The Martyrdom of Uncle Tom

The Martyrdom of Uncle Tom

A Close Reading and Interpretation

            Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the best selling book of the entire nineteenth century, held a unique position as one of the most influential critiques of slavery during the 1850’s. Its archetypal characters, use of irony, and allegorical employment of iconography all made this novel a compelling vehicle for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s condemnation of the chattel slavery system in America. One of the more challenging passages of the novel is the martyrdom of Uncle Tom at the hands of the evil slave master, Simon Legree. In this scene Stowe paints an allegory of the passion narrative of Jesus Christ as Tom is interrogated, threatened and, ultimately, killed. This imagery is intended to be utilized as a means to communicate an equally difficult message: that the dominating master is, himself, a slave to his own passions and the pious and faithful slave is set free in the midst of his suffering and death.

            Tom’s death, placed within the aptly named chapter “The Martyr,” is the culmination of a string of literary references to Tom’s position in the story as a modern-day Apostle or Christ. In a series of scenes Tom is presented to the reader as pious, submissive, selfless, and evangelistic. Tom’s unfortunate journey through the institution of slavery is intended to represent the apostolic journey through heathen lands and Stowe’s audience would have been able to recognize these allusions easily. Tom, unwilling to rebel or flee from captivity, places his life in what he believes to be the benevolent and ultimately providential hands of God. To the highly literate and devout audience Stowe was intending to reach, these intentional Biblical parallels would, again, not have gone unnoticed.

This is certainly the case with the martyrdom of Tom. In this scene Stowe presents a contrast between Tom and Legree and, through the description of body language, vocal inflection, and the vocabulary of each character’s speech. Legree is enraged and ready to commit murder while Tom is calm, in control, at peace, and resigned to his fate. The contrast is wide in this passage and the reader is led to a set of character archetypes that they would have recognized: the cruel and evil tyrant, bloodthirsty and full of intoxicating rage and the serene, faithful, and composed saint full of compassion and forgiveness. The conversation between Tom and Legree (358) communicates all of this, yet Stowe feels obliged to interrupt the building climax, via the narrator, in order to point out to the reader that there is a “spirit of evil,” “rage,” and “vehemence” in Legree about to be unleashed upon Tom (358). Stowe does not immediately return the reader to the cultivated sympathy of Tom’s suffering but, instead, chooses to inject the theological lesson of the crucifixion to the passage. Here she suggests that Tom’s execution is a vehicle by which slavery can be exposed and transformed from “an instrument of torture, degradation, and shame, into a symbol of glory, honor, and immortal life,” (358) in the same way that the Cross of Calvary transformed an instrument of Roman brutality. The analogy here is not satisfied to rest solely on the means, but also incorporates the ends. Just as Christ’s brutal execution brought to salvation the thief on the cross alongside him (and, not to mention, the salvation of all the world and the reunification of God’s “family”), so too does Tom’s execution facilitate the salvation of Sambo and Quimbo and the reunification of Cassy’s and George Harris’ families, a related and alternative theme within the novel that will not be discussed here.

These allegorical scenes do not only contain criticisms, but are also full of ironies and archtypal role-reversals that go to Stowe’s central theme and over-arching message. The first irony to explore is the social faux pas of an antebellum writer creating a fictional Christ-figure out of an African slave. While Stowe’s personal feelings regarding the idea of racial egalitarianism are vague and poorly defined within the novel, we can be sure that her audience – both northerners and southerners – existed in a highly “racialistic” (a term used by George M. Fredrickson in his essay entitled “Romantic Racialism of the North”, 429-438) society that embraced the overly-defined and rigid racial hierarchy which characterized Victorian-era social relations. In short, Stowe fully understood the shock-value of presenting to her audience a black enslaved Christ, and one could surmise that she did so for precisely the reason that it was so potentially outrageous. Another important device provided here is the role-reversal of Simon Legree and Uncle Tom. These two characters represent the furthest extremes of social conditions: one free and one a slave. In the martyrdom scene, however, Stowe attempts – and mostly succeeds – to illuminate the “truth” of the matter: that Simon Legree is the true slave and Tom is truly free. Establishing Simon Legree as a “superstitious man” earlier in the text (347), Stowe provides a psychological profile of fear and mental instability and contrasts it – both throughout the Legree plantation story arc and the martyrdom scene in particular – to the confidence and inner-serenity of the God-fearing Tom. At the climax of Tom and Legree’s confrontation Stowe shows us an out-of-control master, enslaved by his own unbridled passions and a coolly in-control slave, freed from fear and death by an unshakable faith in a benevolent and “wise, all-ruling Father, whose presence fills the void unknown with light and order” (347). The irony of this reversal is inescapable.

It is by playing on this intentional satire that Stowe intends to “preach” her most provocative message: that the vessel of Christ’s gospel – made not of words, but of love and compassion – cannot be defeated by the cruelty and domination of the “kingdom of man.” Her interjection about the natural proclivity of the African race towards the “Christian nature” on page 156, in conjunction with Tom’s own suffering and death, points to the message that, just as Christ’s body was shattered like a vessel to release the power of God’s spirit into the ancient world, so too are the bodies of these Christian slaves shattered in order to release God’s redemptive power into America for the transformation of all humankind. Even in the face of human cruelty and domination, the power of the Christian gospel is not only unrestrained but also propelled forward, touching and transforming the planet one human soul at a time. This scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is intended to communicate the superiority of the Christian gospel over all forms of oppression and domination.

Garrison v. Stowe

Garrison v. Stowe

A Comparison of Moderate and Radical Abolitionism

            In the decades leading up to the Civil War the cause of abolitionism took many forms and a variety of opinions. Two of the most prominent figures of the abolitionism movement in America were William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe. “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another” says Proverbs[1] and, “He who is not against us is for us,” said Christ.[2] As much could be said of American abolitionism. Garrison, himself, was a fiery prophet calling America back to holiness, lest God should visit calamity on the nation. To him, slavery represented the cancer of sin. It so deeply threatened the whole American body that, in his mind, it must be mercilessly removed no matter the cost. Stowe, however, saw the evil of slavery in the way that it disturbed the divinely sanctioned familiar institutions and enabled the unchecked physical appetites of slave masters. These two individuals, while joined in common cause, are a compelling example of the diversity and heterodoxy of antebellum abolitionism.

William Lloyd Garrison became personally acquainted with servitude in the form wage-slavery from an early age.[3] This experience informed his conviction that forced labor was “not only a crime, but the sum of all criminality,”[4] and he resolved to vigorously work toward the demise of the institution in all of its forms. Garrison’s writings reflect a man possessed with the singular purpose of egalitarianism in America. With respect to his uncompromising nature and his radical – and unpopular – rhetoric, Garrison has been often compared to British MP William Wilberforce. It is with their common revulsion in regards to chattel slavery, however, that the comparisons might end. Whereas Wilberforce worked within the halls of government to achieve abolition, Garrison decried the Constitution of the United States – the very foundation of the American government – as a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”[5] Government, in the mind of Garrison, was inherently dependent on the practice of compromise. The Constitution, itself as a legally binding government document, and its particular injunctions on the institution of slavery were rife with compromise. These compromises not only represented acquiescence to evil but he also regarded the Constitution as “the infamous bargain which… virtually dethroned the Most High God”[6] and declared, while burning a copy of it, “So perish all compromises with tyranny!”[7]

While Garrison looked to the radical social ethics of the New Testament for inspiration, he drew most heavily from the Declaration of Independence. The rhetoric of this document led him to insist that the American union was founded on the belief that “all men are created equal” and that all men lay claim to the inalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” including the African slave population. Garrisonian abolitionism was certainly the most radical variation of abolitionism. It required not only the immediate abolition, but also demanded the education of blacks and believed in the equality of the sexes.[8] For his time, William Lloyd Garrison was certainly on the fringe of the movement.

His crusade against slavery led him not only to denounce the whole of human government – claiming, “the governments of this world… they are all Anti-Christ”[9] – but also the American body of Christianity. “What has Christianity done, by direct effort, for our slave population? Comparatively nothing.”[10] He ridiculed American institutional Christianity by claiming that it could tame the foreign wilderness but was powerless to emancipate the African slaves of a Christian nation. Garrison also levels a finger at the so-called free states on the Union. “We are all alike guilty. Slavery is strictly a national sin.”[11] Later he even accuses the North of being even more prejudiced than the South, because the “criminal timidity” of the North in confronting Southern slavery was the enabling force behind the entire institution.[12] Garrison’s avant-garde rhetoric and style was unsettling, even to other abolitionists, and was especially alarming when he attacked the virtue of American life. “Before God, I must say, that such a glaring contradiction as exists between our creed and practice the annals of six thousand years cannot parallel. In view of it, I am ashamed of my country.”[13] Garrison’s views were delivered both in the way of editorial columns and sermon-esque public speeches. William Lloyd Garrison is a polemic demagogue, both in his critical evaluation of ecclesiastical behavior in regards to slavery, but also his hostile disputation of the political reality. His inflammatory rhetoric, his avant-garde style, and his uncompromising principles hearken to the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament. This convention lends itself to reinforce Garrison’s particularly confrontational tone and cloaks his abrasiveness in a mantle of prophetic authority. Noting, however, that his brand of abolitionism never enjoyed a wide popularity, it seems that his polemic style came with the cost of sharing the pariah status of the prophets as well.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, daughter of Protestant evangelical preacher Lyman Beecher, was never a stranger to abolitionism or prolific writing. Her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was a famous abolitionist theologian and her sister, Catherine Beecher, was also a noted abolitionist writer. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was not known for his sympathies to the abolitionist cause, but his contribution to the movement by way of progeny cannot be overlooked. Harriet’s own contributions – Uncle Tom’s Cabin chief among them – came to her audience in the form of the sentimental novel. This style of novel, also called “domestic fiction” was most prevalent in the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth and placed a high value on an appeal to the emotional virtues, directly contrasting the rationalist arguments of the time. Through this convention, we can see that Stowe’s attitudes toward slavery were not so radical as Garrison’s and were born of an entirely different host. Whereas Garrison’s chief concern in abolitionism was the utter equality of mankind and the fulfillment of the Declaration of Independence, Stowe was troubled by the effect the institution of slavery had on the institution of the family. In this respect, among others, Stowe was very much a moderate – or centrist – abolitionist.[14] In her popular and influential novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe portrays the chief sin of slavery as an interruption of the family. Slavery separated Uncle Tom from his wife Chloe; it separated George Harris from his wife Eliza and their son Harry and threatened to detach Harry from both of his parents. Slavery had orphaned poor Topsy, had divided Emily from her brother George, and Cassy from her daughter Eliza. Speaking directly to the issue Stowe states plainly, “The note-book of a missionary, among the Canadian [former slave] refugees, contains truth stranger than fiction. How can it be otherwise, when a system prevails which whirls families and scatters their members… These shores of refuge, like the eternal shore… may bring tidings of mother, sister, child or wife, still lost to view in the shadows of slavery.”[15]

Yet, in direct contrast to Garrison’s charge that every slaveholder is a “man-stealer,” Stowe offers us not only a spectrum of evil in slavery, but also “exploits the reader’s capacity for tenderness, compassion, or sympathy by presenting… an unrealistic view of its subject.”[16] In Stowe’s understanding of slavery, not all slaveholders were evil and not all expressions of the institution were malevolent. The slavery of Kentucky is called “the mildest form of the system” – a concession Garrison would have balked at – and Stowe also refers to the relationship between master and slave there as “goodhumored indulgence” and “affectionate loyalty.”[17] Both George Shelby and his son are presented as the paragon of Christian slaveholders.[18] They are kind, treat their slaves well – if perpetuating their slavery did not, in fact, contradict that estimation – and George, Jr. eventually frees the entire estate.[19] Augustine St. Claire, while not particularly religious, was also good-natured and treated his slaves well, some of them even sharing his own wardrobe and supply of little luxuries.[20] Certainly Garrison never conceived of this lax sort of environment in a Deep South plantation. These kind slaveholders are presented, in Stowe’s narrative, as men never willing to break up the stability and family of their African charges, but only forced to do so when confronted with hard circumstances. It was only in the last pages of the novel that the slaveholder of Garrison’s imagination was revealed for her readers in the form of Simon Legree. While far from relieving the institution of slavery of its earned reproach Stowe, unlike Garrison, was willing to acknowledge that there was a complex and heterogeneous reality that accompanied it. In this, Stowe must have been hoping to gain recognition from both camps by presenting herself as an honest purveyor of social reality. In this, she and Garrison could never have agreed.

Her attitudes on the equality of all mankind were, likewise, divergent. In her narrative, Stowe never outright challenges the legitimacy of the slaveholders nor does she give us a single African character that would be considered an equal to a white character. The slaves are described with intrinsically inferior labels, such as “loyal,” “favored,” or “petted” and only the radical George Harris insists on his right of being a freeman. George is certainly given the position of a protagonist, yet only as it pertained to the preservation of his family and the reclamation of his own unique manhood. Tom, on the other hand, is obviously the favored hero of the novel and is given very passive and acquiescent characteristics. It is in Tom, however, that Stowe intends to formulate her own imaginations of the African race.

Garrison describes blacks in terms of “complexion”, “hue”, “color”, and “clime” whereas Stowe readily assigns each man a “race.” This is, perhaps, the fundamental difference between the two. The clearest presentation of this belief is in George Harris’ speech given near the end of the novel. “To the Anglo-Saxon race has been intrusted [sic] the destinies of the world,” claims Stowe.[21] On the other hand, she trusts “that the development of Africa is to be essentially a Christian one. If not a dominant and commanding race, they are, at least an affectionate, magnanimous and forgiving one.”[22] Whereas she ordains the white race with the administration of the world’s governmental order, she proclaims that the black race will evolve along a path of Christian piety and be vessels of redemption, which shares the personality of Christ wherever they go.[23] The genre that Stowe utilizes is the novel. Prior to the naturalistic writers of the late nineteenth century, such as Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane, American novels were meant to be vehicles by which a series of didactic ethical lessons could be introduced. Intentionally sentimental novels, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, have the advantage of establishing their ethical principles within an allegorical framework. The persuasive efficacy of a novel like Stowe’s is dependant, almost solely, upon the skill of the author in cultivating a connection – via the characters and plot – with the readership. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century, selling “more copies than any other book in the world except the Bible.”[24] While Mark Twain blames the Civil War on the romantic writings of Sir Walter Scott, Abraham Lincoln attributed it to Stowe. Upon meeting her at the White House, President Lincoln is claimed to have said, “So you’re the little lady that wrote the book that made this great war.”[25]

            There is no doubt that both William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe wanted the unconditional abolition of slavery in America. But there can also be no doubt that they both wanted to achieve this end by incompatible means and for incompatible reasons. Garrison would see the governments of the world burn to the ground in order that all men and women be free, a truly liberal position. Stowe, however, would see slavery removed in order to preserve the more fundamental social institution of the family, a fairly conservative position. These positions are as different as their two conventions and it is illustrated in each of their writings. While both Garrison and Stowe are appealing to the more emotional sensibilities of their readership, one could hardly imagine Garrison parceling up his “truth” and hiding them among several hundred pages of domestic fiction. Likewise, we can see Stowe’s attempt to portray her views to American readers as anything but confrontational. Yet, despite their exclusive and unique ideologies, they found common cause together for the elimination of slavery in America.

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[1] Proverbs 27.17, NASB

[2] Mark 9.40, NASB

[3] A House Divided, page 327

[4] A House Divided, page 335

[5] A House Divided, page 335

[6] A House Divided, page 345

[7] A House Divided, page 335

[8] A House Divided, page 347

[9] The American Intellectual Tradition, Fifth Edition, page 267

[10] A House Divided, page 339

[11] A House Divided, page 342

[12] A House Divided, page 341

[13] A House Divided, page 340

[14] A House Divided, page 351

[15] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 372

[16] A House Divided, page 346; Encyclopedia Britannica, entry for “sentimental novel”

[17] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 7

[18] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 8

[19] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 380

[20] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 142

[21] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 376

[22] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 376

[23] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 156

[24] Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page viii

[25] Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life, page 203

Abolition

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]

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[1] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), “Prospectus of the Liberator” page 265

[2] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), A Dissertation on the Cannon and Feudal Law, page 113

[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

[5] Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Narrative), page 68

[6] Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Narrative), page 68

[7] Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Narrative), page 68

[8] Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Narrative), page 63

[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

[11] Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Narrative), page 9

[12] Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Narrative), page 70

[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

[16] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), “The Prospectus of The Liberator”, page 267

[17] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), “The Prospectus of The Liberator”, page 267

[18] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), “The Prospectus of The Liberator”, page 265

[19] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), “The Prospectus of The Liberator”, page 265

[20] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), “The Prospectus of The Liberator”, page 268

[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

[23] The American Intellectual Tradition (HC), “The Prospectus of The Liberator”, page 266