Bounds of Their Habitation Page 8
African American writers and orators repeated many of the same phrases about the divinely appointed destiny of America as did their white contemporaries. This did not mean they spared America of biting critiques for its racist oppression, but that they saw the true American ideals as within the “ultimate design of God.” As black writer William J. Wilson put it, “On this continent, which for so many centuries lay buried from sight of civilization, God intends in his providence, ultimately to bring men of every clime, and hue, and tongue, in one great harmony, to perfect the greater system of man’s highest earthly government.” In this scheme, black Americans were the agents of national redemption and salvation, for, as one Pennsylvanian expressed it, “God may use them to save this nation from that abyss of ruin towards which its brutal pride and folly are driving it headlong.” And, if America was to be God’s instrument, then it would be necessary first to “purify her own domains,” such that the “laws of our country may cease to conflict with the spirit of that sacred instrument, the Declaration of Independence.”
Blacks capitalized on the rhetoric of republicanism, for it provided a powerful intellectual basis for an antislavery argument. Antislavery advocates found their most powerful voice in Frederick Douglass. After escaping from his Maryland plantation in the 1830s, Douglass then embarked on a remarkable career as an internationally known evangelist for human freedom. A brilliant writer and polemicist, Douglass was probably the single most effective proselytizer for the antislavery cause. In the 1840s and 1850s, while residing in Rochester and publishing the black abolitionist organ the North Star, he rhetorically devastated the slave system and the so-called revivalism that accompanied the spread of the iniquitous institution. As Douglass told one gathering, “Revivals in religion, and revivals in the slave trade, go hand in hand together. The church and the slave prison stand next to each other, the groans and cries of the heartbroken slave are often drowned in the pious devotions of his religious master . . . while the blood-stained gold goes to support the pulpit, the pulpit covers the infernal business with the garb of Christianity.” Douglass highlighted the hypocritical pieties of white southern slaveholding religion, in part through his famous mocking imitations of white southern preachers, as recounted in this episode from a meeting he addressed:
They would take a text—say this: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” And this is the way they would apply it. They would explain it to mean, “slaveholders, do unto slaveholders what you would have them do unto you:”—and then looking impudently up to the slaves’ gallery, (for they have a place set apart for us, though it is said they have no prejudice, just as is done here in the northern churches;) looking high up to the poor colored drivers, and the rest, and spreading his hands gracefully abroad, he says, (mimicking,) “And you too, my friends, have souls of infinite value—souls that will live through endless happiness or misery in eternity. Oh, labor diligently to make your calling and election sure. Oh, receive into your souls these words of the hold apostle—‘Servants, be obedient unto your masters.’ (Shouts of laughter and applause.) Oh, consider the wonderful goodness of God! Look at your hard, horny hands, your strong muscular frames, and see how mercifully he has adapted you to the duties you are to fulfill! (continued laughter and applause) while to your masters, who have slender frames and long delicate fingers, he has given brilliant intellects, that they may do the thinking, while you do the working.” (Shouts of applause.)
Douglass memorably extended his withering satire in his famous speech “The Meaning of July Fourth to the Negro,” delivered in Rochester in 1852. The first half of the lengthy address praises the founding fathers for what they accomplished in standing up to the British. Indeed, Douglass suggests that July 4 for Americans was akin to the Passover celebration for Jews, a sign of great deliverance from an evil tyranny. Midway through, though, Douglass pivots to an analysis of the meaning of July 4 for the more than three million slaves who remained in bondage. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” he asks rhetorically, and then answers that the day simply reveals the “injustice and cruelty” of the United States for black Americans:
To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour. Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
Douglass concluded that slavery demonstrated that American republicanism was a “sham” and its much-vaunted Christianity a “lie.” Slavery, he said, “saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing and a bye-word to a mocking earth.” It blocked progress, endangered the Union, stanched education, fostered boastful pride and vice, and yet Americans clung to it “as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom.”
Unlike some radical abolitionists, white and black, Douglass maintained a strong faith in the Constitution. Even his famous speech on the meaning of the Fourth of July to the slave ends with a paean to the constitutional wisdom of the founders and a plea to work within the American constitutional system. Douglass’s faith in American Christianity, however, was not so strong. And over the antebellum years, romantic nationalism and American messianism gave way increasingly to a language of racial separatism. Black religious thought entertained the notion that black Americans were to take the initiative in pressing forward God’s will. Black minister Henry Highland Garnet most clearly articulated black nationalist ideas. Garnet delivered his famous “Address to the Slaves of the United States” to a national convention in 1843. Considered too inflammatory to publish then—Frederick Douglass judged “that there was too much physical force, both in the address and the remarks of the speaker last up”—it appeared in print five years later along with David Walker’s Appeal. They were probably the two most widely read and discussed classics of antebellum black nationalism. Recounting the history of the forced migration of African Americans to the land of slavery, Garnet determined that God had “frowned upon the nefarious institution, and thunderbolts, red with vengeance, struggled to leap forth to blast the guilty wretches who maintained it.” It was too late, for slavery already had “stretched its dark wings of death over the land” even as the Church stood by silently—“the priests prophesied falsely, and the people loved to have it so. Its throne is established, and now it reigns triumphant.” Garnet made his view as directly as he could, with language resonant from Walker’s Appeal: “TO SUCH DEGRADATION IT IS SINFUL IN THE EXTREME FOR YOU TO MAKE VOLUNTARY SUBMISSION.” Garnet recognized the “forlorn condition” of slaves, but insisted this did not “destroy your moral obligation to God,” for it was the slaves’ “SOLEMN AND IMPERATIVE DUTY TO USE EVERY MEANS, BOTH MORAL, INTELLECTUAL, AND PHYSICAL THAT PROMISES SUCCESS . . . The humblest peasant is as free in the sight of God as the proudest monarch that ever swayed a scepter. Liberty is a spirit sent out from God, and like its great Author, is no respecter of persons.” The motto of black Americans should be “resistance! Resistance! RESISTANCE! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance.”
The 1843 convention in Buffalo narrowly voted down Garnet’s call for physical resistance. They recognized that any direct call for bloodshed was
suicidal and a result either of “an unpardonable impatience or an atheistic want of faith in the power of truth as a means of regenerating and reforming the world.” Instead, figures such as Frederick Douglass and Alexander Crummell insisted that the “voice of God and of common sense, equally point out a more excellent way, and that way is a faithful, earnest, and persevering enforcement of the great principles of justice and morality, religion and humanity. . . . Let us invoke the Press and appeal to the pulpit to deal out the righteous denunciations of heaven against oppression, fraud and wrong, and the desire of our hearts will soon be given us in the triumph of Liberty throughout all the land.” But black conventions continued the struggle, insisting, as did the 1847 National Convention of Colored People in Troy, New York, that “there shall be no peace to the wicked, and that this guilty nation shall have no peace, and that we will do all that we can to agitate! AGITATE!! AGITATE!!”
While the monumental figure of Frederick Douglass consistently articulated universalist ideals of black integration into the American Republic and resistance to all forms of separatism or colonization, black nationalists such as Garnet and Martin Delany pressed the case for resistance and separate black institutions. As Delany put it:
Our friends in this and other countries, anxious for our elevation, have for years been erroneously urging us to lose our identity as a distinct race, declaring that we were the same as other people; while at the very same time their own representative was traversing the world and propagating the doctrine in favor of a universal AngloSaxon predominance. The “Universal Brotherhood,” so ably and eloquently advocated by that Polyglot Christian Apostle of this doctrine had established as its basis, a universal acknowledgement of the Anglo-Saxon rule.
The truth is, we are not identical with the Anglo-Saxon or any other race of the Caucasian or pure white type of the human family, and the sooner we know and acknowledge this truth, the better for ourselves and posterity.
The “determined aim of the whites,” Delany said, was to “crush the colored races wherever found,” with the Anglo-Saxon taking the lead in “this work of universal subjugation.”
CONCLUSION
Free northern black thinkers, ministers, and educators debated the merits of universalist aspiration within a white Republic that defined African Americans as dishonored aliens. Meanwhile, southern slaves created powerful forms of cultural expression that suggested the depth of theological ideas held by the most oppressed in American society. In both cases, black Americans let it be known that the bounds of their habitation set by white Americans were not those of their own making or of God’s plan. As slavery exploded through the Southeast, ranging from the Chesapeake to the Brazos by the end of the antebellum era, and as free blacks faced narrowed options and heightened restrictions in the northern states, black Christians turned to the language of the Bible to envision freedom and justice. The Civil War seemed, for a time, to vindicate that hope.
3
Religious Ways of Knowing Race in Antebellum America
THROUGH THE ANTEBELLUM YEARS, evangelicalism and slavery exploded across the American landscape nearly simultaneously. The movement of peoples into new states and territories fueled the growth of an evangelical and benevolent empire. A myth of innocence wrapped together benevolent and violent expansion into a single ideological and material force that subsumed other peoples, propelled the massive internal slave trade from the Upper South to the Lower South, and began to create the evangelical South of the antebellum era. At the same time, the combination of forces arising from the antislavery movement in antebellum America and then the force of the war itself radically challenged how Americans conceived of the bounds of habitation in race and religion. So did early encounters with “other” religions, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism, first seriously discussed by the same intellectuals of the era who were involved in antislavery thought and politics. The boundaries of race, religion, and Christianity were in flux and highly contested in the antebellum era, even as evangelicalism established itself as the dominant force in American religious life for a good many ordinary people.
This chapter explores these themes through the persons of the slave rebel Nat Turner and the anonymous collective authors of the slave spirituals which came to be the defining cultural expression of the Christianity of enslaved people, through the writings of proslavery thinkers such as Richard Furman and Stephen Elliott and through a variety of intellectuals who experimented in early versions of what would later come to be called “comparative religion,” including Hannah Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. The story focuses on the dual forces of expansion and contraction. White Americans tried to define themselves in relationship to “others” around them. Meanwhile, those others made their voices known even when enslaved and oppressed.
NAT TURNER AND THE DANGERS OF SLAVE CHRISTIANITY
In August 1831, whites in Southampton County, Virginia, discovered in Nat Turner their worst nightmare of what evangelical notions of equality and liberty might produce. Instigator of the bloody uprising that month that took the lives of nearly sixty whites and, in the aftermath, a number of blacks executed in revenge, Turner was a Baptist messianist who sensed a divine mission to purge the guilty land with blood. From his younger years, he felt he had been set aside for some special purpose. He confirmed his mission while reflecting on biblical verses which convinced him that the same “Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days” now had come to him, and that he had been “ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty.” Visions from the skies told him that the “Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent.” Later, visions of blood in the morning dew foretold his targeted campaign of violence directed against local slaveholding families in his immediate vicinity. After being captured and tried a few months later, when asked if he still felt justified given his impending execution, Turner replied simply, “Was not Christ crucified?”
Turner’s revolt shocked and unsettled Virginians in a way comparable to how the violence of September 11 upended the national psyche. Contemporary commentators in Virginia pinned the blame for Turner’s rampage on an egalitarian religious fanaticism. Evangelicals, many believed, were to blame. Their message effectively incited insurrection. A report from a Richmond newspaper blasted evangelical preachers who were full of a “ranting cant about equality.” After the Southampton County bloodbath, Virginia Baptists gathered numerous reports that since Turner’s revolt, black members had “constantly exhibited a most rebellious and ungovernable disposition.” John Floyd, the governor of a state whose white citizens now felt themselves under siege, interpreted Turner’s revolt as the culmination of a chilling logic coming from those who had sown the “spirit of insubordination” in the South by “telling the blacks, God was no respecter of persons—the black man was as good as the white—that all men were born free and equal—that they cannot serve two masters—that the white people rebelled against England to obtain freedom, so have the blacks a right to do.” The governor was convinced that “every black preacher in the whole country east of the Blue Ridge was in the secret.” Allegedly, they had been egged on by northern abolitionist presses and by those who had made them “aspire to an equal station” in life. By 1832, Baptist churches began examining black members for signs of incipient insurrection, refusing to ordain black men to preach, and authorizing white members to serve as patrollers. The bounds of the habitation of southern slaves, even Christianized ones, were straitening.
Discussions of the Nat Turner revolt in the Virginia legislature in 1832 considered the future of slavery in the state. The final votes, however, closed down any remaining hopes for emancipation, whether gradual or immediate. The revolt instead helped to spur the “mission to the slaves,” a concerted effort to propagate Christian doctrine in slave communities. In addition, it led to a significant strengthening of proslavery thought. Christi
anity wove its way into the ideology of the master class. At the same time, subversive readings of the Bible and of Christianity spread through slave communities. It periodically frightened white authorities enough to monitor or prohibit black religious meetings.
By the 1830s, southern clerics and intellectuals had elaborated a vigorous theological defense of the peculiar institution. Some of them argued that slavery was a necessary evil, a living emblem of man’s sinful and fallen state. For them, slavery was the lesser of evils. It could not be abolished without bringing even greater evils (anarchy, sedition, or even race mixing) in its wake. Others interpreted slavery as a kind of Christian way station, educating black converts in Christianity so that in God’s due time they could carry the message back to their home continent.
Some took up more folkloric or mythic explanations justifying the peculiar institution. Passages from the Old Testament, especially Genesis 9:18–27 (which outlined the curse on Canaan, son of Ham, who had originally espied Noah’s naked drunkenness), provided at least a start at a religiomythical grounding for modern racial meanings. The “curse” on Canaan, son of Ham, originated in the medieval era, with deep roots in antisemitism. It was revived as a mode of biblical interpretation during the modern age of exploration. As Americans came to understand it, Ham as a figure represented black people. Shem stood in variously sometimes for Indians, other times for Jews. Japheth supposedly was the progenitor of white people. God had doomed Ham’s offspring to lives of servitude to the superior racial descendants of Shem and Japheth and commanded those blessed with a white heritage to avoid contaminating themselves through intermixing. Allusions to the passage appeared frequently in antebellum biblical discussions, sermons, Sunday School lessons, and sectional polemics. The Ham fable deeply, but incompletely, penetrated the consciousness of ordinary white southern Christians. The story seemed to justify racial separation, but the reference to slavery had to be inferred. Moreover, the story’s meanings were unstable and subject to dubious speculative interpretations that disturbed orthodox white churchgoers. While many of the best-educated theologians had little patience with it, the story persisted, haunting southern (and American) thought for centuries. It was, according to the historian Winthrop Jordan, “probably sustained by a feeling that blackness could scarcely be anything but a curse and by the common need to confirm the facts of nature by specific reference to Scripture.”