American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with David William Blight, part 2 of 6

You know, it's one of the main problems with presenting the story to a modern audience, if it is. Yeah. You know, they have no gap at slavery. We've all met, you know, the abolition of one, and so it's easy to assume. And we're all abolitionists now. It's easy to assume. All right. It's natural to assume that they have the upper hand from the beginning. So it's vulnerable. So I wonder if you could give us a sense of the obstacle spacing, a young activist, selling music, and education. Mm-hmm. Well, in the 1820s or by the late 1820s, when William Wood Garrison is getting out of jail in Baltimore, and converting to what he eventually calls immediate abolition as opposed to colonization, this is a moment when anti-slavery activists of any stripe are alonely lot. They're a small group of people largely associated with evangelical Christianity, largely in New England or New York.

Although their roots for many of them are in the border states, it was a person like Benjamin Lundy, who had such an effect on Garrison in all places in Baltimore, or a slave state in Maryland. But this is a moment, a historical moment, when the big picture is that slavery is booming. The cotton boom has been going on now in the South for at least a decade, actually a decade and a half. After the War of 1812, 1815 and the 1820s, you begin to get the southern westward movement, thousands and thousands of southeast eastern seaboard slaveholders and non-slaveholders. Many non-slaveholders are heading west. It was called Alabama fever in the 1820s, and then it was Mississippi fever, and then it was East Texas fever, and it is one of the biggest boom economies this country ever witnessed, from roughly 1820 to the 1850s.

This was the evolution of the so-called cotton kingdom across the deep south, the cotton belt, the black belt, whatever you want to call it, the slave belt, from the Carolinas, from Virginia and the Carolinas across to East Texas, became the largest cotton producing place on planet earth, and cotton became in these few decades, the single greatest American export. It became the most dominant commodity in the entire American economy. It became the principal source of cotton for the industrial revolution in England, in the textile industry. And probably most important of all, most important threat in this of all, that abolitionists were becoming aware of, aware of, took a little time, is that slavery is expanding and leaps and bounds through that domestic slave trade. So if you are of an anti-slavery leaning or bent,

whether you've given over to a mediatism yet or not by the late 1820s, early 1830s, you face tremendous obstacles. The first obstacle you face is the U.S. Constitution itself, which is deeply complicit with the system of slavery is legal in all of these places. The trade of people as slaves, as property, is thoroughly legal and is becoming a very big business across the South. The three-fest compromise, et cetera. The U.S. Constitution, you first face as an obstacle. And in American society in these years, this is only three decades after the revolution. This is now the new generation that's inherited the revolution from their parents. The U.S. Constitution was something people viewed with a certain sanctity. There was this idea that, oh my god, if the U.S. Constitution collapses, this whole republic collapses. Well, we may still have that view, but perhaps with less intensity today than they did then.

Secondly, you face a tremendous obstacle as anti-slavery activists began to realize. And this took time. Over the course of the 1820s and into the 30s, you face the increasing realization of Southern transigence, of just how committed white southerners are to this system. Because if you came of age, let's say from 1800 to the 1820s, or even right after the War of 1812, the dominant worldview in America about slavery was still what we might call a certain kind of Jeffersonianism. Slavery was this awful thing necessary to some degree, but over time, it's just going to wear out. It's just going to gradually fade away. That was Jefferson's, well, he thought by 1820, he's not even arguing that anymore. And he says, we have the wolf by the ears, famously.

But in the 1820s, southerners began to start defending slavery as a positive good. They started defending it as a moral good. They started defending it as a system that is sanctioned by the Bibles, sanctioned by their own version of the natural rights tradition, sanctioned by morality. It takes a while for Northerners who care about this to realize, my God, they mean this. But their numerous pro-slavery defenses and tracks and manifestos that start appearing in the 1820s, and then they really start appearing in the 1830s. So if you're a would-be abolitionist in the late 1820s, early 1830s, you face tremendous obstacles, legal, moral, and then just the sheer physical, material, economic power that slavery is developing. And this is the state-making period of American history, lest we forget.

I mean, from the oughts, 1800, we'll say, to the 1840s, it's one state after another is entering the union. And the task was always, they find a free state to enter with a slave state, and they usually did. It was usually one for one, one for one, one for one. Of course, the Missouri Compromise was a huge crisis, because Missouri was ready for statehood, and they went and invented Maine, so they had a free state to enter with it. But pretty soon by the 1850s, indeed by 1850, when California was ready to become a state, they ran out of southern states to make with it. At any rate, abolitionists faced tremendous barriers, if you like. And I would say this too, they also faced, it takes them a while to fully understand this. Garrison came down to understand this, even though he supposedly didn't believe in politics, because the United States was a republic, because the side that owned the slaves had the right of dissent,

and had representation, not only had representation in the federal government, but many began to realize, have disproportional representation because of the three fifths clause, and they just looked around and opened their eyes and realized that most American presidents had been slaveholders. When they looked around and realized most members of the Supreme Court had been slaveholders, in fact, down to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, two-thirds of our presidents, and about two-thirds of all members of the US Supreme Court were themselves slaveholders. And as abolitionists began, I mean, they don't know that statistic in 1830 yet, but all they had to do is look at the Virginia dynasty. I mean, they may have been geniuses, but they're all slaveholders. So abolitionists began to realize they are up against a tremendous set of obstacles. The reason, the reason that anti-slavery thinking and then anti-slavery activism became more radical

from the 1820s into the 1830s was the realization of what they were up against. I mean, it's true of most movements, isn't it, in history? A social or reform movement radicalizes in relation to the power of its opposition. Lots of people would have been happy if the country could have kept adapting these gradual emancipation plans like most of the northern states had as long as they took 25, 30, 40 years in some cases. Still got a few slaves left around in Connecticut and Rhode Island in the 1830s and 40s. It would that the country could have adopted these kinds of gradual plans. That's actually what Henry Clay had hoped. And all those clay wigs of which Abraham Lincoln was such a staunch member had always believed that needed to be the answer to American slavery. But anyone with their eyes opened by the 1830s could see. Southerners had no interest in ever agreeing to these kinds of gradual emancipation plans.

In fact, they were organizing, thank you very much, to create a slave empire. And they were indeed creating, at that point, the most single most successful slave society on the planet. Well, the wealth of slavery is something that I think many Americans still have a hard time getting their heads around. Just a few simple statistics. By the 1850s, the eve of the Civil War, the roughly 3.9 million American slaves, almost 4 million, were worth approximately 3.5 billion dollars, just as a financial asset. That was by the late 1850s. And this is growing in leaps and bounds from the 1820s to the 1850s. And just think of a 30-year period.

I often tell my students this. You just think of a 30-year period in the history of the American economy, and then consider this boom versus other booms maybe we have seen. By the late 1850s, 4 million slaves, worth about 3.5 billion dollars, it was the single largest financial asset in the entire American economy, worth more than all manufacturing, all railroad, steamship lines, and other transportation systems put together. The only thing in the American economy, worth more as simply a financial asset by the mid-1850s, was the land itself. And no one really quite knows how to value North America. So, an economic interest of enormous power. You can also chart this politically. If you just look at the way power, who's getting elected, who's holding offices, who's being appointed the Supreme Court, who's running for president,

that power in the South moves over just a couple of decades from the Eastern Seaboard to what was then called the Southwest. Where is Jefferson Davis from? Born in Kentucky, but gains his wealth on a plantation in Mississippi. And you can cite many others who became these kind of first-generation, wealthy slaveholds, first-generation millionaires in some cases. Another little financial fact. This is stunning today when we think of the state of Mississippi, which is always at the top of the list of poorest states, highest inform mortality, lowest education rates, or whatever. In the 1850s, the state of Mississippi had more millionaires than any other American state, including New York. Because there were fortunes being made in the Mississippi Delta, in particular, in cotton and in slaves. This team produced 50 stuff of useful to another section.

Was that true in the 1830s? It was, of course, after Civil War, since the Civil War decided to become more of this being common in the future? Well, the burgeoning growing northern economy is in terms of manufacturing, in terms of jobs and labor, and even in terms of agricultural production of wheat, is, of course, booming from the 1820s right up to the 1850s. With periodic panics, the so-called depressions or recessions of 1837, 1857, there is a booming northern economy at the same time. But again, in terms of just sheer wealth and financial assets, nothing was more valuable than the ownership of these slaves. It's easy to forget that. Why did southerners continue to defend this system so vehemently? Why did they right-tracked after-tracked after-tracked defending it?

And by the way, by the late 1850s, a huge two-volume about 800-page compendium of pro-slavery writing was published in the United States. 800 pages of pro-slavery tracks and essays and so on, of all kinds, defending this system. Less to we forget, slavery had a very well-developed intellectual, philosophical defense, partly in response to the abolitionists, by the way. One is causing the other. But the evolution of those pro-slavery writings had a real effect on northern abolitionist, as well, as they began to increasingly realize how entrenched in transagence, how truckulent southerners were becoming about this system that was never just going to die away on its own. Now, on the economic level, you do have two competing booms going on, and this does have.

I mean, the Civil War isn't just caused because of two economic systems that couldn't coexist. It's not inevitable that these two systems could not coexist. But the second boom is, of course, the farm boom, the wheat boom of the Great Midwest. And that, of course, is linked to the McCormick's Reaper and the ability of farmers to till increasing amounts of land to produce that wheat and then to move it, first by canals and then by railroad, from the Old Northwest to the Northeast. And that's a boom going on that southern slaveholders with their eyes open and lots and lots of southern slaveholders understood a world economics. They understood markets. We used to have this idea. The southern slaveholders were so backward, they never looked beyond their own horizon. They couldn't see past the road down the road that led to their plantation.

Not true. These guys understood markets. They were becoming good modern capitalist. And they were worried that over time, an abolitionist are becoming aware of the worries on both sides of this. Those southern slaveholders are becoming worried that over time, they would get out distanced by population, by immigration, and by the sheer wealth that's coming out of the farms of the Midwest and then of the manufacturing of the Northeast and the Midwest. They were worried about that colossus growing in Chicago, for example. And over time, they worried that their system is so different. Their slave society would get surrounded. They would get surrounded by a new kind of economy. And it would begin to diminish the price of slaves. And then the price of their land. Of course, abolitionists were beginning to argue that's exactly what we would like them to think. Now, Garrison wanted them to think that because it was going to change their hearts.

Other abolitionists were beginning to think, well, whether it changes their hearts or not, we need to take over the power of the country and make them change. Um, the one last little thing, uh, someone could get the area for the, uh, probably behind the piece. Uh, especially me, from the back point of view, it's a very, very early time in the United States, especially the kind of society, uh, again, I think modern Americans could provide us fairly anti-slavery. Yeah. Well, um, the 1820s, in particular, and in the 1830s, is what we tend to call the Second Great Awakening. Uh, now, or the Third Great Awakening depending on how you want to date these things. Uh, there's a huge, uh, religious revival movement, especially in the North, especially in upstate New York. I don't know how, in the 1820s and 1830s. And the American abolition movement has deep, deep roots.

And evangelical Christianity. It's an interesting, uh, phenomenon to think about in today's terms, because in our political culture today, we tend to see evangelical Christianity as largely a conservative force. It's usually a voice about social conservatism, whereas in the 1820s and 30s, you could say some of these evangelical Christians were certainly socially conservative in terms of their views of family and so on, but they took their evangelicalism. They took their Christianity, they took their sermon on the Mount, quite literally, and came to believe that it was their duty. It was their mission as Christians. They rid the world of its greatest evils, and the greatest evil in America to most evangelical Christians was clear. After, after, they got active about booze, and demon rum, and created the temperance movement,

which was even bigger than the anti-slavery movement, by the way. They turned to anti-slavery. And so that evangelical Christianity became the source of a radicalizing kind of social philosophy, and even a radicalizing kind of individual morality. Because at the heart of the evangelical Christians' worldview, in the 1820s and 30s, when we see abolitionism taking hold and launching, was this idea that the individual can be converted to Christ, to salvation, to faith almost immediately. So why not the society too? That transference. This is garrison in many ways. Though garrison was not a minister, not a trained preacher, he has his own deep personal roots in evangelical Christianity, and many others around him do. The belief was, if I can find God,

and my soul can be converted by God practically overnight, then why not hold masses of people to the awareness of first, morality of slaveholding, and then ultimately to the morality of emancipation? It's an extremely important root of American abolition. The American abolition movement that begins to flourish with organizations and newspapers and membership by the 1830s takes its root, Christianity from the British model, the deeply influenced by what's been happening in Britain since the 1780s and 1790s, first against the slave trade and then eventually against slavery itself and the British Empire. And I think they take their root from a growing awareness that if you really care about this issue, by the volition of Southernism's cells, it's going to have to die by fierce activism.

Was slavery, how could both sides be used as a Bible? Of course, the Bible was used by both sides to argue against or argue for slavery. Defenses of slavery can be found all over the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. It was usually the first move in most pro-slavery texts to use several old slavery defenses, just the sheer existence of human bondage in biblical stories. It's all over the Bible. Was it so facto justification alone for some pro-slavery writers? On the other hand, if you look to the New Testament principally, if you look to the sermon on the Mount, if you look to various stories in the New Testament, if you look to the New Testament gospels,

it's there where one finds an anti-slavery outlook that the epistles of Paul, you can find the root ideas of some kind of basic human equality before God. I mean, we often argue that the natural rights tradition is, of course, launched, and it flourishes because of the 17th and 18th century enlightenment, the great philosophs of Locke, Sydney, England, and Rousseau, and others in France, and so on and so forth. But the natural rights tradition is as old, at least as old as the New Testament, at least as old as the sermon on the Mount. And its basic kernel of an idea is that people actually are born somehow equal before God. I mean, long before you ever get to equal before law or equal in some polity, it's equality before God. Now, if you take that seriously, ownership of another human being becomes a manifest evil.

And actually, this is so important because what Garrison himself, and he's not alone in this at all, but he was just so good at it, so effective at it, what makes a mediatist of people by the 1830s, white or black, evangelical or not so evangelical? I mean, Garrick Smith didn't come to his abolitionism through evangelical Christianity. And Douglas, in many ways, came to this through experience as much as through Christianity, but what makes him a mediatist is their conception of sin. It was the idea that slaveholding was a mortal sin. And today we may or may not take that idea seriously, but to a very Christian society, however well-churched or not a person might be, the idea that there was this collective social horrible sin being conducted in the name of your own country,

in the name of your own constitution, in the name of your own government, which you have to participate in meant you too, when a complicitis in a vast social sin. We like to say in America, that slavery was our original sin, it's a great phrase, it covers everything if we want it to. Also, depersonalizes it. It takes responsibility away in some ways, doesn't it? It means, wow, we're born with it. We're just born with it. Well, yeah, but the abolitionist was there by the 1830s saying, this isn't just original sin. This is the choices of human beings. There's a slaveholder in Richmond selling people to Tennessee. And a slave trader in Tennessee selling people to Mississippi and another slave trader selling those people in New Orleans. And each of them is making a choice to make money off the blood of human beings. And they're doing it under the laws of our government. It's that sense that slave holding, the practice of slavery, everything associated with slavery

was becoming this big social sin. And, of course, becoming the most dominant thing in the economy. And that began to radicalize people who cared about it. Great, thank you very very much. Can I get a quick breath and break? A quick. Can we take a look at that?