The Black
Hearts of Men
Radical Abolitionists and The
Transformation of Race
By John Stauffer
Introduction
|
The white
man's unadmitted--and apparently, to him,
unspeakable--private fears and longings are projected
onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the
Negro's tyrannical power over him is to consent, in
effect, to become black himself. --James Baldwin, The
Fire Next Time (1963) |
A few days after Christmas in 1846 the
black physician
James McCune Smith told his wealthy white friend
Gerrit Smith what must be done to convince Americans of
"the eternal equality of the Human race." "Good
Government" would help, he said, particularly "Bible
Politics" and its "first principle" of racial
equality. But politics and government represented only the
"outward sign" of "an inward and spirit-owned
conviction." Before equality could be attained, there had
to be a profound shift in American consciousness: "The
heart of the whites must be changed, thoroughly, entirely,
permanently changed." McCune Smith said.
He went on to suggest that whites had to
understand what it was like to be black. They had to learn how
to view the world as if they were black, shed their
"whiteness" as a sign of superiority, and renounce
their belief in skin color as a marker of aptitude and social
status. They had to acquire, in effect, a black heart.
 |
This book is about that moral shift. It
focuses on James McCune Smith Gerrit Smith, and their
better-known comrades Frederick Douglass and John Brown,
all of whom embraced an ethic of a black heart. Their
story is remarkable. Together these four men, two black
and two white, forged interracial bonds of friendship
and alliance that were unprecedented in their own time
and were probably not duplicated until well into the
twentieth century. In a society pervaded by slavery and
racism, they came together to seek equality for all
people in their communities and throughout the
country. They offered an
alternative to an American dream that privileged white
men over almost everyone else.
As
they transformed themselves and overcame existing social
barriers, they reimagined their country as a pluralist society
in which the standard of excellence depended on righteousness
and benevolence rather than on skin color, sex, or material
wealth. in one sense they were exemplars of the notion, now
quite fashionable in the academy, that race, class, and gender
are social constructs. In their time this was a radically new
concept. |
The rise and fall of these four men's
alliance occurred alongside the fragmentation of America from
the panic of 1837 to secession. While the nation virtually
doubled in size and dramatically expanded its slave territory
and slave population, these men experienced their own
extraordinary self-transformations. They saw themselves as
prophets preparing for a new and glorious age--a new America
that would be free from sin and oppression. they embraced the
idea of "sacred self-sovereignty," believing that the
kingdom of God was within them and potentially within all
individuals.
And at a time when the country's two main
political parties were fragmenting, they created their own
political party. They became Radical Political Abolitionists,
and viewed the government as sacred and the appropriate means
for pursuing their millennium. But they were overcome by the
lack of progress toward a just and moral society. The hearts of
whites were not being changed, and they felt profoundly
alienated from the white laws and conventions that defended
slavery and racial oppression.
In their quest for a perfect society, they
accepted righteous violence, which finally resulted in John
Brown disastrous raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry,
Virginia, as part of a scheme to liberate the slaves. The event
produced Brown's execution, sent Gerrit Smith to an insane
asylum, and destroyed the very alliance that they had so
courageously created. It also propelled the nation toward a
brutal Civil War that had been previewed in Brown's attack on
Harper's Ferry and earlier in his efforts to keep Kansas safe
from slavery.
A number of other figures united these four
men. They corresponded frequently and saw one another as often
as possible. In fact, they all lived in New York State during
their alliance, three of them in upstate New York. They were
more successful than any of their peers at collapsing racial
barriers, as is revealed by their political and social alliance.
And they were instrumental in shaping each other's
self-definitions and reform visions.
These lines of influence and
interconnectedness are revealed in form as well as in content in
the story line that unfolds in the following pages, which weaves
together the four men's lives by highlighting one at a time. the
overall effect is a kind of collective biography, a braiding
together of four lives. Only by changing perspectives, listening
to multiple voices from different social groups and vantage
points, is it possible to understand how racial identity gets
defined, blurred, and remade.
|
Gerrit Smith is the lead protagonist.
He is the tragic figure who ultimately loses himself and
his black heart. he is also the primary thread linking
the other three characters. without him, this biracial
quartet could not have existed, for it was through his
initiative and generosity that the four men first came
together.
And without his penchant for saving the
letters he received and making copies of those he wrote,
their friendship would have been lost to posterity. most
of the letters among the four men run through Smith. The
other three corresponded with him far more than they did
among themselves. Gerrit Smith's correspondence with Frederick
Douglass and James McCune Smith represents the largest extant
biracial correspondence in antebellum America, and possibly in
the nineteenth century. |
 |
There are hundreds of letters between
them in the Gerrit Smith papers and the Frederick Douglass
Papers, and hundreds more in Douglass's newspapers, providing
the raw text of their friendship.
As a land baron,
Gerrit Smith was also the
only character able to connect the world of wealth and power
with that of Christian benevolence, militant abolitionism, and
the marginalized status of the other three men. And his
integrated village of Peterboro, in Madison county, New York,
and the black settlement he helped establish at North Elba, New
York (which constituted John Brown's permanent residence from
1834 until his death), offer manageable settings in which to
view the dynamics of race, religion, class, and gender at the
levels of both self and society.
Gerrit Smith,
James McCune Smith,
Frederick
Douglass, and
John Brown were in no way
"representative" men in antebellum America, even
though they were often defined as such by their admirers. They
did, however, represent what was possible: they occupied an
endpoint on the spectrum of "identity formation," and
their self-conceptions and hopes for America depended upon their
success in blurring and breaking down distinctions of race,
religion, class, and gender. Although they stood apart from their
peers in their efforts to imagine and realize a new America,
their reform rhetoric resembled the poetic rhetoric of a number
of romantic writers.
Lord Byron,
Walt Whitman, and
Ralph Waldo
Emerson describe a similar quest for self-transformation and
liberation from existing social codes, and the four
abolitionists were either inspired by or otherwise
connected to these literary figures. Treating their reform work
as "art" and comparing it to the work of the broader
culture of dissent in America by revealing what kinds of test
were permissible, possible, even thinkable.
* * *
The story of this interracial alliance offers
a number of new insights and perspectives on antebellum reform
and the Civil war era. It shows how Americans from different
social groups interacted and shaped each other's
worldviews--something no other study of antebellum reform has
done in depth. Additionally, the links between personal faith
and behavior on the one hand and broader historical, political,
and literary developments on the other hand have been
inadequately addressed, especially among people from different
social groups. In the case of this biracial quartet, these links
produced an exceptional symbiosis that altered the course of
American history, even though two of the characters Gerritt
Smith and James McCune Smith) slipped into an obscurity that
itself obscured what they had accomplished.
Together these men also highlight the dynamic
interactions between race, religion, class, and gender among
moral and social reformers. beginning in 1933, when the
historian Gilbert Barnes published his pathbreaking book on the
religious roots of the abolition crusade, scholarship on
antebellum reform has evolved from the emphasis on religion and
reform to one of religion and class. The current emphasis on
gender and race remains limited, for it downplays the diverse
aspects of identity and personal behavior. Among these four men,
religious belief was the single most important facet of their
identities; it was the principal factor that allowed them to
befriend and trust one another.
Their understanding of God was inseparable
from their understanding of themselves, their shared vision of
America, and their ability to break down social barriers. The
trend in recent scholarship has been to downplay questions of
faith, and instead to question why racism and inequalities
existed. But beliefs in freedom, equality, democracy, and the
every idea that slavery was a sin were still relatively new
concepts in the nineteenth century. These men's alliance shows
how and why some blacks and whites were able to work together in
an effort to overcome these barriers.
As historical actors, Gerrit Smith and James
McCune Smith have been downplayed or ignored, even though in
their own time they were considered preeminent men.
Contemporaries hailed Gerrit Smith as a world-renowned
philanthropist and a central figure in reform, but he has
received little attention since. Only two full-scale biographies
of Smith exist: one was published in 1878, four years after his
death, by his friend Octavius Brooks Frothingham; the other,
which appeared in 1939, was by Ralph Volney Harlow, who treated
his reform efforts as misguided at best and pathological at
worst.
Yet Smith's papers represent one of the
richest collections on nineteenth-century reform, and they are
also well indexed and organized. After researching Smith and
talking with other historians and critics, I concluded that one
reason he has been neglected is that his handwriting appears at
first to be illegible--it almost brought tears to my eyes when I
tried to read it. Fortunately, I was able to read Smith on
microfilm, which allowed me to enlarge his writing by a factor
of twenty or more, make copies, and compare words until I had
mastered his hand.
|
 |
The absence of
James McCune Smith in
the historiographic and critical literature is even more
striking. He was a brilliant scholar, writer, and
critic, as well as a first rate physician. In 1882 the
black leader
Alexander Crummell called him "the
most learned Negro of his day," and Frederick
Douglass considered him the most important black
influence in his life (much as he considered Gerrit
Smith the most important white one). Douglass was
probably correct when, in 1859, he publicly stated:
"No man in this country more thoroughly understands
the whole struggle between freedom and slavery, than
does Dr. Smith, and his heart is as broad as his
understanding." As a prose
stylist and original thinker, McCune Smith ranks, at his
best, alongside such canonical figures as Emerson and
Thoreau. His essays are sophisticated and elegant, his
interpretations of American culture are way ahead of his
time, and his experimental style and use of dialect
anticipates some of the Harlem Renaissance writers of
the 1920s. |
Yet McCune Smith has been completely ignored by literary
critics; and aside from one article on him, he has remained
absent from the historical record.
Although Frederick Douglass and John Brown have been analyzed
at length, important aspects of their characters have been
inadequately addressed. No one has emphasized the significance
of Gerrit Smith, McCune Smith, and Brown in the development of
Douglass' reform work. As a result, scholars have been reluctant
to point out the militant and violent nature of his abolitionism
in the 1850s. Additionally, historians and especially literary
critics have tended to downplay Douglass' millennialist view of
America and his self-conception as a prophet, thus ignoring the
important links between his personal religious beliefs and his
quest to transform his country.
|
John Brown has typically been described as
a thoroughgoing Puritan and Calvinist whose religious
views never changed, and he is almost everywhere seen as
having no interest in political action. Yet his religion
and politics were far more dynamic than scholars have
acknowledged, and they shed enormous light on who Brown
was in the context of his society. Brown deviated from
Puritan and Calvinist theology during the 1850s.
He
embraced sacred self-sovereignty, harbored perfectionist
visions, and looked forward to a heaven on earth and the
end of all sin. Moreover, Brown's reform work in the
1850s was thoroughly political. He played a central role
in the formation of the Radical Abolition party and in
the development of his three comrades' militancy. |
 |
Indeed, Brown's participation in the Radical Abolition party
helped shape the course of American history. By miscasting Brown
as an orthodox Puritan and nonpolitical militant, most scholars
have not viewed Brown as he saw himself--as someone who
identified so closely with blacks that he chose to live among
them and was willing to sacrifice his life for their cause. In
other words, they tend to see Brown simply as a white man, and
do not take into account his ability to blur racial categories.
Focusing on these men's interracial alliance also sheds light
on the origins of a major shift in cultural and intellectual
history--one that moved beyond an understanding of
"character" as fixed and unchanging, based primarily
on heredity and social status, toward a highly subjective notion
of the self in a state of continuous flux. At the heart of this
shift was an effort to reintegrate cultural dichotomies that had
long been present in Western culture--those of black and white,
body and soul, sacred and profane, ideal and real, civilization
and savagery, and masculine and feminine.
The idea of "whiteness" as a sign of superiority
and as a justification for racial oppression depended in part on
the belief in "character" as static and fixed. The
gradual dismantling of these dichotomies relates directly to my
characters' alliances and shared visions of America, their
radical and ultimately revolutionary means to reform, and the
corresponding shifts in their self-conceptions.
Source: John Stauffer.
The Black Hearts of Men:
Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2002.
 |
JOHN
STAUFFER
is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at
Harvard University. He
received his Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University in
1999, and won the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for the best
dissertation in American Studies from the American Studies
Association. His
first book,
The Black Hearts of Men:
Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race
(Harvard
University Press, 2002) was the co-winner of the 2002 Frederick
Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Institute; winner of
the Avery Craven Book Prize from the OAH; and the Lincoln Prize
runner-up. He is
completing an edition of Frederick Douglass’ My
Bondage and My Freedom for the Modern Library; editing a
collection of John Brown’s writings; and writing a new book,
“The American Sublime: Interracial
Friendships and the Dilemma of Democracy.”
|
The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, And the Ambiguities of American
Reform . Edited by Steven Mintz and
John Stauffer
update 4 August 2008
|
