The Martin Duberman Reader (2 page)

Yet such new resolve was not channeled into a heightened demand for the abolition of the institution but only into a demand that its further extension be prevented. By 1845, Northerners may have lost partial but not total confidence in Natural Benevolence; they were now wiser Americans perhaps, but Americans nonetheless. More positive action against slavery, they seemed to be saying, was indeed required, but nothing too positive. Containing the institution would, in the long run, be tantamount to destroying it; a more direct assault was unnecessary. In this sense, the doctrine of nonextension was but a more sophisticated version of the standard faith in time.

One need not question the sincerity of those who believed that nonextension would ultimately destroy slavery, in order to recognize that such a belief partook of wishful thinking. Even if slavery was contained, there remained large areas within the current borders of the Southern states into which the institution could still expand; even without further westward expansion, there was no guarantee that slavery would cease to be profitable; and even should slavery cease to be profitable, there was no certainty that the South, psychologically, would feel able to abandon it. Nonextension, in short, was far from a foolproof formula. Yet many Northerners chose to so regard it.

And thus the question remains: why did not an aroused anti-slavery conscience turn to more certain measures and demand more unequivocal action? To many, a direct assault on slavery meant a direct assault on private property and the Union as well. As devout Lockeans, Americans did believe that the sanctity of private property constituted the essential cornerstone for all other liberties. If property could not be protected in a nation, neither could life nor liberty. And the Constitution, many felt, had upheld the legitimacy of holding property in men. True, the Constitution had not mentioned slavery by name and had not overtly declared in its
favor, but in giving the institution certain indirect guarantees (the three-fifths clause, noninterference for twenty-one years with the slave trade, the fugitive slave proviso), the Constitution had seemed to sanction it. At any rate, no one could be sure. The intentions of the Founding Fathers remained uncertain, and one of the standing debates of the antebellum generation (and since) was whether the Constitution had been designed as a pro- or an antislavery document. Since the issue was unresolved, Northerners remained un-easy, uncertain how far they could go in attacking slavery without at the same time attacking property.

Fear for property rights was underscored by fear for the Union. The white South had many times warned that if her rights and interests were not heeded she would leave the Union and form a separate confederation. The tocsin had been sounded with such regularity that some dismissed it as mere bluster. But there was always the chance that if the South felt sufficiently endangered, it might yet carry out the threat.

It's difficult today fully to appreciate the horror with which most white Northerners regarded the potential breakup of the Union. Lincoln struck a deep chord for his generation when he spoke of the Union as the “last best hope of earth.” That the American experiment was thought the best hope may have been arrogant, a hope at all, naive, but such it was to the average American, convinced of his country's superiority and the possibility of the world learning by example. Americans, enamored of their own extraordinary success story, were especially prone to look on love of country as one of the noblest of human sentiments. Even those Southerners who'd ceased to love the Union had not ceased to love the idea of nationhood; they merely wished to transfer allegiance to a more worthy object.

The difficulty was compounded by the North's ambivalent attitude toward the Negro. The white Northern majority, unlike most of the abolitionists, did not believe in the equality of races. The Bible was read to mean—and the new science of anthropology was said to confirm—the view that the Negro had been a separate, inferior creation meant for a position of servitude. Where there
was doubt on the doctrine of racial equality, its advocacy by the distrusted abolitionists helped to settle the matter in the negative.

It was possible, of course, to believe in Negro inferiority and yet disapprove of Negro slavery. Negroes were obviously men, even if an inferior sort, and as men they could not in conscience (the Christian democratic version) be denied the right to control their own souls and bodies. But if anti-Negro and antislavery sentiments were not actually incompatible, they were not mutually supportive either. Doubt of the Negro's capacity for citizenship continually blunted the edge of antislavery fervor. If God had intended the Negro for a subordinate role in society, perhaps a kind of benevolent slavery was, after all, the most suitable arrangement; as long as there was uncertainty, it might be better to await the slow unfolding of His intentions in His good time.

And so the average Northerner, even after he came actively to disapprove of slavery, continued to be hamstrung in his opposition to it by the competitive pull of other values. Should prime consideration be given to freeing the slaves, even though in the process the rights of property and the preservation of the Union would be threatened? Should the future of the superior race be endangered in order to improve the lot of a people seemingly marked by Nature for a degraded station? Ideally, the North would have liked to satisfy its conscience about slavery and at the same time preserve the rest of its value system intact—to free the Negro and yet do so without threatening property rights or dislocating the Union. This struggle to achieve the best of all possible worlds runs like a forlorn hope throughout the antebellum period—the sad, almost plaintive quest by the American Adam for the perfect world he considered his birthright.

The formula of nonextension did seem to many Northerners, for a time, the ideal formula for balancing these multiple needs. Non-extension would put slavery on the course toward ultimate extinction without producing excessive dislocation; since slavery would not be attacked directly, nor its existence immediately threatened, the South would not be unduly fearful for her property rights, the
Union would not be needlessly jeopardized, and a mass of free Negroes would not be precipitously thrust upon an unprepared public. Nonextension, in short, seemed a panacea: it promised in time to do everything while for the present risking nothing. But like all panaceas, it ignored certain hard realities: would containment really lead to the extinction of slavery? Would the South accept even a gradual dissolution of her peculiar institution? Would it be right to sacrifice two or three more generations of Negroes in the name of uncertain future possibilities? Alas for the American Adam, so soon to be ex-pelled from Eden.

The abolitionists, unlike most Northerners, were not willing to rely on future intangibles. Though often called impractical romantics, they were in some ways the most tough-minded of Americans. They had no easy faith in the benevolent workings of time or in the inevitable triumphs of gradualism. If change was to come, they argued, it would be the result of man's effort to produce it; patience and inactivity had never yet solved the world's ills. Persistently, sometimes harshly, the abolitionists denounced delay and those who advocated it; they were tired, they said, of men using the councils of moderation to perpetuate injustice.

Historians have long assumed that the abolitionists were unified in their advocacy of certain broad policies—immediate emancipation, and without compensation—and also unified in refusing to spell out practical details for implementation. The abolitionists did agree almost unanimously (Gerrit Smith was one of the few exceptions) that slaveholders must not be compensated. One does not pay a man, they argued, for ceasing to commit a sin. Besides, the slaveholder had already been paid many times over in labor for which he had never given wages. Though told that public opinion would never support the confiscation of property, the abolitionists stood firm. They saw themselves as prophets, not politicians; they were concerned with what was right, not with what was possible, though they hoped that if men were made aware of what was right, they would find some practical way of implementing it.

The abolitionists were far less united on the doctrine of immediate
emancipation—that is, in the 1830s, before Southern intransigence and British experience in the West Indies convinced almost all of them that gradualism was hopeless. During the 1830s, there was a considerable spectrum of opinion as to when and how to emancipate the slaves. Contrary to common myth, some of the abolitionists did advocate a period of prior education and training before the granting of full freedom. Men like Theodore Dwight Weld, James G. Birney, and Lewis and Arthur Tappan, stressing the debasing experience of slavery, insisted only that gradual emancipation be immediately begun, not that emancipation itself be at once achieved. This range of opinion hasn't been fully appreciated. Indeed, it might be well to ask whether the abolitionists, in moving steadily toward immediatism, were not, at least in part, driven to that position by the intransigence of their society in the preceding decade, rather than by any inherent extremism in their own temperaments. It has been convenient, then and now, to believe that all abolitionists always advocated instantaneous freedom, for it thus became possible to denounce any call for emancipation as patently impractical.

By 1840, however, most abolitionists
had
become immediatists. They had come to see that not even the most gradual plan for doing away with slavery held any widespread appeal in the country, and had also come to feel the compelling moral urgency of immediatism. Men learned how to be free, the abolitionists had come to believe by 1840, only by being free; slavery, no matter how attenuated, was by its very nature incapable of preparing men for those independent decisions necessary for adult responsibility. Besides, they insisted, the Negro, though perhaps debased by slavery, was no more incapacitated for citizenship than were many poor whites, whose rights no one seriously suggested curtailing. If conditions for emancipation were once established, they could be used as a standing rationale for postponement; the Negro could be kept in a condition of semislavery by the self-perpetuating argument that he was not yet ready for his freedom.

Moreover, any intermediary stage before full freedom would require the spelling out of precise plans, and these would give the
enemies of emancipation an opportunity to pick away at the impracticality of this or that detail. They would have an excuse for disavowing the broader policy under the guise of disagreeing with the specific means for achieving it. Better to concentrate on the larger issue and force men to take sides on that alone, the abolitionists argued, than to give them a chance to hide their opposition behind some supposed disapproval of detail. Wendell Phillips, for one, saw the abolitionists' role as exclusively that of agitating the broader question. Their primary job, Phillips insisted, was to arouse the country's conscience rather than to spell out to it precise plans and formulas.
After
that conscience had been aroused, it would be time to talk of specific proposals; let the moral urgency of the problem be recognized, let the country be brought to a determination to rid itself of slavery, and ways and means to accomplish that purpose would be readily enough found.

No tactical position could really have saved the abolitionists from the denunciation of those hostile to their basic goal. If the abolitionists spelled out a program for emancipation, their enemies could nitpick it to death. If they did not spell out a program, they could then be accused of vagueness and impracticality. Hostility can always find its own justification.

A second mode of attack on the abolitionists has centered on their personalities rather than their policies. The stereotype that has long had currency saw the abolitionist as a disturbed fanatic, a man self-righteous and self-deceived, motivated not by concern for the Negro, as he may have believed, but by an unconscious drive to gratify certain needs of his own. Seeking to discharge either individual anxieties or those frustrations that came from membership in a displaced elite, his antislavery protest was, in any case, a mere disguise for personal anguish.

Underlying this analysis is a broad assumption that has never been made explicit—namely, that strong protest by an individual against social injustice is ipso facto proof of his disturbance. Injustice itself, in this view, is apparently never sufficient to arouse unusual ire in “normal” men, for normal men, so goes the canon, are
always cautious, discreet, circumspect, self-absorbed. Those who hold to this model of human behavior seem rarely to suspect that it may tell us more about their hierarchy of values than about the reform impulse it pretends to describe. Argued in another context, the inadequacies of the stereotype become more apparent: if normal people do not protest “excessively” against injustice, then we should be forced to condemn as neurotic all those who protested with passion against Nazi genocide.

Some of the abolitionists, it is true,
were
palpable neurotics, men who were not comfortable within themselves and therefore not comfortable with others, men whose “reality testing” was poor, whose lifestyles were pronouncedly compulsive, whose relationships were unusual compounds of demand and fantasy. Such neurotics were in the abolitionist movement—the Parker Pillsburys, Stephen Symonds Fosters, Abby Folsoms. Yet even here we should be cautious, for our diagnostic accuracy can be blurred if the lifestyle under evaluation is sharply different from our own. Many of the traits of the abolitionists that today put us off were not peculiar to them but rather to their age—the declamatory style, the abstraction and idealization of issues, the tone of righteous certainty, the religious context of argumentation. Thus the evangelical rhetoric of the movement, with its thunderous emphasis on sin and retribution, can sound downright peculiar (and thus neurotic) to the twenty-first-century skeptic, though in its day common enough to abolitionists and nonabolitionists alike.