OUTLINE

1 Some facts, figures, and texts

2 Pro-slavery Arguments

3 The 1850 Compromise

4 Douglass – Life and works

5 Douglass and Garrison

6 Douglass and Assimilation Ideology

7 Typology of Slave Narratives

1 Some facts, figures, and texts

U.S. Population figures in the 19^th century

1820 9 million

1830 12 million

1840 17 million

1850 23 million (of which 3.2 million were black slaves)

Timeline

1619 20 Africans arrive in Jamestown on a Dutch vessel as indentured servants

1838 Underground railroad aids slaves escape north

1850 Fugitive Slaves Act

1854 Republican Party formed, consolidating anti-slavery factions

1863 Emancipation proclamation

Anti-Slavery Texts

1826 John Rankin, Letters on Slavery

1828 David Walker, Appeal … to the Coloured Citizens of the World

1829 Robert Alexander Young, Ethiopian Manifesto Issued in Defense of the Black Man’s Rights in the Scale of Human Freedom

1839 American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses

1844 Charles W. Andrews, Memoirs of Mrs Anne R. Page

1853 Wendell Phillips, The Philosophy of the Abolition Movement

1859 George Tucker, Political Economy for the People

Pro-Slavery Texts

1828 (secret brief) John Calhoun, South Carolina Exposition and Protest

1836 James Kirke Paulding, Slavery in the United States

1838 William Gilmore Simms, The Pro-Slavery Argument

1851 John Calhoun, Disquisition on Government …

1852 The Pro-Slavery Argument (ed. E. N. Elliott)

1853 John Ruffin, Political Economy of Slavery

1856 Thornton Stringfellow, Scriptural and Statistical Views in Favor of Slavery

1856 Long poem: William J. Grayson, The Hireling and the Slave

1860 Cotton is King and Pro-Slavery Arguments (ed. E. N. Elliott)

1860 Thornton Stringfellow, Slavery: Its Origin, Nature and History

Slave Narratives

1789 Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The Interesting Narrative of …

1835 Maria Stewart

1836 Charles Ball, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of …

1839 Moses Roper, The Narrative and Adventures of escape of …

1842 Lunsford Lane

1844 Moses Grandy, Narrative of …

1845 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of …

1848 Okah Tubbee, A Sketch of the Life of …

1849 Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life of …

1849 Josiah Henson, Life of

1849 James W.C. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith

1851 Henry ‘Box’ Brown, The Narrative of …

1853 Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave

1855 Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro

1855 John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia

1855 William Grimes, Life of …

1856 John Thompson, Life of … a Fugitive Slave

1857 Austin Steward, Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman

1860 William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom

1864 James Mars, The Life of …

1868 Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes

Other texts

1867 William Francis Allen (ed) Slave Songs of the United States

1903 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks

Anti-slavery fiction

1851-2 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

1853 William Wells Brown, Clotel: Or, the President’s Daughter

1859 (1^st novel by an African-American woman) Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black

1859 Martin Delany, Blake, or, The Huts of America

Southern proslavery fiction

1838 Caroline Gilman, Recollections of a Southern Matron

1854 William Gilmore Simms, Woodcraft

2 Proslavery arguments

The paternalistic argument: Slavery is a benign system, which brings some betterment to blacks while keeping order and hierarchy in society.

e.g. John Calhoun, Disquisition on Government …, 1851

The hierarchy argument: There is a natural hierarchy in creation, in which the master-slave relation has its place.

e.g. William Harper, Memoir on Slavery, 1838

The economic argument: The southern economy depended on slave labor and would suffer enormous damage if slaves were given their liberty.

The political argument: The North promoted anti-slavery as a means of weakening the power of the South.

e.g. Cotton is King and Pro-Slavery Arguments (ed. E. N. Elliott), 1860

The anti-capitalism argument: Slavery was more humane than northern capitalism.

e.g. George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or Slaves without Masters, 1857

The primitivist argument: Blacks were either infant-like or animal like, and neither needed nor knew how to use liberty.

e.g. William J. Grayson, The Hireling and the Slave, 1856

The scriptural argument: The Bible endorsed slavery.

e.g. Thornton Stringfellow, Scriptural and Statistical Views in Favor of Slavery, 1856

The historical argument: All world civilizations have practiced slavery, and enslavement has been a humanitarian way of keeping people defeated in battle from death.

e.g. Thornton Stringfellow, Slavery: Its Origin, Nature and History,1860

The quasi-scientific argument: Blacks are inferior to whites in intellectual capacity.

e.g. Josiah Nott, Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races, 1844

The ethnic argument: The mixing of races was unnatural, and would lead to miscegenation and a debasement of the purity of the white race.

e.g. John H. Van Evrie, Negroes and Negro ‘Slavery’, 1861

3 The 1850 Compromise

“Growing out of the crisis over slavery and the imbalance of sectional interests occasioned by the acquisition of western lands in the Mexican War and California’s subsequent adoption of a free-state constitution, the Compromise was pivotal in the political and literary war over slavery. Not just the great political writings of the 1850s but also the central works of literature—Moby-Dick, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Leaves of Grass, and My Bondage and My Freedom, to name the most obvious—all reflected the fragile structure of the Compromise, its perilous balance of destructive national forces. The central provisions of the Compromise admitted California to the Union as a free state and abolished the slave trade in Washington, D.C., but at the same time organized the New Mexico and Utah territories without prohibiting slavery and enacted a new Fugitive Slave Law requiring northerners to aid in the return of escaped slaves to their masters.” (277-78)

“The crisis over the Union permeated the writing of Melville and Whitman, but with the exception of Whittier, Stowe, and Douglass, the central literary figures of the antebellum period did not devote the greater part of their energies to antislavery writing as such…. The most effective statements against slavery, however, came from essayists…. The main figures of Transcendentalism, such as Emerson and Thoreau, remained on the periphery of the battle ... contributing … their deep skepticism of organized reform movements” (279-80)

(Source: Eric J. Lundquist, ‘The Literature of Expansion and Race’, pp. 127-328. In Sacvan Bercovitch (gen. Ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature. Volume 2, 1820-1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.)

4 Douglass, Life and Works

1818 Born Frederick Baily near Easton, Maryland

1824 Works for Captain Aaron Anthony

1826 Travels to Baltimore, Maryland to work for Hugh Auld

1833 Returns to Anthony farm to work for Thomas Auld

1834 Works for Edward Covey

1835 Works for William Freeland

1836 First escape plan fails; is imprisoned; sent back to Hugh Auld

1837 Meets Anna Murray

1838 Escapes to New York; sends for and marries Anna Murray; changes name

1841 Asked to speak at American Anti-Slavery Society meeting; invited for lec. tour

1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is published; Douglass begins UK tour

1847 Returns to the United States and begins lecture tour

1847 Begins printing the North Star

1848 Attends first women's rights convention

1850 Becomes involved in the underground railroad

1851 Breaks with William Garrison

1859 Sails to England to begin lecture tour

1860 Returns to the United States

1863 Meets with President Lincoln to discuss treatment of black soldiers in the Civil War

1864 Meets with Lincoln to formulate plans for blacks in case of a Union defeat

1866 Meets with President Andrew Johnson to discuss black suffrage.

1867 Declines Johnson's offer to head Freedman's Bureau.

1870 The 5th Amendment is adopted. Blacks are granted the right to vote

1870 Becomes editor of the New National Era.

1874 Becomes president of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company

1877 Becomes U.S. Marshal

1880 Appointed recorder of deeds for Washington, D.C.

1882 Anna Douglass dies

1884 Douglass marries Helen Pitts of Rochester

1889 Accepts post of American consul-general to Haiti

1891 Resigns post and returns home

1895 Dies in Washington, D.C.

(Web Source: http://www.history.rochester.edu/class/DOUGLASS/part6.html)

5 Douglass and Garrison

"Douglass broke with Garrison over a number of issues: his unwillingness to accept Garrison’s argument that the Constitution was necessarily a proslavery document and that conventional political activities were useless in combating slavery; Garrison’s opposition to Douglass’s founding of his own antislavery newspaper, the North Star in 1847; and Garrison’s probable jealousy of Douglass’s success as a speaker and writer.” (323)

“Douglass’s Narrative sums up the purpose of testimony by former slaves, namely, to dramatize the spiritual survival of the black family and community within the cauldron of plantation slavery and to explore the means by which power and dehumanization were united in slavery to prohibit African Americans from gaining control of those cultural signs that lend full dignity to life…. Speaking and writing are both modes of discovery in the Narrative. As avenues to ‘mastery’ of himself, they allow him to fashion an ‘autobiography’ in which the freed slave is in effect created as a man in the act of narration, whether before an audience or in print.” (324)

6 Douglass and Assimilation Ideology

“Douglass is of the mind that racial assimilation is

(1) a matter of morality, enabling us to understand persons, regardless of racial background, as fundamentally equal in the most important regards;

(2) the responsibility of government to promote and to guarantee in the face of racist barriers (past and present; institutional and personal) its attainment; and

(3) the responsibility of the citizenry to show its fellow citizens of different racial groups that a society is desired in which members of all racial groups contribute favorably to its life and are potentially social exemplars for all.” (12)

(Source: Bill E. Lawson and Frank M. Kirkland (eds), Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader. Oxford & Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999.)

7 Typology of Slave Narratives

Web Source: http://www.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/en1311/slave.htm

1 Some facts, figures, and texts

U.S. Population figures in the 19th century

1850 Fugitive Slaves Act

Pro-Slavery Texts

Slave Narratives

Anti-slavery fiction

1859 Martin Delany, Blake, or, The Huts of America

Southern proslavery fiction

The political argument: The North promoted anti-slavery as a means of weakening the power of the South.

The primitivist argument: Blacks were either infant-like or animal like, and neither needed nor knew how to use liberty.

The scriptural argument: The Bible endorsed slavery.

The historical argument: All world civilizations have practiced slavery, and enslavement has been a humanitarian way of keeping people defeated in battle from death.

U.S. Population figures in the 19^th century