American Abolitionism

Its Direct Political Impact from Colonial Times into Reconstruction

Stanley Harrold

• Editorial: University of Virginia Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813942308
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia de la Guerra de Secesión

This ambitious book provides the only systematic examination of the American abolition movement's direct impacts on antislavery politics from colonial times to the Civil War and after. As opposed to indirect methods such as propaganda, sermons, and speeches at protest meetings, Stanley Harrold focuses on abolitionists' political tactics—petitioning, lobbying, establishing bonds with sympathetic politicians—and on their disruptions of slavery itself.

Harrold begins with the abolition movement's relationship to politics and government in the northern American colonies and goes on to evaluate its effect in a number of crucial contexts--the U.S. Congress during the 1790s, the Missouri Compromise, the struggle over slavery in Illinois during the 1820s, and abolitionist petitioning of Congress during that same decade. He shows how the rise of "immediate" abolitionism, with its emphasis on moral suasion, did not diminish direct abolitionists' impact on Congress during the 1830s and 1840s. The book also addresses abolitionists' direct actions against slavery itself, aiding escaped or kidnapped slaves, which led southern politicians to demand the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, a major flashpoint of antebellum politics. Finally, Harrold investigates the relationship between abolitionists and the Republican Party through the Civil War and Reconstruction.

1

Direct Abolitionist Engagement in Politics, 1688–1807

When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the United States was a mighty nation divided against itself in a brutal war. The country’s northern section had the most extensive railroad system in the world. Its degree of industrialization rivaled that of Western European counties. Its modern values encouraged individual freedom, initiative, and antislavery politics. The United States’ southern section trailed the North in industry. The South’s premodern values subordinated individuals. And its agricultural economy sustained its barbaric labor system. Even so the South surpassed most of the world in transportation and production. Before the Civil War, northern and European economies depended on the South for raw cotton and other staples to maintain production and employment.

Two centuries earlier, as race-based chattel slavery emerged on the east coast of North America, no comparatively large, powerful independent nation existed on the continent. Neither did abolitionists or antislavery politics. North America lay on the edge of a European imperialism that had begun during the fifteenth century. Spain, England, and France each claimed portions of the continent, while American Indian nations controlled its interior. In the English colonies servitude remained ill-defined during the seventeenth century. This was in part because England had no law for slavery, in part because of the dispersed rural character of colonial society, and in part because of the slow court-based development of law. Most colonial laborers (American Indian, black, and white) were to varying degrees unfree. The condition, legal status, and length of servitude for white and American Indian servants overlapped with those of Africans. They all faced overwork, brutal punishment, poor living conditions, sexual exploitation, and social disgrace.1

Multiple factors changed these circumstances. First, as tobacco cultivation became central to Virginia’s and Maryland’s economies, plantation owners, courts, colonial assemblies, and public opinion (based on racial prejudice and economic self-interest) assigned an especially disadvantaged status to people of African descent. By the 1640s, aspects of chattel slavery had emerged. Judges and legislatures required black people to serve for life and their children to inherit their status. White people assumed that black people were unfree unless they could prove otherwise. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a similar evolution occurred in the Carolinas, Georgia, and East Florida.2

Second, although American Indian slavery persisted through the eighteenth century, disease and westward migration promoted its decline. Third, in 1676 a short-lived rebellion among poor white Virginians led by Nathaniel Bacon frightened Virginia planters away from reliance on unfree white labor. Fourth, English dominance of the Atlantic slave trade by the early eighteenth century lowered the price of black slaves in the colonies. By 1700 black slave labor had become the dominant form of labor in Virginia and Maryland. As slave imports from Africa and the Caribbean increased, plantations replaced small farms as the predominant loci of agricultural production.3

Black servitude began in the Northeast as early as in Virginia and Maryland. It existed in New England by 1624. In 1626 the Dutch West India Company brought enslaved Africans to New Amsterdam (later New York City). In 1664 New Jersey provided large parcels of land to those who imported Africans. In 1687, three years after the founding of Pennsylvania, 150 slaves worked there clearing land. And as bondage grew rigid in the South, it did so in the Northeast. Slaves became common, and masters interfered in black family life, independence, and property. Northeastern colonial governments joined those in the South in curtailing manumission and attempting to control free African Americans. Yet slavery took a different form in the northeastern colonies than it did in the South because of varying climate, soil, economics, and demographics. Plantation slavery rarely existed in the Northeast, black slaves there did not lose all their customary rights, and they continued to interact with white people. Forces for freedom had greater strength in the Northeast than in the South.4

Slavery’s relative weakness north of the Mason-Dixon Line has encouraged assumptions about its eventual peaceful abolition there. A cooler climate, absence of cash crops, large numbers of European immigrants, economic diversification, fewer powerful slaveholders, and a small black population may have predestined slavery’s demise.5 Even so emancipation did not come easily in the Northeast. Slavery brought profits to masters, many white residents regarded black bondage as key to avoiding interracial strife, New England merchants engaged in the Atlantic slave trade, and proslavery interests had political power.

Black resistance, escape, and self-purchase over many years had a major role in undermining slavery in the North. And, as this chapter emphasizes, so did organized abolitionist encouragement of colonial legislatures and later state legislatures to act against slavery and the slave trade. Such encouragement had consequences beyond individual colonies and later states. This was because decisions made by northern assemblies and legislatures regarding emancipation during the late eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth century produced North-South sectionalism. That sectionalism, however, did not lead northern white majorities to favor ending slavery in the South or advocate equal rights for African Americans. Instead it inclined white northeasterners, on the basis of political and economic self-interest, to resist slavery expansion and to tolerate to various degrees the spread of abolitionism.6

Two movements shaped the patterns of thought and action within which eighteenth-century American abolitionism operated. The first of these, the Enlightenment, began in Western Europe during the late seventeenth century. Transatlantic commerce, expanding American port cities, the rise of a merchant class in the Northeast, and a corresponding rise of a master class in the South helped this intellectual revolution spread to the England’s North American colonies. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on perceptions as sources of knowledge (sensibility), human reasoning (rationalism), and scientific enquiry led colonists to establish colleges, publish newspapers, create libraries, and appreciate the value of literate and responsible employees. Sensibility and rationalism also encouraged criticism of the Atlantic slave trade’s brutality and of the violence, degradation, and ignorance associated with slavery. English philosopher John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and his Two Treatises of Government (1689) reflected this outlook. His assertion that all human beings had a natural right to life, liberty, and property suggested the injustice of slavery.7

Four decades later, the second movement, a transatlantic, evangelistic religious revival known in America as the Great Awakening, began. It grew out of dissatisfaction with a deterministic and formalistic Protestantism that seemed to deny most people a chance for salvation. Evangelicals emphasized emotion rather than reason, and they subordinated logic to enthusiasm. They challenged social orthodoxy and encouraged believers to demonstrate their state of grace by providing material aid to the downtrodden. George Whitefield led English evangelicals during the eighteenth century and cofounded the Methodist Church. During his seven visits to the colonies, beginning in 1738, he preached that all who believed in God could gain salvation regardless of their social standing. Although Whitefield supported slavery, he and other evangelicals addressed racially integrated audiences. God, evangelists said, valued all people regardless of their wealth, education, or race. During the Great Awakening, the great majority of African Americans became Christians. Particularly in the Northeast and in the Chesapeake, this conversion narrowed the cultural gap between black and white Americans. It helped encourage some white Americans to regard African Americans as proper objects of benevolence. It enabled African Americans to create a church-based institutional framework for abolitionist activism. The Great Awakening also profoundly influenced how abolitionists approached politics and government.8

For most of the eighteenth century, however, Quakers, few of whom were black and none of whom were evangelicals, led American efforts against slavery. Belief that a God-given inner light united all humans and that violence directed toward any human violated God’s law shaped the Quakers’ pietistic faith. Black unrest led Quakers to fear that God’s wrath in the form of slave revolt awaited those who forced servitude on others. And Quaker merchants, influenced by rationalism, sought to expand flexible, educated workforces based on wage labor. Consequently Quaker abolitionists called on their coreligionists, many of whom owned slaves, to renounce slaveholding and the slave trade. Later they called on non-Quakers to do the same. Most important for this book, Quaker abolitionists pioneered antislavery politics. They had their greatest impact in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, the last of which Quakers governed from its founding into the 1750s.9

Quaker abolitionists were the first to utilize petitioning, a political tactic entrenched in English constitutionalism, to affect government policy regarding slavery. Since before the Magna Carta, English kings had received petitions as a function of their sovereignty. As Parliament developed during the thirteenth century into England’s legislature, inhabitants petitioned that body for relief of grievances. By the seventeenth century, in the colonies as well as in England, petitions had become the first step in the legislative process. Colonial assemblies received petitions, considered them, and either passed appropriate legislation or formally refused to do so. Petitions had to be respectfully addressed to an assembly, “state a grievance,” and “pray for relief.” But anyone, including women, American Indians, African Americans, and children, could petition. No one during the late seventeenth and entire eighteenth centuries doubted the political nature of petitioning.10

At first Quaker abolitionists used petitions to influence the yearly meetings that constituted the highest authority within the Society of Friends. In 1688 Dutch and German Quakers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, petitioned Philadelphia’s yearly meeting in opposition to the slave trade. They cited the golden rule and asserted that an oppressed black population posed a violent threat to white society. In 1693 Philadelphia Quaker George Keith’s An Exhortation and Caution to Friends Concerning Buying and Keeping of Negroes furthered these themes. Keith warned, “He that stealeth a Man and selleth him . . . shall surely be put to Death.” Because the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting exercised quasi-government power in early Pennsylvania, the Germantown Quakers worked in a context that mixed religion and politics when they petitioned the meeting. Within a few decades some Quakers began to petition colonial legislatures. Pamphleteer William Southeby had earlier called on Quakers to free their slaves. In 1712, after a New York City slave revolt caused widespread fear, he petitioned the Pennsylvania legislature for general emancipation and prohibition of the importation of slaves. The Quaker controlled assembly rejected both petitions but subsequently discouraged the trade by taxing it.11

Quaker abolitionist John Woolman (1720–1772) undertook quasi-political action during the 1750s that anticipated later abolitionist tactics regarding state legislatures. (Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

Other eighteenth-century Quaker abolitionists continued to work through their church’s semi-governmental yearly meetings. Benjamin Lay, a merchant who had owned slaves on Barbados before moving to the Philadelphia area in 1731, wrote and spoke against slavery. At the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, held at Burlington, New Jersey, in 1738, he denounced the hypocrisy of Quaker slaveholding. When the meeting disowned him, it encouraged other Quakers, including John Woolman and Anthony Benezet to become abolitionists. Woolman, an itinerant preacher who traveled through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New England, Maryland, and Virginia, advocated gradual abolition among his coreligionists. Benezet, an English Quaker of French descent, beginning during the 1740s conducted an African American school in Philadelphia and wrote against the Atlantic slave trade.12

In 1758 Woolman and Benezet gained control of the Philadelphia meeting, using it to condemn Quaker slaveholders. Subsequent yearly meetings in Maryland (1768), New England (1770), and New York (1774) banned Quaker participation in the slave trade. In 1772 New England Quakers led in expelling slaveholders from their meetings. The Philadelphia meeting followed in 1776 and the New York meeting a year later. Local meetings in Pennsylvania and New Jersey took much longer.13 These quasi-political actions anticipated abolitionist efforts aimed at state legislatures.

Despite progress among Quakers, the divergent forces encouraging abolitionism initially produced a weak, fragmented movement. Many Quaker abolitionists preferred to work only with coreligionists. Quakers living in rural areas lagged behind those in Philadelphia, and Quaker abolitionists did not admit African Americans to their organizations. While some abolitionist sentiment existed in New England, theological and physical distance separated that sentiment from Quakers centered in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Economic considerations, fear of slave revolt, and desire to limit black populations, rather than moral antipathy, often inspired early abolitionist effort. And although slaves resisted and escaped (often with help from African Americans), free black populations did not provide coordinated assistance until the 1780s. Yet by the 1760s, humanitarian sentiment, evangelicalism, and growing free black communities spread abolitionism. Quakers began to exercise greater influence beyond their meetings, and the Great Awakening’s evangelical impulse surged.14 Most importantly increasing numbers of Americans embraced the Enlightenment’s natural rights doctrines as the conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763 intensified long-existing tensions between their colonies and the British Empire.

As those white Americans who later called themselves Patriots charged that British policies regarding trade and taxation reduced them to slaves, they could not avoid the question of responsibility for black slavery. That question in turn encouraged abolitionist political action. In 1761 an abolitionist petition calling on Pennsylvania’s legislature to “prevent or discourage” slave imports led the legislature once again to tax such imports. In 1765 Worcester, Massachusetts, residents instructed their representative in the state legislature to “use his influence” to pass a law to “end” slavery in the colony. After Boston citizens sent similar instructions in 1766, the legislature considered and defeated a bill to end slavery and the slave trade.15

As American resistance to British policies escalated into armed conflict and revolution, Patriot leaders in April 1775 formed the Continental Congress as a provisional national government. Between June 1775 and July 1776, the leaders formed state governments in each of the former thirteen colonies. These governments usually had strong bicameral legislatures, consisting of an assembly and a council, and a weak governor. In 1778 the Continental Congress passed the Articles of Confederation, which, after being ratified by the states in 1781, provided a weak central government until the U.S. Constitution superseded it in 1789.16 All of these developments allowed abolitionists to increase their political engagement.

The American Revolution also influenced slaves. Following the Declaration of Independence’s endorsement of universal human rights in 1776, many slaves left their masters. Others joined British or Patriot armies, and their actions raised issues related to emancipation. Nevertheless abolitionist politics faced major impediments. In South Carolina and Georgia planters steadfastly defended slavery. A widespread negative reaction to Quaker pacifism during the War for Independence diminished their influence. Nearly all northern politicians feared that a too rapid advance toward emancipation would disrupt the North-South unity required to prevail over Britain. Therefore the new northern state assemblies tended to discuss abolitionist legislation but take only peripheral steps against slavery.17

Even so abolitionist ...