What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.33
Douglass’ denunciation of the hypocrisy of U.S. “democracy” did not, however, lead him to join forces with those who supported emigration as a solution to slavery and racism. Douglass opposed the idea of emigrationism as well as the emphasis that Garnet and Delany put on race. He once said that he thanked God for making him a man, whereas Delany thanked God for making him a Black man.34 Douglass believed that slavery was an aberration from the revolutionary traditions that the United States was founded upon. Douglass had illusions about what could be achieved under bourgeois democracy. He served in a number of government posts after the Civil War even while the U.S. government stepped back from granting Blacks full citizenship. But in the pre-Civil War years, his politics were considerably more consistent and clearer than those of the early Black nationalists.
This short review of debates in the abolitionist movement, particularly among Black abolitionists, allows us to make several observations about the character of the Black struggle and Black nationalism. These themes would recur over the next century in subsequent movements for Black civil rights. First, the political paths that both Garnet and Delany took demonstrated that Black nationalism was not primarily a reflection of their primary aspirations or a reflection of any material base for a Black nation. Rather, their adoption of separatism was a reaction to white racism. When the prospect for Black and white unity seemed possible in fighting racism, as in the Civil War period, both abandoned their emigrationist positions. With the defeat of Reconstruction in 1877 (see Chapter Four), they returned to separatist politics. Similarly, the only period when Frederick Douglass flirted with emigrationism was at the lowest point following the defeat of Reconstruction, when he considered the possibilities of any other form of struggle to be very dim.35
Second, separatism and assimilation have to be seen as the expression of the contradictory position in which the small Black elite under slavery found itself. This class aspired to fully become part of American capitalism, and therefore impelled it to seek assimilation, but the existence of slavery and racism placed severe limits on this process, forcing the elite into a separatist position. Finally, as Wilson Moses points out, in the pre-Civil War period there was no clear-cut distinction between Black nationalism and assimilation. Nationalists like Delany “were dedicated to Christianizing and ‘civilizing’ the African continent and actively solicited the support of whites to accomplish this goal. Avowed integrationists, like Douglass, were willing to participate in all-Black institutions, and defended their right to do so.”36
Revolutionary Abolitionism
Despite its often on-target criticisms of the largely white-led abolitionist movement, the politics that Garnet and Delany represented didn’t offer a militant strategy to confront slavery and racism. On this score, Douglass, the avowed integrationist, was in the vanguard. In breaking with the Garrisonian politics of “moral suasion,” Douglass came to the conclusion that armed force would be necessary to rid the country of slavery. Above all, throughout his career Douglass never lost sight of the importance of struggle. It was this commitment to struggle that led Douglass to see both the necessity of Black self-activity and the need for unity with whites who sought to fight slavery. He thus moved from advocacy of moral suasion to advocating armed resistance. “The slaveholder has been tried and sentenced,” he declared in 1857. “He is training his own executioners.”37
One of the abolitionists who influenced Douglass to question the idea of nonresistance, or moral suasion, was John Brown. Brown’s conviction that slavery was actually a state of war made an impression on Douglass. Douglass writes of Brown, “[T]hough a white gentleman, is in sympathy with a Black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”38
John Brown stood out as a white abolitionist who was never charged with racism. Writes Quarles, “Brown’s relationships with Negroes had been close, continuous, and on a peer basis.... Apparently no Negro who ever knew Brown ever said anything in criticism of his attitude or behavior toward colored people. Brown’s attitude toward slavery and his grim and forceful response to it were shaped by many things, of which his own personal experiences with Negroes was not the least.”39
Brown had distinguished himself as an antislavery fighter in the 1850s in Kansas, where a civil war between pro-slavery and antislavery forces raged in the decade before the outbreak of the nationwide Civil War. The attempt of Brown and eighteen other armed men to capture the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the intent of arming slaves in the South for an insurrection, was certainly the boldest blow struck against slavery before the Civil War. Although Douglass demurred from participation in the failed 1859 raid, he defended Brown, even after Brown and his comrades were executed for treason and insurrection:
Did John Brown fail? He certainly did fail to get out of Harpers Ferry before being beaten down by United States soldiers; he did fail to save his own life, and to lead a liberating army into the mountains of Virginia. But he did not go to Harpers Ferry to save his life.
The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? And to this I answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail, who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause. No man, who in his hour of extremest need, when on his way to meet an ignominious death, could so forget himself as to stop and kiss a little child, one of the hated race for whom he was about to die, could by any possibility fail.
Did John Brown fail? Ask Henry A. Wise in whose house less than two years after, a school for the emancipated slaves was taught.
Did John Brown fail? Ask James M. Mason, the author of the inhuman fugitive slave bill, who was cooped up in Fort Warren, as a traitor less than two years from the time that he stood over the prostrate body of John Brown.
Did John Brown fail? Ask Clement C. Vallandingham, one other of the inquisitorial party; for he too went down in the tremendous whirlpool created by the powerful hand of this bold invader. If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men, for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia—not Fort Sumter, but Harpers Ferry and the arsenal—not Col. Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises.
When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone—the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union—and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown’s, the lost cause of the century.40
Chapter three
The Civil War
The election of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in 1860, was greeted with horror by the Southern slaveholders. For the Southern ruling class, a Republican presidency was a “revolution” threatening “to destroy their social system,” above all slavery.1 Rather than submit to Republican rule, they decided to secede