Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 18: Black Abolitionists in the 1830s

George Levesque in 1970 wrote about the neglect of the roles of Black Abolitionists even in mainstream, non-Lost-Cause histories. He focuses particular on the active movement in the 1830s. He cites an example from historian David Donald in a 1956 essay:

Donald does not give us his definition of leadership, but since his leadership category is presumably not limited to those who held office in antislavery organizations, it is remarkable that he could find but three Negroes in the ranks of the leaders in the decade of the thirties. When the American Anti-Slavery Society was organized in 1833, three of the sixty-three delegates were blacks; the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, successor in 1834 to the New England Anti-Slavery Society, elected James G. Barbadoes and Joshua Easton, both Negroes, to its board of counselors. Not only is Donald silent on the participation of colored men and women in the formation of new national societies, but he ignores the fact that Negroes were abolition-minded, having formed Negro antislavery societies in the 1820s and early 1830s in many Northern states. More perplexing yet is Donald's seeming belief that workers on the underground railroad (whites as well as blacks) were not abolitionists.¹

Fortunately, mainstream historians for decades have been much more willing to recognize the importance of African-American Abolitionists like David Walker, Harriet Tubman², and Frederick Douglass.

Levesque was concerned that the focus of white Abolitionists not only presented a distorted picture by ignoring their work and significance but also buying into a conservative stereotype of them as starry-eyed, impractical idealists and/or fanatics. That stereotype, of course, was one slaveowners in the 1930s preferred and one that became part of Lost Cause lore.

Not only had white Abolitionists used religious language and arguments against slavery. Levesque also noted that slaves tended to be Baptists or Methodists:

lt seems more than warrantable, then, to hypothesize that the influence of revivalism in radicalizing the antislavery crusade was more pervasive among black abolitionists than among their white counterparts in the movement.

He also notes that Northern Abolitionists were more likely to take a conservative approach of gradual emancipation, while slaves and free blacks wanted their freedom sooner rather than later. And by the 1830s, freedom “later” in the minds of slaveowners meant freedom never.

In this connection he makes a point having to do with a contradiction in the liberal values that framed American understanding of society and government.

A more persuasive factor [than a belief in gradual progress] explaining the overwhelming conservatism of Americans on the question of immediatism is that the doctrine "challenged the northern hierarchy of values. To many, · a direct assault on slavery meant a direct assault on private property and the Union as well." [Quote from Martin Duberman]

As heirs of the Lockean tradition [John Locke justified slavery³], Americans believed almost without reservation-that the sanctity of private property constituted the essential cornerstone for all other liberties. And the fear that this belief - held tenaciously by [white] southerners as well as [white] northerners - might very well eventuate in the breakup of the union was "no less real for being in part irrational" [Duberman].

Levesque concludes with the observation, “lt is indeed high time that we repossess the important historical truth that black abolitionists in the Age of Jackson were the catalysts behind the radicalization of American abolitionism.”

And that was a good thing in that context! Because the slaveowners were prepared to destroy the United States rather than allow for a peaceful end to the institution of slavery.

1. George A. Levesque (1970): Black Abolitionists in the Age of Jackson: Catalysts in the Radicalization of American Abolitionism. Journal of Black Studies 1:2, 187-201. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2783802>

2. Harriet Tubman's Ballad-Woody Guthrie-HBO Harriet Tubman Movie. Official Veronika Jackson YouTube channel 04/22/2016. (Accessed: 2024-18-04).

3. Farr, James (2008): Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery. Political Theory 36:4, 495-522. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/20452649>:

There is glaring contradiction between mandate of absolute power [in his writing on colonial slavery] and Locke's principles regarding just-war and natural law. All this makes Locke if not a mystery at least a very difficult figure to understand. How could Locke - a philosopher of such judgment and criticism and reflection - live with such contradiction and be so guilty of “immoral evasion” [John Dunn] of the consequences of his labors taken as a whole? But he did. A kink in his head, he partook of the madness of American slavery.