"Let Your Motto be Resistance": Black Abolitionists, 1829-1857

Some of these activists are well-known today, Frederick Douglass being especially prominent. Many, however, have been all to often overlooked.

One of the most important developments of the first half of the nineteenth century was the increasingly militant calls for racial equality by prominent African-Americans such as David Walker, Martin Delaney, and Henry Highland Garnet. Garnet was especially vocal in the abolition movement and was instrumental in developing a political and legal platform for racial equality at a time when the African race was increasingly demeaned in America. His vision was one of bold action and uncompromising dignity, and his radicalism was a catalyst for the radicalization of the abolition movement among blacks. Garnet�s acceptance of the slaves' right of revolution and the place of emigration in the abolition movement created a political agenda to which Frederick Douglass and other black moderates were forced to react. Eventually, the debate over this agenda made the radical platform acceptable as a stand among the mainstream of the movement. As historian William Brewer said of Garnet, "[he] created the idea which Frederick Douglass tempered and presented to the world in a more palliative and acceptable form."

While those abolitionists who adopted militant stands on the subject of violence were often called "radicals", in a very real sense, those black abolitionists who became "radicals" were asserting their right to participate in the American system, and were, in fact, claiming a set of uniquely American values. To that extent they were not radicals at all. Where these thinkers parted ways with mainstream America was their fierce stand that African-Americans were entitled to all the rights of American citizenship, and their willingness to condone violence, should that be necessary to achieve their goals.

Before 1829, the abolition movement was dominated by men such as Lewis Tappan, who saw slavery as a social and political problem. They worked within a system that explicitly permitted slavery and racial brutality to contiue, attempting to make gradual modifications that would eventually crimp the practice of slavery enough to make it unprofitable and unmanageable. On July 4th of that year, however, William Lloyd Garrison gave a speech that gave the first indications that a new kind of abolitionism was emerging. Influenced by the revival spirit of the Great Awakening Garrison saw slavery as a national sin. One did not "work with" sin, and Garrsion and his followers demanded that the nation admit and repent of her sin, and that Americans end slavery immediately. Abolitionism under Garrison became "a highly emotional politics of despair," or as John McKivigan called it, "an extreme brand of perfectionist philosophy."

Garrison and his followers championed argument and propaganda, and Garrison�s personal influence was such that during this time activists were forced to accept his views. By 1840, however, many followers, black and white, were growing increasingly frustrated by nonresistance as a tactic and by Garrison himself. Splinter parties developed among the leading organizations and the significance of the often militant black conventions was amplified by this disarray within the more moderate wing of the abolitionists. "The path had been cleared . . . for an increasingly strident demand for militant action."

Black militancy in the cause of emancipation was nothing new. The year 1829 alone saw the publication of The Hope of Liberty, a book of militant poems by George Moses Horton; the apocalyptic Ethiopian Manifesto . . . in defense of the black man�s rights by Robert Alexander Young; and David Walker�s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens. Walker�s work, the most influential of these, was mostly religious in tone, although he examined the hypocrisy of those white Americans who would quote from the Declaration of Independence in support of revolutions in Poland and Ireland, yet deny black slaves their freedom and civil rights in America. He predicted bloody retributive justice upon white slaveholders and bigots, and he saw this outcome as inevitable unless they did not immediately implement emancipation. Walker used the Declaration of Independence with great effectiveness, "flinging its immortal words into the teeth of those who upheld slavery." He rejected the arguments of the colonizationists as racist, and claimed the right of all blacks to be considered American.

Many abolitionists, white and black, were beginning to question the effectiveness of pacifism and nonresistance. In 1835, an editor of the Colored American, Samuel Cornish, wrote in a lead-in to an article on passive nonresistance, "we have yet to learn what virtue there would be in using moral weapons, in defense against kidnappers or a midnight incindiery with a torch in his hand." Ten years after Walker�s Appeal, black abolitionists were more openly militant as a whole. Charles Remond, making a lecture tour of England in 1840, was openly calling for war between the United States and England, if by consequence the slaves would be freed.

This same year, The Colored American published an address written by a committee "inspired by Garnet":

Garnet spoke before the American Anti-Slavery Society in May 1840, seizing the legacy of the American Revolution for free blacks and slaves. Referring to the Declaration of Independence, and to the principles of liberty as stated by the Founding Fathers, Garnet said:

The most controversial sanction of slave insurrection since Walker was Garnet�s 1843 Address to the Slaves given at the national black convention held in Buffalo, New York. Garnet refrained from explicitly calling for a slave uprising or a war to free the slaves. He did, however, predict a violent retribution from God if the nation did not act immediately:

Unlike Walker, Garnet never entirely denied the possibility of a political solution within the bounds of the American system. Nevertheless, there were several assertions that Garnet�s Address and Walker�s Appeal held in common:

In the Address, Garnet called upon the slaves to confront their masters and ask for their freedom on moral grounds. They ought to offer to remain with the landowners as wage labor, promising to work harder. If that failed, slaves were to refuse to work, and let the sin of punishment fall upon the master and overseers. Finally, slaves were to "use every means, both moral, intellectual, and physical, that promise success" in gaining their freedom. Garnet, in his calculated choice of the national colored convention as his venue, and his carefully worded arguments, was in fact speaking to the leaders of the free black community as much as to the slaves and their owners. Moderates such as Frederick Douglass were forced to respond, and to justify their opposition not only to the convention, but to their constituencies and the public as well. To debate the issue was tantamount to negotiating.

The convention of 1843 was not completely ready to accept Garnet's program, however. With Frederick Douglass and other moderate delegates weighing in heavily on the side of moral suasion, the convention decided, by a margin of only one vote, not to publish the Address in its report.

After the public challenge at the convention, Douglass and Garnet embarked upon a bitter round of competition. In the end Douglass would come out the victor, but only after he accepted the platform Garnet had built. For the next twenty years, however, the two would clash over several issues, including violence, the interpretation of the Constitution, and the role of churches and religion in both supporting and defeating slavery. Garnet accepted an anti-Garrisonian interpretation of the Constitution that saw it as an anti-slavery document in its essential ideology. This view allowed the abolitionists to expropriate the language of the American Revolution with much greater effect, building a stronger attack on the Southern position than Garrison could mount.

In general black militancy increased after 1847. Garnet, unable to get a convention to do it, published his Address on his own that year, in a pamphlet that also included Walker�s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens. Joel Schor, in his biography of Garnet, says, "After 1847 . . . the Douglass faction was compelled to give ground to the Garnet faction in order to maintain effective leadership among blacks." Until the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, abolitionists grew increasingly critical of what they saw as the proslavery stance of the federal government.

In 1848, Douglass and Garnet, at a meeting of the Liberty Party in New York, participated in a debate over the interpretation of the Constitution. At this time Douglass was still very much in favor of the Garrisonian viewpoint. He argued that the Constitution supported slavery and denied the rights of black men, and that the North ought to secede from the Union, as they clearly had a right to do, in order to be free of the wickedness of slavery. He would still be arguing the same two years later: "I would rather lose my right arm, than to put a vote in an American ballot box."

Garnet�s argument was that the doctrine of Liberty and Equality which the framers of the Constitution had fought a war over did include blacks and slaves. The Preamble, in which the intentions of the document were set out, clearly applied to all men. If America were not living up to this standard, it was the fault of men and not the law. Regardless, of the legal arguments, the Garrisonian position of non-participation in the Union--a sort of political "come-outerism"--dramatically reduced the range of weapons that could be used against slavery. It also increased the popular perception of abolitionism as a "fringe" or extreme movement.

That same year the National Colored Convention in Ohio adopted a resolution to distribute five hundred copies of Garnet�s Address. Although they never carried out this resolution, the growing frustration of black leaders with the policy of nonresistance is clear. Only a few months later, on May 31, 1849, Frederick Douglass would make a bold statement in favor of slave insurrection:

By 1849, Garnet had even come out in favor of limited, voluntary emigration for the purpose of raising the position of blacks in America. He argued that a strong Liberia would help to end prejudice in the United States by fighting slavery and the slave trade in Africa, establishing a competitive cotton growing region there, and providing an opportunity for American blacks to escape the color prejudice that limited black activity in America and prove detractors wrong.

The Compromise of 1850, which saw enacted a harsh and arbitrary Fugitive Slave Law, was seen by anti-slavery activists as a complete victory for the proslavery forces in America. Besides the recovery of fugitive slaves anywhere in the American territories, slaveholders were able to convince the government to declare, in essence, that it would not interfere with the introduction of slavery in any new territory or state. The act increased tensions throughout the country, as more people saw it becoming evident that stronger action was needed to end slavery in the United States. Militancy was becoming more attractive.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 further increased sectional tension over slavery, and anger among abolitionists. The slavery wars that broke out in Kansas in the wake of the Act seemed to prove that only militant, perhaps even military, action would be sufficient to defeat the slaveholders. Finally, abolitionist sentiment ran so strongly in the North and West that a national movement based on anti-slavery was born. Although many abolitionists applauded the formation of the Republican Party, Douglass, like many others, would reject their platform in favor of the "Radical Abolitionist" Party, saying, "they [the Republicans] do not give full recognition to the humanity of the Negro."

As sectional strife increased, so did the militancy of many abolitionists. As for Frederick Douglass, throughout the 1850s, he was increasingly anti-Garrisonian on the issue of the Constitution and the Union, and he continued to be vocal about the "slave�s right of revolt":

The decision of the Supreme Court in 1857 that due to his race the slave Dred Scott had no rights in the United States shock waves throughout the nation. Amid calls from Northern abolitionists to secede from a Union seen as corrupt and unjust, Frederick Douglass made a speech (probably May 1857) which showed just how far he and the abolitionist movement as a whole had come since their rejection of Garnet�s Address to the Slaves in 1843: