North slowly became increasingly opposed to slavery
Not always for the best of reasons – Free Soilers
The vast majority of those opposed to slavery were still racists.
(Dog kicking example)
The American Colonization Society – Liberia
Human nature: ugh! (LON 1936)
Southerners in 1861 universally blamed the Civil War on evil Abolitionist agitators.
Some people claim that a compromise should be reached, but the pulpits of both sections have been railing against the evildoing of their opposites. People don’t compromise with the Devil.
There had been some religious opposition to slavery before – the Quakers had always been opposed since Colonial times. But most religions didn’t think about it during the Anomaly stage and thought the “necessary evil” stage was temporary.
BUT:
As we entered stage 3 of slavery and the justification for eternal bondage became more and more interwoven into Southern theology, the North began to react.
Discuss Wilson’s sermon primary source.
Move on to:
William Lloyd Garrison – The Liberator
Religious appeal to the most fervent.
But the fervency of Americans will increase with the Second Great Awakening (coming soon to an Amsco chapter near you!)
Second Great Awakening partially driven by discomfort over the entrenchment of the slave system (also concern over industrialization).
1845 Church of God:
Resolved, That it is the unequivocal and decided opinion of the General Eldership of the Church of God, that the system of involuntary slavery, as it exists in the United States of North America, is a flagrant violation of the natural, unalienable and most precious rights of man, and utterly inconsistent with the spirit, laws and profession of the Christian religion.
1857 They condemned pro-slavery ministers:
"we will not, we cannot hold our peace against this or any other evil or sin, but the trumpet-toned tongues we will sound it through the land until this blighting curse is banished from the soil of our once happy Columbia."
These two quotes are from S.G. Yahn’s “Our First Half Century”
Transcendentalism: Intellectual mysticism: Reason, inner light, morality, self-reliance, nature.
“The Soul Rebels!” against slavery.
Liberalism: 48ers
Lutheranism opposed to slavery, but not inherent in doctrine; more reflective of liberalism of its adherents. German opposition is founded less on religion than on the rights of man.
It is one thing to condemn something on religious grounds. It is entirely another to act on those beliefs.
Examples:
Abortion
Sudan
Pacifism
Homosexuality
Let’s say it’s wrong and then not think about it anymore.
The growing religious discomfort will not reach critical mass until… people start picturing slavery in their heads. Two books. Books matter!
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Best selling book
Emotional appeal (Link to Great Awakening)
Lincoln’s quote
Frederick Douglass’ Autobiographical Narrative
Masculinity
Religion
Education/innate inferiority
Propaganda: Contrast political purpose with David Walker’s “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World”
Southern experience:
Do you like it when people tell you that you are wrong about religion?
Combine that with other events and the South becomes downright paranoid.
Slave revolts
Nat Turner/Denmark Vessey
Southern reaction
Long term ripple effect: Hysteria
Miscegenation! – Jack Johnson Amendment (Douglass’ riposte)
Willie Horton Ad
Anti-McCain push-pull poll
Suppression of dissent
Harsh laws for slaves
Racism
No abolitionist literature in mail
Harsh suppression of dissent (traitors to their race?)
Hinton Rowan Helper
wealth, productivity, population, literacy, culture--and had descended
to "a state of comparative imbecility and obscurity."
“White trash” should politically oppose planterocracy
George Fitzhugh: Cannibals All!
Mudsill theory
Religious obligation
Southerners more honest, humane than “slaveowners” of North
Religious butchery of Bloody Kansas: Religious wars are the worst.
Beecher’s Bibles
John Brown – nutjob? AP Point? (Davis S. Reynolds bio)
Harper’s Ferry: Religion and hysteria. Paranoia in South.
JIHAD!
Why isn’t this taught?
Jack Johnson Amendment:
Feds Made Johnson, and Interracial Sex America’s Taboo
EURweb, January 18, 2005
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
In his PBS documentary Unforgiveable Blackness, on black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, filmmaker Ken Burns masterfully captures the vitriol that whites (and some blacks) showered on Johnson for thumbing his nose at America’s rabid phobia over sex between black men and white women. Johnson paid a heavy price for that defiance. He was prosecuted, forced into self-imposed, and eventually imprisoned.
Burns and other notables have banded together and publicly demanded that President Bush posthumously pardon Johnson. But Burns skirted past the real story of the federal government’s deep role in making sex and marriage between black men and white women America’s taboo, and why the taboo has been nearly impossible to shed even today. The Supreme Court intruded into the bedrooms of America in 1883 when it upheld an Alabama law that made it a felony for black men and white women to have sex.
The Court brushed aside objections that the law violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment since blacks and whites (women that is) were supposedly prosecuted equally. This bizarre logic held. For the next century, interracial sex and marriage in America would not be a crime in the South, but a national crime. The fear of black men making love to white women would be the X factor that instantly stirred latent racial hatreds and touched off mob violence.
“Bad Nigger” Johnson compounded the “crime” when he made Lucille Cameron, a white teenager, his second wife. Blacks were traumatized. The headline in the Black weekly, The Philadelphia Tribune screamed in bold headlines, “JACK JOHNSON DANGEROUSLY ILL, VICTIM OF WHITE FEVER.” The Los Angeles Times chimed in bold headlines “HOW JACK JOHNSON TORURED HIS WHITE WIFE, THE STORY OF A BEAST.”
The New York Times lectured “that there will be no sympathy for his venture in miscegenation.” The Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., father of Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., vainly pled with Americans not to hold black men responsible for “the actions of a single member.” It did.
At the Annual Governors Conference in December 1912, the governors of New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Connecticut were in hot competition to be the first on record to support bills to outlaw interracial marriage. A week later Georgia Democrat Seaborn A. Roddenberg turned up the heat. He introduced a congressional amendment to impose a federal ban on interracial marriages stating: “Interracial marriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of the pure American spirit.”
Roddenberg soon had much of America whistling Dixie. Within weeks there were twenty-one similar bills pending in Congress. In racially polarized pre-World War I America, thousands of black waiters, porters, barbers, and laborers were fired in retaliation for Johnson’s sexual transgressions.
Legislators in Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, Colorado, Minnesota, and Michigan didn’t wait for their governors to take action. They rapidly passed laws that outlawed interracial marriage. Some were worried that the mob hysteria could get out of hand and touch off a destructive race war nationally. The New York Times and a scattering of other Northern newspapers urged moderation, but they stopped far short of demanding that the federal government back off from prosecuting Johnson.
The few stray editorials published in Northern papers condemning violence meant little in the South. White Southerners relied on the standard method: intimidation and terror. State laws against interracial marriage became a harsh tool of racial repression and a thinly disguised cover for sexual revenge against black men.
While the laws against interracial marriage have long since been dumped in the legal trash bin, and society is far more tolerant today than a few years back toward black-white sex, polls still show that there is a wide body of public opinion that opposes interracial marriage. But don’t blame Johnson for that blame the feds. And that’s unforgivable.
Because of Johnson's arrogance and love for white women, many whites considered him a serious threat to racial order. After Johnson married Lucille Cameron (a white woman), two ministers in the South recommended lynching him (Gilmore, 1975, p.107). In a reaction to the Johnson-Cameron marriage, in 1911 Rep. Seaborn Roddenberry of Georgia introduced a constitutional amendment to ban interracial marriages. In his appeal to congress, Roddenberry stated that
"Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant. It is subversive to social peace. It is destructive of moral supremacy, and ultimately this slavery to black beasts will bring this nation to a fatal conflict" (Gilmore, 1975, p.108).
The Impending Crisis drew heavily on the 1850 census to show that slavery was the ruination of the South. It began with a long chapter in which Helper presented a host of tables illustrating the contrast between the two regions of the United States. He cleverly began with statistics showing the difference in agricultural output because, he said, many Southerners liked to flatter themselves that, if in nothing else, the South was superior to the North in agriculture. Not so, Helper pointed out, adding, "Such rampant ignorance should be knocked in the head!" After parading his tables across his pages, he arrived at the conclusion that in 1850 the North produced some $352 million worth of farm products; the South, about $307 million. "So much," he snorted, "for the boasted agricultural superiority of the South!"
The second chapter was the most threatening in a menacing book. Titled "How Slavery Can Be Abolished," it scoffed at the notion that any system of emancipation required compensating slaveholders for the loss of their property. "The idea," he said, "is preposterous." Helper blamed the slaveholders for the wide discrepancy in the value of land between the North and the South. Again using 1850 figures, he reckoned that the average value of an acre of land in the Northern states was $28.07; in the South it was $5.34. "We conclude, therefore," he wrote, "that you, the slaveholders, are indebted to us, the non-slaveholders, in the sum of $22.73, which is the difference between $28.07 and $5.34, on every acre of Southern soil in our possession." The grand total that the "chevaliers of the lash" had gypped the non-slaveholders, according to Helper's calculations, was slightly over $7.5 billion. "And now, Sirs," he demanded, "we are ready to receive the money."
Having thus dismissed the idea of compensation, Helper laid out an 11-point plan for abolishing slavery by July 4, 1876. The agenda included organizing nonslaveholding whites into a political force, denying slaveholders the vote, boycotting slaveholders' services, banning the hiring of slaves by non-slaveholders, and instituting a tax of $60 on every slaveholder for every slave in his possession. Although there was virtually no chance that such a plan would be adopted, it nevertheless was strong stuff for Southern readers.
The book cited numerous authors from both North and South--as well as from other countries--who concurred with Helper's abolitionism. He marshaled quotations from, among others, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, along with economists, French philosophers and Biblical prophets. Helper returned to statistics to contrast North and South in areas such as manufacturing, exports, canals, railroads, bank capital, public schools, libraries, newspapers and literacy. He ruefully concluded that "our indignation is struck almost dumb at this astounding and revolting display of the awful wreck that slavery is leaving behind it in the South."
The most notable aspect of The Impending Crisis was its fierce language. Helper railed that "five millions of 'poor white trash'" suffered under a "second degree of slavery" and that "every white man who is under the necessity of earning his bread, by the sweat of his brow...is treated as if he was a loathsome beast." "There is not," he charged, "a grain of patriotism in the South, except among the non-slaveholders." And since slavery is a "sin" and a "crime," he could not recognize the slaveholders "as gentlemen." "Slaveholders," he thundered, "are more criminal than common murderers." Helper did not even shun the threat of violence. "Do you aspire," he asked the slaveholders of the South, "to become the victims of white non-slaveholding vengeance by day, and of barbarous massacre by the negroes at night?"
David Walker's Appeal
Excerpts from the Appeal
My dearly beloved Brethren and Fellow Citizens.
Having travelled over a considerable portion of these United States, and having, in the course of my travels, taken the most accurate observations of things as they exist -- the result of my observations has warranted the full and unshaken conviction, that we, (coloured people of these United States,) are the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began; and I pray God that none like us ever may live again until time shall be no more. They tell us of the Israelites in Egypt, the Helots in Sparta, and of the Roman Slaves, which last were made up from almost every nation under heaven, whose sufferings under those ancient and heathen nations, were, in comparison with ours, under this enlightened and Christian nation, no more than a cypher -- or, in other words, those heathen nations of antiquity, had but little more among them than the name and form of slavery; while wretchedness and endless miseries were reserved, apparently in a phial, to be poured out upon, our fathers ourselves and our children, by Christian Americans!
...
... I call upon the professing Christians, I call upon the philanthropist, I call upon the very tyrant himself, to show me a page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can be found, which maintains, that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they were not of the human family. Can the whites deny this charge? Have they not, after having reduced us to the deplorable condition of slaves under their feet, held us up as descending originally from the tribes of Monkeys or Orang-Outangs? O! my God! I appeal to every man of feeling-is not this insupportable? Is it not heaping the most gross insult upon our miseries, because they have got us under their feet and we cannot help ourselves? Oh! pity us we pray thee, Lord Jesus, Master. -- Has Mr. Jefferson declared to the world, that we are inferior to the whites, both in the endowments of our bodies and our minds? It is indeed surprising, that a man of such great learning, combined with such excellent natural parts, should speak so of a set of men in chains. I do not know what to compare it to, unless, like putting one wild deer in an iron cage, where it will be secured, and hold another by the side of the same, then let it go, and expect the one in the cage to run as fast as the one at liberty. So far, my brethren, were the Egyptians from heaping these insults upon their slaves, that Pharaoh's daughter took Moses, a son of Israel for her own, as will appear by the following.
...
The world knows, that slavery as it existed was, mans, (which was the primary cause of their destruction) was, comparatively speaking, no more than a cypher, when compared with ours under the Americans. Indeed I should not have noticed the Roman slaves, had not the very learned and penetrating Mr. Jefferson said, "when a master was murdered, all his slaves in the same house, or within hearing, were condemned to death." -- Here let me ask Mr. Jefferson, (but he is gone to answer at the bar of God, for the deeds done in his body while living,) I therefore ask the whole American people, had I not rather die, or be put to death, than to be a slave to any tyrant, who takes not only my own, but my wife and children's lives by the inches? Yea, would I meet death with avidity far! far!! in preference to such servile submission to the murderous hands of tyrants. Mr. Jefferson's very severe remarks on us have been so extensively argued upon by men whose attainments in literature, I shall never be able to reach, that I would not have meddled with it, were it not to solicit each of my brethren, who has the spirit of a man, to buy a copy of Mr. Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia," and put it in the hand of his son.
...
But let us review Mr. Jefferson's remarks respecting us some further. Comparing our miserable fathers, with the learned philosophers of Greece, he says: "Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled too, in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master's children; Epictetus, Terence and Phaedrus, were slaves, -- but they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction." See this, my brethren! ! Do you believe that this assertion is swallowed by millions of the whites? Do you know that Mr. Jefferson was one of as great characters as ever lived among the whites? See his writings for the world, and public labours for the United States of America. Do you believe that the assertions of such a man, will pass away into oblivion unobserved by this people and the world? If you do you are much mistaken-See how the American people treat us -- have we souls in our bodies? Are we men who have any spirits at all? I know that there are many swell-bellied fellows among us, whose greatest object is to fill their stomachs. Such I do not mean -- I am after those who know and feel, that we are MEN, as well as other people; to them, I say, that unless we try to refute Mr. Jefferson's arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.