In the Balance of Power. Omar H. Ali
Robert Purvis, James McCrummell, and James G. Barbadoes were among the signers of the society’s “Declaration of Sentiments.” Six African Americans sat on the national body’s board of managers. Garrison and white abolitionist brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan met with James Forten and other influential black Philadelphians to shape the organization’s mission. The group promised to reach out to “every city, town and village in our land.” They planned on dispatching lecturers, enlisting the press, and circulating antislavery literature. Members sponsored lectures for Northern audiences where former slaves gave firsthand accounts of life under slavery. Over the next weeks and months, African Americans organized dozens of affiliates of the American Anti-Slavery Society, including groups in Ohio, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania. Hundreds of black and white organizers would travel across the Northeast and West linking affiliated groups together. By 1834, abolitionists had established 60 auxiliary societies; by 1835, 200; by 1838, 1,350; and by 1840, at least 2,000, with nearly 200,000 members. Over two-thirds of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s members were women.45
This second generation of abolitionists, more militant than those of the late eighteenth century, used the term anti-slavery to distinguish themselves from the earlier movement. They also distinguished themselves by drawing many of their white allies from rural areas, such as the small Ohio community where Owen Brown lived. Brown was the father of John Brown, famed in years to come as the symbol of the most militant form of abolitionism: armed insurrection. The call among antislavery activists for immediate emancipation provoked reaction from nearly every part of the white social order in the 1830s. Those who profited directly from the slave-based trade between the North and South were openly hostile toward those who advocated immediate emancipation. However, the antislavery “immediatists,” which included perhaps less than 5 percent of the nation’s total white population, were becoming an increasingly vocal minority, and an intolerable voice to their opponents.46
African Americans calling for immediate emancipation faced not only the ire of the establishment but often exclusion, even hostility, from many white male abolitionists and their organizations. Although the American Anti-Slavery Society encouraged the participation of African Americans, as late as 1836 at least 143 of the nearly 1,000 local white-controlled abolitionist societies excluded African Americans (as well as white women) from their membership. The radical vision of the most progressive abolitionists—that all men and women should be citizens—posed a threat to white domination, including the domination of white male abolitionist leaders in the movement. As the historian Leon Litwack writes, “It was possible to be both ‘antislavery’ and anti-Negro,” as many white abolitionists—male and female—were against slavery but maintained their position as racial superiors.47
African Americans, having followed their own courses of action, had created over fifty black abolitionist groups before the 1830s. Such black organizational independence gained particular significance when African Americans were refused membership in white abolitionist organizations during the 1830s.48 Black initiatives nevertheless spurred several leading white abolitionists to follow the lead of the free black community, as in the debate over free black colonization. The white abolitionist Lewis Tappan noted that “it was [African Americans’] united and strenuous opposition to the expatriation scheme that first induced Garrison and others to oppose it.”49 Garrison had initially favored free black emigration and colonization, but shifted his position, bringing him closer in line with the views of the free black Northern communities. Toward this end, in 1831 he would attend the National Negro Convention, which was among the first of a number of national black conventions that soon constituted a movement of its own.
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Throughout most of the 1830s and into the 1850s, the national black convention movement provided an important venue for independent black organizing. Six national conventions were held, supplemented by hundreds of state and local meetings.50 The first official National Negro Convention was held in Philadelphia on September 20–22, 1830 (other national meetings of African Americans had taken place beginning in the late 1810s but are not considered part of the convention movement as such). The Negro Convention’s organizers were all leading black abolitionists of the day, including the veteran Richard Allen (elected president of the body), James Forten, and Rev. Samuel E. Cornish. Forty delegates, representing seven states, attended the first meeting. Among the issues discussed were the pros and cons of emigration and the planning of educational initiatives. Over the years, black abolitionists maintained close ties with the Negro Conventions even as they continued to work with predominantly white antislavery societies. For these African Americans, not only did the conventions provide a national forum to develop social and educational programs, but questions about whether or not to support certain political candidates, or the advantages or disadvantages of creating a third party, were beginning to be raised.51
Although the leadership of the black conventions was primarily drawn from black ministers, its participants came from across the African American community. Both the black churches in the North and the “invisible institution” in the South (where African Americans gathered in the fields late at night to worship, celebrate, and pray) had functioned as wellsprings for the cultivation of black leaders since the turn of the nineteenth century. Even black leaders without a ministerial background, such as Frederick Douglass, were influenced by the teachings of the church and the oratorical styles of the black preachers they had seen. Black abolitionists would powerfully combine the religious basis of African American life with the most progressive principles contained in the nation’s founding documents to justify the abolition of slavery on both moral and political grounds.
In 1831, in the Liberator, the black abolitionist Maria Stewart published her first essay, and the first political manifesto written by an African American woman, entitled “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build.” Stewart articulated the synthesis of secular and religious inspirations driving black abolitionism. She argued that the Bible and the Declaration of Independence provide all people—men, women, rich, poor, black, and white—with the universal birthright of freedom.52 In doing so, she and her abolitionist contemporaries were creating a new definition and understanding of what it meant to be an American. As Eric Foner observes, “The abolitionists . . . invented a new and different Constitution, a different reading of the Constitution, very much informed by the Declaration of Independence and its affirmation of human equality; and posited it as an alternative to the dominant vision of America as a white society, which was so prominent in [the early nineteenth-century].”53
The new generation of black abolitionists would make slavery an issue of polarizing public debate.54 Petitions varied in their demands. Many called on Congress to abolish slavery in the nation’s capital, where it had clear jurisdiction to do so.55 But whether through petitions, publications and pamphleteering, public speaking, or boycotting of slave-produced goods, antebellum abolitionists stressed the immorality and injustice of slavery. For reformers who came after them, these abolitionists would also serve as role models by advancing their radically democratic vision of society through innovative forms of propaganda: mass mailings of antislavery writings and the popular distribution of prints and other visual images on household wares; the publication of biographies and autobiographies of fugitives and former slaves; the sending out of scores of speakers on regional lecture circuits (as well as overseas); and the development of well-coordinated and broad petitioning campaigns directed toward government officials.56 African Americans, organized into vigilance committees (whose members also harbored fugitive slaves as part of the Underground Railroad), would join the mass-petitioning campaigns of the mid-1830s. Over the course of several years, black and white abolitionists sent tens of thousands of petitions to Congress to remove slavery in all federal holdings, including the District of Columbia.
African American women played a critical role in the antislavery petitioning drives. Some of these women, such as Sarah Remond, Margaretta Forten, Clarissa Beman, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, not only emerged as leaders in the abolitionist movement, but subsequently became leaders in the early women’s rights movement. In 1837, women constituted almost half of the signers of a petition in the District of Columbia to abolish slavery in the capital. In Maine and Massachusetts, nearly two-thirds of the