The History of White People (16 page)

So much for the bottom of the American barrel. But Smith also demeans elite southern whites like Thomas Jefferson and his self-satisfied, privileged class. In
Notes on the State of Virginia
Jefferson had scorned the poetry of the Boston slave Phillis Wheatley as proof that
the
Negro could never demonstrate genius. Smith’s retort vindicates black people and insults southern whites: Jefferson was just plain wrong to deride the abilities of a race living so wretchedly, first in Africa, then in American slavery. “Genius,” Smith says, “requires freedom” and the educational and psychological conditions permitting creative thought. Not stopping there, Smith goes after the intellectual abilities of Jefferson’s own class, asking, “Mr. Jefferson, or any other man who is acquainted with American planters, how many of those masters could have written poems equal to those of Phillis Whately [
sic
]?”
²²
In all of this we can see that for a hundred more years, identity of
the
American would contain a contradiction: Americans look and act pretty much the same, but southerners are different—and inferior.

A
S LONG
as observers thought only of European peoples as Americans, the country’s rosy egalitarian image glowed nicely. Always present, however, though little known, was a counterargument that calculated Americanness by experience rather than skin color. Though black authors often generalized about the character of white people, most of their commentary came in the form of asides embedded in work focused on people of African descent. David Walker and Hosea Easton represented their views, addressing their fellow Americans as critics of white supremacy.
²³

In 1829 David Walker (1785–1830), a thoughtful and politically engaged African American living in Boston, published an eighty-page tract with a jaw-breaking title:
David Walker’s Appeal: in four articles, together with a preamble, to the coloured citizens of the world, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of America
.
*
Born free in Wilmington, North Carolina, Walker had moved to Boston around 1825 and made his living as a dealer in used clothing. Among his many activities, he wrote for and distributed the nation’s first black newspaper,
Freedom’s Journal
, and frequently delivered public addresses at black Bostonians’ celebrations—of Haitian independence, for instance, or a visit to Boston by an African prince recently emancipated from southern slavery. A Mason and Methodist (but a critic of black religiosity), Walker was well known and well respected as an activist among Boston’s black people, who numbered about one thousand, and within the antislavery community that surrounded William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison reviewed
Walker’s Appeal
positively in an early number of the
Liberator
, soon to become the nation’s most influential abolitionist periodical.

Walker’s Appeal
spread a wide net, excoriating “whites” and, indeed, “Christian America” for its inhumanity and hypocrisy. Over the long sweep of immutable racial history, Walker traces two essences. On one side lies black history, beginning with ancient Egyptians (“Africans or coloured people, such as we are”) and encompassing “our brethren the Haytians.” On the other lie white people, cradled in bloody, deceitful ancient Greece. Racial traits within these opposites never change:

Murder, Walker concludes, remains the central feature of whiteness, though a sliver of hope for their future might reside in the American heritage of freedom—he ends by quoting the Declaration of Independence, which he exempts from white Americans’ wickedness. The English, for instance, had surmounted their history, turned their backs on slaving, and offered black people the hand of friendship. Once the English stopped oppressing the Irish, Walker opines, their regeneration would be complete.
²⁴
At bottom,
David Walker’s Appeal
speaks to “white Christians,” blaming, ridiculing, and threatening them with destruction in retribution for their mistreatment of blacks. Given white people’s moral and behavioral weaknesses, he wonders, coyly, just which is the inferior race: “I, therefore, in the name and fear of the Lord and God of Heaven and of earth, divested of prejudice either on the side of my colour or that of the whites, advance my suspicion of them whether they are as
good by nature
as we are or not.”
²⁵
This is not to say that Walker was ready to boast about the slaves: as for black people, “we, (coloured people of these United States of America) are the
most wretched, degraded
and
abject
set of beings that
ever lived
since the world began.” He aimed pointed criticism at free northern blacks: “some of them can write a good hand, but who, notwithstanding their neat writing, may be almost as ignorant, in comparison, as a horse.” Walker discerns “a mean, servile spirit” among the people he calls “my colour.” Only when black people organize and throw off the oppressor’s yoke will they “arise from this death-like apathy” and “be men!”
²⁶

Walker’s Appeal
testifies to its author’s immersion in the classics of American and European culture as well as to his familiarity with current politics affecting the Irish, Jews, and Greeks. He strongly indicts white American hypocrisy as exhibited by the Declaration of Independence and the work of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had died in 1826, but Walker, like Samuel Stanhope Smith, felt that the insults from an American of Jefferson’s stature demanded a response. How could Jefferson, a man of enormous learning and “excellent natural parts,” stoop to judge “a set of men in chains.” Jefferson may have believed that black people wanted to be white, but in this he is “dreadfully deceived—we wish to be just as it pleased our Creator to have made us.”
²⁷

An effective promoter, Walker spread his
Appeal
widely, even, via black and white sailors, into the slaveholding South, where it made its author well known and much hated. The incendiary pamphlet, addressed directly to African Americans, so alarmed Virginia’s upper classes that discussion of it took place in a closed-door session of the General Assembly. In New Bern and Wilmington, North Carolina, any black readers associated with
Walker’s Appeal
paid with their lives.
²⁸

In 1830, at only forty-five years of age, Walker died of tuberculosis. That scourge of the nineteenth-century urban poor had, only days before, taken his daughter. A few months earlier, he had issued what became, by default, the final edition of
Walker’s Appeal
. Now, Boston’s Maria Stewart, the first American woman to publicly address “promiscuous” audiences (i.e., audiences including women as well as men), eulogized Walker as “most noble, fearless, and undaunted.” In the revolutionary year of 1848, the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet lauded Walker as a tireless fighter for freedom. Walker’s activism, Garnet concludes, “made his memory sacred.” Walker’s memory remained vivid among abolitionists well into the mid-nineteenth century, only to fade after the Civil War. But meanwhile, he had struck a strong blow against the notion that whiteness, throughout history, deserved to be judged positively.
²⁹

T
HE
R
EVEREND
Hosea Easton (1799–1837) of Hartford, Connecticut, had been born into an activist family with a quintessentially American mixed background, but of a sort Crèvecoeur had not been able to see. Easton’s mother was of at least partial African ancestry, and his father, James, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, had descended from Wampanoag and Narragansett Indians. After the war James Easton had prospered as an iron manufacturer in North Bridgewater (now Brockton, Massachusetts). With his complicated lineage, Hosea identified himself as “colored,” effectively suppressing the Indian ancestry, probably in the interest of achieving undisputed citizenship.
*

Color lines were hardening in the first quarter of the nineteenth century in Massachusetts, with the result that the Easton family found itself rejected from the public sphere. After a long, spirited, dispiriting, and losing protest against enforcement of racial segregation in their local school and church, James Easton opened a school for colored youth in the mid-1810s.

Becoming a minister and following in his father’s activist footsteps, Hosea Easton attended the first meeting of the National Convention of Free People of Color in Philadelphia in 1831, when he was thirty-two. Times were harsh for people of color, and a mob of angry white supremacists attacked Easton’s parishioners and burned down his church in Hartford in 1836. Not one to back off, Easton issued his response the following year in the form of
A Treatise on the Intellectual Character and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States; and the Prejudice Exercised towards Them: with a Sermon on the Duty of the Church to Them
.
³⁰

Citing ancient and current history, Easton’s
Treatise
echoes
David Walker’s Appeal
by comparing the history of Africa—starting with Ham and ancient Egypt—to Europe’s from its roots in ancient Greece. A stout Afrocentrist, Easton maintains that black and brown ancient Egyptians taught the Greeks everything of value. Conversely, he considers European history one long saga of bloodletting, a particular irony since nineteenth-century Europeans and white Americans loudly proclaimed themselves superior in civilization:

Five and a half pages of grisly wrongs perpetrated by Europeans through the ages close, “Any one who has the least conception of true greatness, on comparing the two races by means of what history we have, must decide in favor of the descendants of Ham. The Egyptians alone have done more to cultivate such improvements as comports to the happiness of mankind, than all the descendants of Japhet put together.”

What white supremacists praise as the products of energy and enterprise, Easton describes as booty obtained

In a slight concession, Easton connects civilization to white people, but only as an outcome of violence rather than of innate intelligence. White people are not smarter; they are meaner.

Despite their pungency, neither
Walker’s Appeal
nor Easton’s
Treatise on the Intellectual Character
ever truly penetrated the public consciousness at home or in Europe during the nineteenth century. The visibility of
Walker’s Appeal
grew in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but never approached the reputation of the champion of foreign analysts.

D
EMOCRACY IN
A
MERICA
must hold a record as the most quoted French text in the United States. The Princeton University Library holds thirty-one English editions of the originally two-volume work, published to great acclaim in 1835 and 1840. The reason for such popularity is not far to seek. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) not only approved of the United States; he possessed a lineage Americans prized in their visiting friends. (See figure 8.3, Alexis de Tocqueville.)