The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse PDF

Southern Historical Association The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse Author(s): James L. Huston Source: The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Nov., 1990), pp. 609-640 Published by: Southern Historical Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2210930 Accessed: 18-11-2024 23:25 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Southern Historical Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Southern History This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse By JAMES L. HUSTON A CURIOUS DEVELOPMENT HAS EMERGED IN RECENT STUDIES OF abolitionism and northern antislavery: the connection between the southern institution of slavery and the motivations and behaviors of abolitionists has virtually disappeared. For some time now, research on the intellectual sources of antislavery has focused so closely upon particular aspects of northern culture that the existence of slavery is almost unnecessary to explain the appearance of the antislavery crusade. This divorce of abolitionism from slavery is highly unsettling because it suggests that the movement sprang entirely from internal northern developments and had no basis at all in the actual function- ing of slavery in the South. Historians can reforge the linkage between slavery and abolitionism by considering the experience of northerners who witnessed southern slavery in operation. The shock of northerners who saw slavery's inhumane features provided an experiential basis for antislavery activity. Only by coupling the experience of witnessing slavery with general currents in northern society can an accurate understanding of the abolitionists and the northern antislavery crusade be achieved. Early studies of antislavery operated upon one essential assump- tion: the institution of slavery caused the rise of abolitionism because slavery, as a labor system, condoned and indeed required barbaric treatment of bondspeople.' Thus the abolitionist James Freeman Clarke ' A good example of the difference in the writing on abolitionism over the years is seen by comparing Lorenzo Sears's 1909 biography of Wendell Phillips with James Brewer Stewart's excellent 1986 biography. Early in his biography of Phillips (beginning on page 24) Sears considers the reality of southern slavery in order to explain Phillips's abolitionism. In Stewart's narrative, the actual conditions of southern slavery are simply not discussed. In the first one hundred pages of the book, Stewart, who is highly sympathetic to the aboli- tionists (pp. xi-xii), elaborates instead upon the current topics of upper-class hegemony, economic change, the conditions of New England operatives, republicanism, and various other social environmental features. The link between slavery and abolitionism emerges from the intellectual currents of New England, not from any perception by northerners as to the MR. HUSTON is an associate professor of history at Oklahoma State University. THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY Vol. LVI, No. 4, November 1990 This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 610 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTOR Y wrote in 1884, "No one can understand the terrible severity of the abolitionists, who does not know what the horrors of slavery were, with which, however, they had become more familiar than the slaveholders themselves."' It was in part this charge by the aboli- tionists that slavery was barbaric that gave rise to the study of southern slavery in the early days of the twentieth century. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips concluded that the abolitionist diatribe against southern slavery was highly prejudiced, unfair, and incorrect. Rather, as Phillips sum- marized, "In the actual regime severity was clearly the exception, and kindliness the rule."3 Phillips's interpretations dominated American understanding of slavery for several decades, and the view that slavery was basically a gentle institution-though incidents of savagery had occurred-became standard in the widely read texts of James G. Randall, Clement Eaton, Avery 0. Craven, Arthur Charles Cole, and William B. Hesseltine.4 conditions prevailing in southern servitude. Lorenzo Sears, Wendell Phillips: Orator and Agitator (New York, 1909), 24-29; James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty's Hero (Baton Rouge and London, 1986). Herbert Aptheker has recently reconnected abolitionism with southern slavery in his Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement (Boston, 1989), 59-76. 2 James Freeman Clarke, Anti-Slavery Days: A Sketch of the Struggle... (New York, 1884), 99. See Albert Bushnell Hart, Slavery and Abolition, 1831-1841 (New York and Lon- don, 1906), 92, 109, 112-15, 121, 167. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (New York and Lon- don, 1918), 306; see also Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston, 1929), 188-217. 4On the influence of U. B. Phillips consult C. Vann Woodward, introduction to the 1963 edition of Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South, iii-iv; and Richard Hofstadter, "U. B. Phillips and the Plantation Legend," Journal of Negro History, XXXIX (April 1944), 109-24. Clement Eaton, A History of the Old South (New York, 1949), 236-37; Eaton, The Growth of Southern Civilization, 1790-1860 (New York, 1961), 56-65; Arthur Charles Cole, The Irrepressible Conflict, 1850-1865 (New York, 1934), 40*-41; William B. Hesseltine, A History of the South, 1607-1936 (New York, 1936), 328-29; Avery 0. Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1942), 74-75, 85-89; and James G. Randall, The Civil War and Reconstruction (Boston and other cities, 1937), 62-66. Randall's first edition makes for an interesting comparison with the revision performed by David Donald in 1961 on the subject of the cruelty of slavery: James G. Randall and David Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruc- tion (2d ed.; Boston, 1961), 59, 62-65, 71. Interestingly, Charles A. Beard and Mary Beard never felt that slavery was particularly kindly, as it was driven by the planters' profit motive: see Charles A. Beard and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (2 vols.; New York, 1927), I, 655. Many state studies of slavery published prior to the 1960s stressed that while some cruelty was always present, benevolence on the part of the slaveowner tended to be the norm. Also consistently present in these studies is the verification of the claim of slaveholders that the material lives of southern slaves was at least equal to that of nor- thern free workers. Chase C. Mooney, Slavery in Tgnnessee (Bloomington, Ind., 1957), 86, 98; Orville W. Taylor, Negro Slavery in Arkansas (Durham, N. C., 1958), 131-49, 203; Ralph Betts Flanders, Plantation Slavery in Georgia (Chapel Hill, 1933), 141-42, 159, 299-300; James Benson Sellers, Slavery in Alabama (University, Ala., 1950), 45-46, 80-83; Harrison A. Trexler, Slavery in Missouri, 1804-1865 (Baltimore, 1914), 90-95. Two studies of im- portance that were more circumspect in their handling of benevolence versus cruelty were Charles Sackett Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi (New York and London, 1933), 86, 90, 252-53; and Joe Gray Taylor, Negro Slavery in Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1963), 194-201, 225-27. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EXPERIENTIAL BASIS OF ANTISLA VER Y 611 When these historians proposed that slavery was a benign rather than a savage experience for the enslaved, they in effect broke the causal link between slavery's viciousness and the emergence of aboli- tionism. Thus the path was cleared to consider other influences that might be motivating northern antislavery advocates. Suggestions as to the nature of these influences came in the 1930s in two forms. Gilbert H. Barnes found that the Second Great Awakening led by Charles G. Finney forcefully directed young people toward denounc- ing all sin. Political historians, such as James G. Randall and Charles W. Ramsdell, underscored the abstract nature of the political debate over slavery and deplored the heightened emotions that the crusade evoked North and South. These historians depicted the abolitionists and their antislavery political cohorts as overwrought moralists, driven by evangelical religion and a heightened sense of personal sin, who sacrificed rational judgment and practical politics in their assault on slavery.5 By emphasizing the irrational qualities of both the aboli- tionists' source of inspiration as well as their tactics and program, some historians concluded that they exhibited pathological behavior.6 Stanley M. Elkins went one step further when he analyzed the aboli- tionist program for emancipation and its dismal failure. Elkins found the system of slavery abhorrent, but he focused on the abolitionists' inability to attack slavery sensibly. Drawing upon the emotional, romantic quality of the abolitionists (which he located in transcenden- talism), Elkins declared that the impotency of the abolitionists arose from severe anti-institutional biases.7 In the 1960s the abolitionists obtained a reprieve from historians' relentlessly hostile depictions of them. The civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century inspired several scholars to reassess the antislavery crusade. Dwight L. Dumond, who had for years stressed I Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830-1844 (New York and London, 1933), 3-16, 103-108, 197; James G. Randall, "The Blundering Generation," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXVII (June 1940), 3-28; and Charles W. Ramsdell, "The Natural Limits of Slavery Expansion," ibid., XVI (September 1929), 151-71. For a critique of the revisionist position see Kenneth M. Stampp, The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York and Oxford, 1980), 199-244. For an example of the emphasis placed on the abstract quality of abolitionist rhetoric see John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison: A Biography (Boston and Toronto, 1963), 374-75. 6 See, for example, J. C. Furnas, The Road to Harpers Ferry (New York, 1959), 7, 383-92; Walter M. Merrill, Against Wind and Tide: A Biography of Wm. Lloyd Garrison (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1963), 45-46, 108-9; Hazel Catherine Wolf, On Freedom's Altar: The Mar- tyr Complex in the Abolition Movement (Madison, Wisc., 1952), 7-8, 50, 76-77, 146-47, and passim; Clifford S. Griffin, The Ferment of Reform, 1830-1860 (New York, 1967), 14-15. The summation by David Brion Davis of the revisionist school view of abolitionists ("irresponsible fanatics") is worth reviewing; Davis, ed., Ante-Bellum Reform (New York, Evanston, and London, 1967), 3-4 (quoted phrase on p. 4). 7 Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959), on slavery, 81-139, and on abolitionists, 147-57, 164-93. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 612 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTOR Y the noble qualities of abolitionists, drew attention to the number of southerners in antislavery circles and emphasized the immorality of slavery.8 A number of historians attacked the notion that aboli- tionists were psychological misfits.9 Several scholars disputed the Elkins thesis on the basis that the abolitionists saw the same inhumanity in slavery that Elkins documented; they argued that the abolitionists' anti-institutionalism was a logical refuge for reformers who were fighting institutions designed to protect slavery.'0 Scholars like Aileen S. Kraditor re-examined the link between the abolitionists and the suffering of the slaves and determined that the connection arose from the ability of the abolitionists to empathize with the plight of the slave. " I At the same time that scholars found much that was laudable in the antislavery movement, they also detected much that was troublesome and, indeed, retrograde. Abolitionists did not present merely a simple, unalloyed moral argument; they-or their fellow travelers-seemed to worry and agitate as much over the dangers slavery posed to northern liberties and northern economic develop- ment as they did over the alleged suffering of the slaves.'2 More disturbing was the finding that the abolitionists may have argued against slavery but they did not, even among themselves, suppress racism. Indeed, historians saw a wide gulf between black and white racism. Indeed, historians saw a wide gulf between black and white I Dwight L. Dumond, Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States (Ann Arbor, 1939), 6-8, 39; his most important work is a lengthy history of the abolitionist crusade, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America (Ann Arbor, 1961). 9 Martin B. Duberman, "The Abolitionists and Psychology," Journal of Negro History, XLVII (July 1962), 183-91; Betty Fladeland, "Who Were the Abolitionists?" ibid., XLIX (April 1964), 99-115; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Conscience and Career: Young Abolitionists and Missionaries," in Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher, eds., Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform: Essays in Memory of RogerAnstey (Folkestone, Kent, Eng., 1980), 183-203; Merton L. Dillon, "The Abolitionists: A Decade of Historiography, 1959-1969," Journal of Southern History, XXXV (November 1969), 500-522. '? Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Stanley Elkins' Slavery: The Antislavery Interpretation Reex- amined," American Quarterly, XXV (May 1973), 154-76; Aileen S. Kraditor, "A Note on Elkins and the Abolitionists," in Ann J. Lane, ed., The Debate over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and His Critics (Urbana, Chicago, and London, 1971), 87-100. " Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850 (New York, 1969), 21, 237; Silvan S. Tomkins, "The Psychology of Commitment: The Constructive Role of Violence and Suffering for the In- dividual and for His Society," in Martin B. Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton, 1965), 270-97. 12 See David L. Smiley, Lion of White Hall: The Life of Cassius M. Clay (Madison, Wisc., 1962), 22-23, 4748; and Hugh C. Bailey, Hinton Rowan Helper: Abolitionist-Racist (Univer- sity, Ala., 1965), 19-32, 34. Stanley Harrold has appropriately questioned previous inter- pretations of Cassius Clay's abolitionism as being racist and inspired by a concern for southern whites; see "The Intersectional Relationship Between Cassius M. Clay and the Garrisonian Abolitionists," Civil War History, XXXV (June 1989), 115-19. See also Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York, 1970); and William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, eds., The Antislavery Argu- ment (New York, Indianapolis, and Kansas City, 1965), sections VI and IX. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EXPERIENTIAL BASIS OF ANTISLA VER Y 613 abolitionists in terms of ideals and strategies. Part of this racial separa- tion among abolitionists arose from having different goals. A number of scholars came to see the abolitionists involved in an enterprise that had for its objective the cleansing of white northern guilt rather than the liberation of blacks.'3 And abolitionists failed to embrace the causes of labor radicals, a shortcoming that for many scholars meant that the entire abolitionist enterprise had a suspiciously self- serving quality to it. 14 By the middle of the 1970s a synthesis about the abolitionists, based largely on the explorations undertaken in the 1960s, had ap- peared. Abolitionists were a small, select group in northern society that decried slavery primarily for moral reasons-it was a crusade based on moral sensibilities. Three forces powered the abolitionist sympathy for the oppressed slave: the energy created by the Finneyite Second Great Awakening, the moral imperatives of New England culture, and, making the first two points even more explosive, youthfulness. Historians also found that the antislavery movement received an impetus from the general social reform movement of the time. Antislavery activists espoused individualistic solutions to social problems and were receptive to anarchist views on questions of political and governmental institutions. More generally, abolitionists accepted the free labor economic notions current in the mainstream of northern economic life, and the abolitionists themselves represented an emerging northern middle class.'5 II William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, "Antislavery Ambivalence: Immediatism, Expe- diency, Race," American Quarterly, XVII (Winter 1965), 682-95; Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York, 1969), viii, 15-16, 38-39; Robert H. Abzug, Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform (New York, 1980), 138-43; Peter F. Walker, Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Abolition (Baton Rouge and London, 1978), 271; and David E. Swift, Black Prophets of Justice: Activist Clergy Before the Civil War (Baton Rouge and London, 1989), 90-97. 14 Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism, 243-44; Thomas, The Liberator, 370-71; Russel B. Nye, Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830-1860 (East Lansing, Mich., 1963), 246-47; Eric Foner, "Abolitionism and the Labor Movement in Antebellum America," in Bolt and Drescher, eds., Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform, 255-69. Kraditor and Foner argue strongly in favor of the abolitionists; a more hostile assessment of the abolitionists in relation to the problems of free northern workers can be found in Jonathan A. Glickstein, "'Poverty is Not Slavery': American Abolitionists and the Competitive Labor Market," in Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge and London, 1979), 195-218. 1' Three important studies synthesized the existing literature on antislavery in the mid-1970s: Gerald Sorin, Abolitionism: A New Perspective (New York, Washington, and London, 1972); James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York, 1976); and Merton L. Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority (DeKalb, Ill., 1974). For other studies along these lines see Griffin, Ferment of Reform; Donald G. Mathews, "Orange Scott: The Methodist Evangelist as Revolutionary," in Duber- man, ed., Antislavery Vanguard, 71-101; Mathews, Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 614 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTOR Y These studies also tackle the difficult problem of defining who was and who was not an abolitionist. Most studies agree that aboli- tionists were individuals who demanded immediate emancipation for the slave ("immediatism"), who tended toward extremism in religious and moral principles, who based their opposition to slavery on moral grounds (the sinfulness of slavery), and who expressed some belief by 1840 that the root of American social ills was racial prejudice. These definitions were established in order to separate the abolitionism of the earlier years from the antislavery agitation of the 1840s and 1850s in which the social and economic ramifications of slavery for northern welfare took precedence over the sinfulness of the institution and its degradation of southern blacks. The murkiness surrounding an acceptable definition of abolitionism becomes particularly acute in connection with politics and the rise of the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican parties. It is, however, generally accepted that the original moral impulse of the immediatists became diluted over time, and the broad antislavery sentiment in the North in the 1850s was substantially different from the abolitionist position of the 1830s. 6 Research in the 1970s and 1980s revealed more clearly the fragmen- tation of abolitionists into numerous enclaves, each with its own tactics and philosophy. The most identifiable sets of abolitionists were the New England followers of William Lloyd Garrison, the New York City circle led by Arthur and Lewis Tappan, western New Yorkers aligned with Gerrit Smith, Theodore Dwight Weld's western radicals, and perhaps a milder Ohio group coalescing around Gamaliel Bailey and Salmon P. Chase. Quakers, of course, continued their testimony against slaveholding, and John R. McKivigan has found substantial evidence of abolitionism in the major religious denomina- tions, an agitation that was not particularly connected with the other American Morality, 1780-1845 (Princeton, 1965); Louis Filler, The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860 (New York, 1960); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Cleveland, 1969); and Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca and London, 1973). 16 On the definition of antebellum abolitionism consult Larry Gara, "Who Was an Aboli- tionist?" in Duberman, ed., Antislavery Vanguard, 32-51; Stewart, Holy Warriors, 35, 105, 119-20, 147-51, 160-62; Sorin, Abolitionism, 17-19, 41, 81-89, 134-41; Betty Fladeland, "Who Were the Abolitionists?" 113-15; and Dillon, "Abolitionists," 518-23. The non- moralist reasons for attacking slavery are explicit in Larry Gara, "Slavery and the Slave Power: A Crucial Distinction," Civil War History, XV (March 1969), 5-17; Lowell H. Har- rison, "The Anti-Slavery Career of Cassius M. Clay," Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, LIX (October 1961), 295-303; and Smiley, Lion of White Hall, 47-48. The pro- blem of definitions in the antislavery movement is discussed in Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870 (Cambridge, Mass., and other cities, 1982), 1-2. Although in one sense both antislavery and abolitionism are discussed in this essay, the operative definition of abolitionism here is the traditional one: abolitionists were those who called for an immediate end to slavery, who saw slavery as a moral evil, and who tended toward evangelical radicalism. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EXPERIENTIAL BASIS OF ANTISLA VERY 615 major abolitionist groups.17 During the 1970s antislavery studies took a new turn, one that emphasized more strongly the environmental forces that gave birth to abolitionism and molded the principles that abolitionists espoused. Ronald G. Walters accurately described the new thrust in research when he wrote that "the problem is not to isolate abolitionists from their peers but to find out what it was in antebellum America that made their crusade possible." The new research agenda for aboli- tionist studies, then, was to discover how the antislavery agitators related to all the dimensions of northern culture-among them child- rearing, sexual attitudes, economic endeavors, marital arrangements, and education. Explicit in this rethinking of the abolitionist experience was a desire to break free of the dominance of writing about anti- slavery leaders from the vantage point of an oncoming Civil War (the so-called Civil War Synthesis) and from an interpretation stress- ing the growth of northern antislavery sentiment (the "growth of a dissenting minority" paradigm). In short, abolitionism was to be investigated as a peculiar northern cultural phenomenon, not as a social movement involved in national political events."8 Yet this approach presented one important danger-by concen- trating on the social milieu of the North, it in effect was divorcing the abolitionists from the institution of slavery. Lewis Perry made an oblique reference to this potential difficulty in the preface of his work on the anarchist quality of abolitionist thought. Perry stated that his book concerned the cultural backgrounds of the antislavery commitment and that he was limiting his research to the abolitionists' handling of authority; some readers of the manuscript told him that they thought the wickedness of slavery was sufficient to explain the abolitionists, and that by concentrating on matters peripheral to slavery, works like Perry's would make the abolitionists appear "insincere. " 19 This fear was well founded. 17 Perry, Radical Abolitionism; Friedman, Gregarious Saints; Lawrence J. Friedman, "The Gerrit Smith Circle: Abolitionism in the Burned-Over District," Civil War History, XXVI (March 1980), 18-36; Stanley Harrold, Gamaliel Bailey and Antislavery Union (Kent, Ohio, and London, 1986); John R. McKivigan, "The Antislavery 'Comeouter' Sects: A Neglected Dimension of the Abolitionist Movement," Civil War History, XXVI (June 1980), 142-60; and John R. McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the North- ern Churches, 1830-1865 (Ithaca, N. Y., and London, 1984), especially pages 16-17. 18 Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830 (Baltimore and London, 1976), xiv (first quotation); Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860 (New York, 1978), 3-9, 83-84; Lawrence J. Friedman, " 'Historical Topics Sometimes Run Dry': The State of Abolitionist Studies," Historian, XLIII (February 1981), 177-94 (second quotation on p. 178); Alan M. Kraut, Introduction, in Kraut, ed., Crusaders and Com- promisers: Essays on the Relationship of the Antislavery Struggle to the Antebellum Party System (Westport, Conn., and London, 1983), 1-3. '9 Perry, Radical Abolitionism, xii. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 616 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTOR Y Research of the past fifteen years on abolitionism has indeed focused on the social backgrounds of the abolitionists. One branch of anti- slavery historiography has sought to explicate the motivations of in- dividuals who "converted" to immediatism by using psychological theories and constructing "interior histories." Authors such as Robert H. Abzug, Lewis Perry, Lawrence J. Friedman, and Peter F. Walker tended, in various ways, to stress how the uncertainties of personal life created by northern social and economic transformation begin- ning in the 1820s placed young Americans under severe mental strain. To relieve the burden of coping with a new fluid society, many of these young people found an exhilarating sense of "self-affirmation" by becoming reformers in general and abolitionists in particular.20 While many, and probably most, historians of abolitionism have shied away from extensive use of psychological theory to understand antislavery radicalism, the majority for the past fifteen years have certainly been fascinated by the appearance of immediatism just when the northern economy rapidly began to develop and industrialize. Some speculated that the social and economic modernization of the North required a group who would act as the rationalizers (legitimators) of the change and who would anathematize the structures and prac- tices that inhibited the move to free market capitalism. Hence many scholars have interpreted the entire abolitionist movement as an assemblage of modernizers attacking all older social institutions, slavery being only one of many practices deserving extinction.2' 20 Friedman, Gregarious Saints; Abzug, Passionate Liberator; Walker, Moral Choices; and Lewis Perry, Childhood, Marriage, and Reform: Henry Clarke Wright, 1797-1870 (Chicago and London, 1980). These works are discussed ably in Richard 0. Curry and Lawrence B. Goodheart, "'Knives in Their Heads': Passionate Self-Analysis and the Search for Identity in American Abolitionism," Canadian Review of American Studies, XIV (Winter 1983), 401-14. For a good explication of "interior histories" consult Charles A. Jarvis, "Ad- mission to Abolition: The Case of John Greenleaf Whittier, " Journal of the Early Republic, IV (Summer 1984), 161-76. Other publications focusing on abolitionist motivation and find- ing it in some feature of the social environment, if not precisely in self-analysis, include Joel Bernard, "Authority, Autonomy, and Radical Commitment: Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society..., XC, Pt. 2 (1981), 347-86; Donald Yacovone, "Samuel Joseph May, Antebellum Reform, and the Problem of Patricide," Perspectives in American History, n.s., 11 (1985), 99-124; and Randolph A. Roth, "The First Radical Abolitionists: The Reverend James Milligan and the Reformed Presbyterians of Vermont," New England Quarterly, LV (December 1982), 540-63. 21 An older view of social upheaval creating the abolitionists through the mechanism of status anxiety can be found in David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (New York, 1956), 19-36, but it is now largely ignored. Lawrence J. Friedman has attempted an interesting modification of the Donald thesis by postulating that reformers were modernizers who suffered from dislocation anxiety; "'Pious Fellowship' and Modern- ity: A Psychosocial Interpretation," in Kraut, ed., Crusaders and Compromisers, 235-44. On social upheaval and modernization ideas, see David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Con- spiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge, 1969), 26-31, 54-82; C. Duncan Rice, The Rise and Fall of Black Slavery (New York and other cities, 1975), 305, 324; Stewart, Holy This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EXPERIENTIAL BASIS OF ANTISLA VERY 617 Moreover, the middle-class nature of the abolitionists came to be seen as the pivotal quality of the movement. This fact had an ap- preciable impact upon the assessment of abolitionist motivations regard- ing the institution of slavery. Abolitionists became nothing more than extreme middle-class persons who preached self-discipline, internal restraint, mobility, opportunity, hard work, frugality, education, and piety. Thus the abolitionist assault on slavery could be interpreted as an attack on the practices and social customs of a slaveholding society rather than as a plea for justice for cruelly treated slaves. Abolitionists were appalled at the backward state of the southern economy, the lack of discipline in southerners, the instability of southern family life, and the potential for sexual abuse of female slaves. The antislavery extremists, new interpretations assert, sought to impose a moral order upon the entire country and to convert all Americans to free market capitalism. In essence, some current assessments of the abolitionists hold that they were ideological imperialists out to destroy the structures of the eighteenth-century economy and society and replace them with a full-blown capitalist marketplace.22 Two other important interpretations about antislavery have ap- peared because of the observation that the emergence of abolitionism coincided with the rise of industrialism in England and the United States. David Brion Davis argued that abolitionism appeared in the United States and England as those two countries passed from older, patriarchal forms of society to unrestrained capitalism. Part of this transition involved replacing customary treatment of laborers with treatment governed by the marketplace-that is, labor became a ven- dible commodity. The abolitionists basically legitimized this change; by attacking slavery, an older form of customary labor, they elevated the possibilities that might exist under free market conditions and so justified industrial labor practices-which amounted to no more than a new form of labor oppression.23 Thomas L. Haskell has at- tempted to revise the Davis formulation of the relationship between nineteenth-century industrialization and abolitionism. Haskell posited that the rise of capitalism in the late eighteenth century taught in- dividuals to honor their promises and contracts and to discipline Warriors, 17, 33-34, 53, 67; and Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865 (New York, 1976), 99-100, 122-23. 22 Walters, Antislavery Appeal, xvi-xvii, 54, 60-61, 80, 95, 111-28; Walters, "The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism," American Quarterly, XXV (May 1973), 177-202; Stewart, Holy Warriors, 53, 67; Anne Norton, Alternate Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture (Chicago and London, 1986), 32, 156, 222-25; and Howard Temperley, "Antislavery as a Form of Cultural Imperialism," in Bolt and Drescher, eds., Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform, 342-48. 23 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca and London, 1975), 251-54, 303-6, 349-50, 357-58, 365-66, 377, 382, 455-67. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 618 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTOR Y their activities. In the process of learning these behaviors necessary for an advanced economy, masses of people developed a sensitivity to the requirements of others-the rise of sensibilities. The new sense of responsibilities to others, inculcated from the extension of the marketplace, was then easily applied to the institution of slavery.24 The most recent evolution of abolitionist studies also addresses the question of the relationship between antislavery and economic development in the North. Historians such as John Gilkeson and Stuart Blumin see the abolitionists as the expression of a new class in American urban society. Born of the economic revolution wrought by transportation improvements, the abolitionists drew their numerical strength from rapidly developing areas in the economy and from the new careers opened up by market extension-clerks, small retail merchants, and perhaps minor industrialists. People in these new positions contested the old rulers for sway over communities, social behavior, and public policy. Abolitionism was thus merely a phase of a class struggle between the older rulers, who represented eighteenth- century deferential society, and the new middle class of the nineteenth century, who sought mobility, equality before the law, and elimina- tion of economic restrictions.25 Many historians of abolitionism in the 1970s and 1980s resisted the siren call to investigate the social bases of the antislavery crusade and continued to stress the religious, moral, and intellectual quality of the antislavery activists. They argued that the essential features of abolitionism were its moral indictment of slavery and its origins in evangelical Christianity. In essence, they were positing that religious currents in American life exerted a force upon some northerners that was to some degree independent of social and economic gyrations.26 24 Thomas L. Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility," Parts 1 and 2, American Historical Review, XC (April 1985), 339-61; (June 1985), 547-66; Haskell, "Convention and Hegemonic Interest in the Debate over Antislavery: A Reply to Davis and Ashworth," ibid., XCII (October 1987), 829-78; David Brion Davis, "Reflec- tions on Abolitionism and Ideological Hegemony," ibid., 797-812; John Ashworth, "The Relationship between Capitalism and Humanitarianism," ibid., 813-28. 25 John S. Gilkeson, Jr., Middle-Class Providence, 1820-1940 (Princeton, 1986), 40-94; Stuart M. Blumin, "The Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century America: A Critique and Some Proposals," American Historical Review, XC (April 1985), 299-338. Mary P. Ryan has a somewhat different view of how the expanding market economy affected the occupational groups supporting and opposing abolitionism in Oneida: Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, Mass., and other cities, 1981), 106-14. See also Friedman, Gregarous Saints, 5; Louis S. Gerteis, Morality & Utility in American Antislavery Reform (Chapel Hill and London, 1987), xi-xiv, 4, 16-17, 19, 21, 30, 37, 63-64. The middle-class synthesis does not easily take into account artisanal and working-class abolitionism. See Edward Magdol, The Antislavery Rank and File: A Social Profile of the Abolitionists' Constituency (Westport, Conn., 1986), 46-49, 69-75, 97; and John B. Jentz, "The Antislavery Constituency in Jacksonian New York City," Civil War History, XXVII (June 1981), 101-22. 26 Edward 0. Schriver, Go Free: The Antislavery Impulse in Maine, 1833-1855 (Orono, This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EXPERIENTIAL BASIS OF ANTISLA VER Y 619 Yet the focus on the social origins of northern abolitionists has been at least as prominent in current abolitionist historiography as the emphasis on the movement's roots in Protestant morality and Evangelicalism has been. Indeed, some historians argue that the evangelism coming out of the Second Great Awakening was itself the product of economic transformation.27 But this socioeconomic approach to scrutinizing the abolitionists has almost completely separated the abolitionists from their cause. There is now an inter- pretation of abolitionism-the middle-class synthesis-in which aboli- tionists appear to legitimate free labor, contest the power of the old elite, and educate society in the ways of self-discipline, piety, and frugality. The implication of these studies is that slavery was for the abolitionists just a fortuitous social circumstance, a lucky but transient convenience, that could be manipulated in order to browbeat the upper and lower classes into appropriate behaviors. In short, the current explanation of abolitionism does not require slavery at all; the link between slavery and abolitionism has not only been weak- ened in some recent studies, it has been effectively dissolved. This interpretation is, quite frankly, totally inadequate. To explain how some American historians have effectively con- cluded that abolitionists were antebellum rebels without a cause, it is necessary to understand how the definition of "context" has worked in current and past abolitionist historiography. The older authors on abolitionism, whatever their interpretive faults, wrote their histories under the assumption of a national context. This permitted both northern and southern influences to operate on abolitionists and aboli- tionists likewise to affect somehow both northern and southern developments. The last fifteen years of abolitionist historiography has called for an understanding of abolitionists within a northern context, not a national one; in essence, the new historiography of Maine, 1970), 9-10, 15, 21-24; Anthony J. Barker, Captain Charles Stuart: Anglo-American Abolitionist (Baton Rouge and London, 1986), 3, 36, 44-49, 59; Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (New York and Oxford, 1987), 32-33, 39; McKivigan, War Against Pro- slavery Religion, 13, 19-21, 150, 189; Lawrence Thomas Lesick, The Lane Rebels: Evangelicalism and Antislavery in Antebellum America (Metuchen, N. J., and London, 1980), 84-85; B. Edmon Martin, All We Want Is Make Us Free: La Amistad and the Reform Aboli- tionists (Lanham, Md., 1986), 51-58, 72-73, 93-104; Milton C. Sernett, Abolition's Axe: Beriah Green, Oneida Institute, and the Black Freedom Struggle (Syracuse, 1986), 4; John d'Entremont, Southern Emancipator: Moncure Conway, The American Years, 1832-1865 (New York and Oxford, 1987), 17. Bertram Wyatt-Brown has stressed the change in child- rearing practices among evangelical New England households that replaced discipline with affection in the upbringing of infants; Wyatt-Brown, "Conscience and Career," in Bolt and Drescher, eds., Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform, 184-99; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners (Baton Rouge, 1985), chaps. 2 and 3. 27 For example, see Walters, American Reformers, 3-9, 21-37. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 620 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTOR Y antislavery radicalism has contracted the context-it has eliminated the South as a factor in the evolution of northern antislavery. Historians undoubtedly have to make crucial decisions about what temporal, geographical, and social contexts are appropriate for their subject matter, and that necessitates lopping off some areas of scrutiny. But it may well be that in the case of the recent studies of abolitionism, the context has been far too truncated. Southern words and deeds did shape and inform northern thoughts and actions. The institution of slavery and the appearance and tactics of aboli- tionists have to be reconnected if antebellum political and social history is to make any sense at all. What has been missing from recent studies of abolitionism has been the interaction between northerners and slavery.28 In current studies of abolitionism, one never encounters a slave at all. But there was interaction between northerners and slavery, and the rise of abolitionism in the northern United States was partially caused by the experience of witnessing slavery. Many historians and many antebellum southerners charged that, for the abolitionists, slavery was only an abstraction, an imaginary evil, because northerners had no firsthand knowledge of the institution.29 That charge is only partially true. While most northerners and aboli- tionists did not have continuous daily experience with slavery, they did encounter the peculiar institution.30 These encounters ultimately shaped the abolitionist, and then the general northern, attitude toward the South's unusual labor system. Frequently northerners found that slavery was mild and that southern institutions were beneficent. But when northerners witnessed slaves being auctioned, taken in chains to market, or whipped, they immediately condemned the institution and the South and forgot other, more pleasant aspects of southern life. Early American and English abolitionists had direct knowledge of the slave trade and the conditions of labor on southern plantations.3' John Woolman traveled to the South to see if the cruelties of slavery were exaggerated. John Wesley's animus toward slavery was reinforc- 23 See Aptheker, Abolitionism, 75. 29 Walker, Moral Choices, 20; and Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism, 236-37. 30 For some reason Dwight Dumond's observation that the antislavery ranks were filled with southern white refugees seems to have been discarded. Dumond, Antislavery Origins of the Civil War, 6-8. James Freeman Clarke wrote, "I, myself, was a citizen of the State of Kentucky from 1833 to 1840. Slavery existed there, it is true, in a comparatively mild form. But its evils were such that I learned to look on it with unmixed aversion. I learned my anti-slavery lessons from slavery itself and from the slaveholders around me." Clarke, Anti-Slavery Days, 22. 1 Betty Fladeland, Abolitionism and Working-Class Problems in the Age of Industrializa- tion (Baton Rouge, 1984), 17-19; and Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American An- tislavery Cooperation (Urbana, Chicago, and London, 1972), 9, 252. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EXPERIENTIAL BASIS OF A NTISLA JER Y 621 ed by Anthony Benezet's writings.32 Benjamin Lundy moved from New Jersey to Wheeling, Virginia, in 1809 to set up shop as a skilled mechanic. There, according to his biographer Merton L. Dillon, "he for the first time encountered coffles of chained and handcuffed slaves on their way to" southern plantations; Lundy's "conscience rebelled." Samuel J. May understood how Lundy's conversion to antislavery arose from his personal experience in witnessing slavery: "But he [Lundy] could not banish from his memory the sights he had seen at Wheeling, which was the great thoroughfare of the slave- trade between Virginia and the Southern and Southwestern States ''33 The emotional impact of observing the cruelties of slavery appear in a number of northern memoirs, all of which reveal the shock of seeing these brutalities for the first time. Levi Coffin, later to be a significant figure in the underground railroad in Ohio, wrote about his North Carolina childhood. As a youth in the 1790s he had seen coffles of slaves separated from their families and sold to new owners. In one childhood incident of the many he related, Coffin told about a slave who had caught fish and bargained with Coffin's father to catch more for a fee. The slave's master felt the slave was being presumptuous and started beating him; "My father protested against the act, and I was so deeply moved that I left my breakfast untasted, and going off by myself gave vent to my feelings in sobs and tears."34 The experience of personally witnessing slavery's cruelties shocked northerners, and their antislavery outrage did not simply originate from abstract notions taught to them during childhood and then confirmed by a visit to the South. William Lloyd Garrison, agitating with Benjamin Lundy for emancipation, visited Baltimore in 1829 and 1830. There Garrison saw slave auctions and whippings. On the streets of Baltimore he and a companion heard the shrieks of a slave being whipped in one of the houses along their route; Garrison commented, "This is nothing uncommon." While imprisoned in a Baltimore jail for seditious activities, Garrison saw a slaveowner who had come to repossess a runaway slave. The slaveowner and three friends berated the slave and threatened terrible physical abuse. Gar- rison's response is illuminating: "I had stood speechless during this singular dialogue, my blood boiling in my veins, and my limbs trem- 32 Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago, 1967), 70; and Mathews, Slavery and Methodism, 5-6. II Merton L. Dillon, Benjamin Lundy and the Struggle for Negro Freedom (Urbana and London, 1966), 5; Samuel J. May, Some Recollections of our Antislavery Conflict (Boston, 1869), 12. 3 [Levi Coffin], Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the Reputed President of the Underground Railroad... (2d ed.; Cincinnati, 1880; first published in 1876), 13, 14 (quotation). This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 622 THE JO URNA L OF SO UTHERN HISTOR Y bling with emotion."35 The scenes of slavery disturbed other northerners as well. William Henry Seward recorded in his autobiography several trips into the South. In 1846 he had seen slaves in Virginia loaded upon ships for sale in New Orleans and was upset over the evident misery of the human cargo. A southerner told him not to be concerned; "I replied, 'Yes,' and turned away to conceal manifestations of sym- pathy I might not express." He then commented, "I looked, and there they were-slaves, ill protected from the cold, fed capriciously on the commonest food-going from all that was dear to all that was terrible, and still they wept not. I thanked God that he had made them insensible. And these were 'the happiest people in the world!' " On another occasion in 1835, Seward's wife Frances Adeline saw ten naked slave children being herded and driven like cattle, and in the words of Frederic Bancroft, "she felt that she could no longer look upon the horrors of slavery."36 The impact of slave whippings took its toll upon many northerners. Mary Livermore, a teacher on a Georgia plantation in the 1830s, witnessed one of the plantation owner's sons beating a slave. The son told her: "You haf t' lick niggers, or they'd run over you. You don't know the South yit." She was thankful when told that whip- pings did not occur on the Henderson plantation; nonetheless, she saw a slave whipping there and could not abide the practice. In Englishwoman Fanny Kemble's remembrances of her husband's plan- tation in Georgia, she recorded numerous instances of cruelties to slaves. In one incident a slave was told that he was to be sold to an Alabama farmer and thus separated from his wife. Kemble saw the slave being informed that the transaction was to occur and no protest could prevent it. In words reminiscent of other nonsoutherners on such occasions, Kemble wrote, "I retreated immediately from the horrid scene, breathless with surprise and dismay, and stood for some time in my own room, with my heart and temples throbbing to such a degree that I could hardly support myself." Jane Grey Swisshelm also retained bad memories of southern society 35 [Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison], William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life... (4 vols.; New York, 1885-1889), I, 150 (first quota- tion), 175, 176 (second quotation). This incident was also described in Merrill, Against Wind and Tide, 35. 36 Frederick W. Seward, ed., William H. Seward: An Autobiography from 1801 to 1834... (3 vols.; New York, 1891; first published in 1877 under a slightly different title), I, 778-79 (quotations on p. 779); and Frederic Bancroft, The Life of William H. Seward (2 vols.; New York and London, 1900), I, 57. See also Seward, ed., William H. Seward, I, 36-37, 270-72. For some reason, Glyndon Van Deusen in his excellent biography of Seward did not incor- porate Seward's observations about slavery except in a perfunctory fashion; Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York, 1967), 36. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EXPERIENTIAL BASIS OF ANTISLA VERY 623 from her stay in Kentucky in the late 1830s. Though she was more caustic about the effect of slavery upon southern white society than anything else, she nonetheless recorded with horror the practice of whipping. On one occasion, an elderly female slave, unable to com- plete her sewing chores to bring in money for her mistress, was brought before her owner for determination of punishment: "We adjourned to the kitchen where old Martha stood before her judge, clutching the table with her hard hands, trembling in every limb, her eyelids swollen out like puff-balls, and offensive from neglect.... I promis- ed the Lord then and there, that for life, it should be my work to bring 'deliverance to the captive....'. " The German immigrant Gustave Koerner came to the United States in the 1830s to carve out a new life for himself and his relatives. Visiting Missouri in 1833, Koerner offered many compliments about Missouri society. But while in St. Louis, from "the second story of our residence we could see into the yard of a neighboring house, where we once saw what ap- peared to be an American lady, lashing a young slave girl with a cow hide. Had there still been a lingering disposition in the Engelmann or Abend family to settle in Missouri, these scenes would have quen- ched it forever."37 Other northerners recorded their sense of cultural vertigo and numb- ness in the presence of whippings or slave auctions. Frederick Law Olmsted reported extensively on the one flogging he had seen in 1854 on a Mississippi plantation. "It was the first time I had ever seen a woman flogged," he wrote. "I had seen a man cudgelled and beaten, in the heat of passion, before, but never flogged with a hundredth part of the severity used in this case." Olmsted turned from the scene, "gave [his horse] rein and spur and we plunged into the bushes and scrambled fiercely up the steep acclivity." After- wards Olmsted tried to sort out the experience: "Accepting the posi- tion of the overseer, I knew that his method was right, but it was a red-hot experience to me, and has ever since been a fearful thing in my memory."38 Stephen B. Oates has written that Abraham Lin- Mary A. Livermore, The Story of My Life or the Sunshine and Shadow of Seventy Years.. (Hartford, Conn., 1897), 183 (first quotation), 188, 216-17; Frances Anne Kem- ble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 (New York, 1863), 102; Jane Grey Swisshelm, Half a Century (Chicago, 1880), 56-57; [Gustave Philipp Koerner], Memoirs of Gustave Koerner, 1809-1896.. , edited by Thomas J. McCormack (2 vols.; Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1909), I, 296. Peter Walker has indicated that Swisshelm was more convincing in her portrayal of the slaveholding gentry, particularly the men, than of their slaves; Walker wrote that Swisshelm's accounts of the cruelties inflicted on slaves were the usual kind found in abolitionist writing. Walker, Moral Choices, 114-16, 119. 38 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States... , edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger (New York, 1953), 455-56. Louis S. Gerteis analyzed this incident at some length in Morality & Utility in American Antislavery Reform, 157-63, and interprets Olmsted's reaction to the whip- This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 624 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTOR Y coln's introduction to slavery on an Ohio River steamboat left him brooding and perplexed, and, while he rationalized the misery of the slaves away somewhat, "the sight of those chained Negroes troubled him. Years later he asserted that the spectacle 'was a continual tor- ment to me' and that he saw something like it every time he touched a slave border." The benumbing effects of witnessing slavery on some northerners can perhaps be best seen in the experience of the nonabolitionist peace advocate Elihu Burritt. During a visit to Wil- mington, North Carolina, in 1854, Burritt stumbled upon a slave auction: "While walking up the Main Street I saw by sheer accident a slave sold at auction. As I stepped up to the crowd, I thought that the chattel was a pair of horses, or a carriage, and looked about for one of these objects; when, just as the hammer fell, I saw that it was a man; and I turned away with a cold chill of horror. It was the first time I had ever witnessed the spectacle; I hope it may be the last."39 Northerners could also obtain knowledge of the conditions prevail- ing in southern slavery through secondhand accounts. Abolitionist literature related horror stories from the South, and speeches of aboli- ping as a disgust at discipline imposed by authoritarian means rather than a discipline pro- duced by internal resolve: "It was the lash, then, and not the overseer's decision to use it, that made slavery in its property aspect fundamentally abhorrent" (p. 162). This seems a somewhat strained interpretation of the event. Olmsted's reactions could perhaps be more reasonably understood as the response of someone who for the first time in his life wit- nessed one human torturing another. 39 Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York and other cities, 1977), 59-60 (quotation on p. 60); journal entry of May 24, , quoted from Merle Curti, [ed.], The Learned Blacksmith: The Letters and Journals of Elihu Bur- ritt (New York, 1937), 125. Recorded reactions of northerners confronting slavery also in- clude George F. Dawson, Life and Services of Gen. John A. Logan as Soldier and Statesman (Chicago and New York, 1887), 11; Richard H. Sewell, John P. Hale and the Politics of Abolition (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 114; William Allen Butler, A Retrospect of Forty Years, 1825-1865, edited by Harriet Allen Butler (New York, 1911), 82-83; John F. Hume, The Abolitionists: Together with Personal Memories of the Struggle for Human Rights, 1830-1864 (New York and London, 1905), 37-38; Margaret Hope Bacon, Valiant Friend: The Life of Lucretia Mott (New York, 1980), 40; Abzug, Passionate Liberator, 83, 90-91; Harold Schwarz, Samuel Gridley Howe: Social Reformer, 1801-1876 (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 152-54; [William Tecumseh Sherman], Memoirs of General William T. Sherman (2 vols.; New York, 1887), I, 176-77; Mary Black Clayton, Reminiscences of Jeremiah Sullivan Black (St. Louis, 1887), 109-10; Tilden G. Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Went- worth Higginson (New Haven and London, 1968), 42; Sernett, Abolition's Axe, 18; Mer- ton L. Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy: Abolitionist Editbr (Urbana, 1961), 48, 49; Merrill, Against Wind and Tide, 41-42; Frank Otto Gatell, John Gorham Palfrey and the New England Con- science (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 19, 31-32, 71-72; David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1960), 272; J. Winston Coleman, Jr., Slavery Times in Kentucky (Chapel Hill, 1940), 137; Douglas C. Stange, Patterns of Antislavery Among American Unitarians, 1831-1860 (Rutherford, Madison, and Teaneck, N. J., 1977), 48, 77-78; Richard E. Lowitt, A Merchant Prince of the Nineteenth Century: William E. Dodge (New York, 1954), 198-99; and Richard H. Abbott, Cobbler in Congress: The Life of Henry Wilson, 1812-1875 (Lexington, Ky., 1972), 11. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EXPERIENTIAL BASIS OF ANTISLA VER Y 625 tionists referred to the "oppressed" slave. Adding to the credibility of these stories was testimony given to northerners by slaveholders who could no longer accept the peculiar institution. A young southerner from a slaveowning family, William T. Allan, participated in 1834 in debates over slavery held at the Lane Seminary in Ohio. During the debates Allan said, "Cruelty is the rule, and kindness the excep- tion" in master-slave relations. Theodore Dwight Weld's American Slavery As It Is drew extensively from southern newspapers to substan- tiate the abolitionist claim that mistreatment of slaves was common.40 Black abolitionists, particularly runaway slaves, often appeared at public meetings and told of the inhumanity of slavery and the brutalities that slaveholders inflicted upon them and their families. Blacks also wrote scores of books revealing the sordid details of plantation slavery, a genre that for various reasons sold well in England and the northern United States. Black abolitionists emphasized a number of themes in their testimonials, yet the most consistent was the physical and mental horrors suffered by the bondspeople under slavery.41 40 Gerda Lerner, The Grimk9 Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (Boston, 1967), 8, 19, 34-35, 77-78, 179-80; William T. Allan quoted by Lesick, Lane Rebels, 80; Abzug, Passionate Liberator, 134; Pease and Pease, eds., Antislavery Argument, section IV; the role of expatriate southern abolitionists is discussed in Dwight L. Dumond, Anti- Slavery Origins of the Civil War, 6-8; Aptheker, Abolitionism, 1-3. Because of the general notion that women's sphere included preserving the virtues of sympathy and affection, one assumes that women abolitionists probably used a highly developed cruelty theme in their testimony against slavery; Nancy Hewitt, "The Social Origins of Women's Antislavery Politics in Western New York," in Kraut, ed., Crusaders and Compromisers, 210, 224. However, most studies of women abolitionists focus on their feminism, not the abolitionist themes in their writings and speeches; see for example Catherine Clinton, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984), 67-71; Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana, Chicago, and Lon- don, 1978), chaps. 1 and 2; Ellen DuBois, "Women's Rights and Abolition: The Nature of the Connection," in Perry and Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered, 238-51; Blan- che Glassman Hersh, "'Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?' Abolitionist Beginnings of Nineteenth-Century Feminism," ibid., 252-83. Virtually all studies of the abolitionists discuss appeals made by abolitionists concerning the cruel treatment of the slave. Probably the two most famous works on brutality in the slaveholding South are Mrs. [Lydia Maria] Child, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (New-York, 1836), 12-31; and [Theodore Dwight Weld], American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York, 1839). Weld's work did rely upon southern newspapers, but it also contains observations of southern slavery made by northerners, often clergymen, who had lived in the South for some time before returning to the North; see for example pages 11-17, 17-22, 25-26, 98-99, 99-100, 100-101, 102-5. 41 Larry Gara, "The Professional Fugitive in the Abolition Movement," Wisconsin Magazine of History, XLVIII (Sring 1965), 196-204; Joel Schor, Henry Highland Garnet: A Voice of Black Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn., and London, 1977), 10, 30-31; R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge and London, 1983), 15-18, 28-30; Blackett, Beating Against the Barriers: Biographical Essays in Nineteenth-Century Afro- American History (Baton Rouge and London, 1986), 3, 42-43, 101-2, 105-6; Quarles, Black This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 626 THE JO URNA L OF SO UTHERN HIS TOR Y Mob attacks against their public meetings may have enabled aboli- tionists to imagine the threat of physical violence that southern blacks experienced. Several northerners made their first commitment to anti- slavery because of the outrage they felt under the coercion of a mob. Mobs attacked abolitionists not for any crime they had committed nor for any violation of moral or governmental laws but solely because they spoke out for some other person's freedom. The mob became a visible and powerful means of coercion, and perhaps in the mob actions of the 1 830s many northern antislavery leaders came to under- stand, albeit imperfectly, the coercion a slave constantly faced and so could empathize with southern bondspeople. Salmon P. Chase stood before a threatening Cincinnati mob in 1836 and refused to let the rioters enter a house in search of James G. Birney. Frederick J. Blue wrote of Salmon P. Chase's experience that "his act of great boldness radicalized [him] in a dramatic way."42 The response of northerners who witnessed slavery varied. Perhaps many northerners simply shrugged off encounters with slavery's severities or stories about them and accepted the rigors of the institu- tion as inevitable. Others could not. For some impressionable north- erners like Benjamin Lundy, seeing slavery in practice acted as a catalyst and propelled them into antislavery activities. Other sensitive northerners found memories of slavery ineradicable, and those remem- brances, when coupled with particular currents in northern society, eventually evoked an antislavery commitment. Answering why some northerners responded to shocking scenes and stories while others- the majority-did not is beyond the competence of this writer. For many unexplained reasons, various northerners adopted antislavery convictions, and observing slavery often provided an experiential basis for denouncing the peculiar institution. As Charles Grandison Par- sons wrote in 1855, "No man can visit the South for the first time without having his views of slavery, whatever they may be, to some extent modified. "i4 Abolitionists, 61-67; L. H. Whelchel, Jr., My Chains Fell Off: William Wells Brown, Fugitive Abolitionist (Lanham, Md., 1985), 3-4, passim; Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (Washington, D. C., 1948), 5; Waldo E. Martin, Jr., The Mind ofFrederick Douglass (Chapel Hill and London, 1984), 6, 22-23; Sorin, Abolitionism, 106-8; and Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks' Search for Freedom, 1830-1861 (New York, 1974), 33-40. An analysis of the several themes running in slave narratives and the reasons that northerners were interested in them can be found in Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives (Westport, Conn., and Lon- don, 1979), especially pages 14, 19-21, 82-126. 42 Frederick J. Blue, Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics (Kent, Ohio, and London, 1987), 30 (quotation), mob incident pages 29-3 1; see also Alan M. Kraut, "The Forgotten Reformers: A Profile of Third Party Abolitionists in Antebellum New York," in Perry and Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered, 136; Harrold, Gamaliel Bailey and Antislavery Union, 16-18; Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy, 58-59; and Stewart, Wendell Phillips, 58-64. 43 Charles Grandison Parsons, Inside View of Slavery: or a Tour Among the Planters This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EXPERIENTIAL BASIS OF ANTISLA VER Y 627 The question of how blacks fared under slavery is crucial to the question of the origins of and the motivations within abolitionism. In 1914 Harrison A. Trexler wrote in his study of Missouri slavery that "the physical punishment of the slave was the joint of antislavery attack.... " The revisionists and the Phillips school of slavery studies disconnected the relationship between slave discipline and the rise of abolitionism by positing that slavery was, as actually carried out, a benevolent patriarchy. In fact, in most of the historical literature on abolitionism until the 1970s, there is almost a perfect inverse rela- tionship between what historians wrote about slavery on the one hand and abolitionism on the other. For scholars who maintained that slavery was a vicious institution, abolitionists were heroic crusaders; those who interpreted slavery as a benevolent relationship between masters and slaves almost invariably portrayed the abolitionists as irrational, troublemaking fanatics." Given the connection that had once dominated discussion of slavery and abolitionism, it is worth mentioning that since the mid-1960s the historiography of slavery has reverted to picturing it as a physi- cally exhausting, psychologically terrorizing, and socially demeaning institution. In a recent discussion of slave personality, Bertram Wyatt- Brown has written that the damage physical punishment does to a person's psyche is a "point... so obvious that I hesitate to belabor it...." Yet if the point is so obvious, then one would assume that historical interpretation of the abolitionists would alter to mirror the change in present understanding of southern slavery. Historical work on antislavery in the past two decades has not changed with interpretations of slavery, and that circumstance reinforces awareness of the separation that historians have effected between slavery and northern abolitionism.45 The connection between abolitionism and the welfare of the slave (Boston and Cleveland, 1855), 53. On the sensitivity question see Perry, Childhood, Mar- riage, and Reform, 16; Duberman, "Abolitionists and Psychology," 183-91; Tomkins, "Psychology of Commitment," 270-98; Griffin, Ferment of Reform, 13-15; and Abzug, Passionate Liberator, 132-34. 44 Trexler, Slavery in Missouri, 95. For examples of the inverse relationship, see Dwight Dumond, Antislavery, who writes that slavery reduced blacks "to the status of beasts of the field" [v]. Clifford S. Griffin, on the other hand, castigates the abolitionists as "purveyors of the horror story" and refers to Weld's American Slavery As It Is as a collection of anec- dotes of sex and sadism; Their Brothers' Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800-1865 (New Brunswick, N. J., 1960), 106. 45 Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South," American Historical Review, XCIII (December 1988), 1248; John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972), Chap. 6; Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana and Chicago, 1984), 41, 52-57; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1982), 3, 38, 334-37; and Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956), Chap. 4. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 628 THE JO URNA L OF SO UTHERN HIS TOR Y is, however, exceptionally explicit in the evangelical morality that usually gushed forth from abolitionists. The abolitionist contention that slaveowning was a sin has usually gone somewhat undefined, most authors arguing that abolitionists intended that God meant for each person to own him- or herself and to worship the deity without obstruction from outside authority. But part of the abolitionist indict- ment of slavery was that it broke the spirit of the New Testament, the Golden Rule; here, cruelty was an undeniable violation of biblical morality. In 1818 the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church clearly proclaimed the irreligious nature of slaveholding: "We con- sider the voluntary enslaving of one part of the human race by another as a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature; as utterly inconsistent with the law of God, which requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves, and as totally irreconcilable [sic] with the spirit and principle of the Gospel of Christ, which enjoins that 'all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them'." It is hardly to be wondered that much of the debate over slavery in the antebellum period between northerners and southerners-epitomized by discussions of whether slaves were better off than free laborers-pivoted on the question of the treatment of the slave. If slaves were well treated, then the religious attack on slavery becomes more abstract and otherworldly; but if slaves were mistreated, then the biblical charge against slavery is unambiguous. After all, there is nothing abstract about whippings, family separations, and mutilations.46 The witnessing of slavery by northerners also produced a clear secondary effect: many northerners quickly defamed all southern practices, customs, traditions, and institutions. For antislavery crusaders, slavery became the great causative factor-the lone deter- mining independent variable-of all southern civilization. Because slavery was a massive institution that required physical violence and the forceful separation of families, antislavery activists found it in- conceivable that the South's white population could conduct daily affairs without being affected by the demands of slavery. Susan B. Anthony revealingly wrote in 1854 while staying in Washington, D. C., "There is no promptness, no order, no system down here. The institu- tion of slavery is as ruinous to the white man as to the black...." William Lloyd Garrison wrote upon his expectation of immediately leaving Baltimore, "Of southern habits, southern doctrines, and 46 Presbyterian resolution taken from Schriver, Go Free, 16, who in turn quoted from Edwin S. Gaustad, A Religious History of America (New York, 1966), 182; see also Hart, Slavery and Abolition, 167-68. For interpretations on the meaning of slavery as morally wrong, see McKivigan, War Against Proslavery Religion, 19-21; and Lesick, Lane Rebels, 84-88. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EXPERIENTIAL BASIS OF A NTISLA VERY 629 southern practices, I am heartily sick. The first are loose; the second disorganising; the last oppressive. There is nothing which the curse of slavery has not tainted. It rests on every herb, and every tree, and every field, and on the people, and on the morals."4" Kentucky abolitionist Cassius M. Clay made the connection between slavery and all other affairs of the South explicit in a speech at New York City in 1846: "It is an inevitable result of the laws of God and man, that where a man habitually violates one great law, he will-but with here and there an exception-sooner or later, violate all the rest.""4 Southerners immediately reacted to abolitionist charges of brutality by presenting a congenial, gentle vision of master-slave relations. George Fitzhugh termed slavery a patriarchal relationship that work- ed favorably for the slave, particularly in comparison with the condi- tions under which free workers lived in Europe and in New England. Edward A. Pollard argued that slavery suited blacks and they pros- pered under such a regime; according to Pollard, even the auction block held no real terrors for Africans.49 In the twentieth century, historians have to a considerable degree substantiated the southern complaint that abolitionists overly exaggerated the barbarities of slavery.50 By establishing a factual basis that abolitionists and others II Anthony quoted in Ida H. Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony: Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many from Her Contemporaries during Fifty Years... A Story of the Evolution of the Status of Woman (3 vols.; Indianapolis, 1898-1908), I, 118; William L. Garrison to Harriet Farnham Horton, May 12, 1830, in Louis Ruchames and Walter M. Merrill, eds., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison (6 vols.; Cambridge, Mass., 1971-1981), I, 91-92 (quotation on p. 92). On this matter, note the favorable depic- tions of the South in late fall 1833 in [Koerner], Memoirs, I, 322, and then the reaction to a whipping in July-August, 1833, I, 296. William Seward's first trip to the South occur- red in 1819 when he obtained a position as a teacher in Georgia, but that brief sojourn did not elicit from him particularly trenchant observations about the cruelty of slavery as did his journeys in 1835 and 1846; Seward, ed., William H. Seward, I, 40-43. Interestingly, Thomas Wentworth Higginson's first impressions of the South were of its industriousness and piety, although he was disturbed by slave auctions; Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm, 41-42. 48 Speech of Cassius M. Clay at Broadway Tabernacle, January 1846, in Horace Greeley, ed., The Writings of Cassius Marcellus Clay (New York, 1848), 191-92 (quotation on both pages). 49 Harvey Wish, George Fitzhugh: Propagandist of the Old South (Baton Rouge, 1943), 174-82; Edward A. Pollard, Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South (New York, 1859), 21-45; see also George S. Sawyer, Southern Institutes; or, An Inquiry into the Origin and Early Prevalence of Slavery and the Slave-Trade... (Philadelphia, 1858), 201-24. General works on the proslavery argument include Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860 (Baltimore and Lon- don, 1977); Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge and London, 1982), Chap. 13; Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York, 1969), 118-244; and William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1935). 50 Henry H. Simms, Emotion at High Tide: Abolition as a Controversial Factor, 1830-1845 (Richmond, 1960), 21, 27; Thomas F. Harwood, "The Abolitionist Image of Louisiana and Mississippi," Louisiana History, VII (Fall 1966), 281-308; Phillips, American Negro Slavery, 293-307; Arthur Young Lloyd, The Slavery Controversy, 1831-1860 (Chapel Hill, 1939), 52-101; and Avery Craven, An Historian and the Civil War (Chicago, 1964), 51-60. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 630 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTOR Y grossly magnified the cruelty of slavery, antebellum southerners as well as twentieth-century historians opened the door for different interpretations of northern antislavery behavior.5" Southerners, however, did not deny the existence of cruelties con- nected with slave trading and discipline. They instead responded to the charge that those aspects of slavery were the only ones worthy of consideration. The southern viewpoint was that floggings, the break- ing up of families, and the auction block were merely incidents in a slave's life, ephemeral episodes. If northerners thought about the entirety of a slave's life instead of the few but necessary moments of pain, then, southerners insisted, an impartial assessment of slavery would be much more favorable to the institution and to white southerners. In effect, slave masters complained that northerners really did not understand slavery because they only saw snippets of the institution-unfavorable ones at that-and had no real knowledge of slavery as a day-to-day institution. As William H. Trescott wrote to James H. Hammond in 1858, slavery "is an institution that can only be understood by experience, and its enemies can never be made to see the unreality of their convictions."52 The different experiential bases of southerners and northerners amounted to a cultural chasm over the single point of how to under- stand the punishments required by slavery. Southerners, though uncom- fortable with some of the violence that accompanied slaveowning, did not believe that on the whole their disciplinary techniques revealed any departure from Christian precepts or the spirit of Enlightenment 5 Avery 0. Craven, Civil War in the Making, 1815-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1959), viii; George Lunt, Radicalism in Religion, Philosophy, and Social Life: Four Papers from the Boston Courier for 1858 (Boston, 1858), 74; Charles MacKay, Life and Liberty in America: or, Sketches of a Tour of the United States and Canada in 1857-8 (New York, 1859), 244-45. A modern, quantitative acceptance of the lack of severity in slavery is offered by Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross (2 vols.; Boston, 1974), I, 144-47. Robert W. Fogel's new examination of slavery is less explicit on the subject of cruelty than his effort with Stanley L. Engerman in Time on the Cross. Fogel currently does not accord cruelty as much of a motivating factor in either antislavery or abolition. He stresses that masters used incentives to obtain slave obedience rather than punishment, and he generally discounts the notion that barbaric treatment was particularly important in the lives of slaves; Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York and Lon- don, 1989), on treatment of slaves, pp. 68-69, 142-47, 153, 173, 194-95; on influences pro- ducing abolitionism, pp. 240-44, 254-64, 269-70; on abolitionist use of the cruelty theme, pp. 277-79; on cruelty and the master's power' pp. 394-95. 52 William H. Trescot to James H. Hammond, December 5, 1858, James Henry Ham- mond Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.); see Howard R. Floan, The South in Northern Eyes, 1831 to 1861 (Austin, 1958), 184-85. Frequently southerners explained many features of southern slaveholding by referring to race. But the racial argument did not work as well on the subject of cruelty as it did on topics such as the political, economic, and educational capabilities of the enslaved. Christian morality would, supposedly, decry any instance of barbarity regardless of race, and racial explanations therefore were not an adequate defense of the physical treatment of slaves. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EXPERIENTIAL BASIS OF ANTISLA VER Y 631 thought. Southerners maintained, according to historian Arthur Y. Lloyd, that critics of southern slavery spoke "without perspective or sense of proportion, lacking a knowledge of the South and the problems revolving around slavery...." Northerners, however, often remarked upon the nonchalance that southerners exhibited when disciplining slaves or sending them to auction. Frances Adeline Seward remarked in 1835 on the insensitivity of the people of a Virginia town to the presence of infirm, unclad, and crippled slaves: "Of course such scenes do not attract the attention of the people here who are accustomed to them; but to me they were the source of many unpleasant reflections." Charles Parsons also noted how slaveholding affected southern attitudes toward suffering: "In judg- ing of any of them [slaveholders] it ought not to be forgotten that persons living in the midst of slavery gradually become familiar with its attendant evils, and by imperceptible degrees they come to view calmly exhibitions of cruelty and suffering from which they would once have shrunk with horror."" Continual contact with slavery altered moral sensibilities. Susan B. Anthony, lobbying for antislavery causes in 1854 in Washington, D. C., complained that constant interaction with the institution dulled her moral instincts: "Yes, even I am growing accustomed to slavery; so much so that I cease to think of its accursed influence and calmly eat from the hands of the bondman without being mindful that he is such. 0, Slavery, hateful thing that thou art thus to blunt the keen edge of conscience!" In his biography of Sergeant S. Prentiss, Dallas C. Dickey gave an illustration of how daily contact with slavery altered the perceptions of at least this one particular northerner. At first Prentiss, who migrated from Massachusetts in 1827 to live in Mississippi, found slavery the bane of southern civilization: people lived too sumptuously and did not work hard enough. He found slavery "a difficult institution... to accept." As the years passed, he found slaves rather happy and the extent of cruelty exaggerated. Dickey wrote, significantly, that "tolerance for southern habits increased in Prentiss as he became more adjusted."54 Two mid-nineteenth-century politicians, Henry Winter Davis of Maryland and Orville Hickman Browning of Illinois, provide il- 53 Lloyd, Slavery Controversy, 52; Seward, ed., William Seward, I, 275; Parsons, Inside View of Slavery, 61. Charles Wiltse made a plea for understanding the context of John C. Calhoun's 1831 letter to Armistead Burt advising him to punish a runaway slave. Yet this willingness to adapt to slavery was generating friction between North and South. See Charles M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun: Nullifier, 1829-1839 (Indianapolis and New York, 1949), 116-17. 54 Anthony's journal quoted in Ida H. Harper, Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, I, 118; Dallas C. Dickey, Seargent S. Prentiss: Whig Orator of the Old South (Baton Rouge, 1946), 40-41. For the biography of a northerner who easily accepted slavery, see Robert E. May, John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader (Baton Rouge and London, 1985), 23. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 632 THE JO URNA L OF SO UTHERN HIS TOR Y ruminating examples of the disorientation some Americans felt as they moved back and forth from slave society to free society. Henry Winter Davis, who had spent several years in Ohio at Kenyon College (1833-1837), came back to the South to attend classes at the Universi- ty of Virginia. Though he had disliked the loss of sophistication when he removed to frontier Ohio, "on my return I remember I was struck with a sort of revulsion of feeling at the aspect of slavery which I certainly had not carried with me to the West." Orville H. Browning had been born in Kentucky in 1806 and had moved to Illinois by 1831. He disliked slavery and as an Illinois attorney defend- ed runaway slaves, although he deprecated abolitionism. In 1854 he returned to Kentucky, saw a slave auction, and recorded for posterity the gap that existed between those who knew slavery from continual contact and those who only caught sporadic glimpses of the institu- tion's cruelties: "Also saw a negro man sold at public auction in the [Lexington] Court House yard. Although I am not sensible in any change in my views upon the abstract question of slavery, many of its features, that they are no longer familiar, make a much more vivid impression of wrong than they did before I had lived away from the influence of the institution."55 Much of the cultural gap between northerners and southerners can thus be seen initially as a gap in sensitivity to the discipline re- quired by slavery. Why did the episodes of cruelty to slaves so thoroughly discredit slavery-and then the entire South-in antislavery minds? What had happened to the North so that at least one important element of the population could elevate the matters of cruelty and violence to such a height that they could easily discredit in northern eyes every other aspect of southern slavery and southern life? Slavery, as an institution, produced moments of barbarity because it rested on the application of physical violence. It was only through coercion that labor could be obtained from an unwilling population, hence the vitally important phrase "involuntary servitude." Con- tinuous physical violence in slavery attracted the attention of some northerners. The antislavery movements in the North, especially its abolitionist phase, went beyond the protests of a few individuals and blossomed into a movement. It is in answer to this question of how sensitivity to the plight of the slave expanded from a few isolated individuals to a social movement that the studies of northern social environmental conditions are most valuable. For nearly three 55 Bernard C. Steiner, Life of Henry Winter Davis (Baltimore, 1916), 49-50 (quotation on p. 50); entry of May 8, 1854, in Theodore Calvin Pease and James G. Randall, eds., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning (2 vols.; Springfield, Ill., 1925-1933), I, 138-39; Browning's background is discussed ibid., xi-xvi. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EXPERIENTIAL BASIS OF ANTISLA VERY 633 decades historians have approached the question by focusing upon the coincidence between the rise of abolitionism and the twin economic forces of market expansion and industrialization.56 However, the crucial element in any explanation of the ties between general economic transformation and the rise of abolitionism must be based on interac- tion between northerners and slavery; these general socioeconomic forces did not create abolitionism from a vacuum but rather heighten- ed and magnified the northern cultural shock and distaste of seeing southern slavery in operation. Among the many causes that led to the development of American abolitionism that scholars have enumerated, there has been one that has been omitted: the rise of a generation of northerners who had no experience with slaveholding. Under the impact of Enlightenment thought, the idealism of the revolutionary period, and the relative economic weakness of northern slavery, the northern states passed emancipation laws, and by 1800 the institution of slavery no longer existed there, although some individual slaves remained in states like New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania well into the nineteenth century. The removal of slavery from above the Mason-Dixon line did more than confirm various aspects of the American Revolution or provide an antislavery heritage for future abolitionists to draw upon.57 With the death of northern slavery also came the death of northern acquaintance with the practices and customs and cruelties of slavery. The shrieks from floggings and the auction block were gone; after 1800 these disciplinary and commercial aspects of slavery were beyond the ken of northern experience unless northerners visited with southerners. Just as important, the removal of northern slavery also eliminated northern knowledge and understanding of daily rela- tions between slaves and masters. There was no patriarchal relation- ship left for northerners to witness on a daily basis. There is an obvious correlation between the timing of the abolition of slavery in the North and the rise of Garrisonian immediatism in 1831. Many authors have postulated that the appearance of aboli- tionism in the mid-1830s was tied to northern social phenomena such as a surging evangelism, industrial development, and extensive 56 This article argues for a difference in the forces generating American and British aboli- tionism. For a discussion of economic interpretations of British abolition consult Howard Temperley, "Anti-Slavery as a Form of Cultural Imperalism," 338-41. 57 Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse, N. Y., 1966); Zilversmit, First Emancipation; and Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago and London, 1961), 3-15. Although northern slavery was less violent than that practiced on southern plantations in the colonial period, there was cruelty, and evidently few people protested against the punishment inflicted on bondspeo- ple until the Quakers and some New Englanders spoke out in the quarter century prior to the Revolution; Zilversmit, First Emancipation, 3-32, 55-108. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 634 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTOR Y commercialization.58 Yet the appearance of Garrisonian abolitionism comes nearly exactly one generation after slavery had been wiped out in the North. It has been noted that abolitionists were generally young men and women-the first generation to grow up in the North without slavery.59 In many ways the Garrisonian abolitionists and their cohorts were the first generation of northerners with absolutely no or at least minimal experience with the physical discipline of slavery and with the daily life of slaves. It is hardly to be wondered that the first collision between these young people and the auction block or the whipping post evoked a cultural shock: they had no institutions left in the North to prepare them for the regimen of slavery. Neither did they have institutions in the North that could explain how the master-slave relationship could mitigate cruelty.60 Young northerners had no experience by which they could judge or understand southern slavery. The elimination of northerners' familiarity with slavery resulting from northern abolition following the Revolution and the personal witnessing of the cruelties of slavery in conjunction with northern social developments explain the emergence of militant abolitionism. The North was, and had been, a less violent region than the South.6' Some of the North's growing distaste for violence came from the development of evangelical piety and probably from the heritage of consensus fostered by the Puritan village. But certain social and economic developments may have contributed to a growing disposi- tion of northerners to view violence with more opprobrium than had previous societies. The rise of the market economy evokes Thomas Haskell's interpretation of the connection between abolitionism and commercial capitalism: the spread of contracts also meant the develop- ment of a mechanism to settle conflicts without resort to personal violence. And the surge in economic activity due to transportation improvements created a new middle class. This middle class may have been removed from the more physical aspects of wrenching a livelihood either from the earth or from resistant ores and minerals- that is, the emerging middle class in the United States labored more with their heads than with their hands. This position in society may have influenced such individuals to stress nonviolent means of con- 58 For example, see Davis, Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style, 26; Stewart, Holy Warriors, 34-40; and Walters, American Reformers, 3-9. "1 Abzug, Passionate Liberator, 128-29; Wyatt-Brown, "Conscience and Career," 183-203; Sernett, Abolition's Axe, 4-5. 60 Parsons, Inside View of Slavery, 53. "I See for example Elliott J. Gorn, " 'Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch': The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry," American Historical Review, XC (February 1985), 18-43; Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin and London, 1979). This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EXPERIENTIAL BASIS OF ANTISLA VERY 635 ducting life in order to achieve desired ends.62 Perhaps one of the best indicators of the acceptance of nonviolent means was the rise of the voluntary societies that proliferated in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.63 Northern sensitivity toward violence and cruelty was also fostered by the death of political deference in the United States. Between 1780 and 1830, the deferential traditions of the country came under attack-political elitism was rejected and replaced by ideological and rhetorical egalitarianism. The rise of voluntary associationism that coincided with the death of deferential politics may indeed have been, as some authors have claimed, an attempt by evangelical Federalists to reclaim by social means what they had lost politically. But it may also have been a reaction to the idea that elites had to impose a wholesome order upon society. When, through one process or another, elites were stripped politically of their ability to order society, a number of individuals championed the reordering of social relations by volun- tary consent. For many persons, voluntarism among the people, rather than decrees from the elite, became the means to supply social pro- cedures and structures." Implied in this switch to voluntary associations was a criticism of how elites had provided order for the rest of society when they had reigned politically: they had used force. Elites had created an ordered society by using the police and the military to force obe- dience. This view-that a violent elitism had governed the world until the establishment of the American experiment-did reach print. Theodore Parker once wrote, while castigating the pecuniary instinct, "In ruder days the strong oppressed the weak by brute violence; now the crafty do it by brutal cunning. " Cassius M. Clay lambasted 62 Stewart, Holy Warriors, 14-35, 53, 67, 78-80; and Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part II," 547-66; on the middle class, see especially Blumin, "Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century America," 313-17. Blumin may have overemphasized the separation between manual and mental labor for the antebellum period. 63 Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, Chap. 3; and Gilkeson, Middle-Class Providence, Chap. 2. By enabling more northerners to see slavery more easily, the transportation system probably heightened sectional tensions and the debate over slavery. Several abolitionists com- mented that prior to the nineteenth century the lack of communication between the regions of the nation permitted slavery to operate without northern oversight; presumably, the transportation revolution exposed slavery to northern eyes. See comments of James Russell Lowell, "The Abolitionists and Emancipation," [March 1, 1849], in The Anti-Slavery Papers of James Russell Lowell (2 vols.; Boston and New York, 1902), II, 52; William Goodell, Slavery and Anti-Slavery; A History of the Great Struggle in Both Hemispheres; with a View of the Slavery Question in the United States (New York, 1852), 390; and May, Recollec- tions, 7. 64 Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Par- ties, 1790s-1840s (New York, 1983), 128-35, 305-20, 334; Formisano, "Deferential-Participant Politics: The Early Republic's Political Culture, 1789-1840," American Political Science Review, LXVIII (June 1974), 483-85. Perhaps the work most noted for advancing the argu- ment that social control was the primary motivation in evangelical societies is Griffin, Their Brothers' Keepers. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:25:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 636 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTOR Y the notion of rule by force; in the past "the stronger killed the weaker, and robbed him, or subjected him to slavery, and by the terror of the superior might fed upon the bread of unpaid labor." And the abolitionist Stephen A. Hodgman wrote during the Civil War, "The principle that might makes right, is the principle that has practically governed the world, during Satan's dominion over it." Abolitionists, and perhaps many northerners in general, found elite rule synonymous with violent rule.65 Abolitionists developed numerous arguments against slavery, using such topics as Christian morality, sanctity of the family, proper sexual relations, adequate economic rewards, democratic idealism, and pur- ity of governmental operations. But at the heart of the abolitionist complaint against slavery was the despotic infliction of violence upon others in order to obtain wealth. The pacifist orientation of the early abolitionists is now well known and documented, and the abolitionist repudiation of coercion is also well established. As Lawrence Fried- man wrote of the Garrisonian wing: "[Boston] Clique abolitionists perceived Southern black bondage as only the worst example of American reliance on force-on man oppressing his fellow man rather than partaking in mutual love."66 Abolitionists possessed a clear, systematic analysis of how cruelty was inherent in the institution

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