Part III--Militant Abolitionism and Black Manhood

The issue of violence was a sensitive one for antebellum black leaders. Very aware of racial attitudes among whites throughout the United States, they knew that the issue of black manhood had to be carefully handled. In 1840, an editor of The National Anti-Slavery Standard expressed the general perception among anti-slavery activists regarding calls for equality. "You cannot be free until [the] community shall see and feel that you are men." Henry Highland Garnet, in his 1843 Address to the Slaves, challenged the accepted position that first black men had to be seen as Men, then they could be bolder. He turned this assumption on its head by saying, in essence, first black men had to be bold, then they could be accepted as men. "You act," he said, "as though you were made for the special use of these devils. You act as though your daughters were born to pamper the lusts of your masters and overseers. And worse than all, you tamely submit, while your lords tear your wives from your embraces, and defile them before your eyes. In the name of God we ask, are you men?" Clearly submission was a denial of manhood.

For most middle-class Americans, a Man was expected to have certain gentlemanly values. Black men were denied credit for these characteristics by many whites, whether they displayed them or not. For instance, proslavery thinker John Campbell wrote: "In the Caucasian, these attributes are developed harmoniously, and he is warlike, but not cruel nor destructive. In the negro, on the contrary, these attributes are equally undeveloped: he is neither originative, inventive, nor speculative; he is roving, revengeful and destructive, and he is warlike, predatory and sensual." [my italics] Americans were capable of viewing the same trait that signified heroism in whites--that of being warlike--as signifying degradation and inferiority in blacks. Changing this attitude would necessitate an attack on the very values that gave white men their sense of security and self-worth.

This posed particular problems for black abolitionists, especially when they were claiming America’s revolutionary heritage of equality and liberty for themselves. Frederick Douglass took up this theme directly in "The Heroic Slave", written in 1853: "We have done that which you applaud your fathers for doing, and if we are murderers, so were they." Black men were denied the right of men to "take up arms against their oppressor" until the Civil War.

Even in Douglass’s description of his battle with the slavebreaker Covey, he went to lengths to justify his resort to violence by showing that he had quite simply exhausted all other means of fighting his own degradation. No human being, Douglass explained, could possibly have satisfied Covey. An appeal to Douglass’s owner was rejected, with an admonition not to "trouble him with any more stories," lest the owner be forced to "get hold of [Douglass]." Finally, said Douglass, "[Covey] had used me like a brute for six months, and . . . I was determined to be used so no longer." Douglass was struggling to frame his aggression as an act of manhood within the culture of his white audience, so as not to be accused of African bestiality.

Further, the depiction of black men as heroic and manly had a more subtle downfall. If the black man was capable of rescuing himself without aid, there would be no need for white audiences to get involved in the struggle of emancipation. Blacks needed whites, as much because they needed numbers as because whites were at the head of the power structure. "Douglass’s ambitious agenda was undermined by his intuitive sense that he could challenge white preconceptions regarding race only so far without alienating the audience that he sought to win.

Black abolitionists therefore had to carefully construct the right of self-defense. Knowing that they were seen as violent and uncontrollable, leaders such as Garnet and Douglass also had to recognize that black slaves were being blamed for their lack of resistance. "The people of the North say--‘Why don’t you rise? If we were thus treated we would rise and throw off the yoke. We would wade knee deep in blood before we would endure bondage.’ You’d rise up! Who are these that are asking for manhood in the slave, and who say that he has it not, because he does not rise? The very men who . . . have sworn under God that we shall be slaves or die!"

Like most black intellectuals and writers of the nineteenth century, Douglass had to find a balance between protest and assimilation. Douglass preferred to combat prejudice by encouraging blacks to take on the characteristics of manhood as defined by his white audience. For him, manhood meant more than physical control of one’s immediate surroundings, and he chose to place a greater emphasis on the more ephemeral qualities, such as courage, nobility, intelligence, integrity, and self-reliance.

Upon starting his first newspaper, The North Star, for instance, Douglass partially justified this break with his Garrisonian patrons by arguing that a successful black-run enterprise would disprove stereotypes and serve as an example for the self-improvement of other black men. Later, he heartily endorsed Gerrit Smith’s plan to give land to black families in New York, citing that successful black farmers could help to dispel notions of black inferiority. "All experience taught," he said, "that if a man could not stand he must fall, and that if he stood it must be on his own legs. . . . [T]he colored man would vindicate himself against the assertions now so common, that [blacks] were an inferior people morally and intellectually."

It took black Garrisonians years to overcome their reluctance to condone violence. Into this vacuum, the black radicals were able to project their agenda, and become the "vanguard of black abolitionism." They created the platform in the middle 1840s that became the boundary beyond which the movement as a whole would not advance, even twenty years later. "Nonresistance, the rejection of political action, disunion, and a proslavery interpretation of the Constitution," wrote historian Leon Litwack, "did not strike many abolitionists in the 1840s and 1850s as being either suitable or realistic weapons with which to abolish southern bondage. . . . Indeed, the final triumph of Garrisonian objectives resulted almost entirely from the employment of strictly non-Garrisonian methods."

William Lloyd Garrison’s ideology implied that because they were imperfect, American institutions and statements of liberty had no value. To participate in a government or society that permitted, excused, or condoned slavery was to take that sin upon yourself. The only pure method was to repudiate the society, the Union formed by a Constitution which acknowledged slavery, the "marriage" with slaveholders. Only by repudiating sin could the people become free of it. Garrison’s pacifism, forged in the same revival fires as his rhetoric and his religion, fit in quite well with this political view. By refusing to take up arms, even in self-defense, Garrison denied any participation in the sin of violence.

The result of this strategy, intentional or not, was the denial of the uniquely American values which created the bonds of American society. When the black man (or woman) denied that the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence had been written for him, he also denied that he had a right to a place in American society. The single strongest claim for being an American was and is the legacy of the Revolution and its demand for universal liberation. By repudiating the Revolution, the black Garrisonian repudiated the rights which had been unfairly stolen from him. Only by acknowledging that when the Founding Fathers spoke of liberty and equality, their words did in fact include African slaves and free people of color, could they have a claim to those rights.

Thus it came about that Walker, and Garnet, and eventually Douglass, claimed their rights by rejecting Garrison’s ideas, and by declaring their intention and their people’s intention to fight for what was rightfully theirs.

In his speech regarding the Dred Scott verdict, Douglass reiterates this claim on the legacy of the American fathers:

The radicalization of the Black Abolitionists, as exemplified by Frederick Douglass, was a profound process of empowerment for those black political leaders who considered it desirable to work within the American system to change it. By co-opting Revolutionary language, and by expanding the prevailing definition of manhood to include men of color, the radicals were able to position themselves inside American society, making their claims for American rights much stronger. By accepting the Constitution as it was written, and the words of the founding fathers as they were spoken, and claiming a new sense for them, the radical black abolitionists took a large and necessary step towards perfecting the promise of the American Revolution.

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page