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

Whenever you said this union was a political device, did I do it? Perfect. Perfect. That's the first thing I did. Perfect. I memorized that. I wonder if you could just give us a little forward for the kind of racism that they were up against. The kind of racism that people experienced or expressed back in the 1830s is really hard for people in the 21st century to even imagine. The first point that we have to understand is that there had been slavery in each of the northern states. That slavery was part of the fabric of northern society and all the white supremacist assumptions that underlay slavery in northern society had to be there too. And when slavery was abolished slowly from the 1780s on into the 1820s, the underlying hostility and hatred of dark skinned people by people living in the north continued not only unabated

but was inflamed further by immigration of white people who didn't know that they were white until they came here and were told by other people that that's what they were and that down the street were black guys. So especially in northern cities, the relationships between dark skinned people and light skinned people were sometimes just terrifying way off of a traveler from Great Britain who was touring the New England states, stopped in Hartford and wrote an account of little boys running down the street, pelting a black man with rocks screaming nigger, nigger, nigger. And you couldn't believe that that sort of thing was even allowed. In 1829 in Cincinnati, which contained a large black community, some of them fugitive slaves because Cincinnati's right on the Ohio River and slavery is right on the other

side in Kentucky, the white citizens in Cincinnati simply, no it's 1831, simply cleared out the black citizens of Cincinnati aiming a cannon down the main street, shooting it off, invading the community, 600 black people left that city permanently and never came back. The African-American community reassembled itself with other people later on but Cincinnati was a very good example of how hostile race relations could be back then in an American city. Hartford, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New Haven, Connecticut, all places where you see African-American communities and abolitionist communities under siege. By people who are convinced that black people and white people consorting together is race mixture, involves mongrelization, threatens male, white identity in many profound ways and

the whole political order. So the kind of white supremacy that abolitionists suddenly discovered they were up against was, I think, probably as terrifying a form of it as anything you'd ever see in any other part of American history. Yeah, I was 1820. How do I answer it this? Another really compelling example is what took place in Cincinnati in 1831. Okay. We just need to sit still for just one second, we'll get room time and then... What's room time? Just so we can edit the sound of this room, even though it sounds up to the silence, it's not. So when we're editing it. There was a really interesting program on PBS. No, on public radio.

Or there's a guy who... Thank you. Not on your life. Okay. Good.