Abolition:
A Comparative Essay
“We had but a single object in view – the total abolition of American slavery, and, as a just consequence, the complete enfranchisement of our colored countrymen.”[1] This is, perhaps, the simplest summary of the abolition movement committed to pen and paper, written in 1837 by one of its most radical leaders: William Lloyd Garrison. While the statement is concise, it is also deceptively uncomplicated. This much can be said of any human enterprise that involves more than one mind and abolition is no exception. In a simple survey of abolition one might be tempted to say that leaders like William Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany were endeavoring towards the same goal but that, too, would be an oversimplification. As we look to Garrison’s “The Prospectus of The Liberator”, Douglass’ “Narrative”, and selections from Delany’s The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States we can see the commonality that exists within them: they all seek to set the captives free and enfranchise – in one way or another – the African-American population with equal rights. Yet while the antebellum American abolitionist movement was strong and growing, it was not at all uniform and harbored a wide diversity of adherents with a variety of motives, means, and ends.
If the casting off of shackles is the liberation of the slave’s body, then in no uncertain terms can it be said that education is the liberation of a slave’s mind. Harkening back to the earliest writings of republican thought do we remember the immortal claim of John Adams: in order for a man to be free from tyranny (of “ignorance” as one of the “two great causes of the ruin of mankind”)[2], he must be free to be educated. To the underlying principles of republican enlightenment that existed in the early nineteenth century, knowledge was power. It was under this pretext that William Garrison derived his argument that education should be not held out as a pre-requisite to emancipation. The notion fielded by those in support of “gradual abolition” (a notion Garrison calls “a fatal delusion”[3]) that slaves should retain an education before being freed from bondage went against every concept of justice that a man such as Garrison would have been familiar with.[4] Drawing from his own personal experience on just such a subject, Frederick Douglass recalls that his own literacy and self-induced education as a slave gifted him with a “bold denunciation of slavery and a powerful vindication of human rights.”[5][6] He goes on to say that “the moral that I gained from [my readings] was the power of truth over the conscience of the slaveholder.” Perhaps not as well foreseen by Garrison was what Douglass claimed as the double edge of such education in the hands of one still enslaved: “It had opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out.” [7] Yet it seemed to Douglass that even the slaveholder understood the awesome power of education when, as he summons up an encounter with his first masters in Baltimore, his master, Mr. Auld, forbids his wife from teaching Frederick how to read. In, perhaps, one of the more famous passages of his Narrative Douglass quotes his former master as having said, “A nigger should know nothing except to obey his master – to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world.”[8] (Emphasis added) It is important to note at this point that, while remaining culturally and historically sensitive to the material provided, it is important for a historian to read a work like the Narrative critically. Douglass, at times, gives very explicit details even years after the presumed incidents described. What is not of absolute importance, as some might suggest, is the inerrancy of the narrative but rather the essential truths that Douglass is attempting to communicate to the reader. Did this exact conversation have to take place? Not necessarily. What a historian intends to do with this text is render the reality of the time as Douglass perceived it. In this case it seems that Douglass is intent on presenting education as a universally known foundation to emancipation. It is in that very same vein that we meet Martin Delany. In his work, Condition, Delany not only accuses the slaveholders of withholding education from their bondsmen (which he seems to consider a “given”), but also accuses those in the north who are sympathetic to the cause of enfranchisement of doing the very same to free blacks. To Delany, the white abolitionist might ascend to enfranchisement and equal rights in principle but equal opportunity is far from practice.[9] Calling the education that is available to nearly every white child in the north “the very Key [sic] to prosperity and success for common life”, he then decries the state of education for African-American children as they are taught to barely scribble a chapter of the New Testament and are “announced as having ‘learning enough’” only to be then sent off and given no further training.[10] It is in this passage that we can recognize some of the understandable bitterness and resentment at the historical under-service of even the free African-American community. While it may be politically expedient for some to dwell here on perceptions of “finger-pointing” and blame, the point easily and empirically derived from the texts is that all three men regarded education as the starting point of freedom. True to form, however, all three men differed on their respective approach towards the subject, thus strengthening the position taken here that the means and ends of abolition were not at all homogeneous and were, in some cases, incompatible.
It is this incompatibility that extends so completely to the theories these men pursued in regards to the government of the United States. In what may be acknowledged as the closest concept of American government to a modern political thinker was that of Frederick Douglass. Douglass, breaking completely with his mentor Garrison, does not advocate at all that the U.S. government was overrun with the national stain of slavery or that such a stain was perpetrated by the Constitution. According to editor David Blight, “Douglass came to believe that the Constitution could be used to exert federal power against slavery”[11], an impression that could have been rooted in his ability to manipulate many other things and people throughout his life to gain the ends he desired (such as the poor, witless schoolboys that he tricked into teaching him how to write)[12]. In this way he was also admitting that he believed that freed slaves could, somehow, integrate into society with whites. It is at this point that he comes into contention with Delany. In his Condition, Delany does not dwell so much on the position of the Constitution in regards to slavery but rather in what he sees as the endemic racial prejudice of whites. It is in Victorian-era racism that Delany sees the true problem when he declares that it was not solely the belief of whites that blacks were inferior that created a system of racism in America, but that whites (specifically Anglo-Saxons of the British tradition) were superior or contained racial supremacy. It was this distinction, though it may seem to some as a split hair, that Delany saw an impossibility of racial integration, provided the slaves were ever freed.[13] From this impossibility does Delany open a petition to other nations of the world to allow the African-American population in the United States immigration rights. He claims that the millions of African-Americans (both free and slave) would add a “powerful auxiliary” to any nation willing to host them with equal rights and enfranchisement.[14] No doubt this was a radical – and some might have accused it of being a seditious – proposition for any reader in power in a foreign government. Delany justifies it by lamenting that while African-Americans love America, “she don’t love us – she despises us and bids us begone… whatever love we have for her, we shall love the country nonetheless that receives us as her adopted children.”[15] Not to be outdone, Garrison ups the proverbial ante by claiming the freed slaves (should ever a day come when all were freed) would only find more of the same in any other nation. It is in America that blacks should stay and it is in America that they can aid in what he sees as the holy plan of God to build the Kingdom of God in fact as much as in theory. Whereas Douglass sees, in a rather utilitarian sense, a Constitution that can be made to serve blacks, and Delany sees, in a resentful and bitter sense, blacks as moving to another nation to be served, Garrison sees, with the eyes of an Old Testament prophet, no nation as capable of serving people of either color. Delivering a contemptuous rebuke, he disparages “the governments of this world… in all their essential elements” as “all Anti-Christ.”[16] Perhaps in the boldest condemnation ever delivered, Garrison would throw out the baby, the bathwater, and the shut up the well from whence said bathwater came! At the point when Garrison was redefining the mission of his particular abolitionist movement, it appears that he extrapolated all of his previous arguments and positions to draw them all to one conclusion: government exists in opposition to God. It exists for the sole purpose of oppression – even in spite of a government’s republican vestments. It is born of violence and “fashioned in the likeness and administered in the spirit of their own disobedience.”[17] To Garrison, the governments of the world – and especially the United States – had set up a kingdom that was incompatible with the teachings and Kingdom of Jesus Christ. It was in the American slavery institution that Garrison was able to see the clearest example of what was endemic in all government: the “dominion of man”, the “thralldom of self”, the “government of brute force”, and “the bondage of sin”.[18] His answer to this problem of government was very different from his two contemporaries. It was not to “change from within” as Douglass had argued, and not to run away – into the arms of the same problems elsewhere, but to completely disengage from the government. Garrison chose to see the government of the United States as Jesus saw the government of Rome: a foreign occupying power, a power that had no true legitimacy over the lives of his followers, and a power that will, one day, be brought into subjection to the Kingdom of God: a “kingdom” that is not like human government but one of “righteousness, peace, and joy”. It was the means of disengagement that he hoped to achieve his stated ends: “the emancipation of our whole race.”[19]
Let us not wrongly assume, however, that these lofty notions applied to the establishment of men! In each his own way did all three men assist also in the emancipation and enfranchisement of women. While not realized until well after all of them were dead, they gave to the movement of women’s liberation a moral support that remains a strong relationship even today. The causes of civil rights and women’s rights have been entwined since nearly the beginning. While in Douglass’ Narrative there is scarcely an explicit mention of women’s rights, he aptly fed the propaganda machine with vivid imagery of inhumane and inconceivable abuse towards women. It is not meant by the use of the word “propaganda” that such tales as provided in the Narrative are false, but rather their inclusion served a particular political goal in the writings – namely the depravity of the slaveholders, the hypocrisy of slaveholders’ assertions that the races were incompatible, and, of course, the subjection of the cause of women. Taking it a step further, Garrison appends his “Prospectus” with the declaration that “our object is universal emancipation – to redeem woman as well as man from a servile to an equal condition, - we shall go for the Rights of Woman to their utmost extent.”[20] These two leaders do indeed give a very politically correct endorsement of women’s rights, but it feels almost as an afterthought or an appendage to their main message. Not so with Delany! Embedded deeply within his controversial message is as radical a statement as the male-dominated Victorian society is able to hear: “No people are ever elevated above the condition of their females; hence the condition of the mother determines the condition of the child.”[21] It is here that we again see these three agreeing on the principal of women’s rights, but in three distinctly different ways and offering varying degrees of support: Douglass dealing with the issue indirectly, Garrison mentioning his support in passing, and Delany building a core argument around the concept.
A better topic of contrast could scarcely be found between these three than on the issue of racial identity. In one corner sits Martin Delany, a man very proud of his African heritage and one that laid a good deal of the foundation for concepts such as “black nationalism”. As Douglass once said of Delany: “I thank God for making me a man simply, but Delany always thanks Him for making him a black man.”[22] While much of Delany’s arguments are based around the distinctly incompatible nature of the relationship between whites and blacks in antebellum America, Douglass would be much more neutral – by his own admission – in regards to race. To Delany, he regarded the African-American population of the U.S. as a whole – even perhaps naively perceiving them as monolithic and homogenous. While petitioning other nations to “adopt” the blacks in America he assumes that he has the bargaining power for the whole population. A leader in the community he most certainly was – but negotiating for the mass exodus and emigration of the whole race from a country? A cultural anthropologist never had a more brazen figure in African-American history to analyze! In contrast to that is Douglass’ identification with his “fellow bondsmen”. It could be argued that by identifying with other slaves, he is in fact identifying with them racially as well as in station. When taken with the previous quotation on being simply “a man” instead of “a black man”, the relation to bondsmen seems much more conditional than racial. This is certainly a view we should expect from someone whose mentor was William Garrison. As has been mentioned before, Garrison found his commonality with other men not on the basis of race, but on the basis of universal obedience to Christ. Garrison did not identify, for obvious reasons, with slaves on the basis of race: he was white! Instead he was able to identify with slaves because he believed they shared a condition of servility to man whereas it should only be made to God through Jesus.
As has been stated before, the temptation of regarding abolition as a singular movement proves false when one is able to see the ways in which these men differed. From issues regarding education, to government, to women’s rights, and race consciousness these three men stood together, even if only loosely. In some ways they were wholly incompatible, in others they were separated by simple details. Remembering that William Garrison was able to so eloquently summarize abolition, we return to him for the purposes of highlighting a fuller panorama of those various abolitionists. “However widely we may differ in our view on other subjects, we shall not refuse to labor with him against slavery, in the same phalanx, if he refuse not to labor with us… we make our appeal for support to the honest-hearted… those who are not afraid to think and act independently, among all sects and all parties.”[23]
[3] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), Selection from Thoughts on African Colonization, page 257
[4] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), Selection from Thoughts on African Colonization, page 259
[9] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, page 483
[10] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, page 485
[13] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, page 480
[14] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, page 488-489
[15] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, page 489
[21] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, page 487
[22] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, page 475
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