Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 8: William Freehling on slavery debates in Viriginia

Today I'm linking to a 2010 lecture by historian William Freehling on Pre-Civil War Virginia Showdowns C-Span 09/30/2010. The full lecture available at the C-Span link is not available for embedding here.

Their YouTube channel has a brief clip, Virginia Showdowns and Secession 10/18/2010, also not available for embedding here. They also provide this descriptive comments there:

The most populous slave state in the south prior to the Civil War was Virginia. The debate to abolish slavery in 1832 and the 1861 secession debate became critical showdowns as the Old Dominion struggled to decide whether to stay with the Union or join the Confederacy. Author William Freehling explores both topics at a recent talk given at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond.

He gives a good sense here of the complexity of the slavery question in Virginia politics between the American Revolution and the Civil War. He reminds us that the debate over slavery was prompted by Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 was the occasion for the two-week debate in the legislature.

One of Freehling's important insights is useful for people to day who may struggle to understand that white Americans could be both antislavery and racist against black people. Racist ideas were already in the air and developing rapidly from a variety of sources. But the experience of the voluntary abolition of slavery by Northern states showed a pattern of opposition to slavery being associated with a low percentage of black in the population.

It actually makes sense, though it seems counter-intuitive today. If there were a lot of black people in areas like eastern Virginia, it meant in practice there were a lot of slaves. And with a lot of slaves came a class of wealthy slaveowners who defended the institution of slavery and worked hard to convince other whites to do the same. Areas where there were fewer slaves were areas with a less powerful slaveowning group had less proximate defenses of slavery. And he describes in the case of what became West Virginia when it split off to remain with the Union after Virginia's secession, the whites in those areas resented the disproportionate representation that the eastern Viriginia slaveowners had under the state Constitution. The US Constitution itself in its infamous "three-fifths" clause awarded representation to states based on their slave population, but the slaves themselves weren't allowed to vote. This created an electoral bonus for the slave states that became a major source of regional resentment in the North.

This phenomenon also meant that white Americans in the "whiter" parts of the country came to associate slavery with the presence of black people, including free black people. And vice-versa. Which meant that whites could be bitterly antislavery and also bitterly hostile to black people. That's by no means the whole story of white racism in the pre-Civil War US. But it's an important part of it.

And it speaks specifically to the claim by present-day defenders of the Confederacy that the Civil War couldn't have been about slavery because Northern whites hated black people, too.

It's worth recalling in this regard that one of the most famous prewar antislavery books was Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South (1857). I discussed Helper's book in a blog post even before I started doing these Confederate "Heritage" Month posts every year. John Brown's body lies a-mold'ring in the grave 11/02/2003:

I was glad to see the reference to Hinton Helper, an antislavery Southerner who published a book in 1857 (the year of the infamous Dred Scott decision) called The Impending Crisis of the South. His book goes into a great deal of detail comparing the Northern and Southern economies, relying heavily on contemporary economic statistics. He argues that the Northern industrial/commercial economy was far more efficient and prosperous, and refutes some of the most prominent arguments of pro-slavery propagandists.

He also emphasizes how slavery damaged the interests of non-slaveholding whites in the South. In a weird sort of way, Helper's argument is made even stronger by the fact that the guy was a white supremacist. That comes out at places in the book. After the Civil War, he published books advocating the explusion of African-Americans from the United States (which we would call "ethnic cleansing" today).

Helper was no saintly prophet of multiculturalism, in other words. But he was dead-on in his analysis of slavery. And The Impending Crisis of the South still makes fascinating reading to get an idea of the terms in which slavery was debated by contemporaries prior to the Civil War.

Freehling in the linked lecture argues that the "antislavery" debates in the Virginia Legislature in 1832 were actually about how to "whiten" Virginia. Since slavery was associated with the presence of black people, the white Virginians assumed that ending slavery would necessarily entail getting rid of most of the black people in Virginia.

This was the idea behind the notion of "returning" African-Americans to Africa, favored by white leaders of the stature of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. (And revived in radically different context by white supremacist Sen. Theodore Bilbo after the Second World War.) The American Colonization Society was established for that purpose, as reported in the linked article from KQED's Africans in America resources (article not dated):

The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 to assist free black people in emigrating to Africa, was the brainchild of the Reverend Robert Finley, a Presbyterian minister from Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Finley believed that blacks would never be fully integrated into American society and that they would only be able to fulfill their potential as human beings in Africa, the "land of their fathers." He saw colonization as a charitable work, one that would benefit American blacks and Africans alike through the spreading of Christianity to Africa. He also thought that it would prompt a gradual end to slavery.

In keeping with the popular thought of the day, Finley saw the presence of blacks in America as a threat to the national well-being and the quality of life for whites. He said that free blacks were "unfavorable to our industry and morals" and that removing them would save Americans from difficulties such as interracial marriage and having to provide for poor blacks. ...

In a series of meetings [at the end of 1816], the group adopted a constitution, chose officers, and decided to call themselves the "American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United States." Bushrod Washington, the nephew of George Washington, was chosen as president of the society. Vice presidents included Finley, Henry Clay, and Richard Rush, the son of Benjamin Rush. Andrew Jackson was included on the list without his consent; in reality he was a staunch anti-colonizationist. Caldwell was the organization's secretary, and Key was on the board of managers.

The motives of the ACS members varied considerably. Some were genuine allies of free blacks, and were concerned for their welfare. Some hoped that colonization would eradicate slavery. Others wanted to maintain the institution of slavery but to rid the country of free blacks, who they believed posed a serious threat as potential fomenters of slave rebellion. [my emphasis]

In reality, whatever the motives, it was an impractical idea that was fundamentally cruel. The idea never found more than a small number of supporters among African-Americans, including those like Frederick Douglass who became important Abolitionist leaders.

Although there was enough practicality in the idea that the American Colonization Society was able to establish settlement areas in what became the nation of Liberia in 1947 and a small number of blacks from America were settled there under the auspices of the Society.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 27: Colonization and Republican Abolitionism

Historian William Freehling in his two volumes on The Road to Disunion (Vol 1: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 [1990] and Secessionists Triumphant 1854-1861 [2007]) provides some highly informative discussion of interaction among white racism, slavery and Abolitionism. In my last post, I discussed the American Colonization Society, which many white Abolitionists supported but nevertheless promoted and pandered to white hostility toward blacks.

In Secessionists Triumphant, Freehling describes how the new Republican Party founded in 1854 used an advocacy of colonization, i.e., resettling of blacks from the US to Africa, to widen the appeal of their opposition to slavery:

The colonization strategy also helped distinguish radical abolitionists from moderate Republicans. Garrisonian antislavery campaigns assaulted colonizationists as vehemently as slaveholders. These radicals called expelling blacks as repulsive as enslaving the unfortunates.

By embracing supposedly repulsive colonization, Republicans completed the task of drawing the fangs from antislavery radicalism, yet still claiming its moral glory. They sought ultimate freedom from slaveholders for blacks - but immediate freedom from the Slave Power for whites. They favored emancipation in the South-but only if Southerners became the emancipators. They would lure southern emancipators - but only with federal patronage. They would help allay southern racism - but only with freedmen's federal tickets to Africa. [my emphasis](p. 103)

He notes that "Southern ultras" also opposed colonization because they worried about its potential to undermine slavery. "If the general welfare required blacks to be removed, couldn't the general government free more blacks to remove?" is how Freehling summarizes their argument.

Henry Clay (1777-1852), prominent supporter of the American Colonization Society

Henry Clay, known as the Great Compromiser, was a prominent supporter of the American Colonization Society. He explained his support for sending free blacks to African this way: "Of all classes of our population, the most vicious is that of the free colored people. Contaminated themselves, they extend their vices to all around them. They are the most corrupt, abandoned, and depraved." (Quoted by Henry Wilson in History of The Rise and Fall of The Slave Power in America, Vol 1 []1872)

Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager and William Leutchtenburg in A Concise History of the American Republic (1977) briefly recount the history of the American Colonization Society this way:

... in 1817 the American Colonization Society was founded with the aim of doing for American Negroes what the Republic of Israel later did for Jews - to give them back a part of their homeland, though with the frank admission that the Negro, free or slave, had no place in American society. To further this enterprise, the . A.C.S. purchased from native tribes several tracts along the Grain Coast of West Africa; and several thousand American blacks had been settled by 1847, when they organized the Republic of Liberia, with a capital named Monrovia after President Monroe, and a constitution modeled on that of the United States. However, when the A.C.S., having scraped the barrel of private benevolence, appealed to Congress for federal aid in 1827, Southerners opposed the movement as jeopardizing the supply of slaves and abolitionists denounced it as a subtle attempt to increase the value of the remaining slaves in America. The A. C. S., though discouraged, continued its work to the Civil War, but without congressional backing for colonization, moral suasion against slavery appeared to have spent its force. (p. 226) [my emphasis]

John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr. in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (2003) pointed to the support of the colonization concept by both Abolitionists and slavery advocates, emphsizing here the rejection of it by white Abolistionist leader William Lloyd Garrison:

Although antislavery forces had for years believed that colonization was one way of relieving the country of its dreaded "Negro problem," militant abolitionists were on the whole unalterably opposed to colonization. They were suspicious of it because of the support it received from slaveholders, who could not be interested in putting an end to slavery as an institution. Abolitionists felt, as the great majority of blacks did, that colonization was primarily for the purpose of draining off the free black population in order to make slavery even more secure. Garrison said that the American Colonization Society had "inflicted a great injury upon the free and slave population; first by strengthening the prejudices of the people; secondly, by discouraging the education of those who are free; thirdly, by inducing passage of severe legislative enactments; and, finally, by lulling the whole county into a deep sleep." (p. 195) [my emphasis]

Ultimately, only about 12,000 Americans of African descent were colonized into Africa, almost all of them to Liberia. Franklin and Moss observe, "In Liberia, ... the cost of living was high and the colony's affairs were mismanaged." The motion that the US black population could be successfully colonized into Africa was always very far-fetched. Not only did the idea have limited support among whites, most free blacks also opposed it, especially in the North: "it was not economically feasible to send hundreds of thousands of blacks to African or anywhere else."

Although some slavery advocates worried about the possible antislavery effects of colonization, Franklin and Moss explain that the general attitude among slavery advocates was more inclined to support colonization of free blacks to Africa: "Slaveholders hoped, of course, to drain off the free black population, thereby giving great security to the institution of slavery." Franklin and Moss toward stress that even by the late 1920s, outright hostility toward the colonization project was widespread and intense among free blacks:

Every convention of blacks opposed colonization, and the leaders spoke and wrote against the scheme. Martin R. Delany was especially hostile to the American Colonization Society, which he described as "anti-Christian in its character and misanthropic in its pretended sympathies." He denounced the leaders as "arrant hypocrites" who were conducting an organization that was obviously "one of the Negro's worst enemies." The main motive of colonization, he claimed, was to eliminate blacks from the United States, and for that purpose a government had been set up in Africa that was "not independent - but a poor miserable mockery - a burlesque on a government." (p. 190)

Tags: american colonization society, confederate heritage month 2013, slavery, white racism

Confederate"Heritage" Month, April 26: The American Colonization Society

Henry Wilson in the 1872 History of the Rise and Fall of The Slave Power in America, Vol 1 (Negro Universities Press; New York) wrote about the American Colonization Society and its contradictory program. Its goal was to resettle Americans of African descent in Africa. Wilson writes:

The American Colonization Society was organized in the year 1816, in the city of Washington. Auxiliary societies were soon formed in most of the States. This association, with its affiliated organizations, contributed in no small degree to influence the opinions and actions of men, and to intensify the irrepressible conflict of the last half-century. In its original formation and subsequent progress, in its avowals, arguments, and acts, it was always singularly inconsistent and illogical. It manifestly yielded and pandered to the wicked prejudice against race and color; and yet it called upon churches and Christians to assist in sustaining it as an essential part of the missionary enterprise. It cruelly aspersed and defamed the free people of color; and yet insisted that they were the preordained instruments of Heaven for the civilization of Africa. It evinced the most undisguised hostility to Abolition and Abolitionists; and yet it persistently pressed its claims on the friends of the slave. While it embraced many wise and good men, actuated by philanthropic and Christian principles, its history compels the conviction that, unwittingly or f:om design, its influence was largely instrumental in producing that sad demoralization of the nation which rendered possible the subsequent aggressions and triumphs of the Slave Power. (pp. 208-9)

It became common among critics of slavery before the civil war to refer to the Southern block of slave states as the Slave Power. It seems like a perfectly fine description to me.

Colonization was a popular notion among many white opponents of slavery. But Wilson argued that the American Colonization Society "was to render slavery and its supporters more secure." And the colonization movement was by no means all an antislavery movement. The put a major focus on resettled free blacks outside the United States. As Wilson put it:

The same principle was clearly recognized and avowed by Mr. Webster, in his 7th of March speech, in which, among his other overtures for Southern confidence, he pledged his support to any proposition "or scheme of colonization" the South might see fit to propose, "to relieve themselves from the burden of their free colored population." Though many Northern antislavery men and Christians were lending it their aid, for the promised good to Africa and the Africans, its leading members and supporters were characterizing property in man as "sacred," "as inviolable as any other in the country." They said to the slaveholders: "We know your rights, and we respect them." They claimed Southern support on the ground, as expressed by [John] Randolph at its first meeting, that it "-would prove one of the greatest securities" to such property. This idea even the" Repository" expressed, again and again, in different forms and phrases. It declared that removing free people of color" would contribute more effectually to the continuance and strength" of slavery than anything else; "would augment instead of diminishing the value of the property left behind"; "would secure slaveholders and the whole Southern country"; would render the slave who remains in America more obedient, more faithful, more honest, and, consequently, more useful to his master; and "'would provide and keep open a drain for the excess beyond the occasion of profitable employment." (p. 214)

The white racism in Northern states in antebellum times plays a big role in dishonest neo-Confederate polemics which seek to deny the role of slavery in the Civil War and wanted to minimize and detract from the nature of Southern slavery. "How could the Civil War have been about slavery when Northern whites were racists, too?" goes the argument.

For those actually trying to understand what went on, it's important to be careful to not apply anachronistic thinking, projecting current standards onto earlier times. In 2013, anyone expressing some kind of sympathy for slavery or defending it is almost certainly doing so from a white racist perspective. And most people would be very aware of that. But not even present-day segregationists for the most part would defend slavery explicitly. You can be a white racist and not defend slavery.

That was also true in the 19th century. But the immediate context was different. William Freehling has done an admirable job in explaining how the absence of slavery was also associated in the minds of the white majority with the absence of black people. Northern states voluntarily abolished slavery as the proportion of the white population grew, so abolition in the minds of many white Northerners was associated with the reduction of the number of blacks as a percentage of the population. Many whites also saw slave labor as a threat to the wages, farm income and opportunities of white workers and farmers, without making a sharp distinction in that regard between slaves and the much smaller number of free blacks. "Blacks" and "slaves" were heavily identified concepts, and so for many whites, absence of slaves equated to absence of blacks.

And so it was not only possible but common for whites to be opposed to slavery while being hostile to recognizing blacks as equals, and while being just plain hostile to blacks. White racism and antislavery sentiment could and did coexist in people's minds. A famous Southern example of that is Hinton Helper, a well-known Southern abolitionist also known even after the Civil War as an explicit racist.

As Henry Wilson observed, colonization schemes for the most part failed "to secure the confidence of the colored people." Though the American Colonization Society "was ostensibley formed in their injterest and was really incapable of accomplishing the objects of its organization without their voluntary co-operation and willing acceptance of its assistance, it was never regarded with favor by them." He mention a "national convention of colored men" as early as 1831 adopted a statement rejecting colonization as "a direct road to perpetuate slavery." Free blacks were not only a direct source of antislavery agitation and support to escaped slaves. They were also living proof of the dishonesty of white racist notions that were more and more emphasized over time by slavery propagandists presenting African-Americans as racially inferior. To supporters of colonization, they replied that:

... if we must be sacrificed to their philanthropy, we would rather die at home. Many of our father and some of us have fought and bled for the liberty, independence, and peace which you now enjoy; and surely it would be ungenerous and unfeeling in you to deny us a humble and quiet grave in that country which gave us birth.

They were Americans and insisted on being regarded as such.

Tags: american colonization society, confederate heritage month 2013, slavery, white racism