained military discipline and group solidarity. This evidence would
seem indicate that, while individual differences were insignificant,
cultural differences did influence adjustment to the camp situation.
There are also grounds to believe that different value systems influenced
the way in which contrasting cultures adjusted to slavery. While the
African made the adjustment successfully, the American Indian, when he
was enslaved, did not. The African's agricultural labor had contained
many similarities to the work required on the plantation, but the Indian,
accustomed to a migratory hunting existence, was totally unprepared for
plantation slavery. He found nothing in it to sustain his values or his
will to live, and he was unable to make the adjustment.
If the African's agricultural background helped his adaptation to
American slavery, then we must assume that his detachment from his
heritage was not complete. Perhaps, besides influencing his life as a
slave, his African background may have found its way into other aspects
of American society. However, it would seem that because the African came
to believe in his own inferiority, there must have been very little
conscious attempt to keep his culture alive. Certainly, the recent Black
Power movement, which intended to revive pride in race and in the past,
bears eloquent testimony to the degree to which any conscious link with
the African past had been suppressed. Nevertheless, mental and emotional
habit can continue without any conscious intention, and habits of this
kind are important for the formation of personality, Moreover, it is
possible that the image of "Sambo" as an exasperating child may tell as
much about the mentality of the white master who perpetuated the picture
as it does about the slave whom it depicted. Perhaps the picture of the
childlike slave is also a reverse image of the sober, patronizing white
master whose life was rooted in austerity. To such a man spontaneity and
exuberance might well have seemed infantile.
The life of a slave did not give him much opportunity to create artifacts
which could later be catalogued as evidence of African influence.
However, he did create a unique music. While Negro spirituals were not
imported directly from Africa, they were more than an attempt to copy the
master's music. They represent highly complex fusion of African and
European music, of African and European religion, and of African and
European emotion. Blues and jazz, which emerged at a later date,
represent a similar creative tension. They clearly evolve from the
experience of the African in America and include in them elements which
can be traced directly to Africa. Jazz is now viewed throughout the world
as American music. It demonstrates the fact that the African immigrant
was not totally detached from his heritage and that he has made
significant contributions to American culture. While American slavery
did violate the person of the slave, some Africans, in the face of it
all, managed to maintain some sense of individuality and manhood.
Slave Response
Undoubtedly, the slave's most common response to his condition was one of
submission. There was no hope of his returning to Africa, and there was
no realistic expectation that the situation would be significantly
altered. The hopelessness of his plight created a deep sense of apathy.
However, even this acceptance of his master's values may have reflected
African influences. It was common for a defeated tribe in West Africa to
adopt the gods of its victors within the framework of its own religion.
This attitude would have facilitated the African's adjustment to slavery
in an alien culture.
The majority of slaves worked in the fields on large plantations. The
majority of them were herded into large work gangs, supervised by
overseers, and carefully directed in the accomplishment of whatever task
was necessary for that day. Others were regularly assigned to a specific
task without constant supervision and were held responsible for its
completion. In this way it was possible for them to develop some sense of
initiative. House slave were usually better off than field hands, but,
because they lived in such proximity to their masters, they were much
quicker to adopt the master's values and tended to be more obsequious.
Another significant group of slaves, both on the plantation and in the
city, developed their talents and became skilled craftsmen: barbers,
blacksmiths, carpenters, and a wide variety of other trades. Masters who
could not fully utilize the skills of such a craftsman rented their
property to their neighbors. In some cases, master permitted the slave to
be responsible for hiring himself out and allowed him to keep some of the
profits. The variety of experiences permitted within slavery allowed
significant variations in the types of slaves who emerged.
Even apparently submissive slaves developed techniques of passive
resistance. The laziness, stealing, lying, and faked illnesses, which
were usually attributed to the slave's childlike behavior, may have been
deliberate ways of opposing the system. Masters complained that many of
their slaves were chronic shirkers. When slaves dragged their feet while
working, it was seen as evidence of their inferiority. When white union
workers behave similarly, it is labeled a slowdown.
Other slaves appear to have indulged in deliberate mischief, trampling
down crops, breaking tools, and abusing livestock. A southern physician,
Dr. Cartwright, concluded that this behavior was symptomatic of a mental
disease peculiar to Africans. He labeled the disease Dysaethesia
Aethiopica and insisted that masters were wrong in thinking that it was
merely rascality. He also concluded that the slave's chronic tendency to
run away was in reality the symptom of yet another African disease,
Drapetomania, which he believed would eventually be medically cured.
Finally, some slaves engaged in active resistance. Most of the slave
insurrections in America were very small, and most were unsuccessful.
The three best known insurrections were those led by Gabriel Prosser,
Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. These revolts will be treated more fully
in the next chapter.
The masters consistently refused to see examples of passive or active
resistance as signs of manhood. Lying and stealing were never interpreted
as passive resistance, but were always attributed to an inferior savage
heritage, as was slave violence. Prosser, Vesey, and Turner, instead of
being numbered among the world's heroes fighting for the freedom of their
people, were usually represented as something closer to savages,
criminals, or psychopaths. Modern historical scholarship has been
influenced by the interpretation of slave behavior, which stressed the
impact of the system on the slave, rather than his response to it.
Consequently, it has failed to give proper recognition to African
contributions to American life.
Chapter 4
All Men Are Created Equal
Slavery and the American Revolution
"How is it," asked Samuel Johnson, "that we hear the loudest yelps for
liberty among the drivers of negroes?" The British author was only one
of many Europeans who thought it strange that a nation run by slave
owners should be so noisily demanding its own freedom. This same bitter
inconsistency was embodied in the death of Crispus Attucks. A mulatto
slave who had run away from his Massachusetts master in 1750, he spent
the next twenty years working as a seaman and living in constant fear of
capture and punishment. In 1770, he, with four others, was killed in the
Boston Massacre. Ironically, the first man to die in the Colonial fight
for freedom was both an Afro-American and a runaway slave. His death
became symbolic of what was to be an underlying question in the years to
come: "What place would there be for the African in America once the
colonies gained freedom from the old world?"
The Quakers were the first group in America to attack slavery. In his
book Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, John Woolman
contended that no one had the right to own another human being. In 1758
the Philadelphia yearly meeting said that slavery was inconsistent with
Christianity, and in 1775 Quakers played a dominant role in the formation
of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, the first
antislavery society in America.
As the colonists began to agitate for their own freedom, many of them
became increasingly aware of the contradiction involved in slaveholders
fighting for their own freedom. "To contend for liberty," John Jay
wrote, "and to deny that blessing to others involves an inconsistency not
to be excused." James Otis maintained that the same arguments which were
used to defend the rights of the colonists against Britain could be used
with at least equal force against the colonists by their slaves. "It is
a clear truth," he said, "that those who every day barter away other
men's liberty will soon care little for their own."
In the same vein, Abigail Adams wrote her husband: "It always appeared a
most iniquitous scheme to me to fight ourselves for what we are daily
robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as
we have." Perhaps the most radical statement was made by the Reverend
Isaac Skillman in 1773. Again, comparing the struggle of the colonists
with that of the slaves, he said that it was in conformity with natural
law that a slave could rebel against his master.
In 1774 the Continental Congress did agree to a temporary termination of
the importation of Africans into the colonies, but, in reality, this was
a tactical blow against the British slave trade and not an attack against
slavery itself. In an early draft of the Declaration of Independence,
the British king was attacked for his in involvement in the slave trade,
and he was charged with going against human nature by violating the
sacred rights of life and liberty. However, this section was deleted.
Apparently, Southern delegates feared that this condemnation of the
monarch reflected on them as well.
Although neither slavery nor the slave trade was mentioned in the
Declaration, it did maintain that all men were created equal and endowed
with the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This
seeming ambivalence concerning the future of slavery on the part of the
Continental Congress left Samuel Johnson's ironic question about American
hypocrisy unanswered. From a logical point of view, the Declaration of
Independence either affirmed the freedom of the African immigrant, or it
denied his humanity. Because each state continued almost as a separate
sovereign entity, the Declaration of Independence became a philosophical
abstraction, and the status of the African in America was determined
independently by each.
Lord Dunmore, the British governor of Virginia, put teeth into Johnson's
bitter question. In 1775 he offered to grant freedom to any slave who
ran away from his master and joined the British army. Earlier that year,
in spite of the fact that both slaves and free men had served at
Lexington and Concord, the colonists had shown an increasing reluctance
to have any blacks serving in their Army. The Council of War, under
Washington's leadership, had unanimously rejected the enlistment of
slaves and, by a large majority, it had opposed their recruitment
altogether. However, the eager response of many slaves to Lord Dunmore's
invitation gradually compelled the colonists to reconsider their stand.
Although many colonists felt that the use of slaves was inconsistent with
the principles for which the Army was fighting, all the colonies, with
the exception of Georgia and South Carolina, eventually recruited slaves
as well as freedmen. In most cases, slaves were granted their freedom at
the end of their military service. During the war some five thousand
blacks served in the Continental Army with the vast majority coming from
the North.
In contrast to later practice, during the Revolution the armed services
were largely integrated with only a few segregated units. While the vast
majority of Afro-American troops fighting in the Revolutionary War will
always remain anonymous, there were several who achieved distinction and
made their mark in history. Both Prince Whipple and Oliver Cromwell
crossed the Delaware with Washington on Christmas Day in 1776. Lemuel
Haynes, later a pastor of a white church, served at the Battle of
Ticonderoga. According to many reports, Peter Salem killed the British
major, John Pitcairn, at the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Gradually, the colonies were split into two sections by differing
attitudes towards slavery. In 1780 the Pennsylvania Legislature passed a
law providing for the gradual abolition of slavery. The Preamble to the
legislation argued that, considering that America had gone to war for its
own freedom, it should share that blessing with those who were being
subjected to a similar state of bondage in its midst. Three years later
the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided that slavery was contrary to that
state's constitution and that it violated the natural rights of man.
Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New York all passed laws
providing for gradual emancipation. Although the liberal philosophy of
the revolution did lead these states to end slavery, most Northern
citizens were not genuinely convinced that natural law had conferred full
equality on their Afro-American neighbors. Racial discrimination
remained widespread.
At the same time, the Southern states which were dependent on slavery for
their economic prosperity showed little interest in applying the
doctrines of the Declaration of Independence to either the slaves or the
free blacks in their midst. If anything, the passage of stiffer black
codes increased the rights of the masters while diminishing those of
slaves and freedmen. Some Southern states had qualms about the
advisability of continuing the slave trade, but this did not mean that
they had doubts about the value of slavery. Rather, the number of slave
insurrections which swept through South America, highlighted by the
bloody revolt in Haiti, led them to fear possible uprisings at home.
They had always been cautious about bringing unbroken slaves directly
from Africa, and now they were also afraid to import unruly slaves from
South America.
In 1783 Maryland passed a law prohibiting the importation of slaves, and
in 1786 North Carolina drastically increased the duty on the importation
of slaves, thereby severely reducing the flow. The Federal Government
finally took action to terminate the slave trade in 1807, but a vigorous,
illegal trade continued until the Civil War. The first sectional
conflict over slavery had taken place at the Constitutional Convention.
Those Northerners who had hoped to see slavery abolished by this new
constitution were quick to realize that such a document would never be
approved by the South. Most of the antislavery forces concluded that it
was necessary to put the Union above abolition.
While the Constitution did not specifically mention slavery, it did
legally recognize the institution in three places. First, there was a
heated debate over the means of calculating representation to the House.
Southern spokesmen wanted as many delegates as possible and preferred
that slaves be counted. Northerners, wanting to restrict Southern
representation, insisted that slaves not be counted. Some of them
pointed out that it was an insult to whites to be put on an equal footing
with slaves. The compromise which was framed in Article I, Section 2,
was that a slave should be counted as three-fifths of a man.
Second, the antislavery elements tried to make their stand at the
convention by attacking the slave trade. However, while many Southern
states were opposed to the trade, the issue became entangled in power
politics. South Carolina, which had few slaves, believed that the
termination of the slave trade would force up the price of slaves and
place her at a severe disadvantage in comparison with Virginia which
already had a large slave supply. It argued that Virginia would be
artificially enriched to the disadvantage of the other Southern states.
The states of the North and middle South were again forced to compromise,
and, in Article II, Section 9, they agreed that the trade would be
permitted to continue for another twenty years.
The third capitulation occurred in Article IV, Section 2, which as the
Fugitive Slave Provision. It stated that a slave who ran away and
reached a free state, did not thereby obtain his freedom. Instead, that
state was required, at the master's request, to seize and return him.
In fact, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were afraid that
the revolutionary ideology of freedom and equality had unwisely and
unintentionally unleashed a social revolution. Southern planters
envisioned the end of slavery on which their wealth was based. Northern
capitalists were opposed to the liberal and democratic land laws which
the people were demanding. The economic leaders in both sections of the
country believed that there was a need to protect property rights against
these new revolutionary human rights. While the Northern states strove
to stabilize society in order to build a flourishing commerce, the
Southern states tightened their control over their slaves fearing that
insurrections from South America or ideas about freedom and equality from
the American Revolution itself might inspire a serious slave rebellion.
Slave Insurrections
From the time that the first African was captured until the completion of
Emancipation, slaves struck out against the institution in one way or
another. Herbert Aptheker has recorded over hundred insurrections.
Although most slave revolts in America were small and ineffective, there
were three in particular which chilled Southern hearts. These were led
by Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner and occurred within the
short span between 1800 and 1831. Toussaint l'Ouverture in Haiti had
previously demonstrated that slaves could be victorious over large
European armies, and the American colonists had taught by their example
in the American Revolution that violence in the service of freedom was
justifiable. The gradual abolition of slavery which was occurring in the
Northern states gave hope that the institution in America might be
terminated altogether. However, the slaves saw little reason to believe
that their Southern masters would follow the example of the Northerners
in abolishing slavery. Many of the slaves came to accept that if the
institution was to be destroyed, it would have to be done by the slaves
themselves.
In August, 1800, Gabriel Prosser led a slave attack on Richmond,
Virginia. During several months of careful planning and organizing, the
insurrectionists had gathered clubs, swords, and other crude weapons.
The intention was to divide into three columns: one to attack the
penitentiary which was being used as an arsenal, another to capture the
powder house, and a third to attack the city itself. If the citizens
would not surrender, the rebels planned to kill all of the whites with
the exception of Quakers, Methodists, and Frenchman. Apparently, Prosser
and his followers shared a deep distrust of most white men. When they had
gathered a large supply of guns and powder, and taken over the state's
treasury, the rebels calculated, they would be able to hold out for
several weeks. What they hoped for was that slaves from the surrounding
territory would join them and, eventually, that the uprising would reach
such proportions as to compel the whites to come to terms with them.
Unfortunately for the plotters, on the day of the insurrection a severe
storm struck Virginia, wiping out roads and bridges. This forced a delay
of several days. In the meantime, two slaves betrayed the plot, and the
government took swift action. Thirty-five of the participants, including
Prosser, were executed. As the leaders refused to divulge any details of
their plans, the exact number involved in the plot remains unknown.
However, rumor had it that somewhere between two thousand and fifty
thousand slaves were connected with the conspiracy. During the trials,
one of the rebels said that he had done nothing more than what Washington
had done, that he had ventured his life for his countrymen, and that he
was a willing sacrifice.
In Charleston, South Carolina, a young slave named Denmark Vesey won
$1,500 in a lottery with which he purchased his freedom. During the
following years he worked as a carpenter. In his concern over the plight
of his slave brethren, he formed a plan for an insurrection which would
bring them their freedom. He and other freedmen collected two hundred
pike heads and bayonets as well as three hundred daggers to use in the
revolt, but, before the plans could be put into motion in 1882, a slave
informed on them. This time it was rumored that there had been some nine
thousand involved in the plot. Over a hundred arrests were made,
including four whites who had encouraged the project, and several of the
leaders, including Vesey, were executed.
The bloodiest insurrection of all, in which some sixty whites were
murdered, occurred in Southampton County, Virginia, in August, 1831. Nat
Turner, its leader, besides being a skilled carpenter, was a literate,
mystical preacher. He had discovered particular relevance in the
prophets of the Old Testament. Besides identifying with the slave
experience of the Israelites, Turner and other slaves felt that the
social righteousness which the prophets preached related directly to
their situation. The picture of the Lord exercising vengeance against
the oppressors gave them hope and inspiration. While the Bible did
appear to tell the slave to be faithful and obedient to his master, it
also condemned the wicked and provided examples that could be interpreted
to prove God's willingness to use human instruments in order to bring
justice against oppressors. Turner's growing hatred of slavery and his
increasing concern for the plight of his brothers, led him to believe he
was one of God's chosen instruments.
As his conviction deepened, the solar eclipse early in 1831 appeared to
him to be a sign that the day of vengeance was at hand. In the following
months he collected a small band of followers, and in August they went
into action. Unlike Prosser and Vesey, he began with only a very small
band which lessened his chance of betrayal. As they moved from farm to
farm, slaughtering the white inhabitants, they were joined by many of the
slaves who were freed in the process. However, word of the massacre
spread. At one farm, they were met by armed resistance. Slaves as well
as masters fought fiercely to stop the attack. Some of Turner's men were
killed and wounded, and the planned drive towards Jerusalem was thrown
off stride. This enabled the militia to arrive and break up the attack.
In due time Turner and several of his followers were captured and
executed.
White men in both the South and the North saw little similarity between
these insurrections and the American Revolution. The Turner massacre was
universally depicted as the work of savages and brutes, not of men.
Vigilance was tightened, and new laws controlling the slaves were passed
throughout the South. Both the violence of the slaves and the verbal
abuse of the abolitionists only served to strengthen the South in its
defense of the peculiar institution. Slaves who revolted were depicted
as beasts who could not be freed because they would endanger society.
Submissive slaves were pictured as children in need of paternal
protection from the evils of a complex, modern world. They were never
seen as men whose rights and liberties had been proclaimed in the
Declaration of Independence.
Growing Racism
As Afro-American freedmen sought to claim their rights as men and
citizens, they were confronted with constant resistance from whites who
were unwilling to accept them. Actually, pressure from the mass of
Northern white workers had contributed to abolition of slavery in those
states. In the Northern states slavery was forced to compete with free
white labor in a way which was not true of the plantation economy of the
South. White workers continually complained that slavery was keeping
their wages down and unemployment up, and in 1737 the governor of New
York had asked the Legislature to investigate the charges that slave
competition contributed to unemployment. While this attack had helped to
undermine slavery, it had also exacerbated tension between black and
white labor. The continual flow of runaways from the South brought an
increasing supply of cheap black labor to compete with white workers, and
the friction between the two races continued. While many of the
runaways, like Frederick Douglass, had worked as skilled craftsmen in the
South, they found economic discrimination in the North limiting them to
menial labor.
After 1830, when the tide of European immigration began to swell, the
competition for jobs grew even sharper, and blacks found that even menial
jobs were being taken over by the new European immigrants. Jobs such as
stevedores, coachmen, barbers, and servants, which had traditionally been
left to blacks, were now being invaded by the Irish. Whereas in 1830 the
vast majority of New York City servants were Afro-American, after 1850
most of them were Irish. This economic competition contributed
considerably to the hostility, fear, and discrimination which confronted
the Northern freedmen.
In 1816 the American Colonization Society was founded. It was considered
the ideal solution to the American racial dilemma. Claiming to be
interested in the welfare of the African in its midst, the Society
advocated colonizing in Africa or wherever else it was expedient. It
comforted slave owners by announcing that it was not concerned with
either emancipation or amelioration. Both were outside its jurisdiction.
It did imply that slaves might eventually be purchased for colonization.
Most of its propaganda tried to demonstrate that the freedman lived in a
wretched state of poverty, immorality, and ignorance and that he would be
better off in Africa.
The movement received widespread support from almost all sectors of the
white community including presidents Madison and Jackson. Several state
legislatures supported the idea, and Congress voted $100,000 to finance
the plan which eventually led to the establishment of the Republic of
Liberia.
However, the Afro-American community was not very enthusiastic about the
project. In 1817 three thousand blacks crowded into the Bethel Church in
Philadelphia and, led by Richard Allen, vehemently criticized
colonization. They charged that the Society's propaganda only served to
increase racial discrimination since it stressed the poverty and
ignorance of the freedman and claimed he was doomed to continue in his
filth and degradation because of his natural inferiority. It also argued
that whites would only take advantage of the Afro-American, and that the
separation of the two races was the only solution. The participants at
the Bethel meeting contended that this propaganda tended to justify
racial discrimination.
The claim was also made that the removal of freedmen from America would
only serve to make the slave system more secure, and they pledged
themselves never to abandon their slave brothers. Besides, while they
were African by heritage, they had been born in America, and it was now
their home. Most of the fifteen thousand who did return to Africa were
slaves who had been freed for this purpose, and the project was
acknowledged to be a failure. The Society's own propaganda contributed
to the alienation of many freedmen. One of its own leaders admitted that
lacks could read and hear and, when they were spoken of as a nuisance to
be banished, they reacted negatively like men.
Widespread racial prejudice, besides creating racial discrimination,
resulted in oppressive legislation. In 1810 Congress excluded
Afro-Americans from carrying the mail. In 1820 it authorized the
District of Columbia to elect white city officials, and it consistently
admitted new states to the Union whose constitutions severely limited the
rights of freedmen. The office of the Attorney General usually took the
position that the Constitution did not grant citizenship to Negroes, and
Congress itself had limited naturalization to white aliens in 1790. This
point of view was later justified by the Dred Scott decision. With only
a few exceptions, the Secretary of State refused to grant passports to
those wishing to travel abroad, although it did provide a letter of
identification stating that the carrier was a resident of the United
States. Finally, Massachusetts granted its own passports to its colored
citizens, complaining that they had been virtually denationalized.
Also, many states in the Northwest passed laws prohibiting or limiting
the migration of Afro-Americans into their territory. An Illinois law
said that anyone who entered the state illegally could be whipped and
sold at auction. Many states denied blacks the ballot, prohibited their
serving on a jury and legally segregated transportation, restaurants,
hotels, theaters, churches, and even cemeteries. Most Northern states
did not allow them to testify in court against whites. This meant that,
if a white man beat a black, the black had no legal protection unless
another white was willing to testify on his behalf.
On several occasions white hostility erupted into violence. Black
workmen were harassed, abolitionists beaten, and entire communities
terrorized. One of the worst of these events occurred in Cincinnati in
1829. With the rapid growth of "Little Africa," that city's black
ghetto, the local citizens decided to enforce the state's
anti-integration legislation. Some twenty years before, the state had
passed a law requiring blacks entering the state to provide proof of
their freedom and to post a bond as guarantee of their good behavior.
When the inhabitants of "Little Africa" obtained an extension of the
30-day time limit within which they were to comply with the law, the
citizens of Cincinnati were outraged, and they took matters into their
own hands. White mobs ransacked the area, indiscriminately and
mercilessly beating women and children, looting stores and burning
houses. It was estimated that half of the two thousand inhabitants of
the area left the city. Many of them emigrated to Canada, and the local
paper, which had helped to inflame the mob, lamented that the respectable
black citizens had left and only derelicts remained.
At the very point in American history when democracy was sinking its
roots deeper into the national soil, the status of the Afro-American was
being clearly defined as an inferior one. The Jacksonian Era brought the
common man into new prominence, but the same privileges were not extended
to the blacks. In the South, society was strengthening the institution
of slavery against any possible recurrences of slave insurrections. The
activities of the slaves, especially those of Negro preachers, were being
watched even more closely than before. In the North, both state and
federal laws denied blacks many of the rights of citizenship.
PART TWO Emancipation Without Freedom
Chapter 5
A Nation Divided
Black Moderates And Black Militants
On the eve of the Revolution there was justification for assuming that
slavery in the Northern states was withering away. By 1800 most of the
Northern states had either done away with slavery or had made provision
for its gradual abolition. Although this might not change the status of
an adult slave, he knew his children, when they reached maturity, would
be free. This meant that the important issue in the North was that of
identity. What would be the place of Negroes who were not fully accepted
as Americans? While Northern states were willing to grant freedom to the
Afro-Americans, they continued to view them as inferiors. Many observers
remarked that race prejudice actually increased with the abolition of
slavery. Northern freedmen concluded, like their slave brothers in the
South, that they would have to work out their own salvation. This left
them to wrestle with such questions as: "Am I an American?" "Am I an
African?" "Am I inferior?" "How can I establish my manhood and gain
acceptance?"
In the years immediately preceding the Revolution, there were slaves who
had wrestled with some of these questions: Jupiter Hammon and Phillis
Wheatley. They tried to establish their claim to manhood through literary
ability. Both were poets and wrote romantic poetry in the spirit of the
day. In 1761 Jupiter Hammon, a Long Island slave, published his poem: "An
Evening Thought. Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries". Twelve
years later Phillis Wheatley published a slim volume of poetry which was
written in a style much like that of Alexander Pope. Born in Africa in
1753, she had been brought to America as a child and had served in the
Wheatley home in Boston. When she displayed some literary ability, her
master granted freedom to her and, to some extent, became her patron. Her
volume of poetry was published while she was visiting England and is
generally considered superior to the poetry of Jupiter Hammon. Although
on one occasion Hammon did suggest that slavery was evil, he instructed
slaves to bear it with patience. Neither he nor Phillis Wheatley made any
direct challenge to race prejudice. Instead, they strove to gain
acceptance as talented individuals who might help others of their race to
improve their situation. Unfortunately, white society regarded them only
as unusual individual exceptions and continued to maintain its racial
views.
Gustavus Vassa was born in Africa in 1745 and was brought to America as a
slave. Eventually, after serving several masters, he became the property
of a Philadelphia merchant who let him buy his own freedom. After
working for some time as a sailor, he settled in England, where he felt
he would encounter less racial discrimination. There he became an active
worker in the British anti-slavery movement. In 1789 he published his
autobiography, "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oloudah Equiano,
or Gustavus Vassa", in which he bitterly attacked Christians for
participating in the slave trade.
In 1792, Benjamin Banneker, a freedman from Maryland, wrote to Thomas
Jefferson complaining that it was time to eradicate false racial
stereotypes. While expressing doubts regarding the merits of slavery in
his "Notes on Virginia", Jefferson had expressed his belief in the
inferiority of the African. Banneker had educated himself, especially in
mathematics and astronomy, and in 1789 he was one of those who helped to
survey the District of Columbia. Later, he predicted a solar eclipse. In
1791 he had begun the publication of a series of almanacs, and the next
year he sent one of these to Jefferson in an attempt to challenge his
racial views. Jefferson was so impressed with the work that he sent it
to the French Academy of Science. However, he seemed to view Banneker as
an exception rather than fresh evidence undermining white stereotypes.
In Massachusetts Paul Cuffe was rapidly becoming a black capitalist.
After having worked as a sailor, he managed to buy a business of his own.
Over the years, he came to own considerable property in Boston, and
eventually he had an entire fleet of ships sailing along the Atlantic
coast, visiting the Caribbean and crossing the ocean to Africa. During
the Revolution, he and his brother, both of whom owned property and paid
taxes, raised the question of political rights. Claiming "no taxation
without representation", they both refused to pay their taxes because
they were denied the ballot. Their protest led Massachusetts to permit
blacks to vote on the same basis as whites. Nevertheless, over the years
Cuffe developed reservations about the future of the African in America.
In 1815, at his own expense, he transported thirty-eight blacks back to
Africa. This was one of the first attempts at African colonization.
Apparently the costs and other problems surrounding the project were so
great that he never pursued it further.
As it became increasingly apparent that the end of slavery would not mean
the end of discrimination, cooperative action by Afro-Americans seemed to
be the only basis from which to gain acceptance, and in 1775 the African
Lodge No. 459, the first Afro-American Masonic lodge in America, was
founded. Prince Hall, its founder, was born in Barbados and came to
America with the idea of identifying himself with Afro-Americans. He
became a minister in the Methodist Church, where he dedicated himself to
their advancement. However, he concluded that only through working
together through black cooperation, could any progress be made. After
being refused recognition by the American masons, his lodge was
legitimized by a branch of the British Masons connected with army
stationed in Boston. Before long African lodges as well as other
fraternal organizations sprang up all across the country. Denied access
to white society, blacks found it necessary to form various kinds of
organizations for their own welfare.
Even within the church which supposedly stressed brotherhood, separate
African organizations were emerging. During the revolution, George Liele
founded a black Baptist church in Savannah, Georgia. Although similar
churches sprang up throughout the South, the independent church movement
progressed more rapidly in the Northern states. In 1786 Richard Allen,
who had previously purchased his freedom from his Delaware master, began
similar meetings among his own people in Philadelphia. He wanted to found
a separate black church, but he was opposed by Blacks and whites alike.
However, when the officials of St. George's Methodist Church proposed
segregating the congregation, events came to a head. Richard Allen,
Absalom Jones, and others went to the gallery as directed, but the ushers
even objected to their sitting in the front seats of the gallery. When
they were pulled from their knees during prayer, Allen and his friends
left the church, never to return. They immediately formed the Free
African Society and began collecting funds to build a church. This
resulted in the founding of St. Thomas' African Protestant Episcopal
Church headed by Absalom Jones. In spite of the behavior of the
Methodists, Allen believed that Methodism was better suited to his
people's style of worship and gradually he collected a community of
followers. In 1794 the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church was
opened in Philadelphia. In 1816 several A.M.E. congregations met
together to form a national organization with Allen as its bishop.
Similar events in New York City led to the establishment of the African
Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Early in 1807 a black Baptist Church was
founded in Philadelphia, and later in that same year congregations were
established in Boston and New York. The New York congregation developed
into the Abyssinian Baptist Church.
The African church became the most important organization within the
Afro-American community. Besides providing spiritual strength and
comfort, it became a community institution, a center for social,
political, and economic life. The minister became the most important
leader of his people. However, the full potential for organizing protest
was overlooked. For the most part, the church taught an other-worldly
religion which strove to provide strength with which to endure the
sorrows of this life, but it did not try too actively to change the
situation. Richard Allen, for example, counseled patience and caution,
advising his people to wait for God to work in His own way. In the
meantime, the Christian was to practice obedience to God and to his
master. Most of the clergy stuck to religious matters and avoided
political questions. However, there were those who took an active part
in politics, and they became leaders in the abolition movement and in the
Negro Convention movement. They included men like Samuel Ringgold Ward
and Henry Highland Garnet.
Another manifestation of group solidarity occurred in the Negro
Convention Movement which began in 1830 and continued until the Civil
War. These meetings brought together leaders from Afro-American
communities throughout the North. They debated important problems,
developed common policies, and spoke out with a united voice. They
consistently urged the abolition of slavery in the Southern states, and
they condemned the legal and social discrimination which was rampant
throughout the North. At the 1843 convention in Buffalo, N.Y., Henry
Highland Garnet tried to persuade the movement to declare violence an
acceptable tool in the destruction of slavery. However, by a vote of 19
to 15, the movement continued to oppose violence and to limit its power
to an appeal based on moral persuasion.
Besides the Convention Movement, there were two other means of achieving
broad leadership. This was still an age of oratory. Frederick Douglass,
William Wells Brown, Sojourner Truth, and many others traveled from town
to town and state to state giving lectures to both black and white
audiences. Also, they exploited the press to reach even larger numbers.
Some of the more famous autobiographies written at this time were those
of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Austin Steward, and Josiah
Henson, all of whom recorded the horrors of slavery as well as the
humiliations of racial discrimination.
One of the most vehement attacks against slavery and discrimination was
"Walker's Appeal in Four Articles Together with a Preamble to the Colored
Citizens of the World But in Particular and Very Particularly to those of
the United States of America". Although his father had been a slave,
David Walker himself was born free in North Carolina. His hatred of
slavery drove him to Boston, where he became a clothing merchant, but he
was unable to forget his brethren who were still in bondage. The result
was that in 1829, he published a pamphlet which was both a vehement
attack against the institution of slavery and an open invitation for the
slaves to rise up in arms.
First, he pointed out that all races of the earth were called men and
assumed to be free with the sole exception of the Africans. He denied
that his people wished to be white, insisting rather that they preferred
to be just as their creator had made them. Urging his brothers not to
show fear because God was on their side, Walker contended that any man
who was not willing to fight for his freedom deserved to remain in
slavery and to be butchered by his captors. Insisting that death was
preferable to slavery, he insisted that, if an uprising occurred, the
slaves would have to be willing to kill or be killed. Moreover, he urged
that it was no worse to kill a man in self-defense than it was to take a
drink of water when thirsty. Rather, a man who would not defend himself
was worse than an infidel, and not deserving of pity.
In addressing the American people, Walker foresaw that if they would
treat Africans as men, they could all live together in harmony. Georgia
offered $10,000 for Walker if taken alive and $1,000 for him dead. A year
later Walker died under somewhat mysterious circumstances, and some
claimed that he had been murdered. His pamphlet circulated widely
throughout the North and the South, and many believed that it helped to
encourage slave insurrections.
"Freedoms Journal", which had been founded in 1827 by Samuel E. Cornish
and John B. Russwurm, was the first in a long series of Afro-American
newspapers. Russwurm had been the first of his race to receive a college
degree in America. In their first editorial, they proclaimed what was
becoming a growing conviction. They said that others had spoken for the
black man for too long. It was time that he spoke for himself. They also
attacked slavery and racial prejudice. They strove to make the paper a
medium for communication and debate within the Afro-American community.
They also intended to use the paper to clarify misconceptions about
Africa. Like many of their contemporaries, Cornish and Russwurm believed
that even those who were friendly to their race were unconsciously
steeped in prejudice. Therefore, it was doubly necessary for
Afro-Americans to speak out for themselves, to expose the prejudices of
bigots and liberals. However, by 1829 Russwurm had become increasingly
bitter about the future of his race in America and came to believe that
returning to Africa was the only way to escape prejudice. He believed
that the colony which had been established in Liberia was in need of
educated leadership, and he went there to become its superintendent of
education. Cornish remained behind and continued to work as a minister
and as a newspaper editor.
The "North Star", later known as Frederick Douglass's paper, was the best
known of the black journals. Its editor, Frederick Douglass, was born a
slave in Maryland in 1817. His mother was a slave named Harriet Bailey,
and the identity of his white father remains unknown. He was raised by
his maternal grandmother on a distant farm and almost never saw his
mother. Like many slaves, he was denied a father, almost denied a mother,
and largely denied any meaningful identity. After working for several
years as a slave both on the plantation and in the city, he determined to
run away. Although an earlier attempt had failed, he now made his way
north to New Bedford, Massachusetts. There he was shocked to discover
that, while some whites gave him protection and help, race prejudice was
still rampant. A skilled craftsman, he was unable to find work. When an
employer was willing to accept him, his fellow workers threatened to walk
off the job. For the next three years, he worked as servant, coachman,
and common laborer earning about a dollar a day.
Then, he met William Lloyd Garrison, the famous white abolitionist, who
was impressed with his slave experiences and his ability to describe
them. At one meeting, after Douglass had spoken, Garrison asked the
audience whether this was a beast or a man. Douglass soon became a
regular lecturer in the abolitionist movement. As he traveled throughout
the North, he was continually harassed by racial discrimination in
trains, coaches, boats, restaurants hotels, and other public places. In
contrast, when he went to England to raise funds for the movement, he was
struck by the fact that he could go any place, including places
frequented by the aristocracy, and be accepted as a man. He said that
wherever he went in England he could always identify an American because
his race prejudice clung to him like clothing. While in England,
abolitionists raised funds which allowed him to purchase his freedom.
When he returned to America, Douglass settled in Rochester, New York,
where he began publication of "The North Star". Rochester was a thriving
city on the Erie Canal, and, because it also had a port on Lake Ontario,
it became an important terminal on the Underground Railroad. While many
runaways settled in Rochester, others boarded steamers for Canada where
they would be beyond the reach of the law. Douglass came to play an
important role on the Underground Railroad, in the life of Rochester and,
through "The North Star", among Northern freedmen. Garrison felt
double-crossed when his most important cohort in the Afro-American
community struck out on his own. Douglass, in agreement with the position
previously taken by Cornish and Russwurm, believed that blacks must
assume leadership in their own cause.
Before long, "The North Star" was recognized as the voice of the black
man in America. Douglass spoke out on all issues through its pages, and
he continued to tour the country lecturing before audiences of both
colors and discussing matters of policy with other abolitionists. He did
not believe in merely exercising patience and obedience. Rather, he
believed it was necessary to prick the white man's conscience with moral
persuasion. His tactics combined nonviolence with self-assertion.
Although the Constitution had indirectly recognized slavery, Douglass
believed that its spirit, as well as that of the American Revolution,
implied the eventual destruction of that institution. Therefore,
political action was a legitimate and necessary tool with which to attack
slavery and racial discrimination. From his knowledge of the South, he
was convinced that slavery could not be overthrown without violence.
However, he insisted that the black man was in no position to take the
leadership in the use of physical force. At the same time, he was
increasingly aware of the depth of racial prejudice of Northern whites,
and he knew that there was a long struggle ahead to gain political,
social, and economic freedom.
White Liberals
In 1832 William Lloyd Garrison and eleven other whites founded the New
England Anti-Slavery Society which, besides working for the abolition of
slavery, fought for the rights of freedmen. Garrison soon became the
fiery and controversial leader of the abolitionist movement and the
editor of "The Liberator". The movement included men like Wendell
Phillips, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, Theodore Dwight Weld, Gerrit Smith,
James Birney, and many others. They condemned the American Colonization
Society for sharing the unchristian prejudices of the slaveholders.
Although the Northern states had abolished slavery, most whites believed
that it was not their business to interfere with the domestic affairs of
the Southern states. They also held that freedmen in the North must be
kept in their place, and they viewed the abolitionists as a dangerous and
radical minority.
The abolition movement itself was weakened by internal fragmentation.
Garrison was jealous of anyone who competed with him for leadership. His
brand of abolitionism attacked the Constitution as a vicious document
giving sanction to slavery. He advocated that the Northern states
separate from the South as a means of removing federal protection from
slavery. Because the government was based on an unholy document, he
concluded that any kind of political action automatically enmeshed one in
this evil system. He was vehemently against the use of violence to
overthrow slavery and insisted that moral persuasion was the only
legitimate tool in the cause. Anyone who did not support his doctrines
faithfully was viewed as an enemy. This meant that he did not cooperate
with abolitionists who condoned the use of violence or with those who
were willing to accept the Constitution and engage in political action.
Ironically, the abolitionist movement was also divided by racial
prejudice. While opposing slavery, some refused to believe in political
equality. Others were willing to grant political equality, but resisted
the idea of social mixing. The Philadelphia anti-slavery society spent
many meetings debating whether it should extend membership to blacks,
and, by a majority of two, it finally voted to drop its color bar.
Black abolitionists became increasingly irritated by the racial attitudes
of their white colleagues. Many of the whites were influential
businessmen, and they were attacked for their own hiring practices. It
was claimed that, when they hired blacks at all, they hired them only in
menial positions. Martin R. Delany, abolitionist, journalist, and
physician, complained that the blacks had taken a back seat in the
movement for too long. He also bitterly attacked whites for thinking that
they knew best what was good for the African. He concluded that both
friend and foe shared the same prejudices.
The Underground Railroad was another project which involved large numbers
of whites. Besides providing financial backing for it, they worked as
conductors and station masters. They helped runaways to safety, and they
sheltered escapees. These men wanted to do more than speak out on the
issue of slavery; they wanted to take action. Helping runaway slaves was
against the law, and these men had such strong convictions that, while
they did not think of themselves as criminals, they were willing to
deliberately break the law. They participated in a kind of civil
disobedience. However, the bravest workers on the underground railroad
were black. If they were caught, especially in the South, they would have
to pay the ultimate price for their heroism. The best known of all the
black conductors was a brave runaway slave woman named Harriet Tubman.
She ventured deep into the South on several occasions to lead large
numbers of slaves to freedom, and she became a national legend. Several
states put a price on her head. During the Civil War she served as a
Union spy behind confederate lines.
Gradually the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad won the
support of ever-increasing numbers of white Northerners. At the same
time, the South became increasingly bitter. Abolitionist literature was
banned throughout the South, and most of the abolitionist leaders,
because they had circulated literature in violation of this ban, had a
price put on their heads. The Underground Railroad was more than a
symbolic attack on the institution of slavery. While there is no way of
telling how many slaves traveled to freedom with its help, certainly the
value of human property lost to the South was very high. A slave was
worth about $1,000, and thousands of slaves escaped. The financial loss
was very real. When Southern masters came north to recapture runaway
slaves, Northern consciences were outraged.
Finally, as the new states from the West were being permitted to join the
Union, the question as to whether slavery should be legalized in them
became important. Even Northern white bigots opposed the extension of
slavery into these states. From their point of view, slavery was unfair
competition with free labor, and they wanted the new states for the
purpose of expansion. As the middle of the century approached, dark
clouds of crisis could be seen on the horizon.
Growth of Extremism
During the 1850s American racial attitudes grew more extreme. While
slavery continued to flourish throughout the South, discrimination was
rampant throughout the North. Instead of gradually withering away as some
had expected, the peculiar institution had been thriving and spreading
into the Southwest ever since Eli Whitney's discovery of the cotton gin
in 1793 had given new life to the growing of cotton. Slavery was booming
in Alabama and spreading into Louisiana, Mississippi, and even Texas. At
the same time, the North, after experiencing a full decade without
slavery, was still steeped in discrimination and prejudice. After several
years of freedom, Northern blacks still were not gaining economic
advancement, political rights, or social acceptance. As the numbers of
European immigrants had increased, job discrimination grew. The Northern
states were, at the same time, abolishing the political rights of
Afro-Americans. The hopes which had accompanied the end of slavery in
those states were fading into despair. The relentless struggle for
advancement apparently had failed, and increasing numbers became
convinced that more radical action was necessary.
At the same time White supremacy advocates were uneasy because their
views had not been universally accepted, and they were adopting a
stronger defense. The Southern justification of slavery was based on four
main arguments. First, it was claimed that slavery was indispensable to
its economy and that every society, whether slave or free, needed those
who must do its menial labor. Although many Northerners might not agree
that the need for labor was a justification for slavery, many would
concur with second argument, which was that the Negro was destined for a
position of inferiority. Here the racial prejudices of North and the
South overlapped. The third argument was that Christianity had sanctioned
slavery throughout all of history as a means for conversion. This
contention had more justification than the religious colonists would care
to admit. Finally, the South argued that white civilization had
developed a unique high culture precisely because slavery removed the
burden from the white citizens. Again, while Northerners might not
totally agree with this point, many of them did believe in the
superiority of white civilization. Although these points convinced few
outsiders of the necessity for the existence of slavery, they did
underline the widespread belief in black inferiority and white
superiority. From this point of view, the necessity for defending the
glories of white civilization against the corruption of racial
degeneration justified more and more radical action.
Besides mounting this vigorous vocal defense of slavery, the South
stiffened its resistance to the circulation of anti-slavery propaganda.
State laws were passed banning the publication and circulation of
abolitionist materials, and mobs broke into post offices, confiscated
literature from the U.S. mail, and publicly burned it. The Compromise of
1850, at the urging of the South, included the Fugitive Slave Act which
vastly increased the powers of the slave owner to pursue runaway slaves
throughout the North. The law also required that Northern officials
cooperate in this process. Afro-Americans who had been living in Northern
communities for years and who were accepted as respected citizens were
now threatened with recapture by their previous masters. Many of these
leaders were forced to flee. Freedmen who lacked adequate identification
were also endangered by legal kidnapping and enslavement.
Throughout the North both blacks and whites, with the aid of the Federal
Government, were alienated by this new long arm of the peculiar
institution which reached deep into their communities. In fact many
felt, like Frederick Douglass, that this law made the Federal Government
an agent of slavery, and they believed that it forced local governments
to become its co-conspirators. Several Northern states passed new civil
rights laws in an attempt to protect their citizens. Frequently local
vigilance comittees tried to prevent the arrest of blacks in their midst.
On other occasions mobs tried and sometimes succeeded in freeing those
already arrested, In Boston, for example, a federal marshal was killed in
a clash with one such mob. The Fugitive Slave Act was a powerful blow at
the Afro-American communities in the North. It has been estimated that
between 1850 and 1860 some twenty thousand fled to Canada. In the face of
this reversal moderation became meaningless.
The involvement of the Federal Government in supporting slavery led to a
growing alienation within the Afro-American community. Increasingly,
militant leaders reevaluated their position on colonization. Henry
Highland Garnet and Martin R. Delany, both workers in the abolition
movement, reversed their positions and became proponents of emigration.
While Garnet favored emigration to Liberia, Delany became an advocate of
moving to Central and South America. He said that the United States had
violated its own principles of republicanism and equality and that it was
keeping Negroes in economic and political bondage. He concluded that
Negroes were left with a choice between continued degradation in America
or emigration. By 1852 he had come to prefer the latter choice.
In 1854 a colonization convention was held in Cleveland for those who
were interested in emigration within the boundaries of the western
hemisphere. The convention noted that the Afro-American community was
developing a growing sense of racial consciousness and pride. Although
blacks were in the minority in Europe and America, it pointed out that
most of the world's population was colored. Integration into the
mainstream of American life, besides appearing to be impossible, seemed
to demand the denial of selfhood for the black man. Therefore, black
separatism grew in popularity and became a platform from which to
maintain a sense of identity and individual worth.
However, many militants like Frederick Douglass did not approve of black
nationalism and colonization. They claimed that they were still
Americans and did not constitute a separate nation. Leaders who were not
black nationalists, however, could still be militant. Although Douglass
did not actively support John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, the reason
for his decision was that he doubted its effectiveness and not because he
opposed its violent technique. In fact, Douglass applauded the attack. He
said that Brown had attacked slavery "with the weapons precisely adapted
to bring it to the death," and he contended that, since slavery existed
by "brute force," then it was legitimate to turn its own weapons against
it. Previously the Reverend Moses Dixon had established two fraternal
organizations to train blacks for military action. Although nothing
substantial came from them, the idea of developing guerrilla forces as
the only remaining tool against slavery was gaining support.
Another militant, H. Ford Douglass, concluded that the government had
become so tyrannical that it was possible for him to engage in military
action against it without his becoming a traitor to his country. He said,
"I can hate this government without becoming disloyal because it has
stricken down my manhood, and treated me as a salable commodity. I can
join a foreign enemy and fight against it, without being a traitor,
because it treats me as an ALIEN and a STRANGER, and I am free to avow
that should such a contingency arise I should not hesitate to take any
advantage in order to procure such indemnity for the future."
Robert Purvis, a Philadelphian, also agreed that revolution might be the
only tool left with which to secure redress for grievances. He contended
that to support the government and the constitution on which it was based
was to endorse a despotic state, and he went on to express his abhorrence
for the system which destroyed him and his people. Purvis said that he
could welcome the overthrow of this government and he could hope that it
would be replaced by a better one.
The alienation of the Afro-American from his government was dramatically
underscored and justified in 1857 by the Dred Scott Decision which was
handed down by the Supreme Court. A slave who had resided with his master
in a territory where slavery was forbidden by act of Congress had claimed
his freedom. After returning to slave territory, he sued his master on
the grounds that residence in a non-slave territory had made him free.
The court said that the Missouri Compromise which had established
slave-free territories was unconstitutional, and it went on to state that
blacks were not citizens of the United States and therefore could not
bring a suit in court. In one single decision the court had lashed out at
the Afro-American with two blows. Besides justifying slavery, it had
openly supported the spread of the peculiar institution into the West.
Then, it castrated the freedmen by denying any political rights to them.
They were left with four alternatives: slavery, a freedom rooted in
poverty and prejudice, emigration abroad, or revolution.
Suddenly, the terms of the equation were dramatically altered by an
obscure white man named John Brown. After beginning his public career in
New England as a participant in the abolitionist struggle, Brown became
absolutely outraged by the apparent success that the South was having in
spreading slavery into the new territories. He became one of the most
active leaders in Kansas and rallied support to prevent that state from
falling into the hands of proslavery factions. The slavery debates in
Kansas exploded into open combat. Brown's outrage became a fiery
conviction that God had chosen him to be one of the leaders in the
righteous struggle against slavery. He also came to believe that, if God
had justified violence in defending righteousness in the Old Testament,
it could be used in other places and on a wider scale to topple the
peculiar institution.
Brown spent several weeks in Rochester, New York, at the home of
Frederick Douglass, planning what amounted to a guerrilla campaign
against the South. Despite Brown's urging, Douglass refused to join in
what he believed to be a futile and desperate gesture. However, he wished
Brown the best of luck. The plan was to establish a center of operation
in the Virginia hills. Brown did not expect to defeat the South by force
of arms. Instead, he believed that he could establish a mountain refuge
which would attract ever-increasing numbers of slaves. His hope was that
the drain on the slave system, coupled with the masters' fear of attack,
would so strain the peculiar institution that, bit by bit, the South
would be forced to negotiate some kind of settlement.
However, Brown had to obtain arms and ammunition, and, to keep the
operation going he and his men needed food and other supplies. The result
was the raid on the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The
attacking party included five blacks: Lewis Sheridan Leary, Dangerfield
Newly, John Anthony Copeland, Osborn Perry Anderson, and Shields Green.
Two of them were killed in the attack, two more were later executed, and
one escaped. The attack failed, and Brown and several others were
executed. Before his execution Brown said that, while they might dispose
of him quite easily, the Negro question itself could not be easily
dismissed. His prediction proved correct, Brown's execution made him a
martyr and at the end led to the victory for which he had yearned.
CHAPTER 6
From Slavery to Segregation
Blue, Gray, and Black
John Brown's raid convinced the South that Northern harassment of slavery
would continue and that the tactics would become even more desperate. At
the same time, the election of Abraham Lincoln was interpreted by the
South as a swing of the political pendulum in favor of the abolitionists.
This was not true. Both Lincoln and the Republican Party had decided that
the Anti-slave issue was not a broad enough platform on which to win an
election. While Lincoln had made it clear that he himself opposed
slavery, he also insisted that his political position, as well as that of
the party, was to oppose the extension of slavery rather than to abolish
it.
Although he emphasized different beliefs in varying localities, he still
maintained that, while he opposed the enslavement of human beings, he did
not view Africans as equals. He was convinced that there was a wide
social gap between whites and blacks, and he indicated that he had grave
doubts about extending equal political rights to Afro-Americans. Besides
opposing slavery, he believed that racial differences pointed to the
necessity for the separation of the two races, and he favored a policy of
emigration. However, he had no interest in forcing either abolition or
emigration on anyone. His political goals were to increase national
unity, to suppress the extension of slavery, to encourage voluntary
emancipation, and to stimulate volitional emigration. He was far from the
abolitionist which the South believed him to be. At the same time,
abolitionists were as unhappy with his election as were slaveholders. His
election was clearly an attempt to strike a compromise, but the South was
in no mood to negotiate. It was not willing to permit the restriction of
slavery to the states in which the system already existed, and the
Southern states seceded.
Once the Civil War began, Lincoln's primary goal was to maintain
or reestablish the union of all the states. His strategy was to negotiate
from a platform which provided the largest numbers of supporters. With
these priorities in the foreground, the government took considerable time
to clarify its position on emancipation as well as its stand regarding
the use of freedmen in the Union forces. Lincoln suspected that he would
not get the kind of solid and enthusiastic support from the Northern
states which he needed if he did not work towards eventual emancipation.
At the same time, if he took too strong a position in favor of
emancipation he feared that the border states would abandon the Union and
side with the South. Similarly, the refusal to use blacks in the Union
forces might seriously weaken the military cause. Yet, their use might
alienate the border states, and it might be so repugnant to the South as
to hinder future negotiations.
Early in the war the North was faced with the problem of what to do with
the slaves who fled from the South into the Union lines for safety. In
the absence of any uniform policy, individual officers made their own
decisions. According to the Fugitive Slave Act, Northern officials should
have helped in capturing and returning them. When General Butler learned
that the South was using slaves to erect military defenses, he declared
that such slaves were contraband of war and therefore did not have to be
returned. Congress stated that it was not the duty of an officer to
return freed slaves. However, on at least one occasion, Lincoln gave
instructions to permit masters to cross the Potomac into Union lines to
look for their runaway slaves.
In August, 1861, a uniform policy was initiated with the passing of the
Confiscation Act. It stated that property used in aiding the insurrection
could be captured. When such property consisted of slaves, it stated that
those slaves were to be forever free. Thereafter, slaves flocked into
Union lines in an ever-swelling flood. Besides fighting the war, the
Union army found itself bogged down caring for thousands of escaped
slaves, a task for which it was unprepared. In some cases confiscated
plantations were leased to Northern whites, and escaped slaves were hired
out to work them. In December of 1862 General Saxton declared that
abandoned land could be used for the benefit of the ex-slave. Each family
was given two acres of land for every worker in the family, and the
government provided some tools with which to work it. However, most of
the land was sold to Northern capitalists who became absentee landlords
with little or no interest in maintaining the quality of the land or in
caring for the ex-slave who did the actual labor. These ex-slaves were
herded into large camps with very poor facilities. The mortality rate ran
as high as 25 percent within a two-year period.
Gradually, a very large number of philanthropic relief associations, many
of which were related to the churches, sprang up to help the ex-slave by
providing food, clothing, and education. Thousands of school teachers,
both black and white, flocked into the South to help prepare the ex-slave
for his new life.
In the beginning, Lincoln had been very reticent in permitting the use of
slaves or freedmen in the army. As early as 1861 General Sherman had
authorized the employment of fugitive slaves in "services for which they
were suited." Late in 1862 Lincoln permitted the enlistment of some
freedmen, and, in 1863, their enlistment became widespread. By the end of
the war more than 186,000 of them had joined the Union forces. For the
first time in American history, however, they were forced to serve in
segregated units and were usually commanded by white officers. One of
the ironies of the conflict was that the war which terminated slavery was
also responsible for initiating segregation within the armed Forces. In a
way this fact became symbolic of the role which racial discrimination and
segregation eventually came to play in American society. Besides fighting
in segregated units, the Negro soldiers, for about a year, received half
pay. The 54th Massachusetts regiment served for an entire year without
any pay rather than to accept discriminatory wages. In South Carolina a
group of soldiers stacked their arms in front of their captain's tent in
protest against the prejudicial pay scale. Sgt. William Walker, one of
the instigators of the demonstration, was court-martialed and shot for
this action. Finally, in 1864 all soldiers received equal pay.
The South was outraged by the use of "colored troops." It refused to
recognize them and treat them as enemy soldiers, and, whenever any were
captured, it preferred to treat them as runaway slaves under the black
codes. This meant that they received much harsher treatment than they
would have if they had been treated as prisoners of war. Also, the South
preferred to kill them instead of permitting their surrender. As a result
more than 38,000 of them were killed during the war.
Many Northerners were also upset by the use of "colored troops." They did
not like to have the Civil War considered a war to abolish slavery. Many
of them feared that this would only increase competition. As a result,
when white longshoremen struck in New York and blacks were brought in to
take their place, a riot ensued. Many of the white strikers found
themselves drafted into the Army, and they did not appreciate fighting to
secure the freedom of men who took away their jobs. Even during the war
racial emotions continued to run high in the North.
In 1862 General Hunter proclaimed the freedom of all slaves in the
military sector: Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. When Lincoln heard
of it, he immediately reversed the decree. He preferred gradual,
compensated emancipation followed by voluntary emancipation. He persuaded
Congress to pass a bill promising Federal aid to any state which set
forth a policy of gradual compensated emancipation. Abolitionists said
that masters should not be paid for freeing their slaves because slaves
were never legitimate property. Congress also established a fund to aid
voluntary emigration to either Africa or Latin America. However, few
slaves were interested even in compensated emancipation, and the plan
received almost no support. Lincoln finally concluded that emancipation
had become a military necessity. In September 1862 he issued a
preliminary decree promising to free all slaves in rebel territory. On
January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.
However, slavery continued to be legal in a areas which were not in
rebellion. Final abolition of the institution came with the passage of
the Thirteenth Amendment after the end of hostilities.
By the end of the war the South became so desperate that the use of
slaves in the Army was sanctioned, and they were promised freedom at the
end of the conflict. As the end of the war, some questions had been
solved and new ones had been created. Lincoln's belief in the fact that
the Union was indissoluble had been vindicated, and it was also evident
that national unity could not go hand in hand with sectional slavery.
But three new questions were now emerging. How should sectional strife be
healed? What should be the status of the ex-slave? Who should determine
that status?
Reconstruction and Its Failure
At the close of the war more attention was given to the reconstruction of
Southern institutions than to the elevation of the ex-slave. While a
handful of the Radical Republicans, such as Sumner and Stevens, were
aware that slavery had not prepared the ex-slave for participation in a
free competitive society, most liberals assumed that the termination of
slavery meant the end of their problems. They believed that blacks could
immediately enter into community life on an equal footing with other
citizens, Any suggestion that the ex-slave needed help to get started
drew considerable resentment and hostility from liberals and
conservatives alike. With the abolition of the peculiar institution, the
anti-slavery societies considered their work finished. Frederick
Douglass, however, complained that the slaves were sent out into the
world empty-handed. In fact, both the war and emancipation had
intensified racial hostility. The ex-slave had not yet been granted his
civil rights. At the same time, he was no longer covered by property
rights. Therefore he was even more vulnerable to physical intimidation
than before.
As the war drew to an end, Lincoln initiated a program aimed at the rapid
reconstruction of the South and the healing of sectional bitterness. With
only the exclusion of a few Confederate officials, he offered immediate
pardon to all who would swear allegiance to the Federal Government. As
soon as ten percent of the citizens of any state who had voted in 1860
had taken this oath, a state could then hold local elections and resume
home rule. Since almost no blacks had voted in the Southern states in
1860, his plan did nothing to encourage extending the franchise to them.
However, he did believe that educated blacks could and should be given
the right to vote, but this extension of the franchise was apparently to
be determined by each state at some future time.
After Lincoln's assassination, Andrew Johnson further accelerated the
pace of reconciliation. Granting personal pardons by the thousands, he
initiated a plan for restoration which was even more lenient. Southern
states resumed home rule, and, in the Federal election of 1866, they
elected scores of Confederate officials to Congress. At the same time
other Confederate officials were elected to other local posts throughout
the South. One of the most urgent tasks taken up by these new home-rule
governments was the determination and definition of the status of the
ex-slave. State after state passed black codes which bore an amazing
resemblance to those of slavery days. Blacks were not allowed to testify
in court against whites. If they quit their jobs, they could be
imprisoned for breach of contract. Anyone found without a job could be
arrested and fined $50. Those who could not pay the fine were hired out
to anyone in the community who would pay the fine. This created a new
system of forced labor. At the same time, blacks could be fined for
insulting gestures, breaking the curfew, and for possessing firearms.
This created the kind of supervision of personal life which was similar
to that of slavery. Although the Thirteenth Amendment had made slavery
unconstitutional, the South was trying to recreate the peculiar
institution in law while not admitting it in name.
Radical Republicans in Congress were outraged both at the unrepentant
obstinacy of the South and at the leniency of Johnson's plan for
restoration. After refusing to seat many of the Southern delegates to
Congress the Radical Republicans went on to pass civil rights legislation
which was aimed at protecting the ex-slave from the black codes.
President Johnson, however vetoed these bills as well as the Fourteenth
Amendment. An enraged Congress passed the civil rights legislation over
his veto and came within one vote of impeaching the President. Although
impeachment failed, Johnson lost his leadership in the government, and
Congress, within two years after the end of the war, began Reconstruction
all over again. The first large-scale Congressional hearings in American
history were held to investigate the conditions in the South. The
investigation documented widespread poverty, physical brutality, and
intimidation as well as legal discrimination. The comittee made a
detailed examination of the race riots which had occurred in Memphis and
New Orleans in which scores of blacks had been killed. It concluded that
the New Orleans riot was in fact a police massacre in which dozens of
blacks were murdered in cold blood.
Congress removed home rule from the Southern states and divided the area
into five military districts. Even those Southerners who had already
received federal pardons were now required to swear a stricter oath in
order to regain their right to vote. State conventions met to draft new
constitutions. These conventions were dominated by a coalition of three
groups: new black voters, whites who had come from the North either to
make personal fortunes or to help educate the ex-slave, and Southern
whites who had never supported the Confederacy. The oath of allegiance
required a citizen to swear that he was now and always had been loyal to
the Federal Government. This excluded all the Confederate officials.
These new Southern reconstruction governments operated under the
protection of the Army and with the encouragement of the Federal
Government. They strove to reconstruct the South economically,
politically, and socially.
They established a system of public education, built many new hospitals,
founded institutions for the mentally and physically handicapped, and
attempted to reform the penal system. During Reconstruction blacks
played a significant political role throughout the South. Besides voting
in large numbers, they were elected to local, state, and federal offices.
Between 1869 and 1901, two became U. S. Senators and twenty were members
of the House of Representatives. Senators Revels and Bruce were elected
from Mississippi. P. B. S. Pinchback was elected to the Senate from
Louisiana, but he was not permitted to take his seat. He did serve as
Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana, and, for three days, was Acting
Governor.
White conservatives in the South were outraged, and they were determined
to have absolutely nothing to do with a government which permitted Negro
participation. They spread the myth that Reconstruction governments were
in the grip of intolerably stupid and corrupt black men. Although Negroes
were elected to state governments in significant numbers, the fact was
that at no time were they in control. Moreover, when the critics
themselves came to power, they did nothing to undo the work of the
Reconstruction governments. This fact cast doubts on the sincerity of
their criticism. The one thing which the white conservatives did when
they regained power was to disenfranchise the blacks. This indicated that
their real complaint in regard to Reconstruction was the participation of
Negroes in government. With the Federal Government protecting the civil
and political rights of the ex-slave, the South was unable to use the law
to keep him in his place. The passionate belief in white superiority and
a desperate fear of black retaliation caused many whites to resort to
physical intimidation to achieve their purposes. The Ku Klux Klan was the
most notorious of a large number of similar organizations which spread
throughout the South. Negroes and white sympathizers were beaten and
lynched. Some had their property burned, and others lost their jobs if
they showed too much independence.
In 1869 Congress took action against the Klan and other white supremacy
organizations, The Klan was officially disbanded, but, in fact, it only
went underground. Most of these organizations were spontaneous local
developments, and this made it difficult for either federal or state
governments to find and destroy them. Often their tactics were
successful in shaping election results. Their propaganda was also useful
in influencing public opinion. They insisted that they were only
protecting women, children, and civic morality. The federal military
forces stationed in the South were too small to be effective against such
widespread guerrilla activities, and many of the soldiers, though they
had fought against slavery, were still in sympathy with white supremacy.
Although Reconstruction did protect some of the political and civil
rights of the Afro-American community, it achieved almost nothing in
improving the social and economic situation. The concept of social and
economic rights was almost nonexistent a century ago. Political rights,
however, without economic security could be a mere abstraction.
Meaningful freedom had to be more than the freedom to starve. This meant
that the ex-slave needed land, tools, and training to provide him with an
economic base that would make his freedom real. The ex-slave had limited
education, limited experience, a servile slave attitude, and he was in
need of social and economic training to compensate for the years of
slavery. Without this he could not enter a competitive society as an
equal. Emancipation was not enough.
Most slaves had been engaged in plantation agriculture and were destined
to continue in some kind of farm work. Sumner and Stevens led the fight
in Congress to provide each of them with forty acres and a mule, and this
would have provided the basis for their developing into an independent
class of farmers. However, they were doomed to remain a subservient mass
of peasants. The prewar slave plantation was replaced by sharecropping,
tenant farming, and the convict lease system. In some cases the ex-slave
was provided with land, tools, and seed by plantation owner who, in turn,
was to get a share of the crop at the end of the season. His share was
always so large that the cropper remained permanently in his debt.
Similarly, tenant farmers paid rent for their land and were extended
loans by the store keeper for their provisions. Interest rates ran so
high that they too remained in permanent bondage. Finally, some
plantation owners leased convicts from the state and worked them in chain
gangs which most closely resembled the prewar slave system. In every
case, the result was that black farm laborers remained members of a
permanent peasant class.
The other hope for the advancement of the ex-slave was through the
development of industrial skills. At this time the American labor
movement was emerging and was striving to protect and elevate the status
of industrial workers. If the ex-slave had been integrated into this
movement, it would have helped many of them to achieve economic security.
At the same time, it would have strengthened the labor movement itself.
However, white workers usually saw blacks as job competitors rather than
as part of a mass labor alliance. In 1866 the National Labor Union
decided to organize black workers within its ranks, but by 1869 it was
urging colored delegates to its convention to form their own separate
organization. This resulted in the creation of the National Negro Labor
Convention. This split between black and white workers tended to push
blacks into political action while whites put all their efforts into
economic advancement.
The Knights of Labor was formed in 1869, and it did seriously try to
organize blacks and whites. In the North it operated mixed locals, and in
the South it had separate black and white organizations. It employed both
black and white organizers. In 1886 its total membership was estimated at
700,000 of which 60,000 were black. The following year its total
membership had shrunk to 500,000, but its black membership had increased
to 90,000. The early labor movement which strove to organize the mass of
industrial workers was soon replaced by skilled trade unions which aimed
at the organization of a labor elite.
Although the American Federation of Labor did not profess racial
discrimination as a deliberate national policy, many of its individual
trade unions did, and, because of its federated structure, the A. F. of
L. had no power over local discriminatory practices. Whites in skilled
trades used unions to maintain an exclusive control in those trades, and
they deliberately strove to relegate blacks to the lower ranks of
industrial labor. Barred from the road to advancement, black labor became
a permanent industrial proletariat.
The Freedmen's Bureau was the one federal attempt to raise the social and
economic standing of the ex-slave. Along with the American Missionary
Association, the Freedmen's Bureau did significant work in education.
Hundreds of teachers staffed scores of schools and brought some degree of
literacy and job skills to thousands of pupils. However, beyond the field
of education, the bureau did little except to provide temporary help.
Begun as a war measure, when the Radical Republicans came into control,
they put it on a more permanent footing. Even liberals, however, were not
prepared to support a long-term social experiment, and, after some half
dozen years, the Bureau was terminated. This left the Afro-American
community without the economic base necessary for competing in American
society on an equal basis.
The one achievement of Reconstruction had been to guarantee minimum of
political and civil rights to the ex-slave, but white supremacy advocates
were adamant in their intention to destroy this advance. Where terror
and intimidation were not successful, relentless economic pressure by
landowners, merchants, and industrialists brought most of the ex-slaves
into line. Year by year they exerted less influence at the voting booths.
Although the country was aware of this, Northern liberals were growing
weary of the unending fight to protect the freedman. Furthermore, masses
of Northern whites sympathized with Southern race prejudice. While they
did approve of ending slavery, they were not willing to extend social and
political equality. The North had begun to put a higher priority on peace
than on justice. Industrialists were expanding their businesses rapidly,
and they wanted the South to be pacified, so that it would be a safe area
for investment and expansion. If this meant returning power to white
conservatives, they were willing to pay the price. The presidential
election of 1876 degenerated into chaos and confusion. Samuel J. Tilden,
the Democratic candidate, and Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican,
disputed its results. Democrats and Republicans both claimed twenty
electoral votes from Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. The
first returns had shown that Tilden was the victor, but Republicans,
especially Army veterans, warned that they would not accept such a
result. The Republicans represented themselves as the party of the Union,
and they claimed that the Democrats were the party of secession. The
debate grew so heated that it appeared war could erupt again. Pessimists
warned that it would be the last free election in American history. After
months of bickering, a compromise was reached. The South was willing to
support Republican Hayes if, when in power, he would remove the troops
and restore home rule. The votes were counted again in the four states in
question, and all twenty were awarded to Hayes allowing him to win by one
electoral vote.
Hayes began on an ambivalent note. On one hand he said that the country
must have honest and equal government, This would appear to be a
concession to the South which complained vehemently about the supposed
corruption of black Reconstruction. On the other hand, he admitted that
the rights of blacks must be protected by the Federal Government. In
practice, however, by returning the South to home rule, he abandoned the
ex-slave. He said that the ex-slave's interest would be best protected by
being left in the hands of honest and influential Southern whites. Hayes
had expressed an awareness of the brutality and intimidation which still
continued in the South, but he had apparently concluded that federal
intervention only aggravated the problem. In his opinion Southern
gentlemen were not thieves and cut-throats; they too were educated,
civilized, and Christians. The fact that they were not aware of the
brutality in their midst and that some of them undoubtedly participated
in it, bewildered him. He was willing to proceed on the assumption that,
if the Southern whites were left alone, they would, as they asserted,
treat the ex-slave honestly and fairly. Hayes seemed unaware that men
could be educated, civilized, and claim to be Christians while at the
same time behaving as bigots and racists. To satisfy the industrialists
in the North and the white conservatives in the South, Hayes buried the
last remains of Reconstruction. However, he made a one-sided compromise.
While he comitted himself to immediate action, the South was only bound
by vague promises to be fulfilled at some indefinite date. At the end of
his term white supremacy in the South was more firmly rooted than it had
been when he took office.
The New Racism
For several years the fate of the Southern Negro hung in the balance.
With home rule restored, the South, so it seemed, had achieved its goals.
Bourbon whites, the remnant of the plantation aristocracy, dominated the
Southern Democratic party and through it controlled state and local
governments. There was a growing discontent among small farmers who
wanted the state governments to alter the tax burden and interest rates
in their favor. Largely spearheaded by the Populist movement, Negro and
white farmers came to see that their interests were identical. The
Southern Farmers' Alliance grew rapidly, and it encouraged the formation
of the colored farmers' organizations with which it was closely allied.
In Georgia, Tom Watson led the attempt to form a coalition between Negro
and white farmers against the interests of the conservative white
aristocracy. Hopes for a genuinely popular government and for a society
free from racial tension reached a high level.
Unfortunately, some Negroes continued to back the Democratic party.
House servants had always felt close to the gentry, and many of them
remembered that poor white farmers had always been particularly
prejudiced against them. In turn, conservatives deliberately encouraged
racial hatred in order to drive a wedge between poor whites and Negroes
within the rising Populist movement. It became evident to both Democrats
and populists that the Negro vote had become the deciding vote in many
states. White farmers and white aristocrats both felt uneasy over this
state of affairs.
The result was widespread agreement to systematically and legally
eliminate Negroes from politics altogether. State constitutions were
either amended or rewritten. Literacy tests and poll taxes became
standard devices for limiting Negro voting. The "understanding test"
required a citizen to interpret a portion of the state constitution to
the satisfaction of the registrar. The severity of the test varied
invariably with the color of the applicant. The "grandfather clause"
prohibited those whose ancestors had not voted from exercising the
franchise. Because slaves had not voted, their descendants were
disqualified. Although the Fifteenth Amendment had been designed to
guarantee the vote to the ex-slave, the South now evaded it. Although
both major parties complained about this disenfranchisement and condemned
it as being unconstitutional, neither party took any action. The Supreme
Court also played an important part in restricting the freedom of
freedmen. In 1883 it declared the 1875 Civil Rights Act to be
unconstitutional. This act had made it illegal for individuals to
discriminate in public accommodations. Although it had never been
enforced, the court's decision nevertheless, came as a setback, because
it was the signal to the South that through Jim Crow legislation Negroes
could be kept in "their place." Under slavery there had been considerable
social contact between the races. Segregation as a social system was
begun in the North prior to the Civil War, but, during the last two
decades of the nineteenth century, Southern states made it a legal
requirement. Its relentless growth is carefully outlined by C. Vann
Woodward in his book The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Finally the South
developed two societies with two sets of institutions: separate railroad
cars, separate waiting rooms, separate wash rooms, separate drinking
fountains, separate hospitals, separate schools, separate restaurants,
separate cemeteries and, although there was only one judicial system,
separate Bibles for taking oaths.
In 1896 the Supreme Court gave its blessing to the Jim Crow system.
Plessy, a Louisiana mulatto, insisted on riding in the white car on the
train. He was arrested and found guilty of violating the state statute.
He appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court, but it upheld his conviction by
claiming that "separate but equal" facilities were not a violation of his
rights. Because the court did not define what it meant by equal and did
not insist on enforcing that equality in concrete terms, its decision
was, in fact, a blatant justification for separate and inferior
facilities for Negroes.
Segregation was accompanied by a new wave of race hatred. White Americans
came to believe that all Negroes were alike and therefore could be
treated as a group. An identical stereotype of the Negro fixed itself on
the white mind throughout the entire country. If the Northerner hated
this stereotype somewhat less than did the Southerner, it was only
because the number of Negroes in the North was considerably smaller. At
the end of the century only two percent of the total number of
Afro-Americans was to be found in the North. The great northern migration
had not yet begun.
Both the Northern press and the genteel literary magazines contained the
same vulgar image of the Negro which was to be found in openly racist
communities in the South. Whether he appeared in news articles,
editorials, cartoons, or works of fiction, he was universally portrayed
as superstitious, stupid, lazy, happy-go-lucky, a liar, a thief, and a
drunkard. He loved fun, clothes, and trinkets as well as chickens,
watermelons, and sweet potatoes. Usually he was depicted as having been a
faithful and loving slave before Emancipation, but, unfortunately, he was
unable to adjust to his new freedom News stories and editorials referred
to Negroes in slanderous terms without any apparent sense of
embarrassment. Phrases like "barbarian," "Negro ruffian," "African
Annie," "colored cannibal," "coon," and "darkie" were standard epithets.
Whenever blacks were depicted in cartoons or photographs, the stereotype
presented them as having thick lips, flat noses, big ears, big feet, and
kinky woolly hair. News items concerning those involved in criminal
activities almost always identified them by color. This contributed to
the development of the stereotype of the criminal Negro.
Throughout its history, America had been predominantly an Anglo-Saxon and
Protestant country. The Afro-American stood out in sharp distinction to
this picture both because of his color and his African heritage. By the
end of the nineteenth century America was being flooded with immigrants
from Southern and Eastern Europe. They too were much darker than the
dominant strains of Northern Europe, and many were Catholics. There was a
growing feeling that these new immigrants, like the Negroes, were
inherently alien and intrinsically unassimilable. Liberals in the
progressive movement, who were concerned about protecting the integrity
and morality of American society, were in the fore-front of those who
feared the new hordes of "swarthy" immigrants.
One of those who feared that the large influx of South and East Europeans
would undermine the quality of American life was Madison Grant. In his
book The Passing of the Great Race, he warned that Nordic excellence
would be swamped by the faster-spawning Catholic immigrants. Originally
these racial stereotypes had some cultural and historical basis, but they
were gaining a new strength and authority from the sociological and
biological sciences centering in the concepts of Social Darwinisn.
Darwinism and related theories in anthropology and sociology helped to
give an aura of respectability to racism in both Europe and America. The
same kind of pseudo-scientific thinking which was developed in Europe to
justify anti-Semitism was used in America to reinforce prejudices against
Negroes as well as against Jews and South Europeans. In the first half
of the nineteenth century the American anthropologist Samuel George
Morton argued that each race had its own unique characteristics. Racial
character, he believed, was the result of inheritance rather than of
environment. Because these characteristics found specific environments
congenial, each race had gravitated to its preordained geographic habitat.
Darwin's theory of evolution offered another explanation for the
existence of differing species in the animal kingdom, and anthropologists
concluded that it would also provide an explanation for racial
differences in mankind. Early anthropologists and sociologists were
preoccupied with dividing humanity into differing races and trying to
catalog and explain these differences. Phrenology was another
pseudo-science which attempted to construct a system according to which
intellectual and moral characteristics would be correlated with the size
and shape of the human head. On this basis many tried to divide mankind
into physical types and to assign to each its own intellectual and moral
qualities. Another one who believed that human races could be
scientifically measured and that their superiority and inferiority could
thus be established was Joseph A. de Gobineau, a French anthropologist.
Herbert Spencer took Darwin's concept of the survival of the fittest and
used it as a scientific justification for the competitive spirit, It
became the basis of the explanation why some individuals moved up the
social ladder while others remained behind. Racial thinkers applied the
concept of human competitiveness to racial conflict instead of to
individual competition. In its usual form the Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic
race was depicted as superior, and the Semitic and Negroid races as
inferior. Human history was explained as the history of race conflict,
and racial hostility was justified because, through this conflict, the
superior types would survive and human civilization would be elevated.
The concept of human equality was reduced to a meaningless abstraction,
Scholars like William Graham Sumner insisted that the founding fathers
only intended human equality to refer to their own kind of people.
To Thomas Nelson Page, in the North American Review, it appeared that the
African race had not progressed in human history. It had failed to
progress in America, not because it had been enslaved, but because it did
not have the faculty to raise itself above that status. He continued to
argue that its inability to advance in the scale of civilization was
demonstrated by the level of social and political life to be found in
Liberia, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil. In the same journal,
Theodore Roosevelt announced that the African was a member of "a
perfectly stupid race" which was kept down by a lack of natural
development. Another one whose views became influential was Josiah
Strong. A prominent clergyman at the turn of the century, he was of the
opinion that the pressure of population expansion would eventually push
the whites, who had superior energy and talent, into Mexico, South and
Central America, the islands of the seas, and eventually into Africa
itself. This expansion would lead to racial conflict which would
culminate in the survival of the fittest through the victory of the white
over the colored races of the world. Strong's belief that white racial
superiority would naturally lead to racial imperialism and world
domination by the white race was shared by many contemporary Americans. A
few of those who shared his ideas were Senator Albert Beveridge, Senator
Cabot Lodge, John Hay, Admiral Alfred T. Mahan, and Theodore Roosevelt.
Racism opened the door to American imperialism.
The new racism could not depend on the existence of slavery in order to
reinforce white superiority. Instead, it drew on racial stereotypes and
flimsy scientific opinion. The conquest of Africa by Europe and the
American acquisition of lands in the Caribbean and Pacific which were
inhabited by darker peoples, were taken as clear evidence of racial
inequality even in the land which had been founded on the belief in the
equality of all men.
Second-class citizenship for blacks had become a fact which was accepted
by Presidents, Congres
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