Like Walker, Garnet stressed Black resistance to slavery. His evolving political perspective illustrated in microcosm all the key questions the movement confronted. He helped bring to a head the debate among Black abolitionists concerning the question of moral suasion and armed resistance. Garnet, like other Black nationalists after him, initially opposed schemes of separation like the proposals to emigrate to Africa. “America is my home, my country, and I have no other,” he explained in 1848.15 Yet Garnet was to change his position, as did several other Black abolitionists, on emigrationism after 1850.
Martin R. Delany’s The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States is widely considered as the first manifesto of Black nationalism in the United States, making Delany “the founding father of Black nationalism.”16 A Harvard-trained physician, Delany’s early political activity included a stint in 1846 as coeditor of Frederick Douglass’ abolitionist newspaper, North Star, and as a passionate opponent of the American Colonization Society. The American Colonization Society—with a Congressional appropriation of $100,000 in 1819—purchased a strip of land three miles wide and 36 miles long on the west coast of Africa. This strip of land was named Liberia—and its capital was named Monrovia, in honor of then-president James Monroe. However, with the passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Act (FSA), which gave slaveholders the right to recapture escaped slaves even in free states and territories, Delany grew quite pessimistic about the prospects for either coexistence with whites or for abolishing slavery itself. The FSA created a force of federal commissioners empowered to pursue fugitive slaves in any state and return them to their owners. No statute of limitations applied, so that even those slaves who had been free for many years could be (and were) returned.
“We love our country,” Delany wrote in 1852, “dearly love her, but she doesn’t love us—she despises us, and bids us be gone, driving us from her embraces.”17 In a similar vein, he wrote to William Lloyd Garrison, “I am not in favor of caste, nor a separation of the brotherhood of mankind, and would as willingly live among white men as Black, if I had an equal possession and enjoyment of privileges; but shall never be reconciled to live among them, subservient to their will—existing by mere sufferance, as we, the colored people, do, in this country.”18
Delany became the most vocal advocate of emigrationism among Black abolitionists. He continued to oppose the American Colonization Society’s attempt to colonize Liberia, which he referred to as “a poor miserable mockery—a burlesque on a government,”19 and instead argued for resettlement in the Western Hemisphere—including such locations as Canada, the West Indies, Central and South America.20
Delany went further than Garnet in developing a Black nationalist approach and aims for the movement. He argued at an 1854 national emigration convention (an outgrowth of the pro-emigration Negro Convention Movement established in 1817):
Let it then be understood, as a great principle of political economy, that no people can be free who themselves do not constitute an essential part of the ruling element of the country in which they live.... The liberty of no man is secure who controls not his own political destiny.... A people, to be free, must necessarily be their own rulers: that is, each individual must, in himself, embody the essential ingredient—so to speak—of the sovereign principle which composes the true basis of his liberty.21
The struggle for Black freedom, argued Delany, was not “a question of rich against the poor, nor the common people against the higher classes,” that is, a class struggle, “but a question of white against Black—every white person, by legal right, being held superior to a Black or colored person.”22
Delany’s call for Black emancipation aimed at creating a Black elite to replace a society ruled by whites. Foreshadowing the type of appeal that Booker T. Washington later became known for, Delany argued: “Let our young men and women prepare themselves for usefulness, trading, and other things of importance.... Educate them for the store and the country house...to do everyday practical business.”23 By 1860, Delany’s battle cry had become “Africa for the Africans.”24
Delany was also aware that any colonization of Africa would have to involve the assistance or support of one of the “Great Powers.” Delany looked to Britain and France for assistance in the colonization project. “The National Council shall appoint one or two special commissioners, to England [and] France, to solicit...the necessary outfit and support.”25 After all, he argued, Africa was ready for colonization: “The land is ours—there it lies with inexhaustible resources; let us go and possess it.”26
Douglass and Radical Abolitionism
The preeminent Black abolitionist of this period was Frederick Douglass. More than any other abolitionist of the time, Douglass tied the antislavery struggle to a general struggle against oppression in all forms; and, unlike the emigrationists, Douglass saw the Black struggle as being rooted in the United States.
Douglass was born a slave in 1817. At age sixteen, he recounts in his autobiography, he resisted a whipping by the plantation’s overseer. “I was a changed being after that fight,” he wrote. “I had reached the point at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a freeman in fact, though I still remained a slave in form. When a slave cannot be flogged, he is more than half free.”27 Douglass escaped in 1838, and soon became active with William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist group. Over the next ten years, he became the most renowned Black abolitionist in the United States. During this period, on most questions, Douglass lined up squarely with Garrison. Like Garrison, he strongly objected to Henry Garnet’s 1843 call for insurrection, arguing it would only end in disaster. Likewise, he opposed all plans for emigration. Following Garrison, Douglass argued that because the U.S. constitution was a pro-slavery document, holding office or participating in electoral activity would be immoral and sanctify slavery itself.
Nevertheless, differences between Garrison and Douglass had already emerged. In 1847, Douglass had started publication of his own newspaper, the North Star, despite Garrison’s objections. “The man who has suffered the wrong is the man to demand redress,” argued Douglass. “He who has endured the cruel pangs of Slavery is the man to advocate Liberty.”28 Other differences of substance emerged. Douglass began to reassess the tenets of Garrisonian abolitionism. He soon came to reject the idea that nonviolent resistance could end slavery. He told a Boston audience in 1849 that he would “welcome the intelligence to-morrow, should it come, that the slaves had risen in the South, and that the sable arms which had been engaged in beautifying and adorning the South were engaged in spreading death and devastation there.”29 Douglass also came to reject some of Garrison’s views on politics and political activity. Instead of the wholesale rejection of political activity advocated by Garrison, Douglass came to see political action as another arena of action for the abolitionist movement, describing such action as a “legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery.”30 Indeed, he came to believe that political action was necessary, and that the federal government had a responsibility to eradicate slavery. He also argued against Garrison’s slogan of “No union with slaveholders.” For abolitionists to push for a secession from the slave states would deprive slaves of their allies and slavery would continue even if the north had washed its hands of it, Douglass argued.31 Until 1849, Douglass claimed to be loyal to Garrison’s credo. But it was clear that Douglass had begun to shake off some of the limitations of Garrison’s politics. In 1851, he made public his break with Garrison on several key questions at the annual convention of the Anti-Slavery Society.
Douglass also extended his analysis of how racism was used to divide white from Black in the slaveholding South to the North, as well. Garrison and his leading followers tended to be upper-middle-class Northerners who reflected the outlook of their class. Their elitist views left little room for a broader critique of American society, much less any sympathy for working people or their organization. In contrast, Douglass grasped the class dynamic of racism in U.S. society. The “poor laboring white man” was “almost as much a slave as the Black slave himself,” Douglass argued. Explaining this view, he added, “The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the Black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony. Both were plundered