American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with James Brewer Stewart, part 1 of 5

Good, so we'll start at the beginning. We pick up the story in 1828, but I wonder if first you would kind of set the scene for us and give us a sense of Garrison's background, what were his circumstances going on? Garrison had probably as hard a life as a little boy could have. His father deserted him when he was seven, his father was an alcoholic, his mother was very, very pious, an overbearing woman, who had no other skills than being a laundrous or someone who worked as a domestic servant in someone else's house. They lived in Newbury, Port Ness, to choose it, and in order to be able to keep the family together at times he was begging scraps at the back doors of wealthy people's kitchens. He also sold apples and did odd jobs carrying slop jars when he was a young boy. We had a formal education, which was completely self-taught. Great publicist of the abolitionist cause, somebody who was just a genius with words, taught

himself, starting in New York, by memorizing the Bible. How do you think he was affected by his skills hardships? I think he felt all of his life that had something very deep and basic to prove. When he said in 1831, in his inaugural editorial of his newspaper The Liberator, I will be heard. He really meant it. Somebody who came from poverty, somebody who came from obscurity, somebody who held within himself a deeply, deeply spiritual conviction about the importance of leading a life that really counts for the honor of God. The idea of constantly reproving himself over and over again, and then being assured that he was being hurt, having the audience come back to him, to tell him that he was telling them the truth, or shocking them with the truth, or insulting them with the truth. It didn't matter quite what the reaction was, in fact, sometimes the stronger the negative

reaction, the better garrison liked it, because he was being hurt. I want to get back to his spiritual life in a second, but what would it have been like to be in a room with him? Was he a self-pacing guy in 1828? As a young man, he's someone who is very anxious to prove himself as a respectable citizen. As he was getting older, he began to associate with other artisans and people who were working in print shops, founding a Ben Franklin Society, where they would read Ben Franklin's autobiography and his works, and they would emulate Franklin with the idea of becoming self-made men. When garrison was, I think, twenty or twenty-one, he had a formal portrait artist paint his portrait as a young man, and I've seen the portrait, and he's very fancily dressed, far beyond what his actual station in life is. He has a very confident look at his face, and he's really presenting himself as someone

that his background completely denies. He was raised a Baptist. I'm sorry, I just started again now, because my questions are cut out. Oh, I'm sorry. OK. Sure. Oh, I'm sorry. You want to say the question again? Sure. What was garrison's religious background? Garrison's religious background was not just a background. It was in the core of who he was. It isn't as if his mother instructed him to be a good Christian. It's that his mother made an indwelling spirit inside of him that constantly thought about making God's will come into being on this earth. The idea that there is a strict right and wrong is only the beginning of a bit deeper idea that society should be structured by sacred relationships between people, that we're ultimately what God wants us to be.

So it's not outward observances. It's a whole idea of trying to make society conform to what garrison believed God had intended it to be. And it sounds that in those thoughts he didn't stand out that much from at least it was a time of religious further. It is a time of religious further and his mother, Fannie Garrison, was caught up in that further so deeply that she really imprinted him completely with that idea. His older brother, James Garrison, responded to the same parental pressure by becoming an alcoholic, a sex abuser, leaving the family, spending 25 years at sea, coming back with tuberculosis to Garrison's house, confessing his sins, writing his autobiography. So Fannie Garrison's impact on her two children were absolutely the opposite. And for William Lloyd Garrison, the idea of living out his mother's injunctions to put the will of God first in the world is very much what he did.

And what makes him unusual is that instead of simply being a pious and observing Christian trying to lead a good life, he developed a vision of how the whole world had to change in order to be able to conform to God's will. Can you give us a sense of the religious climate of the time to be the second-grade awakening? Yes, the second-grade awakening has a big impact on Garrison. And Garrison listens to several of the big ministers who are most important in the second-grade awakening. Glyman Beacher was one of his favorites. Second-grade awakening is a great emotional upheaval of religious fervor that began in the late 1820s in upstate New York, spread all the way into Ohio, back to New York City again, and became a very contentious issue among theologians. Was this kind of emotive religion, was this kind of idea that somehow you could select for yourself to follow God's path rather than be ordained by God and chosen? And Garrison very much became a believer in a person's free will to choose right, to

listen to God inside your heart. And become somebody who is really convicted of their own sin and is able to transform him or herself into a much more pure and perfect creature as a consequence of this kind of upheaval. For formalized religion, that was very controversial because it takes away the authority of ministers and it makes laypeople make the choices rather than the ministers tell you what the choices are. And so in the film we'll talk about Lundy, how would you summarize the impact of Lundy? Lundy is someone who is temperamentally very different than Garrison. Benjamin Lundy spent most of his life in the upper south wandering around with all the equipment that he needs to print a newspaper except for the big stationary press in a backpack, all of his types. And he published a newspaper which had the quaint name of the genius of universally anticipation. He believed that by speaking bluntly but gently, very interesting mixture, he's a quaker,

he's a pacifist. He believes that his inner light can shine and make other people see the truth that God is putting through his mouth to actually make slaveholders begin to emancipate their slaves. So he spent most of his career in the upper south and he moved from place to place. Usually he was in Tennessee, he was in Kentucky, he was in Baltimore, all places on the border between slavery and freedom in this middle ground which is where he operated. And that's where Garrison and he began this collaboration in Baltimore. And what Garrison shared with Lundy, and I think the quakerism is really important because quakerism is very important to a lot of abolitionists who are in Garrison's circle is the same sense of God speaking in an inner light with no need for a need or needy area, no need for an ecclesiastical structure, no need for somebody to tell you what the Bible means.

Only God speaking to your heart, telling you what the moral imperative is. Lundy was that way, Garrison was that way, and they agreed to disagree in their editorial policy when they were jointly editing the newspaper, and Lundy's very quiet and rational sorts of editorials about slavery were in one column, and Garrison's much more hyperbolic and incendiary editorials were in another column and they would sign their names at the bottom. Now I want to go back to Boston and their first meeting was Garrison's conversion, just to talk about Garrison's conversion, was it a click-up fair, was it a... Garrison's conversion to abolitionism? Garrison's conversion to abolitionism was a long ways along before he ever met Lundy. The fact of the matter is that Garrison's early newspaper experiences were all tied up with a very important group of politicians, very powerful within New England called the Federalist Party, which was the original party of Alexander Hamilton and people

like that. By the time he's editing and working it as apprentice in newspapers around New England, Federalists have fallen out of favor, they're out of power, they'll never come back to power again, and they blame their demise on slaveholders, on the South, on Thomas Jefferson, on all the clauses in the Constitution that give Southern politicians who happen to be slaveholders undue power in the affairs of the nation. And even before Garrison ever thought about becoming an abolitionist, he inherited all that anti-Southern rhetoric and outlook. So he brought that to what became the fashionable sort of anti-slavery to become involved with in New England, the American colonization society, which was a good-hearted sometimes and sometimes very mean-spirited effort to first convince slaveholders to emancipate their slaves with the idea of then creating a colony on the other side of the water with

the idea of sending African-descended people back home. Now, Africa is a very large place in Liberia, the little place that they ended up going to. It certainly wasn't home, but it was a nice way for Garrison to feel as if he was involved in a number of different causes, like temperance reform. He began early talking about questions of pacifism and warfare, and the idea of being a gentile and kind of universal reformer was really what he had become before he met Lundy. And he was actually a member of the colonization society in Boston after he met Lundy. He stood up to give an address in front of the colonization society and basically condemned colonization as a terrible thing. And insisted that the immediate emancipation of all slaves in the United States was the imperative. And he became an abolitionist openly at that point, but there are many different steps along the way that they're getting there. How much exposure had he had met in 1828? How much exposure had he had

to black people? Almost none. I'm sorry. Garrison had almost no exposure to black people at all when he first took his steps towards abolition. But the important thing that one has to remember is that Garrison went to Baltimore with Benjamin Lundy, and they're boarded with free blacks living in Baltimore, had to share the table with them, had to break bread with them, had to sleep in the same quarters with them, and they told him many things about slavery that he'd never heard before. And those kinds of encounters between white people and black people in creating abolitionists that experiential component of it is very, very common for the original abolitionists that entered the movement in the 1830s. The idea of blacks telling whites how it was. And suddenly Garrison had an idea that he had a much expanded mission that did not simply speak to the question of slavery but spoke

to the question of race. And to put those two things together is by far and away. Where do I start? Okay. So taking a position to get slavery is the easy thing. The more difficult thing is to understand that underneath slavery and supporting slavery not just in the south but all over the United States is white supremacy. What Garrison began to call the color phobia back in the 1830s and all abolitionists began to talk that way. I think we need to remember that every northern state had a system of slavery at the time that it entered the original union in 1787 with the exception of Vermont which was part of New Hampshire and entered the union with an anti-slavery constitution. Slavery had to be abolished in the north but the white supremacy that had supported that slavery did not leave.

Now what would the project of colonization working? None. Okay. Colonization was much more a project that made people feel like they were working against slavery than it was a project that worked against slavery. It made one feel active. It made one feel responsible. It's sort of like if you can make an analogy. It's sort of like buying a Prius instead of a gas gousler with the hope of shrinking your carbon footprint rather than getting rid of your automobile entirely and riding a bike. The idea of transporting what began in the census of 1790 as about 900,000 enslaved people by the census of 1840 was 2 million enslaved people and by the census of 1860 was 4 million enslaved people to any other place as of course patently ridiculous. The process

that brought them here was the largest transfer of populations from one side of a notion to another that's ever been accomplished by human beings. This is a whole African slavery. So to try and reverse that, remembering that slavery is itself the second largest capital asset in the U.S. economy next to land makes it a very difficult process but it's an idea that will not die. Abraham Lincoln has this idea. Even during the war he has this idea and Garrison criticizes him for that. After the war has started while Lincoln is still being very hesitant about what emancipation might mean. Yes, colonization to him is pro-slavery. Colonization to him is pro-slavery because first of all it's a phantom as an actual program and second of all it makes people feel good

about themselves rather than having to reflect inward on how they feel about themselves in relation to people who represent difference. One of the very first things that Garrison did once he did now speak of a colonization in 1832 one year after he started the liberator. He publishes a huge compendium called Thoughts on Colonization which is a giant collection of all the racist and terrible things that you could find in the colonizer's magazines together with statements about African-Americans about how they hated this idea and would never be subjected to being sent back to Africa because they were full American citizens. Thank you very much. Now Garrison ends up in trouble in Baltimore. How is it the end of the bill? It's a very fascinating story and it gets back to some of the matters we were talking

about a bit earlier of Garrison needing this constant sense of being heard and being affirmed. What he did while he was in Baltimore and while he was working for a Lundy he found out about a slave trader from Newport, Rhode Island who had done a perfectly legal transfer of slaves from one place to another down to the New Orleans slave mart 70 slaves and Garrison vilified him in the newspaper called him a pirate, called him a murderer, called him everything that you could think of that was bad and awful and the slave shipper turned around and sued him for a libel and won. So Garrison had to go to jail. He was fined $100. He couldn't pay the $100 check. So he was confined in the Baltimore jail together with lots of other people. Now it happened to be that this was a very nice jail. It was a jail that was very ample. He could walk around. He weren't in little teeny tiny cells where he couldn't socially mix and he first he became more educated about black people because that was also a holding cell for fugitives

and escapees and also for people who were coming off of inbound ships who happened to be dark skinned, who were not allowed out in the regular population and who were incarcerated until the ship left again. Garrison got another lesson from black people but at the same time he saw himself as this wonderful martyr who was being oppressed and silenced because of what slavery was in the world and so he began writing flamboyant editorials and writing newspaper accounts that would go back to his hometown so that everybody could recognize him and he had a wonderful time in jail. He said I struck like a lion of the day and really enjoyed himself with the idea of making himself famous by being oppressed in the jail cell and it's a typical Garrison deal because on the one hand there's this very serious experience with black people and there's very daring and venture some idea about equality and skin color and on the other hand right alongside it is this huge egotism that is Garrison's

and the two can't be taken apart from each other. If you were to take apart the one you wouldn't have the other and it's always so important in understanding Garrison to put all that back together. He can be very dislikable. He can seem to say very irresponsible things but at the same time his need to be heard is also a vision for a better world. He's called the pioneer by other abolitionists. Garrison is actually called the pioneer by other abolitionists. Okay go ahead and ask the question again so I can respond to it. Garrison's sense of himself is very complicated. On the one hand he does see himself as a

truth teller, as a prophet, as an anointed one, as someone who has a magical picture in his head about God's obvious design and he's empowered by God to say what that is. And in that sense he is a truth teller. He presents himself as a voice crying in the wilderness, make way the path of the Lord and all that and you'll see in the mast head of the liberator a picture of Jesus coming back in the early liberators. So he's associating that very very strongly with his own role. At the same time he sees himself in a private sense as someone who has a charismatic effect on people close to him and he does. In private he is gregarious, funny, smart, loves puns, loves word play, loves the idea of turning his home after he marries, he calls it the abolitionist hotel, everybody just shows up.

And the idea of creating a sacred community around which he is sort of the central figure and is seen by the others as the pioneer, as the person who had the vision first. That's what other very powerful abolitionists like Wendell Phillips, who was one of his closest associates and from a completely different end of the social spectrum, wealthy, ambitious, law degree, Harvard would always defer to Garrison as the person with the basic moral insight. So Garrison is someone who sees himself as lonely for good reason and at the same time surrounded by a Christian community that he energizes and that energizes him. Now, I want to pull back and look at another fundamental idea that what it means to be at the center of the 18th century. We were all familiar with what protestors did with

the American value. But how was that different then? What hurdles did Garrison and his colleagues face in the 1830s that was surprising? I think the most surprising thing that a modern American no matter where they lived in the United States and even no matter what their skin color was the virulence of racism. I mean, the utter virulence of it. English visitors to the United States would walk down the streets of Hartford, Connecticut, watching little boys, white boys, pelting black men with rocks screaming nigger, nigger, nigger. The whole apparatus of communication was all about white supremacy. You could walk into drugstores, you could walk into apothecaries, and you'd see distorted images of black people everywhere. It was popular culture. This is also the age of menstrualcy. This is also the age of blackface. There's a lot of complicated stuff that puts race way out in front as a really, really, really powerful force outside the

South. That's the first response that people are going to have to someone coming along saying, all men and women are created equal regardless of what their complexion is. The second problem that Garrison would face is the point that slavery is a tremendously successful way to run a republic. If you were to interview a slaveholder in 1829-30 and ask him, how do you feel about the future? At slaveholder would tell you I'm making eight to nine percent annually, no taxes, thanks. We used to be a social system that was backed up against the Atlantic Seaboard. Now we sprawl to Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, all that. We're protected in the Constitution in four or five different places. Everybody's obliged to return our fugitive slaves. We get to count enslaved people for additional representation in the House of Representatives. We got a good deal to be able to locate

the capital of the United States in slave country so that when you walk into Congress, if you take a right, you head to the House of Representatives, if you head to the left, you go to Gorsuch's Slave Mart. Slaveholders are tremendously powerful people, but at the same time they're very fearful people. At about the time that Warly Milloy Garrison happens, so does something called the Nat Turner Rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, which ends up with 28 white people dead and then just mayhem done in retribution on enslaved people throughout Virginia. Concerned with that was the publishing of a pamphlet that came out of Boston by a black artist who was extraordinarily eloquent and who wrote a landmark piece of black protest literature, which is unlike anything that had ever been seeded before, David Walker's appeal. David Walker had a plan to circulate his appeal to slaves in the South by smuggling it onto ships, those same black guys who were held

in the Baltimore jail, so that literate slaves could begin to read it and it's just the most incredibly electrifying statement of black anger and protest that you could possibly read in. It drove slaveholders crazy to know about this. The other concurred event that was happening at the time was South Carolina's attempt to succeed from the Union in 1831-32, the nullification crisis. So while slavery is very strong, the political issues surrounding slavery, rebellion, secession, uppity blacks, telling other blacks to pick up arms if needed, that's what David Walker recommended, puts garrison in at all abolitionists at tremendous peril. When they begin to demand a, that all slavery be abolished in the United States immediately, one does not stop sinning gradually, tell the rapist to withdraw gradually, garrison would say that, tell a man whose house is on fire, to flee his home gradually. So when

garrison and others start making these statements and are seen on the streets working with black people and you look at the liberator and there's a lot of black writers in there, it's a complete inversion of the whole racial, social, political, moral order. It's really revolutionary. And the response to that is to stifle as much of it as you possibly can. Didn't happen right away, but the minute the liberator was published, the South Carolina legislature put a bounty on garrison's head. $15,000 you've got to deliver his body, I think more if you deliver the whole man alive. So the repression in the South was immediate happened right away and it took three or four years until big mobs started breaking up abolitionists meetings and doing tremendous damage to black communities in the north as a consequence of abolitionist agitation. They called it by mid-1830s a reign of terror. Before we get there, the South Carolina business speaks to our earlier question just

how is it that a state could put a bounty on a man's head to speak? Well, the interesting question is that there is no such thing as national citizenship. Every state will define citizenship differently, especially when it comes to questions of race. In Massachusetts, for example, the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 had an 80 slavery clause in it and at the same time said nothing about preventing black people, black men from voting. So they did. New York Constitution immediately disenfranchised all black males and that and after a while there was a property qualification added so that rich black guys could vote, poor black guys couldn't vote. But you can see just in that one set of contrast, what the differences in rights are as you go from place to place.

Why is freedom of speech not respected? Because of the issues that are being raised. There is no organized police force back then. Instead, there are sheriffs who are appointed officials or elected officials and they basically have a police equivalent of a volunteer fire department. There is no professionalization of any police in the United States until New York City develops a metropolitan police force in the middle of the Civil War. And so the idea of being able to enforce moral order through the application of civil control doesn't exist. And many people believe that the actual law and the enforcement of law in order is the responsibility of citizens out of doors. The idea that the mob is actually the agent of order that makes sure that society is calm, peaceful, that limits are made and that within those limits you can have free speech.

But Garrison is outside those limits. And so the people who made up the mob didn't see themselves as Oh no. They see themselves as people who are protecting their homes, their hearts, their children, their slaves, their identities as white people, their sense of themselves as the blood and guts of the community. Many of the people who led these mobs were called by the abolitionist gentleman of property and standing. These were people who were merchants, bankers, and represented moral authority. People who became involved in these mobs were anybody that wanted to become involved. Sure.