American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with Lois Brown, part 1 of 4

Are we starting right now? Is this it? Oh, we are. Sorry. And you had that as my first question. It was also gorgeous. I got very quiet. I thought, oh, no. Okay. All right. You know, it took obvious that the government, the community of sanctions, played you the survivor, the men of sanctions, played you the society of multiple people, so many more their names were, you know, the census and projects. So, you know, what you have kind of a situator audience in 28, what are those? Well, the anti-slavery movement and the effort to get to abolition was all wrapped up in all sorts of other causes as well.

So, intemperance was huge. Everybody was thinking about, or not everybody, but just stop there and start again. Sorry. Okay. Just keep going. Okay. All right. So, intemperance is one movement. There is continued agitation around the rights of women and whether or not they can have access to education. There's ongoing debate about representation because of taxation. So, you have African Americans really working towards petition drives and other kinds of legislative action that will reflect their presence in the United States. You have increased formalization of the underground railroad movements and you have self emancipated people making their way into the northern cities and you also have slavery and the interstate traffic and slavery intensifying and becoming much more streamlined. So, in the 1820s, we are in a way between wars.

You have War of 1812 and then you have the Mexican War looming for the 1840s. We know that the Civil War is in the 1860s, but it's this moment. I think where there is much to be done around social causes of all kinds. And I think one of Garrison's colleagues said when he finally became an abolitionist par excellence, he said he didn't hate intemperance or poverty less, he hated slavery more. And so, those were the kinds of choices that were available to somebody who was thinking about a life dedicated to making the world and this country a better place. If it's hard to convey to a very... I'm not a sector of it, but if religion is going to play the same role in public spirit, then the religious climate seems so almost revert that it's going to play something.

Certainly not, Garrison. What would you tell us about the first of all, just the general social atmosphere and that we kind of did not spawn there? Well, certainly there's a time when there's this great awakening. You're in the second great awakening and you have... Although, you know, I think that churches were increasingly becoming social organizations that were then taking on political objectives and agendas. But you have a lot of attention being paid to this notion of salvation, of conscientious Christianity and performance of good works. But as that conversation is happening, you're also seeing an increased institutionalization of church practice. And with institutions come rules, with rules come exclusions and penalties and benefits. And so there are all sorts of negotiations being made in the same breadth as people are talking about what it means to be a sinner

and what it means to be saved and how does one convert others. And so you see a lot of conversation about sort of moral sensibilities. And that will come to play a huge role in the abolitionist struggle, and certainly for William or Garrison, who was really somebody advancing this notion that one's morality was one's compass and that moral swation, that emphasis on persuading individuals to hear their own conscience and to act in a way that was moral, and not just delusionally moral, but really upstanding and right. And you see all of that coming into play in the 1820s, more broadly speaking. But you have much more of a performance of Christianity and you have a move towards increased institutionalization of religious practice. And so, you have Garrison. What do you do those on quite a religious journey?

Where did it start? Where did it start? Well, Garrison inherits a sense of the power of faith and the transcendence that can come when one believes in a promised land, in a creator, in a world beyond this one. You know, he's born into poverty, his father abandons the family, but only after really displaying his distress and his depression and his tendency toward drink and really performing his sense of being less than in a world that was just, you know, shifting in ways that he couldn't predict and couldn't take advantage of. But Garrison's mother, who's often referred to as sister Garrison, was a devout Baptist. And she truly hoped that Garrison, her son, would take on, and that he would become, I think she imagined that he would become a fully-orbed Baptist at some point. And she did worry that all the work he was doing as a writer would take him away from God

and take him away from godliness. And he would tell her, no, it's the writing that keeps me good. You know, you want me to write because that's what makes me stay away from vice and trouble. So he begins in that world of Baptist organization. His mother is also the first, I think, to organize a women's evangelical group in the United States. So he is aware of the work that can be done within the church and the kind of support that can come from a church community because when his family is in distress, it's his mother's brethren. And the church community that rally around her to help and to support him. But he moves away, as we know, from that sense that organized religion is truly organized for the best purposes of humanity. And he begins to move, I think even before he meets Helen Benson and the Benson family themselves have strong baptist ties but are moving away to more of a sense of inner light

and that one must listen to oneself and one's heart and be guided by one's conscience. One must try to be good. I mean, it was just a very simple, straightforward code. You know, listen to your heart and don't do anything wrong. And you'll know it's wrong because your heart will either harden or it will be in an uproar. So, Garrison is a place where he moves away from that baptist organization. In part because he's seeing the ways in which, you know, the conversation about slavery is all wrapped up in excuses. One of the primary apologies, you know, primary justifications is that well, we go to the coast of Africa and we raid these villages only because we want to bring them to the Lord. And, you know, there are those who would say, well, you could just take the Lord there. But, you know, Garrison sees the way in which religious hypocrisy is playing into a political, economic and social system that is now just unjust and inhuman.

And so is moving away from those particular kinds of tenets and towards what is much more of a transcendent kind of spirituality. So, how is it that the apologies, you know, again, it seems up either to us that the Bible is anti-slavery. Was that not the case then? Why are the established sorts of many of the established Church of the Year are complicit or decide on the issue? How is the Bible beneath? I'm thinking about the Bible as an anti-slavery or even a pro-slavery text. Again, it just depends on who's reading it and who it is that they're reading it for and why they're reading it. So that you have the famous, you know, servants of your masters that's intoned up and down, you know, throughout the southern states and even repeated in the north as a way to understand that there is a social order and yes, maybe the good Lord did intend for there to be this kind of separations kind of labor and a peer after for those who are less fortunate.

But, you know, the Bible is also full of stories of bondage and slavery and people who are oppressed and unable to worship freely and have no access to education. So it just depends on where it is that you want to place yourself. Garrison sits squarely in the middle of the Bible as a prophet, right? And we meet other prophets in the Bible, people who are going to assess the world in which they are living and say, we need to move to a different place. We need to pursue a different set of principles and objectives and goals and discipline. So for Garrison, you know, the Bible was just as much his as it was the text that guaranteed a pro-slavery perspective because for him, you could bring your conscience to bear on the Bible. He was truly, I think, a New Testament believer. He was never in favor of warfare. He was a pacifist, did not believe in violence, never raised a gun in protest.

But he didn't judge those who did in ways that were unfair. He said, I understand. But for Garrison, the love of the New Testament, the ability to forgive, the ability to come to a place where you meet your conscience and are converted. Conversion was so key for him. But the Old Testament is full of the battles and the intonations and the tablets and the commandments. And there are times in his life as a leader of the abolitionist movement where he is involved in crafting declarations of intent and constitutions. So he doesn't find documents and guidelines like that to be anathema. He decides, well, there's a practical use for them. But again, in moderation, only so far as you can then do the work that you are called to do. Not that those will define the work that you cannot do.

Right, so Garrison is converted into Boston. Or, you know, the church is kind of approach to the massacres of Boston. How did he end up in jail? Well, he ended up in jail in Baltimore because he spoke his mind. Garrison was a man who would, in our way of saying today, you know, called it as he saw it. And he was in Baltimore and he was seeing the traffic in slavery. But Baltimore is a curious place because it has a substantial African-American free population. And it also is the hub for interstate slavery traffic.

So you have an enormous shipbuilding and sort of docks and harbors and ships coming in, bearing all sorts of products of that triangle trade and thinking about just the ways in which Baltimore was key to the maintenance of slavery. So he sees all this industry and he sees the profit and he sees the heartlessness of these merchants because that's what they were in all the richness of that term. And he decides to name one of the sea captains and decide that, you know, yes, I will charge you with this crime of actually contributing to this institution of slavery and not doing, not being an upstanding citizen and doing all this wrong. And that's slander. And so he's charged with libel. Well, I think one of the, you know, garrisons distrust of the system as it was in 19th century America. Increasing was, I'm sorry.

So garrisons, all right. So garrisons distrust of the system grew intensified because of the ways in which he saw the political social economic machinery increasingly working together to protect the interests and assets and financial benefits and profits that were just so tied up intertwined. In slavery, slavery was no social practice. It wasn't a religious practice. It was entirely economic. This was a nation built on work. And there were people who were working. They were not being paid. They had no rights. They had, you know, and he saw that. And so for garrison to suggest that a man who was doing, that a sea captain was doing business that was in fact unconscionable, there's the slander. It's not that he's making a living for himself. It's the business in which he's making a living that's against God against country and should be against his own conscience.

And so for that, that's the charge that garrison is not just critiquing the practice of making a dollar or two or 300 or 5,000. He's critiquing the heartlessness that goes into protecting and creating your profit off the bodies of enslaved people. After he's released from jail, he's kind of gone up support for his business product. Who's he pitching to and how did he receive it? So garrison makes his way to Boston to, you know, it's funny because there are these moments in garrison's life where he, there are these moments when his life's work, there are these moments when, no, stop that, sorry. So at these moments when he makes huge transitions, as he does when he moves from Baltimore to Boston and he's trying to begin the liberator and formalize his position as an abolitionist and a man in the public sphere, he takes a holy pledge.

I mean, this is a man who believes in promises, you know, and I think that that's at the heart of who garrison really is and part of his conviction as an abolitionist and part of his unswerving rejection of the Constitution, for instance, that that was a promise broken. That document represented promises that were not kept and he is such a sentimentalist. He's such a romantic. This man is just, you know, as he says to Helen on one occasion, I'm quite the combination. Am I not, you know, I'm quite the mix of things out there in the world. I'm like a lion and with you, I'm just a little kitten. I mean, he says these things. This is the man who, you know, is taking on governments and, you know, sort of escaping lynch mobs and, you know, but he's, he's such in that way, I think it's the romantic activism in him. So he takes so, you know, he's met with Benjamin Lundy and has, you know, gone to work on the genius of the universal emancipation and then he comes back and at these moments, both where he's going to work with Lundy and again when he's about to take up the liberator.

He makes these pledges that are very solemn. They're like marriage vows where he says, you know, I pledge to do this work with all that I have and I will not stop I pledge my life to it. I mean, that kind of heartfelt commitment, spoken aloud and offered in print, leaves a record and it's something that he holds himself accountable to and that then others will see. From the absolute beginning, that this is no charlatan. This is no man trying to take advantage of a political situation and say, let's try the abolitionist cause. Maybe we can make a little dollar doing that. He is somebody who comes into the practice of abolition, anti-slavery, immediate abolition with a sense that it is indeed a conviction, that it is a marriage of ideas, that it is something it's a cause to die for. But it's also a cause by which he will live.

He mentioned that when we went to Baltimore, it was still just interesting, that kind of conversion thing. It was a large competition for black people living in the city and I was kind of amazed at you boarding with black people and, you know, presumably eating with them. How were you affected by your experience in black people? You know, just to kind of go back to what you just said about Baltimore. You know, one of the things that made Benjamin Lundy so awe-inspiring, one of the things that made him so impressive for Garrison was the fact that he himself was moved to activism by what he saw and what he felt. And Lundy had been working in Wheeling, Virginia, which is now West Virginia, and had seen coffees of enslaved people being moving through markets. And he said, you know, I saw that and I felt their pain and the iron came into my soul.

And for Garrison, again, it's all about proximity, that it's genuine activism because it's rooted in access to conversations with exchanges with counsel from mentoring by the very people in whose name and on whose behalf he is also going forward. So he has his very practical agendas of what he wants for the nation, but it's also informed by his ability to listen and to seek out those, you know, for whom he's working. And Lundy, I think it was complained, you know, he says, the colored people are everywhere, but they're the last people. People, anybody, everything's going to talk to or get advice from. And so Garrison is able to make a difference because he basically has that connection on the ground. His activism is rooted in the day-to-day reality. So when he is in Baltimore and becomes part of that African-American community and is not only depending on them for sanctuary and his boarding or for support or, you know, thinking aloud.

I mean, this is a man who loves to talk and who loves to write. And he's not going to exist in their company as a silent solitary soul. He's gathering information and he's sharpening his perspectives. And you see him in sconce in various African-American communities up and down the Atlantic seaboard. So in Providence, in Boston, he is, you know, welcomed like the, you know, the favorite son, come home. And it's genuine. And it's not patronizing. It is a thoroughly respectful welcome to a man who, again, has made this solemn vow that's not to defend them, but to make the country live up to the ideals. In such a way that they too can live here and he can live here in a way that is good and uplifting.

Yeah, he seems to leave off when he, you know, arises with his conversion to a media to be thrown across. But he really comes. He leaves jail. And then I guess he's a fair to say that to some extent he adopts the program of the blackout person. And certainly his proximity, I think to African-American communities and families and individuals and men and women and even the children. He changes how his politics evolve, you know, just changes his politics. He starts out with vague notions and, you know, endorsements of colonization. And then he moves on to gradual abolition. And then he moves on to immediate abolition. And that's the, you know, third times the charm, right?

At that point that after seeing what he's seen, families rooted in this country with members, you know, ancestors who have fought in the wars to claim this nation of individuals who are forming schools and militias and organizing themselves as entrepreneurs and industry. I mean, there is no field in which an African-American family community is not represented technically. It's just an active, vibrant and earnest set of individuals and communities. So part of what, I'm losing the question, sorry, what was the question? Right. So one of the things that's important to recognize is not just that Garrison has this informal relationship with African-American communities and institutions as well. But that it is very much deliberate and that he uses his time in African-American communities and churches and meetings to think very deliberately about how to organize his own abolitionist campaign.

When he comes to Boston, you know, before he's established the New England Anti-Slavery Society, which he does in the only church that will open its doors to him, which is the African Baptist Church on Beacon Hill. You know, before he gets to that point, and that's snowy night in December of 1832, he is preceded by the general mechanics, one is the general. Sorry, this point general colored mechanics. You don't have to do this again, I always forget them. Sorry. Let's mix it up, general. The Massachusetts General Colored Association. Okay. So before he begins, before he finds the New England Anti-Slavery Society in that African church on Beacon Hill, he's preceded by at least four years by the Massachusetts General Colored Association, which is a group of men who have great ties to the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge, which is the first African-American Lodge in the world. And also the first Masonic Order in the nation. And he sees the ways in which they themselves are organizing through, again, their petition drives, their solidarity meetings and their efforts to institutionalize equality.

That they've been advocating for equal opportunity, but in the meantime, they've been taking care of community and documenting the ways in which they can uplift themselves, both politically, socially, and intellectually. So when Garrison comes to Boston, he's in a way preaching to the already converted, but it's not even so much that as he is joining like-minded men. They are men and women of color, but they are all like-minded souls. And so there is a true connection and a partnership that can go forward. There's a kind of work that Garrison can do precisely because he is a white man in America in the 1830s that many of them could not do from 1638 to that point. And when it becomes evident that the work of the New England Anti-Slavery Society is going forward and that that is a body that will make a difference, the men of the Mass General Colored Association join in.

They become really a first cohort of African American members. So it's clear that Garrison is both learning from partnering with, being inspired by the people of color, both the free people of color that he's meeting in cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston. But he's also then creating his own method of moving forward. Okay. Great. Yay.