Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (25 page)

By the time the ACS released the second volume of its periodical in the spring of 1826, Jefferson’s health had deteriorated to the point that he could not leave home. By June, he could not leave his bed. Late that month, writer Henry Lee IV—known to Jefferson as the grandson of a Revolutionary War hero—desired a meeting with him. When the bedridden Jefferson learned of Lee’s presence, he demanded to see him. The half-brother of future Confederate general Robert E. Lee was Jefferson’s last visitor.

Jefferson had to decline an invitation to Washington to attend the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He sent a celebratory statement to Washington instead, saying: “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” His last public words—so sweet to every free person, so bitter to the enslaved.
²⁷

Aside from his Hemings children (and Sally Hemings), Jefferson did not free any of the other enslaved people at Monticello. One historian estimated that Jefferson had owned more than six hundred slaves over the course of his lifetime. In 1826, he held around two hundred
people as property and he was about $100,000 in debt (about $2 million in 2014), an amount so staggering that he knew that once he died, everything—and everyone—would be sold.

On July 2, 1826, Jefferson seemed to be fighting to stay alive. The eighty-three-year-old awoke before dawn on July 4 and beckoned his enslaved house servants. The Black faces gathered around his bed. They were probably his final sight, and he gave them his final words. He had come full circle. In his earliest childhood memory and in his final lucid moment, Jefferson rested in the comfort of slavery.
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PART III

William Lloyd Garrison

CHAPTER 13

Gradual Equality

IT WAS THE STORY
of the age—Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dying on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. No other headline had ever before caused such amazement. Many thought the twin deaths on Freedom Day must have been an act of divine will, an undeniable sign that the United States had the blessing of God Almighty. Newspapers could not print enough eulogies, anecdotes, letters, statements, and biographical pieces on the two men whom Benjamin Rush had once called “the North and South Poles of the American Revolution.”
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John Adams died in his home in Quincy, due south of the overgrown maritime city of Boston. By the time of Adams’s death, Boston had grown to nearly 60,000 people and was fully immersed in New England’s industrial revolution, which ran on the wheels of southern cotton. The odd collection of philosophies, business dealings, denominations, interest groups, and moral movements visitors encountered in the seaside city might have been enough to make them dizzy. But none of the moral movements were trying to stamp out the nation’s most immoral institution. The Revolutionary-era abolitionist movement was pretty much dead. Jefferson’s fatalism about the difficulty of solving the problem of evil slavery, and his habit of deflecting blame for it onto the British, had become entrenched across the nation. The convention of abolitionist societies that Benjamin Rush had gathered together in 1794 still existed, but it was no longer much of a force for change. Tiny antislavery societies in the Upper South and in the
North were being swallowed up by colonizationists and their racist ideas.
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Every moral cause seemed to have its day on the annual giving schedule for New England philanthropists. The American Colonization Society imprinted its cause onto America’s greatest national holiday, Independence Day. On July 4, 1829, the ACS invited a young newcomer to give the Fourth of July Address at the distinguished Park Street Church in Boston. Since arriving in the city in 1826, the twenty-three-year-old William Lloyd Garrison had amassed a reputation as a reform-minded, pious, and passionate editor, the usual characteristics of a forthright champion of colonization.

His mother, Frances Maria Lloyd, was the source of his piety. She had raised him and his two siblings as a single mother in Newburyport, Massachusetts. They had been poor, but her Baptist faith had brought them through the rough times. He remembered the poverty and her maternal lessons like it was yesterday. When he and his older brother had come home carrying food from their mother’s employers or the town’s soup kitchen, they had endured a gauntlet of taunts from the richer kids on the street. But Frances Maria Lloyd preached to them about human worth: though they were low on funds, they were not low as people.

His older brother had been a difficult boy to raise, but William Lloyd was a model child, seeking only to please his mother. In 1818, when he was twelve, he had begun a seven-year indenture to Ephraim W. Allen, the talented editor of the
Newburyport Herald
. When he was not busy learning the printing trade or writing letters to his mother, who had moved to Baltimore, he was usually intent on educating himself through reading. He devoured the works of Cotton Mather and tracts by politicians and other clergyman proclaiming New England’s peculiar destiny to civilize the world. He especially enjoyed the novels of Sir Walter Scott, whose heroes changed the world through the might of their character and their readiness to sacrifice their blood for human justice. He also admired the work of the English poet Felicia Hemans, which was praised for its moral purity.

William Lloyd Garrison’s mother died before his indenture ended in 1825. In one of her final requests to her son that did not involve religion, Frances pleaded with him to “remember[,] . . . for your poor mother’s sake,” the Black woman, Henny, who had kindly cared for her. “Although a slave to man,” Frances wrote her son, she is “yet a free-born soul by the grace of God.”

Freed of his indenture, and now skilled in the printing trade, Garrison moved to Boston and secured an editorship at a temperance paper. He had a personal interest in the temperance movement. His absent father had never left liquor, and his older brother had been seduced by it. Garrison probably would have become one of the most notable voices for temperance of the age. But a year before his Independence Day Address for the American Colonization Society, an itinerant abolitionist came along to change the course of his life.
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Garrison first met the Quaker founder and editor of the
Genius of Universal Emancipation
on March 17, 1828. He sat next to eight esteemed Boston clergymen listening to Benjamin Lundy in the parlor of his boardinghouse, which was owned by a local Baptist minister. Up from Baltimore, Lundy was in town raising money for his newspaper and raising support for emancipation. The wrongs of enslavement Lundy spoke about that night wrenched Garrison’s heart. And Lundy’s activist’s life, no doubt inspired by John Woolman, thrilled Garrison. The man seemed to be straight out of a Walter Scott novel—he had given speeches in nineteen of the twenty-four states, traveled 12,000 miles, engaged in marathon debates with slave owners, been beaten in Baltimore for his beliefs. Authorities had attempted to suppress his paper, but he had kept saying what he believed: “Nothing is wanting . . . but the
will
.” He had continued to publish his crude sketches of slave coffles under the title “Hail Columbia!” and a stinging demand: “LOOK AT IT,
again
and
again!
” While Garrison sat on the edge of his seat, the eight ministers sat back. They politely listened, but only one offered to help. The others saw nothing to gain and a lot to lose in the cause of emancipation. They feared that a push for emancipation would only cause social disorder.

Before the meeting, Garrison—like the lazy ministers sitting beside him—probably thought nothing could be done about the evil institution of slavery. It’s not that they were in favor of it, but that they thought trying to abolish it was a hopeless cause. As Garrison listened to Lundy, everything changed. Garrison crawled into bed that night enthusiastic about working toward Lundy’s aim of provoking “gradual, though total, abolition of slavery in the United States.” Soon after Lundy’s visit, Garrison resigned from his temperance newspaper and thrust himself into the antislavery cause. Little did he know that almost four decades would pass before he could stop pressing America to free itself of slavery.
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ALMOST FROM HIS
first words in 1829, agents of the American Colonization Society knew they had selected the wrong Independence Day speaker. “I am sick of . . . our hypocritical cant about the rights of man,” Garrison bellowed, making the church crowd uncomfortable. We should be demanding “a gradual abolition of slavery,” not promoting colonization. It was a “pitiful subterfuge” to say that liberation would hurt the enslaved. If enslavement had reduced Blacks to “brutes,” then was it “a valid argument to say that therefore they must remain brutes?” Freedom and education would “elevate [Blacks] to a proper rank in the scale of being.”
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Ten days later, Garrison attended a Black Baptist church and participated in the annual celebration of England’s abolition of the slave trade. A White clergyman addressed the largely Black crowd, lecturing them that emancipation was neither wise nor safe without a long period qualifying Blacks for freedom. A murmur of disgust shot from the crowd, and an ACS agent leaped to the speaker’s defense.

The murmur rang in Garrison’s ears as he walked home that night. In the Independence Day Address, he had called immediate emancipation a “wild vision.” But was it really wild? Or was it wilder to stand on some middle ground between sinful slavery and righteous freedom? “I saw there was nothing to stand upon,” Garrison admitted. In August,
Garrison moved to Baltimore to join Benjamin Lundy and co-edit the
Genius of Universal Emancipation
.
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FROM THE EDITORIAL
page of the
Genius of Universal Emancipation
, Garrison called for immediate emancipation in September 1829. This new position was not only a change from his own view of two months earlier, but a stance more bold than even Benjamin Lundy’s. “No valid excuse can be given for the continuance of the evil [of slavery] a single hour,” he wrote—not even colonization. Colonization could be used to relieve some enslaved Africans, of course, but as a solution to the problem of slavery it was “altogether inadequate.”
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A disciple of Denmark Vesey agreed, and he let the world know it about two months later, in November, when he published his
Appeal
. . .
to the Colored Citizens of the World
. Antislavery activist David Walker was part of the Black community in Boston, and Garrison may have already crossed paths with him. The Whites, raged Walker in the pamphlet, were “dragging us around in chains” to enrich themselves, “believing firmly” that Black people had been made to serve them forever. “Did our Creator make us to be slaves?” he asked. “Unless we try to refute Mr. Jefferson’s arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.” Walker appealed for Black people to refute and resist racism, and he had the antiracist foresight to see that racism would only end when slavery ended. Walker told enslaved Blacks to mobilize themselves for the second American revolutionary war.

No Black person could have read Walker’s intoxicating
Appeal
without being moved. And yet Walker watered down his appeal by disparaging the very people he was calling upon to resist. Blacks were “the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began,” he proclaimed. He cited the “inhuman system of slavery,” Black ignorance, preachers, and colonizationists as all being responsible for their present plight. In doing so, he regurgitated the theory of how slavery had made Black people inferior. Walker repeated popular racist contrasts of “enlightened Europe” and wretched Africa,
contrasts that had been reproduced by the gradual abolitionists, colonizationists, and the very enslavers he so fervently opposed. Walker did not, however, share his opponents’ imaginative version of how enlightened Europe had civilized Africa. He spoke instead of “enlightened . . . Europe” plunging the “ignorant” fathers of Black people into a “wretchedness ten thousand times more intolerable.”

In Walker’s historical racism, Africa was the place where “learning [had] originated” in antiquity. It had become a land of “ignorance” since that time, however, because African people had been disobedient to their Maker. Cursed by God, Black people lacked political unity, and that lack of unity had enabled their “natural enemies” in the United States “to keep their feet on our throats.” David Walker was hardly the first, and he was certainly not the last, Black activist to complain about political disunity as a uniquely Black problem—as if White abolitionists were not betraying White enslavers, and as if White people were more politically unified, and therefore superior politically and better able to rule. Voting patterns never did quite support complaints of Black disunity and White unity. In the late 1820s, Black male voters in the Northeast typically supported the fading Federalists, while White male voters were split between the two major parties. (Although the parties have changed, similar voting patterns persist today.)

These racist ideas diluted Walker’s message, and yet it was still intoxicatingly antiracist. Walker identified and decried America’s favorite racist pastime: denying Blacks access to education and jobs and then calling their resultant impoverished state “natural.” In closing, Walker addressed enslaving America, courageously booming that he was prepared to die for the “truth”: “For what is the use of living, when in fact I am dead.” Give us freedom, give us rights, or one day you will “curse the day that you ever were born!” He then reprinted parts of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, imploring Americans to “See your Declaration!” Finally, he asked Americans to compare the “cruelties” England had inflicted on them to those they had inflicted on Black people.
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