Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel
Northern city, sought to prevent blacks from moving there.
The fear of black migration also derailed a black school founded in Canterbury, Connecticut. The well-documented efforts of Prudence Crandall to educate young black girls in 1831 met with staunch resistance by Canterbury citizens. Connecticut had instituted “black laws” in 1833 to prevent out-of-state blacks from coming into the state for an education. Crandall was accused of violating these laws and was acquitted on a technicality. Afterward her school was the target of vandalism and attempted arson when the citizens of Canterbury descended on the school and destroyed all its windows. The entire episode was brought about because twenty young African American girls were attending Crandall’s school. Eventually she abandoned Connecticut for Illinois, an even worse environment of racial intolerance.
Connecticut claims as a daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose emotional appeal was a catalyst for the anti-slavery movement and the Civil War. Hartford boasts the Harriet Beecher Stowe house, a museum that was once the home of the famous author. Stowe captured the horrors of slavery in her monumental novel that appeared in 1852. Despite her difficulty in finding a publisher, copies of the book literally flew off the press: ten thousand copies in the first week, three hundred thousand in the first year. The book spawned theater productions and other slave stories as its monetary success became widely known.
Stowe’s enlightenment had limits. We know what she thought about slavery, but what was her attitude toward free blacks? The reader of Uncle Tom’s Cabin may easily overlook the book’s denouement, the fate of its heroes and heroines—Stowe sent them to Liberia. She deliberately followed the colonization scheme and fictionally deported them to Africa as missionaries. She speaks through George Harris, the former slave. After gaining his freedom, he articulates his future plans:
I might mingle in the circle of whites, in [America], my shade of color is so slight, and that of my wife and family scarce perceptible. . . . But to tell you the truth, I have no wish to. . . . I have no wish to pass for an American, or to identify myself with them. . . .
We have more than the rights of common men;—we have claim of an injured race for reparation. But, then, I do not want it; I want a country, a nation, of my own.
As a Christian patriot, as a teacher of Christianity, I go to my country,—glorious Africa. I go to Liberia, not as to an Elysium of romance, but as a field of work.
This is a staggering and prescient statement by the author of the most powerful anti-slavery tract ever written in America. Harriet Beecher Stowe sent her characters George, Eliza, and their family and Topsy to Liberia as missionaries to “civilize and proselytize.” Here, consciously or subconsciously, was an argument that blacks needed to be separate. It is also the first mention of reparations for the injustice and harm done by slavery, a demand that continues even today. Notably, the white Stowe rejected reparations, as has white America.
In response to Stowe’s colonization solution, the black leader Frederick Douglass was indignant. “The truth is, dear Madam, we are here, & we are likely to remain.” The colonization attempts championed by Abraham Lincoln, by many abolitionists, and by white Southerners are often dismissed as impractical. Indeed, African Americans, despite the harsh reality of the lives of free blacks, thought of themselves as Americans: “Why should we leave this land?” the Reverend Jehiel C. Beman asked in 1835. “Truly this is our home, here let us live and here let us die.” When encouraged by an abolitionist in 1853 to consider leaving America through the colonization effort, an Ohio black was adamant: “I would die first, before I would leave the land of my birth.”
In 1853 Harriet Beecher Stowe, with her newly minted wealth, rejected Frederick Douglass’s proposal for a vocational school for blacks in New Haven, Connecticut. Douglass expressed his “great disappointment” at her response, which had put him in “an awkward position before the colored people.” Stowe explained her refusal in a letter to the abolitionist Wendell Phillips:
Of all the vague unbased fabrics of a vision this floating idea of a colored industrial school is the most illusive. If [black people] want one why don’t they have one—many men among the colored people are richer than I am & better able to help such an object.—Will they ever learn to walk?
Stowe thought that blacks should be responsible for their own progress.
After the Civil War, Stowe provided $10,000 for her son Frederick and two of his Connecticut army friends to rent a cotton plantation in Florida, near the St. John’s River. She stayed with him in 1866 and described the work ethic of emancipated blacks in her book Palmetto Leaves: “As a class they are more obedient, better natured, more joyous, and easily satisfied [than whites].” At the time, conventional white (and some black) American opinion held that blacks were better suited than whites to manual labor in hot climates. Stowe agreed. Blacks seemed at home in the cotton fields:
The thermometer, for these three days past, has risen over ninety every day. No white man that we know of dares stay in the fields later than ten o’clock. . . . Yet, the black laborers whom we leave in the field pursue their toil, if anything more actively, more cheerfully, than during the cooler months. The sun awakes all their vigor and all their boundless jolly. . . . A gang of negroes, great brawny, muscular fellows, seemed to make a perfect frolic of this job which, under such a sun, would have threatened sunstroke to any white man.
For Stowe, education during the transition from slavery to freedom resembled the much-criticized practical philosophy later espoused by Booker T. Washington. Here is the education she envisioned for black children:
The teaching in the common schools ought to be largely industrial, and do what it can to prepare the children to get a living by doing something well. Practical sewing, cutting and fitting, for girls, and the general principles of agriculture for boys, might be taught with advantage.
Unfortunately for Stowe, cotton was easier for her to write about than to grow. The army worm, an insect capable of devastating a cotton field, intervened. Her brave Union captains who had won many military battles were “defeated and routed” over a period of just two days. Only two bales of cotton were harvested from her farm, and she lost her entire $10,000 investment. She returned chastened to the North. Her commitment to black uplift in the South dissipated once there was no easy “golden fortune” in the cotton fields.
Northerners had no use for fiction that portrayed the true lives of blacks in the North. The first novel written in English by an African American was Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). The author, a black woman named Harriet Wilson, of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, related the brutality and poverty of daily existence for Frado, the black heroine, at the hands of her white custodians. Wilson shows that “slavery’s shadows fall” even in Massachusetts. At the beginning of her story, she apologizes for embarrassing her “anti-slavery friends” by revealing the brute racial hatred of free blacks in the North. The six-year-old Frado is abandoned by her mother on the doorsteps of a white family, the Belmonts. During her period of indenture she is beaten repeatedly: at one point Mrs. Belmont “inflicted a blow which lay the tottering . . . [Frado] prostrate on the floor . . . [and then] snatching a towel, stuffed the mouth of the sufferer, and beat her cruelly.” Daily routines included Mrs. Belmont’s “spicing the toil with words that burn and frequent blows on [Frado’s] head.” After running away, Frado is “maltreated by professed abolitionists, who didn’t want slaves at the South, nor niggers in their own houses, . . . to lodge one; to eat with one; to admit one through the front door; to sit next to one; awful!”
Harriet Wilson’s novel lay in obscurity until 1983, a testament to the lack of interest in descriptions of the lives of free blacks in the North. Slavery would sell books, but the sordid condition of free blacks was largely ignored.
To further illustrate the North’s distinction between slaves and blacks, consider the case of William Henry Seward, the scruffy but sociable senator and former governor of New York. On May 18, 1860,