The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917

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[269] Spring, "Memoir of Mills," 131, 139, 140.

[270] Brown, _Finley_, 65, 66.

[271] _Ibid._, "A Respectable Resident of the District of Columbia to
Brown," 64, 65.

[272] Sunderland, "Liberian Colonization," _Liberian Bulletin_, No.
16, 19.

[273] Virginia Historical Society, Collections, VI, 26; _Niles'
Register_, XI, 296.

[274] _Niles' Register_, XI, 296.

[275] Manuscript Record of the Meeting, Library of Congress. Copy
furnished by the American Colonization Society.

[276] The _National Intelligencer_ reported the meeting. The substance
of Clay's remarks is printed in Archibald Alexander, "A History of
Colonization on the Western Coast of Africa" (Philadelphia, 1849),
77-82; in J. Tracy, "A View of Exertions Lately Made for the Purpose
of Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United States, in
Africa, or Elsewhere" (Washington, 1817), 4 ff.

[277] Alexander, "A History of Colonization," 82-87; Tracy, "A View of
Exertions," 4-11. For a criticism of all the speeches before this
meeting see David Walker, "An Appeal" (Boston, 1830), 50 ff.

[278] Torrey, "A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery," 69.

[279] Torrey, "A View of Exertions," 9, 10; Walker, "Appeal," 57.

[280] Spring, "Memoir of Mills, Samuel J. Mills to Ebenezer Burgess,"
July 30, 1817, 136.

[281] _Ibid._, 136.

[282] American Colonization Society, Eighty-second report, 7.

[283] See the _American Museum_, December, 1790, 285-286, for his
plan.

[284] Thorton's activities have been related by H. N. Sherwood, "Early
Negro Deportation Projects," in _Mississippi Valley Historical
Review_, March, 1916, 502-505.

[285] The committee for the memorial consisted of: E. B. Caldwell,
John Randolph, Richard Rush, Walter Jones, Francis S. Key, Robert
Wright, James H. Blake and John Peter. The committee for the
Constitution: Francis S. Key, Bushrod Washington, E. B. Caldwell,
James Breckenridge, Walter Jones, Richard Rush, and W. G. D.
Worthington.

[286] Mills wrote Cuffe, December 26, 1816, informing him of the
activities in Washington and asked for information about Africa. He
added a postscript: "If the general government were to request you to
go out for the purpose of exploring in your own vessel would you
engage in this service if offered proper support?" Cuffe Manuscripts,
Samuel J. Mills to Paul Cuffe, December 26, 1916.

[287] The signers of this Constitution are given by Sunderland,
"Liberian Colonization," _Liberian Bulletin_, No. 16, 20, as follows:

_Signers of American Colonization Society, December 28, 1816._

H. Clay Jno. Loockerman John Taylor
E. B. Caldwell Jno. Woodside Overton Carr
Thos. Dougherty Wm. Dudley Diggs P. H. Wendover
Stephen B. Balch Thos. Carberry F. S. Key
Jno. Chambers, Jr. Samuel J. Mills Charles Marsh
Thos. Patterson Geo. A. Carroll David M. Forest
John Randolph of Roanoke W. G. D. Worthington John Wiley
Rob't H. Goldsborough John Lee Nathan Lufborough
Wm. Thornton Richard Bland Lee William Meade
George Clark D. Murray William H. Wilmer
James Laurie Robert Finley Geo. Travers
J. T. Stull B. Allison Edm. I. Lee
Dan'l Webster B. L. Lear John P. Todd
J. C. Herbert W. Jones Bushrod Washington
Wm. Simmons J. Mason
E. Forman Mord. Booth
Ferdinand Fairfax J. S. Shaaf
V. Maxsy Geo. Peter

[288] The other officers were as follows:

William H. Crawford of Georgia
Henry Clay of Kentucky
William Phillips of Massachusetts
Col. Henry Rutgers of New York
John E. Howard }
Samuel Smith } of Maryland
John C. Herbert }
John Taylor of Caroline, of Virginia
Andrew Jackson of Tennessee
Robert Ralston }
Richard Rush } of Pennsylvania

John Mason of the District of Columbia
Robert Finley of New Jersey

These were the thirteen vice presidents.

Elias B. Caldwell, Secretary
William G. D. Worthington, Recorder
David English, Treasurer

Francis S. Key
Walter Jones
John Laird
Rev. Dr. James Laurie
Rev. Stephen B. Balch
Rev. Obadiah B. Brown
James H. Blake
John Peter
Edmund I. Lee
William Thorton
Jacob Hoffman
Henry Carroll

These composed the Board of Managers.

[289] Manuscript Records of the Meeting.

[290] Brown, _Finley_, 65, 66.

THE EVOLUTION OF SLAVE STATUS IN AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

II

The story of the evolution of the status of the Negro in the North
during the first part of the nineteenth century can be easily told as
it was the result of forces the existence of which we have already
suggested. By far the most important among these were economic and
industrial. Lecky has said somewhere that the masses of men are
influenced far more by the practical implications of daily life in the
pursuit of their callings than they are by abstract ideas and this
finds abundant illustration in the attitude taken by the northern mind
upon the Negro. In Pennsylvania, where slavery existed in its mildest
form and where the moral sentiment of the community was best prepared
for its eradication, thanks to the persistent and effective campaign
of education begun by the Quakers as early as 1688 and prosecuted
under the leadership of such men as the saintly John Woolman and
Benezet, economic interests still played a more important part than
ethical.[291] Slavery flourished only where the plantation system was
profitable and this was not the case in Pennsylvania. The industrial
development of the State was in the direction of small farming,
manufacturing and commerce, all of which were uncongenial to slavery.
In the absence of paramount economic needs, slavery was unable to hold
its own against the moral idealism of the Quaker and the racial
antipathies of the German and the Scotch Irish.

Even in respect to New England the evidence is abundant that it was
economic rather than moral or religious influences that paved the way
to freedom for the slave. At the beginning it was the imperative
demand for labor that led to the enslavement of the Indian and Negro,
which the Puritan justified by an appeal to his high Calvinism. When
this demand ceased because of the increase of white labor and when the
diminished supply rendered it more difficult to get profitable slaves,
the same economic laws tended to encourage the freedom of the
slave.[292] "Fortunately for the moral development of our beloved
colonies," says Weeden, "the climate was too harsh, the social system
too simple, to engender a good economic employment of black labor. The
simple industrial methods of each New England homestead, described in
so many ways through these pages, make a natural barrier against an
alien social system including either black or copper-colored
dependents. The blacks soon dwindled in numbers, or dropped out from a
life too severe for any but the hardiest and firmest fibered
races."[293] When we see how during the constitutional convention of
1787 selfish economic interests led Massachusetts to enter into the
unholy alliance with the pro-slavery States of the far South to fix
upon another section of the country the nefarious slave-trade for
twenty years longer, we may perhaps conclude that it was after all
fortunate for the integrity of the Puritan conscience that slavery was
unprofitable as a domestic institution. The slave-trade ended in 1808
and during the years 1806, 1807 six hundred New England slavers
arrived at the port of Charleston alone.[294]

There seems to have been, on the whole, comparatively little express
legislation in the way of constitutional changes and few express acts
abolishing slavery in the North during this period.[295] The process
was a gradual one, proceeding by acts of manumission or gradual
abolition, the act of Pennsylvania in 1780 being typical. Slavery does
not appear to have ever been made illegal in Pennsylvania by express
law but died out in the natural course of events. Hence slaves were
found in this State well on toward the middle of the nineteenth
century.[296] This goes to show that the abolition of slavery and the
admission of the Negro to complete citizenship were the result of a
slow evolution of public sentiment. Moore even contends that slavery
was never formally abolished in Massachusetts until 1866 when it was
agreed on all hands that it was "considered as abolished."[297] Thus
the social mind, by a natural and normal development of democratic
ideals, arrived unconsciously at the point where it was impossible to
harmonize the status of the slave with the prevailing sentiments of
the community. The social mind was for this reason often far in
advance of the legal status of the Negro as determined by the laws
which represented earlier stages of opinion. A case in point is the
Massachusetts act of 1788, of which Moore says: "We doubt if anything
in human legislation can be found which comes nearer branding color as
a crime," and yet this law remained upon the statute books of the
State long after it had ceased to be in accord with the feelings and
practices of the community and was only repealed in 1834.[298] The
hesitancy of the legislators of the different free States to pass
express acts of abolition and thus formally to pronounce slavery
illegal may have been due in part to the fact that slavery was
sanctioned to a certain extent by the constitution and was the
"peculiar institution" around which centered the social and economic
life of a large number of sister States.

The great industrial expansion of the North and West toward the end of
the second decade of the century and the increase of population
through immigration in time reduced the Negro in the North in point of
number to an almost negligible factor. He was swept along with the
rising tide of the growing industrial democracy and shared in the
general benefits of citizenship accorded to all. But it would give a
very superficial idea of the real status of the Negro in the North
during this time if we were to base our judgments upon the statistics
of slave and free, the various acts for manumission or the vigorous
anti-slavery agitation from 1830 on. A closer acquaintance with the
actual conditions of the time shows that there was a striking contrast
between the theoretical rights and privileges which the Negro was
supposed to enjoy by virtue of the constitution and bills of rights
and those he really did enjoy.

This was a subject of frequent remark by foreigners travelling in
America. Captain Marryat, writing of conditions in Philadelphia in
1838, says, "Singular is the degree of contempt and dislike in which
the free blacks are held in all the free states of America. They are
deprived of their rights as citizens; and the white pauper who holds
out his hand for charity ... will turn away from a negro or
colored man with disdain."[299] DeTocqueville, in a remarkable
characterization of the relations between the races based upon his
observations in the early thirties, says that as the legal barriers
fall away in the free States those of race prejudice are drawn all the
sharper. Wherever the freemen have increased the gap has widened
between them and the whites. "The prejudice which repels the negroes
seems to increase in proportion as they are emancipated, and
inequality is sanctioned by the manners while it is effaced from the
laws of the country. Though having the franchise the Negro may not
exercise the right for fear of his life;[300] his rights before the
law are pronounced upon by white judges only; his children may not
attend the same school with the white's and gold can not buy a ticket
for him in the same theater; he lies apart in the hospital, worships
at a different altar and must bury his dead in a different
cemetery."[301]

Harriet Martineau, writing in 1834-35 and commenting upon the
statement of a Boston gentleman that the Negroes were perfectly well
treated in New England in the matter of education, the franchise, and
otherwise, states that while they are nominally citizens, "yet their
houses and schools are pulled down,[302] and they can obtain no remedy
at law. They are thrust out of offices, and excluded from the most
honorable employments, and stripped of all the best benefits of
society by fellow-citizens who, once a year, solemnly lay their hands
on their hearts, and declare that all men are born free and equal, and
that rulers derive their just powers from the consent of the
governed."[303] Fanny Kemble, the English actress, writes in 1838-39
of the treatment of the free blacks at the North, "They are marked as
the Hebrew lepers of old, and are condemned to sit, like these
unfortunates, without the gates of every human and social sympathy.
From their own sable color, a pall falls over the whole of God's
universe to them, and they find themselves stamped with a badge of
infamy of Nature's own devising, at sight of which all natural
kindness of man to man seems to recoil from them. They are not slaves
indeed, but they are pariahs; debarred from all fellowship save with
their own despised race--scorned by the lowest white ruffian in your
streets, not tolerated as companions by the foreign menials in your
kitchens. They are free certainly but they are also degraded,
rejected, the offscum and the offscouring of the very dregs of your
society; they are free from the chain, the whip, the enforced task and
unpaid toils of slavery; but they are not the less under a ban."[304]

There was in fact throughout this entire period a remarkable paradox
in the social mind of the North with regard to the Negro, for we find
everywhere the strongest antipathy to the Negro personally and general
discriminations against him socially and politically, united with the
greatest enthusiasm for his rights in the abstract. Even the best
spirits of the time did not escape it. Fanny Kemble relates of John
Quincy Adams, who became the very head and front of the anti-slavery
element in Congress,[305] that while discussing with her at a Boston
dinner-party the Shaksperean heroine Desdemona, he asserted "with a
most serious expression of sincere disgust, that he considered all her
misfortunes as a very just judgment upon her for having married a
'nigger.'"[306] About the time when Garrisonian abolition was at its
high tide, when Wendell Phillips was placing Toussaint l'Ouverture
above Caesar and Napoleon on the roll of fame, when Whittier,
Longfellow, and Lowell were lending their talents to the cause of
unalterable and inalienable rights of mankind, Jesse Chickering
published a "Statistical View of the Population of Massachusetts from
1765 to 1840," at the end of which he appended some very interesting
facts and conclusions as to the colored population of this State. He
stated that, owing partly to their race traits and partly to fixed and
immovable prejudices of the whites against them, the blacks are
deprived of sympathy and social enjoyments and reduced to a servile
and degraded condition of poverty and dependence (p. 137). Because of
this widespread prejudice against their color, "they cannot obtain
employment on equal terms with the whites, and wherever they go a
sneer is passed upon them, as if this sportive inhumanity were an act
of merit.... Thus, though their legal rights are the same as those of
the whites, their condition is one of degradation and dependence." In
spite of the vigorous agitation for the rights of the Negro which
stirred New England and the entire nation at this time, the writer
says "the prejudices which are now felt in this Commonwealth against
the people of color and the disadvantages under which they labor ...
we can hardly expect will soon be removed," though he is persuaded
that "this want of true sympathy, and this sense of degradation, must
operate on their sensibility and unfavorably affect their physical,
moral, and social condition, and shorten to them the duration of life"
(pp. 156, 157).

The anti-slavery movement in Pennsylvania never went to the
rhapsodical extremes we find in Massachusetts. It was from beginning
to end sane and reasonable and yet vigorous and unremittent.
Nevertheless, we find the same enthusiasm for the rights of the Negro
in the abstract combined with racial antipathy, social and political
discriminations, and even on more than one occasion mob violence in
the actual treatment of the Negro population of the State.[307]
Pennsylvania's interest in slavery, because of her position just to
the north of slaveholding States, was never allowed to lag even after
she had set all her slaves free. Her Negro population was constantly
being replenished from the South and largely by fugitive slaves. This
brought about much friction with Maryland, owing to the unwillingness
of Pennsylvanians to surrender the runaways. In spite of Federal law
the spirit of freedom made it unsafe for owners to hunt for their
escaped slaves in Pennsylvania, as the famous Christiana riot of 1851
shows, and brought the State to the verge of nullification,[308] to
such extremes were a peaceful and yet liberty-loving people ready to
go in their championship of the abstract rights of the oppressed
slave.

But while this was true, there is abundant evidence to show that by
the masses of the people the Negro was thoroughly disliked, persecuted
and relegated to an inferior social status by no means in harmony with
the doctrine of the inalienable and unalterable rights of man. Negroes
were set upon in the streets, beaten, cut and even stoned to death in
sheer wanton cruelty. In 1831 the refusal of New Haven, Connecticut,
to establish a Negro college was enthusiastically endorsed in
resolutions passed at a public meeting in Philadelphia, and in 1834,
1835, 1838, 1842 and 1849 this city was distracted by riots directed
against the Negroes. The houses of the Negroes were sacked, their
inmates beaten and mobs of whites and blacks fought through the
streets with clubs and stones.[309] "A careful study of each of these
riots," says Turner, "makes inevitable the deduction that the deep
underlying cause which made every one of them possible, and which
prepared them long before they burst forth, was a fierce, and at least
among the lower classes, an almost universal, hatred of the negro
himself."

How are we to explain this contradiction in dealing with the Negro?
Why did Pennsylvanians mob him, disfranchise him from 1838 to 1873,
seek to get rid of him by colonization and yet hide him from his
master and resolutely refuse to close to him the door of freedom even
in the face of Federal laws? The answer is one of fundamental
importance for the comprehension of the status of the Negro in the
social consciousness of the nation now as well as then. The people of
Pennsylvania had been educated for generations in the great traditions
of freedom. These traditions had their roots in the religious
emancipation of the reformation and gradually extended to the
political sphere and became endeared to the hearts of all Americans
through the struggle with Great Britain. Pennsylvanians had little
special love for the Negro but they loved these traditions dearly. In
a healthy democracy these traditions are inseparably united in the
thought of the average citizen with the personal sense of liberty. To
violate them is to violate that which lends validity to his own
conviction of his right to be free.

It will be said, of course, that in the social and political
restrictions placed upon the Negro as an actual member of the
community, these lofty ideals were negated. Rights that are granted in
theory but are denied in the actual give and take of social contacts
are not true rights. This was undoubtedly the case. But to register
this criticism does not by any means exhaust the situation. For these
so-called inalienable rights are not something that the individual is
born heir to as he is to his father's fortune. They are his
inalienably only by virtue of his potentiality for realizing them and
as such they exist only as possible forms of self-activity, functions
which by common consensus of opinion are conceded to each individual.
In a very real sense, therefore, they must be won or created by each
for himself. The individual or the group, which through ignorance or
inefficiency or thriftlessness or racial discrimination is
incapacitated for measuring up to the demands of an aggressive and
virile democracy, will inevitably find these inalienable and
unalterable rights merely a name so far as they are concerned. Actual
social status in existing American democracy is the result of a
balance of forces one of which is the individual's power of
self-assertion. In _der Kampf um's Recht_ the community imagines it
has done its utmost when it insists upon fair play. There was also the
inevitable friction due to the close contact of diverse race groups.
The Negro population of Pennsylvania was larger than that of any other
northern State. The presence of thousands of members of a different
race, to whom complete social assimilation through intermarriage was
refused, and who represented different standards of living and lower
industrial efficiency, led inevitably to group conflicts.

Just on the eve of the Civil War, therefore, the theoretical status
assigned the Negro in the social consciousness of the North and the
one very soon to be assured to him throughout the entire nation in
Lincoln's emancipation proclamation, insisted that he be included in
those broad and somewhat indefinite categories of rights embodied in
our national political symbols. The enthusiasm for these is to be
explained not so much from the objective and eternal nature of the
rights themselves as from the feeling that they represent a phase of
common social experience of fundamental importance for society as a
whole. Previous training in democratic traditions made men capable of
the noblest self-sacrifice in their loyalty to these ideas of freedom
and equality, but the fact of their being associated with the enslaved
Negro was accidental. No sooner had they assisted the runaway slave to
freedom than they forgot him. He was left to make good in the
autonomous, _laissez faire_ atmosphere of a vigorous democracy. Soon,
however, his economic helplessness and inefficiency, his ignorance of
the tense northern life aroused the same men who had helped him to
freedom to the realization that he was of an alien race, with
characteristics that made his social assimilation difficult. Where the
blacks were present in large numbers the situation was fraught with
the gravest difficulties of social adjustment. These were facts not
encouraging for the future of the two races in the nation. They should
have taught men that emancipation, instead of solving the problem,
would plunge the nation and particularly the South into a situation
the infinite difficulties of which were never dreamed of by the
enthusiastic champions of abstract human rights. DeTocqueville's
language, though written almost thirty years before the _debacle_
came, sounds like a veritable prophecy. He felt that national
abolition was bound to come in the course of events. "I am obliged to
confess," he says however, "that I do not regard the abolition of
slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the
United States," for abolition will inevitably "increase the repugnance
of the white population for the men of color."[310]

It is well to remember, when we come to examine the status of the
Negro in the slave States, that slavery would naturally follow lines
of development determined by the economic, social and climatic
conditions of the sections concerned. These conditions, of course,
vary greatly throughout a region stretching from Maryland to Texas. As
late as the famous Dred Scott case, when slavery was limited to the
South, Justice Curtis could say, "the status of slavery embraces every
condition from that in which the slave is known to the law simply as a
chattel, with no civil rights, to that in which he is recognized as a
person for all purposes, save the compulsory power of directing and
receiving the fruits of his labor. Which of these conditions shall
attend the status of slavery, must depend upon the municipal law which
creates and upholds it."[311] A comparative study of the legislation
of all the slave States with regard to the Negro both as slave and
free will very clearly reveal the effect of these varying conditions
in the several States concerned.[312] Nothing is more necessary to a
calm and unprejudiced study of the institution of slavery than the
realization of this fact.

What then were the economic, climatic and social conditions in the
South which contributed to shape the attitude of the social mind of
the section toward the Negro? The dominant feature of the social and
economic life of the South of ante bellum days was the plantation.
This was the industrial unit comprising usually large land areas,
worked by slaves divided into groups, under strict supervision, with a
fixed routine of labor in the production of special commodities such
as tobacco, rice, sugar-cane or cotton. Two types of plantation life
developed even before the Revolution, the Virginian and the West
Indian, the latter confined at first to the coast line of South
Carolina and later covering the "Black Belt" of the far South. The
term "plantation" was originally synonymous with colony. Virginia was
the "plantation of the London Company"[313] but was later broken up
into smaller economic units which retained the name. By the beginning
of the eighteenth century the prevailing industrial system in Virginia
and Maryland was these small plantations or farms where Negro slaves
gradually took the place of white redemptioners and the prevailing
staple was tobacco. About the end of the seventeenth century the
Jamaican or West Indian type of plantation was introduced on the coast
region around Charleston. It consisted of larger estates cultivated by
thirty or more slaves, with few or no white laborers, the master and
his family often being the only whites present the year around. Fanny
Kemble's "Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation," 1838-39,
gives an interesting though somewhat sombre picture of the conditions
prevailing on the rice plantations near Darien, Georgia.

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