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The situation of free blacks in ante-bellum America was double-edged. While they enjoyed freedom, they were technically second-class citizens without the right to vote and both socially and economically discriminated against. In both the north and the south, European racism was an everyday aspect of life. Aside from economic and political marginalization, African-Americans were often victims of racial violence of the worst kind. In spite of this, the culture of free blacks produced some of the highest points of American culture: Phillis Wheatley, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, Henry Highland Garnet, Sojourner Truth, Harriett Tubman, and Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey who, as a free man, took the name Frederick Douglass. |
| Phillis Wheatley | The years after the American Revolution were a time in which there were few rules; everything was potentially up for grabs. It seemed in those early years that slavery would eventually die out and the eagerness with which northern states applied principles of the Revolution to the situation of African-Americans produced a heady relaxation of the racism that was a prominent feature of everyday American life. Within this fluid situation, the first major black author rose to international prominence, Phillis Wheatley. Brought as a slave to Boston at the age of eight, she was purchased by John Wheatley and her gifts with language became apparent almost immediately. She had one slim volume of poetry published in Britain, which made her the second American black and the second American woman to be published. |
| Richard Allen |
The first great leader of the African-American community was a passionate and brilliant minister, Richard Allen, who, along with Absalom Jones and six others founded the first black American political group, the Free African Society. Allen was an amazing orator and Christian minister who bought his freedom and then settled in Philadelphia. Whe he established the Free African Society, it was a response to acrimonious racism in white churches. When a group of worshippers, including Absalom Jones, were forcibly evacuated from a Methodist church during prayer, the group formed their own church. The founding of African-American societies began with the formation of independent black churches and most of the great black leaders of the nineteenth century would come out of these independent churches.
Absalom Jones, the first man to be evacuated from the Methodist church, set up his own Episcopalian Church. However, the Episcopalian Church proper refused to recognize Jones' church or to admit blacks into its church. This, as far as Allen was concerned, was absolutely unforgiveable. Allen had one and only one goal: absolute Christian equality either within an established white church or in a separate black church. He finally came to the decision that black Christians had no place among white Christians who universally discriminated against blacks as bretheren in Christ. so he formed his own independent Methodist church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, in 1816. Richard Allen has often been called the father of African-Americans not without good reason. Allen and Jones set a pattern for the establishment of free African-American culture in American in antebellum American: the black church. Free culture constellated around independent churches that developed the black community, black culture, and black politics. From these churches would arise the African-American political consciousness and movements that sought equal rights in both slave and free states. From these churches arose organized protests against both slavery and Northern attempts to hinder the development of the black community. These churches formed the focal point of the organization of black schools and the equal education movement. |
| Henry Highland Garnet |
Of all African-American leaders of antebellum America, the one that most terrified European-Americans was Henry Highland Garnet who, through his newspaper, was one of the most impassioned abolitionists in the pre-civil war days.
The American Anti-Slavery Society was a European-American group that soon attracted powerful African-American activists and speakers. The first African-Americans to become prominent in the movement in the 1830's were fugitive slaves. In the 1840's, these early activists gave way to an eloquent and angry group of black abolitionists: Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, William Wells Brown, Charles Lenox Redmond, Henry Highland Garnet and, of course, Frederick Douglass. Garnet escaped with his family from slavery when he was ten and became a Presbyterian minister in New York. The whole of issue of slavery angered him to his soul and he became one of the most prominent abolitionists after a fiery speech before the American Anti-Slavery Society convention in 1840. It was in 1843, however, that he raised the stakes by calling for a slave strike before the American Anti-Slavery Society. He implied in his speech that a black revolution would be necessary to free the slaves. Was he right? Could slavery in the United States had ended without violence against the slaveowners? We will never know. It is, however, highly unlikely that slavery would have ended at any time, even up to the present, in the south. Some historians like to argue that technology would have eventually made slavery obsolete, but this is unlikely. Until very recently, wages in the southern United States have been abysmally low despite technology; remember that slavery is primarily an economic practice that is justified by its low cost relative to productivity. Also, by 1850, the logic of slavery had become deeply ingrained in the culture of the white southern United States. This slavery logic was an integral part of southern culture until only a couple decades ago; it's very unlikely that the southern world view would have permitted southern Americans to volunatarily left off slavery. We will, however, never know. The question was resolved through violence; southerners had to be physically forced to abandon slavery. Black abolitionists were deeply divided over this issue and the role that black both free and slave, should play in the struggle. Both Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet believed that African-Americans should be primarily, if not totally, responsible for the liberation of both free and slave blacks. In Garnet's famous speech, he not only asked slaves to rise up against their masters, he declared that slaves should answer white violence with black violence. These two issues, raised in an impassioned and fiery speech, dominated African-American political speech throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are still unresolved issues. |
| Sojourner Truth |
The abolitionist movement was a great center of gravity for all social problems and difficulties of the age. America before the war was an astonishingly optimistic place, full of reformers who believed that society could be infinitely improved and that America was going to be the place where it happened. The abolitionist movement was one such optimistic movement; in its general rhetoric, it constructed slavery as the greatest hindrance to the overall improvement of humankind. It wasn't really a one issue cause; it's larger project was social development in general. The abolitionists, then, tended to concentrate their attention on any number of issues. Most prominent among these issues was women. It soon became apparent to even the most thick-headed among them that the domestic and social situation of women was very similar to the situation of the slaves. Liberation of the slaves would also require liberation of women; the anti-slavery movement really represents one of the first organized attempts to deal with feminist issues. When the world convention of the anti-slavery movement met in England in 1840, the Europeans refused to allow the American women abolitionists to join the convention. Not only did the American abolitionists leave the world movement, this event inspired the first feminist conference in the world which consisted entirely of women abolitionists.
The first major women leaders and public speakers in America were black women; the first woman to become a major political speaker in America was Maria Stewart, a black woman who lectured throughout the North on the issue of slavery in the 1830's. All the major female speakers of the 1830's were African-Americans. These pioneering women, largely lost in both traditional and feminist histories of early America, gave way in the 1840's to two of the greatest female political speakers of all time: Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. Sojourner Truth lived with a religious intensity remarkable even for her own age. She had been liberated at the age of thirty in 1827 when New York emancipated its slaves. She was called Isabella and, upon her freedom, she joined an eccentric religious group. When that group fell apart, she had a religious conversion and took a new name: Sojourner Truth. This name, she said, had been given to her by God in a vision. She was Sojourner because God told her to walk all over America and declare to the population the gravity of their sins; she was given the name Truth for that was what she would declare to all the people. And this is what she did from 1843 to 1883. Words cannot express the sheer force of this woman's preaching. By all accounts she was one of the greatest religious orators of America at that time, and probably for all time. She could not read or write, but audiences were transported by her rhetoric as she testified across America about the evils of slavery. |
| Harriet Tubman |
While Sojourner Truth was the great abolitionist speaker of her time, Harriett Tubman was the great abolitionist soldier of her time. Born into slavery in Maryland, she escaped at the age of twenty-five. She so hated slavery that she returned to the south, even though she was a fugitive slave, some nineteen times and led over three hundred slaves to freedom. So hated was she in the south that the reward for her, dead or alive, was over forty thousand dollars. Despite this reward, she continued to return to the slave states to rescue her fellow slaves. There was no-one in America who ever came close to this heroism.
The most powerful free African-American, however, was a tall and captivating speaker and writer, Frederick Douglass. More than anyone else, he would give a voice to the experience of black America, both slave and free, before the Civil War. |
