Abolitionism

ABOLITIONISM “Abolitionists often identified themselves with the slaves in a mood not so much of compassion as of self- seeking liberation.” — Bliss Perry, THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE, page 233 Eli Thayer would comment, after the civil war, about the antebellum abolitionists, that they had constituted “a mutual admiration society possessed by an unusual malignity towards those who did not belong to it.” He instanced that they had “never exhibited any diffidence or modesty in sounding their own praises.” However, the ultimate denunciation of the abolitionist movement would come considerably later, and from an unexpected source: If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a part of his own heart? — Alexander Solzhenitsyn, THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO I’ve been reading a new biography of William Lloyd Garrison and musing on his life trajectory and have begun to have some really serious doubts about the manner in which this antebellum history has been presented to us in our public education. It has ever been presented as a story about abolitionists who were categorically righteous and were ultimately successful, as of course American slavery bit the dust. It has been presented as a story which is completely disconnected from all the race problems which our nation has faced subsequent to that grand victory, the golden era of fairness that came subsequent to the surrender at Appomattox Court House. In particular, the story as presented to us during our public schooling makes it really troublesome, that before the civil war American Friends were being warned by their monthly meetings to steer clear of those abolitionists, steer clear of having anything to do with such non-Quaker groups. This detachment is made to seem exceedingly problematic at best. In fact, however, abolitionism originated not as a movement to end slavery but as a movement to prevent any more blacks from being brought into “our” country. Abolitionism started out in a manner that very compatible with racism. That is, what it had sought to abolish was not slavery, not even the slave trade, but HDT WHAT? INDEX ABOLITIONISM ABOLITIONISM merely the international slave trade. Notice that this had something for everyone, or at least something for everyone white — abolishing the international trade would raise the market value of young blacks raised locally! This went hand in hand with the colonization-in-Africa schemes, the Liberia schemes, which were not at all aimed at enslaved black Americans but instead at black Americans who were free, and which were not intended to help them but rather were intended so that “we” (we white people) could be rid of them. So then just after the turn of the 19th Century, the international slave trade was at least nominally abolished. That phase of the abolitionist struggle had been triumphant. (Of course, the international slave trade actually did continue without much interruption, and only 1-count-’em-1 white American was ever hanged, half a century later just as the civil war was beginning, for having been caught engaging in it.) However, after the nominal abolition of the international slave trade, abolitionism became (or pretended to become) a movement to free the black slave. The burden of my remarks here will be to determine what it meant to these non-Quaker abolitionists (such as William Lloyd Garrison, Waldo Emerson, etc.), against whom the Quakers were warning one another, to “free the slave”: was this freeing perhaps intended to benefit the lives of enslaved black Americans — or was it intended rather to do harm to the social reputation and economic prospects of insufferably elitist white slavemasters? (When I say “insufferably elitist white slavemasters,” I am contemplating the mob of drunken armed young fop Southerner medical students who marched through Philadelphia defiantly shouting out the number of black slaves owned by their families down south, and of the easy manner in which these proud young white masters were constantly taking offense at slights and challenged others to duels to the death, with pistol or sword.) Another way to ask this question I am asking would be: were the white abolitionists actually intending to help the black slaves or, instead, were they merely intending to harm the white slavemasters? Was it righteous or was it unrighteous? My contention here is going to be, it was decidedly the latter. Here is my reasoning: If one were to set out to ameliorate the lot of employees in general, one might begin with agitation for laws limiting the hours of work to the hours of daylight, laws enforcing Sunday as a day of rest, laws proscribing the employment of children who should be in school, laws adding safety shields to moving machinery, minimum-wage laws, healthcare, etc. A slave is a type of degraded employee, so why was there never any such agitation on the part of the abolitionists in regard to slaves? Why was there never any law providing a slave child with a childhood? Why were the existing laws regarding rape and murder not simply extended to effectively provide protection to the slave from being raped or murdered by his or her slavemaster? Over the decades, were such a campaign of gradual amelioration HDT WHAT? INDEX ABOLITIONISM ABOLITIONISM to have been pursued, the distinction between the degraded “slave” and the ordinary “employee” might have been altogether erased, by gradually leveling up the “slave” to the life condition of the “employee,” until finally the employee with a right to wages and an old- age pension would have become virtually indistinguishable from the slave with a right to proper sustenance. My suggestion is that back then, for the abolitionists, any such movement to gradually alleviate the ills of slavery would have been regarded as a decided step in the wrong direction. It would have reduced outrage when their politics needed the generation of unrelenting over-the-top outrage. The abolitionist needed for enslavement to remain an intolerable offense, so that the political carpet would not be yanked out from underneath his own indignant feet! (This was a perennial problem in the north, between the white abolitionists and the black abolitionists. The white abolitionists were forever going to the black abolitionists with the admonition “You’ve got to be prepared to sacrifice more for the cause,” and the black abolitionists were forever coming back to the white abolitionists with “What this whole thing is about is, we’re already sacrificing far too much.” Often the two groups were at loggerheads, and if you watch carefully during the carriage scene in the movie “Amistad,” you will see an attempt at a depiction of this situation.) Since the white abolitionist was opposed on principle to improving the life conditions of the enslaved, what does that say about the motivation of this abolitionist? If the desire was not one of helping the black, then the desire could only have been one of hurting the white. —And our Quaker ancestors would have been very correct in urging one another to steer clear of entanglements with the non-Quakers who engaged in such worldly causes. This must have been a struggle of white American against white American, perhaps a class struggle between those whites rich enough to own blacks and those whites not rich enough to own blacks, in which the goal was to do harm to the social reputation and economic prospects of insufferably elitist white slavemasters. Which hypothesis, I ask you, best fits the outcome? By the end of our civil war, we are told by our historians, the northern white population had “become weary,” and once the southern blacks were at least nominally freed, we discover them losing all interest. The condition of the southern black population had been rendered utterly desperate, and who except the southern black population gave a damn? They were due to collect, as reparations from their former slavedrivers, their unpaid wages for generation after generation of hard labor in the construction of America, and who except them gave a damn about stuff like that? If the movement to end slavery in America had been what it pretended to be, a movement to improve the lives and the life prospects of black Americans, then at the end of the civil war the northern whites would not have so suddenly and totally abandoned their struggle to produce justice and equity. Our actual behavior at the end of the civil war is explicable HDT WHAT? INDEX ABOLITIONISM ABOLITIONISM only on the hypothesis that the actual motivation for white abolitionism had been the humiliation of other white Americans, a goal which had indeed been accomplished as the plantations had been reduced to ruins. The Southern high and mighty slavemasters had been tumbled and “all glory be to God”! Blacks, you have served our purpose, so now you can just “root hog or die”! It was not accident that the attitude of contempt projected by most of the abolitionists, Henry Thoreau excluded, toward the white Southerner, was well designed to help the northerner feel better about himself or herself, but poorly designed to motive the white Southerner to clean up his or her act. I fear that it must be stated, as a 1st-order approximation with few significant exceptions, that the abolitionist “cause” lacked an intent to help America’s interracial situation to improve: The Emersons, Adamses, and other New Englanders, who demonstrably knew little about southern intellectual life, announced that southerners had no minds, only temperaments.

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