What Hath God Wrought (63 page)

Both by precept and example, Walker’s
Appeal
stressed education as a vehicle for black liberation. In this respect, the author reflected mainstream opinion in the African American middle class. Less conventional aspects of Walker’s message made a mark on public attitudes. His denunciation of the colonization movement turned the northern black community decisively against it and to supporting racial equality within American society as the alternative to separation. Walker’s insistence that the literate minority spread his message to the rest of the African American community formed part of his call for black solidarity against oppression. Most shockingly of all, at least to those whites who encountered his pamphlet, Walker called for resistance on the part of the slaves. “Never make an attempt to gain our freedom or
natural right
, from under our cruel oppressors and murderers, until you see your way clear—when that hour arrives and you move, be not afraid or dismayed; then be you assured that Jesus Christ the King of heaven and of earth who is the God of justice and of armies, will surely go before you.” Walker spoke in the biblical prophetic tradition. Unless white America changed its ways, the country was doomed to the wrath of an avenging God.
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David Walker had spent several years in Charleston, South Carolina, where he may well have been involved with Denmark Vesey’s circle. Now, Walker made use of his waterfront contacts to distribute his pamphlet to southern ports, hoping its message would reach an audience that included slaves. To evade southern censorship, he sometimes stitched copies into the coats he sold black sailors. Worcester and Butler, the missionaries to the Cherokees whose cause was vindicated by the Supreme Court, may have carried Walker’s pamphlet. In the months following its publication, authorities in Georgia, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Louisiana confiscated copies of the
Appeal
wholesale. They also passed new laws against circulating seditious literature, isolated black sailors on ships coming into port, and tightened restrictions on black religion and literacy. Rumor had it that southern planters put out a contract on Walker’s life. No wonder that when David Walker died suddenly on August 6, 1830, many suspected poison.
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Walker’s work as a Boston antislavery publicist with a national audience was carried on by a white man named William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison’s sailor father had walked out when the boy was twelve; his mother, a cleaning woman, could give her son little but love and Baptist devotion. Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, a few yards from the tomb of the great revival preacher George Whitefield, Garrison grew to manhood poor, talented, and “all on fire” with religious zeal to set the world aright in preparation for the Second Coming of Christ.
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After experience working in Baltimore for the Quaker Benjamin Lundy on a periodical called
The Genius of Universal Emancipation
, twenty-five-year-old Garrison returned to Boston; with encouragement and help from the black community there he set up his own antislavery newspaper. The first issue of the
Liberator
appeared in January 1831, bearing a statement of editorial policy that became famous.

Within six months, the
Liberator
had a firm circulation base in the black neighborhoods of northern cities as well as financial support from the New York businessmen Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who also supported Charles Finney’s revivals. Defying conventional journalistic practice, Garrison opened his paper’s columns to black and female writers. For the next thirty-five years, the weekly publication of the
Liberator
kept Garrison’s promise of protest until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment purged slavery from the Constitution.

Garrison’s
Liberator
became the most prominent voice of a distinctive antislavery position known as abolitionism, whose platform demanded that emancipation should be immediate, not gradual, without compensation to the masters, and without the deportation or “colonization” of the freedpeople. On January 6, 1832, in the basement of Boston’s African Meeting House, he and others founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society, dedicated to the principles of abolitionism. Within a few years a nationwide American Anti-Slavery Society had been formed, with a network of abolitionist associations operating throughout the North, despite periodic violent harassment from racist mobs. It is conventional for historians to emphasize what a small minority abolitionism constituted. Yet its expansion actually reflected a remarkably successful effort of communication, organization, and influence on the state of opinion. By 1835, the AASS boasted 200 auxiliaries (local chapters), and by 1838, a remarkable 1,350, representing some 250,000 members. This number, the historian Kathleen McCarthy points out, is 2 percent of the U.S. population at the time—making the American Anti-Slavery Society larger, in relation to its American public, than the Boy Scouts of America or the National Wildlife Federation or the National Rifle Association in the year 2000.
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Whether accurate or not, AASS numerical claims carried enough conviction to arouse serious alarm in southern political circles.

While Garrison, like Walker, scorned the Colonization Society, he deliberately courted the constituency that had opposed Indian Removal and associated their cause with his own. In his
Thoughts on African Colonization
(1832), he declared that black organizations were “as unanimously opposed to a removal to Africa, as the Cherokees from the council-fires and graves of their ancestors.”
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Indeed, the controversy over Removal, by demonstrating the evils of expulsion as a way to treat a racial minority, helped discredit African colonization in the eyes of northern reformers. Garrison’s fundamental objection to the colonization movement was its failure to stress the moral evil of slavery. Though regularly condemned as an impractical fanatic, Garrison actually had a sound understanding of the nature of the antislavery cause. It was a battle for public opinion. If a critical segment of public opinion could be brought to recognize slavery as a moral evil, the institution’s days would be numbered.

Failing to capture the imagination of the rising generation of Yankee philanthropists, the colonization movement increasingly fell under the control of southerners. The great debate in Virginia following Nat Turner’s Rebellion represented the best chance that the colonization movement ever had of large-scale implementation. Yet the impulse fell apart when it became apparent that western Virginians supported colonization as a means to get rid of emancipated slaves, whereas eastern Virginians only cared about it as a way to get rid of blacks who were already free. Free black Virginians were rarely interested in voluntary emigration, and western white Virginians were unwilling to deport them forcibly.
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Meanwhile, the Jackson administration decided that the colonization program constituted an implied critique of slavery and curtailed its modest federal funding. Lydia Maria Child’s influential abolitionist
Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans
(1836) declared colonization impractical, as indeed it was without government support. The decline of colonization as a viable option contributed over the long run to the polarization of positions on the slavery issue.

Through his discussion of Walker and his impact, Garrison positioned the
Liberator
as heir to the
Appeal
. Unlike Walker, however, Garrison was a thoroughgoing pacifist and drew the line at violent insurrection. This did nothing to reassure southerners, however, since he also disapproved of government-sponsored violence such as the suppression of insurrection. Sometimes southern editors reprinted
Liberator
articles with their own rebuttals—thereby magnifying Garrison’s fame/notoriety. Nat Turner’s Uprising in the summer of 1831 gave a new immediacy to the issue of whether slavery justified violent resistance. Did northern criticism of slavery incite bloodshed? Had Nat Turner read David Walker? The most likely answer is given by the historian Vincent Harding. Without needing to read Walker, “Nat Turner had long been convinced that the God of Walker’s
Appeal
had always been in Southampton.”
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Yet, rather than admit that slaves inevitably resented their oppression, white southerners usually blamed insurrection on outside agitators.

For quite a while after Turner’s Uprising, the new northern abolitionist organizations refrained from pushing their literature on the South. The debate in the Virginia House of Delegates suggested that southerners themselves might take steps against slavery, even if not the ones that Garrison would find morally sound. However, when nothing had come of Virginia’s debate over slavery by the summer of 1835, it seemed clear that the colonization movement had demonstrated its bankruptcy. Garrison and his New York City counterpart, Elizur Wright, then decided to undertake a major southern propaganda offensive. Their target audience consisted of twenty thousand influential southern whites, including many who had previously criticized slavery in conventional Jeffersonian terms as an unfortunate legacy from previous generations, a problem that could be solved with the help of colonization when the time was ripe. The abolitionists intended to persuade such southern moderates that further procrastination was pointless: The time for emancipation was now, and the colonization movement offered no hope. Their program took advantage of the latest mass-production printing technology and relied on the U.S. mails for distribution. The federal Post Office would not be legally bound by the censorship that southern states had enacted in response to David Walker and Nat Turner.
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The abolitionists printed up 175,000 tracts and would have a million ready by the end of the calendar year, but no more than a handful ever reached their addressees. Southern local authorities had vainly urged the mayor of Boston to crack down on Walker’s
Appeal
and Garrison’s
Liberator
; when the first abolitionist tracts showed up in their local post offices, they took the law into their own hands. Regardless of the fact that the literature was addressed to prominent white citizens, most southerners seemed convinced that it could fall into the hands of literate blacks and incite rebellion. On June 29, 1835, a group of burglars broke into the Charleston, South Carolina, post office and made off with a bag of abolitionist publications that the postmaster had (not coincidentally) sorted out and labeled for their convenience. The next night the contents of the mailbag were burned before a crowd of two thousand.
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In the abolitionists’ fight to influence public opinion, access to the mails was crucial. Postmasters from all over the country began to ask Jackson’s newly appointed postmaster general, Amos Kendall, how they should deal with abolitionist literature. Did they really have to obey the law and deliver the mail? A member of the kitchen cabinet who had ghostwritten some of Jackson’s major state papers, Kendall consulted his chief on August 7, proposing to allow local postmasters to leave antislavery mail undelivered. Old Hickory concurred, calling the abolitionists “monsters” guilty of stirring up “the horrors of a servile war,” who deserved “to atone for this wicked attempt with their lives.” Whereas Kendall expressed the hope to resolve the matter “with as little noise and difficulty as possible,” Jackson characteristically took the issue public. At the next session of Congress, he called for legislation authorizing federal censorship “to prohibit, under severe penalties, the circulation in the Southern States, through the mail, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection.” Until Congress met, Jackson hit upon a scheme to stifle the distribution of abolitionist material. “Direct that those inflamatory [
sic
] papers be delivered to none but who will demand them as subscribers,” he told the postmaster general, and then publish their names as supporters of “exciting the negroes to insurrection and to massacre.” This, the president confidently predicted, would bring them “into such disrepute with all the South, that they would be compelled to desist, or move from the country.”
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Kendall went further. He not only deferred to local sentiment in the South, he even instructed postmasters in the North that although there was no legal authority for them to do so, they were “justified” if they refused to dispatch abolitionist mailings into the South. To shield the administration from legal action, he carefully added that postmasters acted on their own responsibility when they did this.
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