American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with Manisha Sinha, part 1 of 4

As a reminder, we have a lot of time, a lot of time. So yeah, we take questions and remember that my questions are all cut out. So you need to take these questions. So we need Garrison in 1828 before he needs one. And we want to give a sense of where he's going on and what he's going on and what he's going on. So before we do the background, could you give us a portrait of Garrison in that spring? Like, what is your life, what is your life, what is your life, what is your benefit of Christ? You know, Garrison, a lot of people argue that he was a self-made man. But at that point, I don't think he had really found a direction or a calling. He was a printer by trade. He came from a very humble background, poverty-stricken. And he really had found a trade that could lift him out of that very humble, poverty-stricken

background that he came from. His father had abandoned them. His mother had to leave him and work to support her family and had gone to Baltimore, in fact, to work. And so here's a young man who is really searching for his place in the world. And I think at that point, he is interested in many sorts of reform efforts. He's a federalist. He's a supporter of John Quincy Adams. He has edited a paper successfully and said enough anti-slavery things in it to attract London's attention and the attention of the old American Convention of Abolition Societies, which recommended that paper as one of the papers that abolitionists should read. So even before... Sorry, but I think that's right. I think so here. Yeah, then. And here, you're on row one? Yeah, so if we were staying at...

What's the thing that's boarding us? Colleers. Yeah. Through, you know, in the meeting with my book, what would this guy be like? He's young, he's earnest. And clearly, he is looking for a calling. He's been a printer. He's been an editor of a newspaper, of a partisan newspaper. But I don't think he has found a calling as yet. And I think when he meets Lundy, and he's always been interested in abolition, because in his earlier paper, he had, you know, sort of mentioned slavery. But he hadn't really found his calling as an abolitionist. I think what happens is that when Lundy meets Garrison, he finds a follower. And Garrison, in turn, finds his life's calling as an abolitionist. He is inspired by Lundy. And he quickly, I think, moves towards abolition as the sort of his life's calling, yeah.

And so there are two aspects of his earlier life that I wanted to look at. One is just the poverty of that group. How about Lundy? Pretty bad. Sorry, you'd have to start the answer with that. With a sentence. Sorry. Garrison's childhood is extremely difficult. It's poverty-stricken. He's abandoned by his father. His mother, who's a developed Baptist, is forced to work and leave her children depend on the kindness of neighbors. Garrison himself is put to work at a very young age. He experiences extreme hunger. He runs away from his master. All these aspects of his childhood, I think,

really prepared him for his life as an abolitionist. The kind of empathy that Garrison felt for slaves was extraordinary, because he was living in the north. He may have seen free African-Americans there, but he clearly had not met a slave. But his own very difficult childhood, not bringing, I think, opened him up to really not sympathizing so much, but empathizing with the plight of the slave. You mentioned that it came from a life-indicted servant. Yes. His family was descended from endangered servants, unlike some later abolitionists who would join Garrison. Many of them, skeens of New England families, traced the heritage back to the revolution, back to the colonial era to Puritans. Garrison came from extremely humble beginnings. He did not have a formal education,

and it is something that he felt throughout his life. And his opponents, many times, used it against him. May you mention that his mother was a debauch Baptist. I wonder, since religion is such a big part of the story, could you tell me a little more about what he inherited and how he saw his relationship to God? That's an interesting question. Garrison's mother is a debauch Baptist, and we do know that abolition was one of those radical reform movements to emerge out off the second grade awakening and the religious revivals that were going on in the north at this time, and that spread pretty much throughout the New England states, and then upstate New York to Western Ohio. Garrison himself was not particularly religious, and this explains his religious iconoclism later on. He is not as bound to evangelical Christianity

in the way, let's say, that the tapence or even Theodore Weld was. He is clearly influenced by his mother. His mother, when she's dying in Baltimore, is actually nursed by an African-American woman, a named Henny. And his mother writes to him that this woman, though a slave, is spiritually certainly equal if not a superior. So there is something that he gets from his mother in terms of how he views African-Americans, and her notion of the spiritual equality of all souls, regardless of race, or station, and life, is something that I think he probably inherited from her. The next question, the second grade awakening, is there a modern analogy to it? It's hard to convey what's, I'd even understand, that kind of religious ferment in the States.

It almost seems like the 60s or something that the place is being turned upside down. Can you describe the atmosphere in the country at the time? Yes. The second grade awakening is a large, you know, enormous religious movement that sort of spreads. People are literally calling the areas where it spreads burned over districts, because it's burned over these revival meetings, meetings outside the formal, sort of institutional frameworks of existing churches. You have preachers. It's what once called the democratization of American Christianity, African-Americans, women. People call to preach who are sort of influenced by these revival movements would come up and talk in many of these camp meetings. There were also, of course, great preachers.

The most famous, of course, was Finney, Charles Grandeson Finney. And he left a trail of converts wherever he spoke. And I think abolition, like many other reform movements, benefited from this sort of religious fervor that had spread. But I think it also grew out of this empire of religious benevolence, unlike temperance, moral reform, sabotarian movements, Bible societies, track societies. Abolition, so grows out of this religious benevolence, the empire of religious benevolence. It becomes fairly radical. It develops in a way like the women's rights movement or the later communitarian movements, utopian socialist movements. So it is influenced, I think, by the second grade awakening, but it is not confined by it. It is just the last thing, but the religious atmosphere.

I get the impression, because we think of religion as being kind of an establishment thing, something that people discover in the world, but it seems very useful and vigorous. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, all these people, if you look at them, Finney, Theodore Weld, Charles Toward, the British abolitionist, who is influenced by Finney and who influences Weld, they are all young and they are all searching for meaning and direction in their life. So it is not the way, let's say, we view religion today as more sort of established. I think it was a period of religious and social experimentation and that was what was so exciting about it. Yeah, sure. Can we all stop now? The second grade awakening, it has all the electricity of the Federalist Party or something,

but it must have been this really, you know, and people like Anthony and Grincae just get their whole lives were wrapped up in this, and that's going to be very, very important, absorbing time. So Garrison is, everybody's living in this atmosphere. And so what impact did Lundi have on Garrison? I think he had an enormous impact on Garrison. Lundi found somebody to carry on his work. And Garrison, I think, in so in Lundi, a man who was sort of literally fighting all alone, virtually, against an enormous evil. And I think Garrison admired that immensely and tried to model himself after Lundi. And Lundi, of course, was at the end of a long list of, quote, gentle Quakers who gave their testimony against slavery.

But I think what Garrison saw was this lone man fighting against tremendous odds and not wearing on principle. And I think Garrison takes that from Lundi. Lundi is a lot more, is milder, is more compromise minded. He is definitely willing to think about emancipation in gradual terms. All that Garrison rejects. But what he does get from Lundi is this sort of single-minded devotion to abolition. How suddenly Garrison's conversion was it? I don't think it was a sudden conversion. Garrison grew up in Newbury Port. He was an apprentice in a Federalist paper and Federalists in the early 19th century had already developed a critique of slavery.

It was sometimes a moral critique, sometimes a political critique. So he was certainly exposed to anti-slavery views of the Federalist sort, which was still highly political, anti-Jepersonian. But there were these theory Federalist preachers like Elijah Parrish, who spoke out against slavery in after whom Elijah Lovejoy was named. The abolitionist editor who died defending his press. So I think the Federalist anti-slavery legacy was important. It was not as if speaking out against slavery was something that Garrison did not encounter. He probably did, given the fact that he was in Massachusetts and there was immense Federalist criticism of the so-called slaveocracy of Virginia and the Virginia dynasty of slaveholders. Right, right. Now for a long time, advocates of free labor,

and they're pulling back to the complete picture of slavery, how that free labor would always be more profitable than slave labor. Was slavery profitable? Slavery was immensely profitable. If you look at the statistics, it's actually quite astounding, and it shows you how deeply entrenched it was in the nation's political and economic life. The value of slave-grown cotton exceeded the value of all exports from the United States until the Civil War. It was the single largest item of export from the United States, shipping merchants in New York, insurance industry, other industry, textiles, shoemaking, the textiles of Lowe. Charles Sumner called it the alliance between the lords of the loom and the lords of the lash. They kept spinning because they were getting slave-grown cotton

from the south. So. So to redo that, because you put it in jail, because that was very nice. OK. The link between the belts of the market. Yes, Charles Sumner called it the alliance between the lords of the loom and the lords of the lash, that the northern economic lead, especially textile owners, or those involved in the shipping industry in New York, were heavily invested in slavery. Slavery may have been a regional institution, but it was of immense national economic importance. In fact, international importance, because it kept looms humming in Manchester, New England, too. And this is precisely the time that the industrial revolution takes off in England. And it is the textiles that first developed the factory system based on slave-grown cotton. So what is seen as this sort of idiosyncratic, peculiar, southern institution actually had an enormous economic significance for both the world economy and the national

economy of the United States. So is this movement? Is getting off the ground, the anti-slaved movement? It's really facing a much more deeply entrenched system than simply a farming system in the South that there's resistance in the North. There are these as built in. Absolutely. I'm sorry. You should have said sentences. When abolition takes off, abolitionists, like Garrison, are facing immense opposition because slavery is so entrenched in the nation's political and economic life. And also, because slavery is not dying, it is not eventually disappearing as many of the Revolutionary Generation thought. It is, in fact, expanding. It is vibrant. There's a new cotton empire in the Southwest. There's a vigorous domestic slave trade in which more African-Americans are sold than the number of Africans who actually

came to the British North American colonies from Africa. Over 1 million are sold on South. And if you count local sales within the episode, it's much more. So slavery has gained a new lease of life, and it is an extremely prosperous and expanding institution. And that is the reason why abolitionists face such an uphill task. To question slavery, men to question, an institution that was responsible for the dynamic economic growth of the South, and also one that had immense political power because of certain clauses in the Constitution. I wonder if you would just clarify one point there. If you talked about the million slaves being sold South, I wonder if just clarify the idea that the institution is in sent moving South, because the idea of sold South is called such terror.

And that there's this kind of network that is emerging. By the 1820s, 1830s, the early anti-bellum period, the domestic slave trade becomes a big symbol of slavery. Both of its cruelty and its economic expansiveness. This is when slavery in the upper south states, like Virginia and Maryland, state where Douglas was held as a slave, gets a new lease of life. These were areas where stable crop plantation that needed slave labor, like tobacco, this was on decline. And with the domestic slave trade, these plantation economies literally receive a new lease of life. They start selling out their surplus slaves to the expanding growing areas in the southwest, the lower south, to the cotton areas, where the slave regimen is harsher.

It's newer, it's more brutal. And so being sold on the river held in almost terror for many slaves who lived in upper south states, like Virginia, Maryland. And so that is one of the ways, I think, that the cotton revolution did not just lead to the expansion of slavery in the southwest, it also shorted up slavery in areas where it was in decline. And what advantages, in terms of the probability of what advantages would a deep south big cotton plantation hold over a New England farm, for example? Well, you know, there's an economic historian who has calculated that if a southern farmer owned one slave, he had more capital than the average northern farmer. So slavery slaves represented an enormous source of capital

for slaveholders, but even small farmers with one or two slaves. Their average wealth was much larger than that of an average northern farmer, not based on their land holding, but their control over slave labor. What was the prospect of colonization working? The colonization was this dream, I think, that a lot of anti-slavery men had a dream of sort of getting rid of slavery and black people at the same time, imagining a lily-white nation, a white republic, rid of its stain of black slavery. So it was an odd movement. It included anti-slavery northerners.

Some of whom wanted to be missionaries or advocated missionizing in Africa. And others who were slaveholders in upper south areas who simply wanted to get rid of free blacks. It was a strange idea to think that you could actually transport all people of African descent back to Africa. And I guess in an age when immigration was common, the New World itself was settled by forced and voluntary migration. Maybe it was something that people could imagine. But in the end, it was highly impractical. It would have been an enormous undertaking which the federal government would have had to step into. And frankly, I don't think that it was at all practical. Of course, the most important fact was that most people of African descent did not want to go back to Africa, but saw themselves as Americans. Great.

So, yeah, I should drink. OK, I have another one. So Garrison goes to Baltimore, and by this time, he's advocating immigration. Was that his idea? Garrison is exposed to slavery, and more importantly, the slave trade for the first time when he goes to Baltimore. This is when he comes into contact with slavery for the first time. And when he's jailed for allegedly labeling a slave trader from his hometown in Massachusetts, he actually comes across slaves being held either as a punishment or to be traded down south. And I think that was a transformative experience for him, just like his meeting with Lundy.

Garrison comes up with this notion of the immediate abolition of slavery. But the idea had actually existed before he sort of really used it in a programmatic way and said, this is what the abolition movement should stand for, the immediate abolition of slavery. In the 1820s, the British movement to abolish slavery had taken an immediate disturn with Quakers like Elizabeth Herrick, who actually wrote a pamphlet saying immediate, not gradual emancipation. African-Americans themselves may not have used the term immediatism or immediatist. But when they spoke and wrote against slavery, they really advocated gradualism or compensation to slaveholders. They made quite clear that their plea to end slavery was an urgent one.

But it is, to Garrison's credit, to actually take that notion. And that's what Garrison does repeatedly throughout his abolitionist career. He's able to take a single idea and express it bitterly and make it a kind of a rallying point for a movement. And in that sense, I think Garrison is extremely important. He does sort of give birth to the immediateist abolition movement by using it as a slogan, immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery. That is, slaveholders should not be compensated. Garrison claimed, if anyone deserved compensation, it was slaves. That's very interesting. It speaks to Garrison's view, his own noble Garrison role, as a dissent to that part of what it does is crystallize ideas that are in circulation. But it makes them not viable and potent. Absolutely.

And I do think that Garrison may have heard of Herick. After all, Benjamin Lundy published Elizabeth Herick's pamphlet. Even though he himself did not completely endorse immediatism, he did like Herick's pamphlet. So the ideas were there. But it is Garrison, even more than the British movement to abolish slavery, who makes immediatism a central tenet of abolitionism. And that's what Garrison excelled at as a dissenting agitator. And given the enormous obstacles he had to encounter in starting this movement, I think that was a very valuable political talent that he had. There were other things that Garrison got from others, his stance against colonization, and for black citizenship rights. That's quite clear that Garrison got that from the African-American community. When he had given his famous Fourth of July speech in 1829 in Park Street Church in Boston,

it was done under the ages of the American colonization society. Garrison himself was never a member of the society, the way Garrett Smith or Arthur and Louis Tappen were. But that was the only anti-Slayer reggae in town. And Garrison spoke under their auspices. Later, he went to a meeting of African-Americans and noted their disapproval of colonization. When he's in Baltimore, he's living in a boarding house with Benjamin Lundy and two very important African-American abolitionists, William Watkins and Jacob Greener. And in a way, he serves an apprenticeship, not just with Lundy, but also those black abolitionists who, throughout the 1820s, had been agitating against colonization and had been demanding equal citizenship rights. I find this fascinating, but he's sharing boarding house with two black guys in Baltimore 1829. I can't imagine there were a lot of multiracial boarding

houses in 1829 in Baltimore. But so, yeah, where was he crossing paths? Where was he being influenced? Where was he meeting black people turning across them and what was he taking from them? I know you can't imagine. Baltimore had a large and vibrant free black community. And surprisingly enough, at this point in the 1820s, it was not just places like New York and Philadelphia that served as centers of anti-slay reactivism. It was also Baltimore, largely because Lundy published his Genius of Universal Emancipation there, but also because it had a very activist black community represented by people like William Watkins. Now, Lundy published William Watkins toast to the Haitian Revolution. Garrison published, when he was serving as an assistant to Lundy, William Watkins pieces against colonization, Jacob Greener's pieces against colonization

and arguments for black education and political rights. So, he is living with these black abolitionists, but he's also clearly in a very extraordinary milieu, one of the few spaces in anti-Belam America, probably, that was interracial. And that was, I think, one of the strengths of the abolition movement, that it created an area where African-Americans could be heard and where they could actually come across certain white abolitionists like Lundy, like Garrison, who were willing to listen to them. You want me to do it by a day of changing my stuff? Beautiful, man. I'm not going to do it. You want me to do a change date?