Douglass, Garnet, and the Radicalization of the Black Abolitionists, 1840-1857

The movement among black intellectuals to abolish slavery must be seen as a part of the larger reformist spirit of the nineteenth century. Abolitionism challenged the fabric of a society that professed an idealized kind of liberty and yet countenanced the capture and enslavement of millions of people. Black abolitionists increasingly took an approach to the issue that differed in fundamental ways from their white counterparts and reflected the unique position of the free black man in antebellum America.

Henry Highland Garnet

Black leaders became more and more militant after 1840. Many began to openly dispute the Garrisonian ideals of political boycott and reliance on "moral suasion" alone, and had become active in electoral politics as early as the 1830s. Over the course of the next two decades, it was black leaders such as Henry Highland Garnet, author of "Address to the Slaves," formed the vanguard of the fight for the end of slavery by claiming civil rights for black men.

Garnet’s acceptance of the slaves' right to rebel and of the importance of voluntary emigration in the abolition movement created a political agenda to which Frederick Douglass and other moderates, white and black, were forced to react. Eventually, the debate over this agenda "radicalized" even moderate blacks, or more correctly, 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, they 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. 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 an anti-Calvinist emphasis on human perfectibility through repudiation of sin, Garrison saw slavery as the national sin. The wages of this sin would be race war of the bloodiest sort. The violence slave uprisings would wreak was not merely vengeance on behalf of the slaves as persons, but on behalf of God. He would destroy the nation as punishment for the sin of slavery. Garrison and his followers had a world view that saw social evils as symptoms of a deep-seated societal dysfunction, which had to be eliminated for the good of the nation.

Garrison felt, especially at this early stage, that only by making the strongest possible case against slavery could the abolitionists prevent slaves from rising up and destroying society in the process. "If antislavery forces qualified their attack," says Richard Abzug, "the slave would lose hope and turn to violence." This line of argument is evident even as late as 1841, in a speech Frederick Douglass, then a solid Garrisonian, gave in Massachusetts:

As long as the abolitionists were attacking slavery frontally, the Garrisonians argued, the slaves would not revolt. This view demanded that the North admit and repent of her sin, and that Americans work to 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."

The Garrisonians, with their harsh language and severe censure of the churches, the government, or any individuals who disagreed with them, added to the popular impression that abolitionism was a fringe movement. Fugitive slaves on the other hand, aroused sympathy from Northern audiences, and brought abolitionism out of the abstract and dangerous and made it personal. White abolitionists gladly took full advantage of the public clamor for the testimony of fugitive slaves as a draw to increase support for abolition, to get the message out to larger audiences, and to make their point. Black fugitives were made over into object lessons, into examples, of the cruelties of slavery. For instance, Frederick Douglass’s early role in the abolition movement was "To be taken as another speaker’s 'text' . . . The condescending instructions from William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists required that he stick to the 'facts' and leave the 'philosophy' to others."

Many black activists felt restricted not only by this atmosphere, but also by the constraints imposed on the anti-slavery societies by the general public. The American Anti-Slavery society, for instance, was unable to make black civil rights beyond emancipation a part of their agenda. Society leaders were aware of the very real possibility of mob violence against them should any claim to desegregation or suffrage for blacks be made. Only a limited form of assimilation, in which blacks were inculcated with white middle-class values and mannerisms but not given the rights of the middle class, was advisable.

One result of this was the movement for separate Colored Conventions during the late 1830s, and, despite the debate over this step, by the end of the 1830s the black conventions were ready to take advantage of organizational problems among white abolitionists. These problems were the result of ideological differences about the methods as well as about the goals of the movement. Garrison and his followers championed argument and propaganda, and Garrison’s personal influence during this time was such that most 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.

Black militancy in the cause of emancipation was, of course, 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 rightly rejected the arguments of the colonizationists as racist, and claimed the right of all blacks to be considered American. This sentiment was alarming, even (or especially) to most white abolitionists, particularly the pacifists in the Garrisonian camp. Many black activists, however, were beginning to openly disparage the effectiveness of pacifism and nonresistance.

The same year as the publication of Walker's Appeal, an editor of the Colored American newspaper, Samuel Cornish, wrote "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 even more openly militant as a whole. The Colored American published an address written by a committee "inspired by Garnet":

Henry Highland 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:

Garnet was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the possibility of enlightening the slave owner by conventional means. If Southern minds were closed to the reality of peaceful emancipation in the West Indies, then propaganda by words would never change them. Only the realities of political and demographic power could make a difference. His address would point out to the slave holder that there were three million angry slaves.

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. The Address was effective in inserting the issue of the use of violence by or on behalf of the slaves into the debate.

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. Moderates were forced to respond, however, 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.

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 black 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.

Part II--Black Abolitionism 1849-1857

Part III--Black Abolitionism and Black Manhood

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