Book blog #7

Chapter 4 The Political Economics of Slavery and Racist Ideology in Pre-Civil War America

Slave life under the rule of Southern plantations has been described from the perspective of slaves, by following the lives of Solomon Northrup, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. The complementary side of slave life is an exploration of the politics and racist ideologies that enabled Southern plantation slavery to function. An insight laden place to begin is in Virginia with Bacon’s rebellion of 1676.

Bacon’s Rebellion

The story of this historically early rebellion includes class tensions that were escalating between White laborers and elites. Nathaniel Bacon, to gain favor with Gov. Berkeley, redirected the anger of the laboring class from targeting elites to the Native Americans instigating an “Indian War.” The governor, however, was not happy to have the profitable fur trade disrupted. So, instead of praising Bacon, he charged him with treason. Bacon was enraged, proclaiming liberty to all slaves and servants, he led a rebellious force of 500 men that burned down Jamestown and forced the governor to flee. For Governor Berkeley’s wealthy, White inner circle, poor Whites and enslaved Blacks joining hands presaged disaster. When Bacon died of dysentery, the rebellion was doomed. The governor with mercenaries plus inducements to Bacon’s supporters squelched the rebellion.

Rich planters learned from Bacon’s Rebellion that poor Whites had to be forever separated from enslaved Blacks. They divided and conquered by creating more White privileges. In 1680, Virginia legislators pardoned only the White rebels; they prescribed thirty lashes for any slave who lifted a hand “against any Christian” (Christian now meant White).[i]

Whites then wielded absolute power to abuse any African person. Every Virginia county soon had a militia of landless Whites “ready in case of any sudden eruption of Indians or insurrection of Negroes.” Poor Whites had risen into their lowly place in slave society—the armed defenders of planters—a place that would sow bitter animosity between them and enslaved Africans.[ii]

White Supremacy, Championed by Cotton Mather’s Seminal Writings, Became the Colonial Norm

Racist ideology advanced up and down the East Coast and in concert with Europe. Cotton Mather, Boston intellectual and preacher, prolifically wrote about the unblemished White soul the same year that John Locke declared all unblemished minds as White. Isaac Newton had already popularized light as White and Michelangelo had already painted the original Adam and God as both being White, in the Vatican’s Chapel. Whiteness symbolized beauty.

White supremacy became a norm, infusing education and socialization, enforced to the point that even questioning this norm was “evil.” Mather’s cohort of New England ministers ostracized egalitarian rebels as devils and witches. “How many doleful Wretches have been deployed to witchcraft,” Mather asked in 1691. And in nearly every instance, the Devil who was preying upon innocent White Puritans was described as Black.[iii]

Cotton Mather presented himself as the defender of God’s law, the crucifier of any non-Puritan, African, Native American, poor person, or woman who defied God’s law by not following the rules of submission. He obsessed over maintaining social hierarchies by convincing the lowly that God and nature had put them there, whether it applied to women, children, enslaved Africans, or poor people. Society, he said, became destabilized when children, women, and servants refused to accept their station. “You are better fed & better clothed, & better managed by far, than you would be, if you were your own men,” Mather informed enslaved Africans. Do not partake in evil and “make yourself infinitely Blacker than you are all ready,” Mather warned. By obeying, your “souls will be washed White in the blood of the Lamb.’” If you fail to be “orderly servants,” then you shall forever welter “under intolerable blows and wounds.”[iv]

Mather’s writings on slavery spread throughout the colonies, influencing enslavers from Boston to Virginia. His native Boston had become colonial America’s booming intellectual center. Boston was now on the periphery of a prosperous slave society centered in the coastal region of Maryland, Virginia, and northeastern Carolina. The Mid-Atlantic’s moderate climate, fertile land, and waterways for transportation were ideal for the raising of tobacco, and lots of it.

The imports of captives (and racist ideas) soared with tobacco exports. In the 1680s, enslaved Africans eclipsed White servants as the principal labor force. In 1698, the crown ended the Royal African Company’s monopoly and opened the slave trade. Purchasing enslaved Africans became the investment craze.[v]

Meanwhile, the enslaved population continued to rise noticeably, which led to fears of revolts and then, in 1705, new racist codes to prevent revolts and secure human property up and down the Atlantic Coast. Massachusetts authorities forbade interracial relationships, began taxing imported captives, and rated Indians and Negroes with horses and hogs during a revision of the tax code. Virginia lawmakers made slave patrols compulsory for non-slaveholding Whites; these groups of White citizens were charged with policing slaves, enforcing discipline, and guarding routes of escape.[vi]

Americans reading early colonial newspapers learned two recurring lessons about Black people: they could be bought like cattle, and they were dangerous criminals like those witches. From their arrival around 1619, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery. In all of the fifty suspected or actual slave revolts reported in newspapers during the American colonial era, resisting Africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals, not people reacting to enslavers’ brutality, or pressing for freedom.[vii]

Wetiko and Racism in the Birth of a New Nation

In the midst of relentless African resistance and increasingly vocal antislavery Quakers, British slave-traders were still doing quite well, and they were primed for growth. But preceding the Revolutionary war, the abolitionist movement in Britain and among the more liberal Quakers began to heat up. John Woolman, originally a store clerk, had his conscience awakened when he was asked to write a bill of sale for an African woman. Subsequently he became a leading writer and voice for abolitionism among Quakers.

Thomas Jefferson, in scribing the Declaration of Independence, was to write about liberty, equality and freedom, (for White males) but like most Founding Fathers, he had been raised with slaves and was a slaveholder himself.

Benjamin Franklin, is another example of a leader known for reflective capacities and commitment beyond self-interest to the formation of the Constitution, but like Jefferson, as a child of his time, began his adult life as utterly racist. In lobbying the crown for Georgia’s harsh slave code in 1770, he argued that the “majority” of slaves was “of a plotting disposition, dark, sullen, malicious, revengeful, and cruel in the highest Degree.” Franklin is an example of how a reflective and otherwise moral person can be infected with racism. Franklin, like Jefferson and others, however, was complex. As noted previously, he had championed the Iroquois Constitution. And, by 1790, he was head of the Pennsylvania abolitionist society and at 84 was arguing before Congress in an attempt to reconcile the ideals of American freedom with slavery. His successful struggle for personal change is both a tribute to Franklin and an illustration that individual racist attitudes can be overcome.

Abolitionist debate was stimulated on both sides of the Atlantic, when England officially reversed its proslavery course. In 1772, an English judge ruled that antislavery English law overruled proslavery colonial law.[viii] Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote that slavery was killing, torturing, raping, and exploiting people, tearing apart families, and locking captives in socioeconomic desolation. (The “strategy” of breaking up families and ripping children from their mothers, was a racist precedent for what is happening to Brown children at the United States’ Southern border today; and for early 20th century strategies of taking Native American children from their families and placing them in boarding schools.) Rush’s words consolidated the forces that in 1774 organized the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the first known antislavery society of non-Africans in North America.[ix]

The publication of Bostonian slave, Phillis Wheatley’s poems in September 1773, a year after slavery had been outlawed in England and a few months after Rush’s abolitionist pamphlet reached England, set off a social earthquake in London. Londoners condemned American slavery, and American slaveholders resisted the Londoners. And then abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic more firmly resisted the rule of slaveholders in the colonies.[x]

As the American Revolution approached, British commentators slammed the hypocrisy of Bostonians’ boasts of Wheatley’s ingenuity while keeping her enslaved. The poet was quickly freed. The authenticity of Phillis Wheatley’s 1774 words rang out—

“in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle which we call love of freedom”—

as did the words of Connecticut Blacks, who a few years later had proclaimed,

“We perceive by our own Reflection, that we are endowed with the same Faculties with our Masters, and there is nothing that leads us to a Belief, or Suspicion, that we are any more obliged to serve them, than they us.”

All over Revolutionary America, African people were rejecting the racist compact that asserted that they were meant to be enslaved. Still, neither Wheatley nor Benjamin Rush nor any Enlightenment abolitionist nor any voice of Black Americans was able to alter the position of proslavery segregationists.[xi]

Jefferson’s mind, like the minds of many rich men in the colonies, remained focused on building a new nation. They were reeling from British debt, taxes, and mandates to trade within the empire. They had the most to gain in independence and the most to lose under British colonialism. Politically, they could not help but fear all those British abolitionists opposing American slavery, toasting Phillis Wheatley, and freeing the Virginia runaways.

As a holder of nearly two hundred people with no known plans to free them, Jefferson authored the heralded American philosophy of freedom. What did it mean for him to call “liberty” an “inalienable right” when he enslaved people?

“To secure these rights,” Jefferson continued, “it is the right of the people… to institute a new government… organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness.”

As Jefferson penned this thrilling call for revolutionary action, thousands of Africans were taking matters into their own hands, running away from their plantations, setting up their own governments on the frontier, or fighting on the side of the British—all to “effect their safety & happiness.” In South Carolina, there emerged a three-sided conflict, with as many as 20,000 Africans asserting their own interests. An estimated two-thirds of enslaved Africans in Georgia ran away. According to Jefferson’s own calculations, Virginia lost as many as 30,000 enslaved Africans in a single year.

Thomas Jefferson really handed revolutionary license only to his band of wealthy, White, male revolutionaries. He criminalized runaways in the Declaration of Independence, and he ignored women. The declaration reads,

He (the King) has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

The merging of wetiko greed with racism is evidenced in Jefferson’s listing of financial justifications for independence in the Declaration. British monopolists, he asserted, are “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.” The inability of American merchants and planters to do business with merchants and planters outside the British Empire had checked their freedoms in buying and selling African people to and from anyone and in selling their slave-grown crops and manufactured goods outside of Britannica.[xii]

Racial policies in the United States during the 1790s were governed by the importance of slavery to the economy and by fears of slave revolt that were ignited by the revolution in Haiti. Close to half a million enslaved Africans, who were producing about half the world’s sugar and coffee in the most profitable European colony in the world, heard the cries for rights and liberty echoing from the American and French Revolutions. In 1791 they revolted. Within two months, a force of 100,000 African freedom-fighters had killed more than 4,000 enslavers, destroyed almost 200 plantations, and gained control of the entire Northern Province.[xiii].;pppp

In fearful response, to stop slave revolts in the United States from gaining further momentum, the American Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, bestowing on slaveholders the right and legal apparatus to recover escaped Africans and criminalize those who harbored them. Thomas Jefferson, for one, did not view the Haitian Revolution, led by enslaved Blacks, in the same guise as the American or French Revolutions. “Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man,” he wrote in July 1793. To Jefferson, the slave revolt against the enslavers was more evil and tragic than the millions of Africans who died on American plantations. Jefferson called the Haitian leaders “Cannibals of the terrible Republic.”[xiv] The referent of “cannibals” depends upon whom is being eaten. Previously we noted that “cannibals,” a.k.a. “wetiko” is exactly what the Native Americans called Columbus and subsequent European invaders.

Cotton Economics Intensify Wetiko and Racism

Cotton, after the invention of the gin in 1793, became America’s leading export; and with it, demands for more slaves, more land, more violence, and more racist justifications. Legions of Americans were persuaded to see slavery as necessary to pay off national debts and build their nation. Added to this argument was the stoking of fears that if slaves were freed, horrific barbarism would be bound to arise.[xv]

Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of Haitian revolutionaries required him to reimagine the French Empire. The vast Louisiana Territory did not fit in and in 1803, it was quickly purchased by Jefferson. Over the next few decades, slaveholders marched their captives onto the new western lands, terrorizing them into planting new cotton and sugar fields, sending the crops to New England and British factories, and powering the Industrial Revolution. The new lands of slavery, the new crops and cash sucked the life out of the antislavery movement during the early 1800s.[xvi]

In his Annual Message to Congress three years earlier, Jefferson had condemned the “violations of human rights” enabled by the slave trade and urged Congress to abolish it. Congress followed his lead in 1807, after a contentious debate over how illegal slave traders would be punished. Traders, they decided, would be fined under the Slave Trade Act of 1807. But it was an empty and mostly symbolic law. The act failed to close the door on the ongoing international slave trade while flinging open the door to a domestic one. The so-called financial health of the economy and the prosperity of slaveholders (wetiko), overcame moral deliberations. Violations of human rights continued with children being snatched from parents; and slave ships now traveling down American waters in a kind of “middle passage” from Virginia to New Orleans.

Jefferson and like-minded planters of the Upper South started deliberately “breeding” captives to supply the Deep South’s demand. “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm,” Jefferson once explained to a friend. His moral ambivalence about racist policies frequently resurfaced but the balance seemed to be readily tipped by financially driven wetiko. He was infected! Jefferson was not alone. A year after the Slave Trade Act, a South Carolina court ruled that enslaved women had no legal claims on their children. They stood “on the same footings as other animals.”[xvii]

Despite promises, enslaved Africans in Jefferson’s Louisiana Territory were not gaining their freedom aspirations. And these captives refused to wait until their Masters gained an emancipatory opinion of them, knowing they could be waiting forever for their freedom. The previously noted 1811 invasion of New Orleans, (insert cross reference) began with about fifteen captives on a sugar plantation in an area known as the German Coast, wounding a planter, Major Manuel Andry, and killing his son. Bearing military uniforms and guns, cane knives, and axes while beating drums and waving flags, they started marching from plantation to plantation, swelling their numbers and the dead bodies of enslavers. In time, between two hundred and five hundred biracial and African people had joined the thirty-five-mile freedom march to invade New Orleans.

Inspired by the Haitian Revolution—these revolutionaries waged the largest slave revolt in the history of the United States. But the poorly armed band of freed people was defeated by a well-armed band of four hundred militiamen and sixty US army troops. In the end, almost one hundred former captives were killed or executed. Louisiana provided reparations for the planters—$300 (about $4,200 in 2014) for each captive killed. Authorities whacked off their heads and strung them up for all to see at intervals from New Orleans to Andry’s plantation.” Given the present interest in reparations, it is worth noting that this is the first of several times that reparations were paid to slaveowners.

The number of enslaved Africans swelled 70 percent in twenty years, increasing from 697,897 in the first federal census of 1790 to 1,191,354 in 1810, before tripling over the next fifty years. The escalation of slavery and the Nationalist-financial-driven wetiko need to defend it against anti-American abolitionists in Europe, generated one of the first waves of rationalizing, post revolutionary, proslavery thought.[xviii]

Nationalism fused with wetiko and racism to overcome moral considerations regarding slavery. Even Northerners, or native Northerners living in the South, defended it. In 1810, future Pennsylvania congressman Charles Jared Ingersoll released Jesuit Letters, refuting the aspersions cast upon slavery “by former residents and tourists.” A few years later, New York antislavery novelist James Kirke Paulding tried to defend his nation and the slow pace of change. He wrote that freeing happy Africans could endanger the community, undermine property rights, and render them “more wretched” than they already were.[xix]

Philadelphia Federalist Robert Walsh published An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain, Respecting the United States of America in 1819. Though he blamed the British for slavery, he said

the institution endeared Masters with “sensibility, justice and steadfastness…. For the African, whose “colour is a perpetual momento of their servile origin,” their enslavement is “positively good.” Thomas Jefferson responded, “Your work will furnish the first volume of every future American history,”

The power of wetiko plus racist motivation was sufficiently great to enable defenders of slavery to overlook slave revolts and runaways in their justifications.

In 1809, Jefferson estimated his net worth to be $225,000 (roughly $3.3 million in 2014) based on 10,000 acres of land, a manufacturing mill, 200 slaves, and a mountain of debt. Whether he was proslavery or antislavery, Jefferson needed slavery to maintain his financial solvency and life of luxury.[xx]

American Colonization Society: Send Africans to Africa

In 1800, following an aborted but massive slave rebellion, the Virginia House of Delegates and Governor James Monroe secretly asked the incoming President Jefferson to find lands outside of Virginia where “persons… dangerous to the peace of society may be removed.” Jefferson suggested colonization in the Caribbean or Africa. Lawmakers gathered in secret in 1802 to respond to Jefferson’s idea. Slavery had to continue, and its natural by-product—resistance—had to stop. So, Virginia lawmen took Jefferson up on his proposal to send freed slaves back to Africa, asking him to find a foreign home for the state’s free Blacks. Jefferson went to work, inquiring through intermediaries about West Africa’s Sierra Leone, England’s colony for freed people since 1792.[xxi] Jefferson’s readiness to send free Blacks back to Africa parallels his ideas that were to soon follow regarding the removal of Indians to West of the Mississippi River. He wanted to keep racial problems at a distance. A previously cited quotation by Speckled Snake, (insert crossreference) regarding presidential attitudes toward Native Americans, applied equally to Blacks --

His (the President’s) hand grasped the eastern and the western sea, and his head rested on the moon. Then he became our Great Father. He loved his red children, and he said, ‘Get a little further, lest I tread on thee.’ Brothers I have listened to a great many talks from our father. But they always began and ended in this - ‘Get a little further; you are too near me.[xxii]

By 1824, American settlers had built fortifications in Africa. They renamed the settlement “Liberia,” and its capital “Monrovia,” after the US president. Despite Jeffersonian aspirations, between 1820 and 1830, only 154 freed slaves out of more than 100,000 were persuaded to emigrate to Liberia.

Europe’s anti-slavery movement did not halt the ongoing evolution of racist ideas on the continent. Hegel failed to free himself and Europe from the Enlightenment era’s racist legacy.

“It is… the concrete universal, self-determining thought, which constitutes the principle and character of Europeans,” Hegel once wrote. “God becomes man, revealing himself.” In contrast, African people, he said, were “a nation of children” in the “first stage” of human development: “The negro is an example of animal man in all his savagery and lawlessness.”

They could be educated, but they would never advance on their own. Hegel’s foundational racist idea justified Europe’s ongoing colonization of Africa.[xxiii]

American slave rebellions kept coming, and nothing accelerated enslavers’ support for the colonization movement more than actual or potential slave rebellions.[xxiv] In the eighteen twenties, the American Colonization Society (ACS) grew into the preeminent race-relations reform organization in the United States.

In 1825, a twenty-eight-year-old Yale alumnus, Ralph Gurley, became the new ACS secretary. He held the position until his death in 1872, serving twice as the chaplain of the House of Representatives. Gurley had a vision: he believed that to win the minds and souls of Americans to the colonization cause, it had to be linked to the Protestant movement. His timing was good, because the Second Great Awakening was at hand as he began his ACS post.

The Confluence of Evangelical Christianity and White Supremacism

Protestant organizations started mass-producing, marketing, and distributing images of Jesus, who was always depicted as White. Protestants saw all the aspirations of the new American identity in the White Jesus. As pictures of this White Jesus started to appear, Blacks and Whites started to make connections, consciously and unconsciously, between the White God the Father, his White son Jesus, and the power and perfection of White people. In this movement, Christian supremacy and White supremacy became one. Christians who chose to look down on people of color were implicitly justified.[xxv] The confluence of “evangelical” Christianity and White Supremacism, implicitly supporting racist politicians is continuous to the present.

While Southern colonizationists sought to remove free Blacks, Northerners sought to remove all Blacks, enslaved and freed. Northern race relations had grown progressively worse since the 1790s. Each culturally accommodating step of Black people stoked competitive anxiety, and runaways stoked fear and animosity. Race riots embroiled New York City, New Haven, Boston, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh in the 1820s. As racial tensions accumulated, the ACS continued to gain adherents to the cause. Its agents argued forcefully that White prejudice and Black slavery would be eternal, and that freed Blacks must use the talents they had acquired from Whites to go back and redeem unenlightened Africans.[ ] (The preceding racist statement of how Africans benefited from slavery is a precedent for Governor Desantis directing that the benefit of enslavement be included ln Florida's junior high curriculum.

On January 1, 1831 William Lloyd Garrison entered the public debate. (insert crossreference) , publishing the first issue of The Liberator, the organ that relaunched an abolitionist movement among White Americans. His antislavery organizational work had the mixed impact of igniting the hostilities of proslavery financial interests, the fears of White communities, and the threat of job competition to immigrants already working for less than living wages.

Violent reactions to the launching of antislavery organizations extended through both Southern and Northern states, with mobs breaking up antislavery meetings, assaulting lecturers, ransacking antislavery offices, burning postal sacks of antislavery pamphlets, and destroying antislavery presses. Bounties were offered in Southern states for the capture of Garrison, “dead or alive.”

In, 1835, a mob of several thousand surrounded the building housing Boston's anti-slavery offices, where Garrison had agreed to address a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. The mayor persuaded the women to leave the building and suggested, Garrison escape by a back window. The mob spotted and apprehended Garrison, tied a rope around his waist, and pulled him through the streets toward Boston Common, calling for tar and feathers. The mayor intervened and had Garrison arrested and rushed off to the jailhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leverett_Street_Jail for his own protection.[xxvii]

In this environment of entrenched racism, America’s first minstrel shows appeared, and they began attracting large audiences of European immigrants and Whites. By 1830, Thomas “Daddy” Rice was touring the South, perfecting the character that thrust him into international prominence: Jim Crow. Appearing in blackface, and dressed in rags, torn shoes, and a weathered hat, Jim Crow sang and danced as a stupid, childlike, cheerful Black field hand.[xxviii]

Nat Turner Spiritually Envisions a Violent Liberation Movement

One enslaved Virginian did not share the humor in Jim Crow’s dance nor Garrison’s view that enslaved Africans should wait while White abolitionists and refined free Blacks accomplished liberation through the nonviolent tactics of persuasion. Waiting meant that more people were being whipped and even mutilated or lynched, and more families were being broken up and children separated from their parents. The violence of slavery, immersion in Biblical stories of liberation and the overthrowing of oppression plus a mystical temperament, were the ingredients that led the prayerfully, contemplative Nat Turner to initiate a violent revolution. He believed it was his divine calling to liberate Black people from slavery. (insert cross reference)

(Information regarding Turner’s experience is selected primarily from The Confessions of Nat Turner.[xxix] )

Nat Turner, met with five of his disciples, on the evening of August 21, 1831, planning for the liberation task that they believed had been given to them by God. Their journey of violent revolution began with the killing of Turner’s master’s family. They secured arms and horses, and moved on to the next plantation. Twenty-four hours later, about seventy freed people had joined the crusade. After two days, seventy Black soldiers had killed at least fifty-seven enslavers across a twenty-mile path of destruction before the rebellion was put down. Panic spread as newspapers everywhere blared the gory details.

Before his hanging, Turner shared the experiences that led to his liberation theology.

“I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and hold the power of the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching, when the first should be the last and the last should be the first.”

“Do you find yourself mistaken now?” He was asked, and replied,

“Was not Christ crucified?”

Nat Turner, prior to these events had evidently not been a violent person and, within the limitations of master slave relationship, had been known to be friendly. Killing the family was probably not an easy decision. But he felt that the institution of slavery was contrary to the Will of God and that he was receiving a Divine calling to liberate slaves from their oppression. The justification that he understood came both from his mystical contemplation and Bible stories. The issue of whether violence is justified to overcome oppression is ongoing. Not only is there racist oppression but also some 40 million people are enslaved in today’s world, including millions of children. Bible stories are still being used to justify alternative strategies for overcoming such oppression: nonviolence versus violence and assertive violence versus violent defense against violence. Exploring the Biblical stories that informed Turner and many such debates has contemporary relevance.

What does it mean for Turner's vision of the "serpent" to be released? Prior to the oral tradition supporting Old Testament stories, the serpent was most often seen as a companion to the Mother Goddess, who connected the domains of above and below the surface of the earth, bringing healing. (This theme lives on in the symbol of the caduceus, used on the uniforms of U.S. Army medical officers and many other medically oriented institutions.) The serpent is powerful. Its fangs can be poisonous and can kill. Its fangs are also milked to provide medication. In the Old Testament's 21st chapter of Numbers, Moses "held back" while also making accessible, the power of the serpent by placing it on a pole, on a cross; a symbol that is prescient of Christ on the cross. (e.g. N. T. John 3:14 “just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son Of Man be lifted up.”) The O.T. Israelites who looked at the serpent, seeking forgiveness of their sins, were healed. Turner’s confessions then go on to link releasing the serpent’s power with the mission of Jesus to release slaves, His announcement of the Jubilee (when the captives shall be released). He notes that “the first shall be last” another Christ statement that links to the Jubilee and to Jesus initial preaching at his home synagogue in Nazareth.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives (slaves) and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” (the year of the Jubilee, that includes emancipation)

The prophet, Amos, noted that where there is oppression rather than justice, the year of the Lord, the Jubilee, comes with judgment. There is gloom rather than joy and the power of the serpent is to bite rather than to heal.

O. T. Amos 5: Why do you want the Day of the Lord? (Jubilee). It is darkness, not light; as if someone fled from a lion and was met by a bear; or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall and was bitten by a serpent. Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it? …let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Putting Turner’s spiritually received images together: releasing the power of the serpent and the mission of the Judeo-Christian Jubilee, together with personally knowing the agonies of slavery, one can understand how he discerned a divine mission to violently overthrow the institution of slavery.[xxx] In Turner’s words,

I heard a loud voice in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said . . . I should arise and prepare myself, and slay my enemies with their own weapons . . . for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.

The question of how to use power to overthrow racism and slavery continues to be relevant in the United States and internationally as we face the ongoing challenges of racism. Beyond US borders, it is estimated that in addition to the blights of racism, there are still 40 million slaves, one fourth of them being children.[xxxi] Following Turner’s execution, slaves turned him into a martyr. The symbolism Blacks attached to Turner’s death allowed him to emerge as a messianic figure. Circumstances of his apprehension and execution added to his legendary significance. When he had been finally apprehended by authorities in the Virginia countryside, this rebel leader was dragged into the town of Jerusalem, Virginia, where he was reviled by an angry mob. After his trial and conviction, so reminiscent of Jesus’s treatment at the hands of the Romans, Turner was sentenced to die. He mounted the gallows and was hanged in the middle of a trio—strikingly emblematic of Jesus for African Americans. Even more stirring to messianic imagination, the weather chimed in, again reminiscent of the story of Jesus:

“The sun was hidden behind angry clouds, the thunder rolled, the lightning flashed, and the most terrible storm visited that country ever known.”

In the wake of Turner's rebellion, impassioned debate continues to be waged about whether or not violence is justified to strike back against the violence of slavery.[xxxii] Markedly, this debate not only entered into justification for the Civil War but the issue also took on a resurgent heightening during the civil rights activism against racism in the 60s. On the one hand there were activists who believed that nonviolence was getting nowhere; and on the other hand, there were activists who believed that powerful fighting against racism could most successfully be waged without asserting physical violence. The Biblical stories that informed Nat Turner, continue to be interpreted differently by each of these dissonant activist camps, in ways that support each of their strategies[xxxiii]

During the slavery era, the strategic dichotomy of violence versus nonviolence affected not only the strategies of slaves hungry for freedom but also affected the way they were perceived by Whites. If slaves did not violently resist, then they were cast as naturally servile. And yet, whenever they did fight, reactionary commentators, in both North and South, classified them as barbaric animals who needed to be caged in slavery. Those enslavers who sought comfort in myths of natural Black docility hunted for those whom they considered the real agitators: abolitionists like Garrison. Georgia went as far as offering a reward of $5,000 (roughly $109,000 today) for anyone who brought Garrison to the state for trial.[xxxiv]

Abolitionists Form the American Anti-Slavery Society

While White mobs made some hesitate, sixty-six abolitionists, fearing only the threat of apathy, gathered in Philadelphia on December 4, 1833, to form the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). They believed in immediate emancipation, without sending the released captives to Africa.[xxxv]

While enslavers calmly discussed profits, losses, colonization, torture techniques, and the duties of Christian Masters, they felt the spring drizzle of abolitionist tracts. By the summer of 1835, it had become a downpour—there were some 20,000 tracts in July alone, and over 1 million by the year’s end. Enraged enslavers viewed the American Anti-Slavery Society’s postal campaign as an act of war. Raging to defend “our sister states” against abolitionists, White male thugs roamed Northern Black neighborhoods in the summer and fall of 1835, looting and destroying homes, schools, and churches. They shouted about their mission to protect White women from the hypersexual Black-faced animals that, if freed, would ravage the exemplars of human purity and beauty.[xxxvi]

In an 1841session of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, a tall twenty-three-year-old runaway mustered the courage to request the floor. This was the first time many White abolitionists had ever heard a runaway share his experience of the grueling trek from slavery to freedom. Impressed, the Society offered Frederick Douglass a job as a traveling speaker.[xxxvii] Becoming an acclaimed speaker, Douglas convincingly took the onus of the characteristics of slaves and placed the character problem with the oppressors. Frequently he noted that

It’s“When men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.” [xxxviii]

In this sentence, Douglas summed up much of the history of commentary on racist thought. The psychodynamic which can be added is that the attributions put upon the oppressed are often the oppressor’s unrecognized darkside. A remark attributed to Jesus, 2000 years earlier, put it this way:

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in the eyes of others and pay no attention to the board in your own eye?” (N. T. Matthew 3:7)

In June 1845, Garrison’s printing office published Douglas’s autobiographical, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. (Insert cross reference) ‘s Douglas told his story with a personal touch that enabled readers to empathize with his experience of slavery. In five months, 4,500 copies of his book were sold, and in the next five years, 30,000. The gripping best seller garnered Douglass international prestige and forced thousands of readers to come to grips with the brutality of slavery and the human desire of Black people to be free. Douglass’s Narrative opened the door to a series of slave narratives, countering the falsity of the notion that enslavement was good for Black people.[xxxix]

Nevertheless, the Fugitive Slave Act, giving slaveholders rights to go anywhere to capture runaways was passed, but not without sparking counter reactions. Harriet Beecher Stowe, an anti-slavery women’s suffrage advocate, like many other middle-class women, felt increasingly impotent and frustrated. A writer, Stowe was triggered into action by hearing about a suffrage conference that took place at a church in Akron, Ohio, in 1851.

A tall, thin, fifty-something-year-old lady adorned by a gray dress, White turban, and sunbonnet walked into the church “with the air of a queen up the aisle,” an observer recorded. As White women buzzed for her to turn back around and leave, Sojourner Truth defiantly took her seat and bowed her head in disgust. She may have thought back to all the turmoil she had experienced, which she had described in The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, printed by Garrison the year before.

Male ministers preached about superior male intellect, the gender of Jesus, Eve’s sin, the feebleness of women, all to counter the equal rights resolutions. The women were growing weary when Sojourner Truth, who had kept her head bowed almost the whole time, raised her head up. She lifted her body slowly and started walking to the front. “Don’t let her speak!” some women shouted. Gage, the convention organizer, begged the audience for silence. Quiet came in an instant as all the eyes on White faces became transfixed on the single dark face. Truth straightened her back and raised herself to her full height—all six feet. She towered over nearby men. “Ain’t I a Woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!” Truth showed off her bulging muscles. “Ain’t I a Woman? I can outwork, outeat, outlast any man! Ain’t I a Woman!” Sojourner Truth had shut down and shut up the male hecklers.

Truth imparted a double blow in “Ain’t I a Woman”: an attack on the sexist ideas of the male disrupters, and an attack on the racist ideas of females trying to banish her. “Ain’t I a Woman” in all of my strength and power and tenderness and intelligence. “Ain’t I a Woman” in all of my dark skin. Never again would anyone enfold more seamlessly the dual challenge of antiracist feminism.[xl]

Hearing this story, Harriet Beecher Stowe declared, “I will write something.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was born and entered bookstores in 1852. “The scenes of this story,” she opened the novel’s preface,

“lie among… an exotic race, whose… character” was “so essentially unlike the hard and dominant Anglo-Saxon race.” In Black people’s “lowly docility of heart, their aptitude to repose on a superior mind and rest on a higher power, their childlike simplicity of affection, and facility of forgiveness,” she wrote, “in all these they will exhibit the highest form of the peculiarly Christian life.”

Only enslavement was holding them back. Though racist, in attributing docility to Blacks, her argument converted many Christians to the antislavery cause.[xli]

Abraham Lincoln Navigates a Pre-Emancipation Political Course

Two years later, Lincoln, speaking in Illinois, noted the “monstrous injustice” of slavery; adding,

“my first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia.” But that was impossible. “What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings?… Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feeling will not admit this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of White people will not.”

Typical of his ambivalence toward emancipation, Lincoln did not like the domestic slave trade, and yet he had no problem advocating against Black voting rights in his career as an Illinois state legislator.[xlii]

Debating Stephen Douglas, in 1858, Lincoln declared

“I am not nor ever have been in favor of making Black people voters or jurors, or politicians or marriage partners. There is a physical difference between the White and Black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the White race.”

Strategically, Lincoln then steered the debates toward slavery and economics, a topic inspired by the 1857 best seller The Impending Crisis of the South by North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper. Slavery needed to end because it was retarding southern economic progress and the opportunities of non-slaveholding Whites, who were oppressed by wealthy enslavers. He declared that a vote for Stephen Douglas was a vote for expanding slavery, and a vote against “free White people” finding homes and improving their lives by moving west.” Republicans in swing states like Illinois had started focusing on the much more popular rights of “free labor,” Lincoln was able to piece together a political message that included anti-slavery to gather abolitionist votes, segregation to gather racist votes and free labor to gather economically motivated votes of the working class. Although Lincoln failed to win the Senate race, his debates and their publication presaged his Republican party nomination for the presidency.[xliii]

Enslavers were furious about the implications of Helper’s book, which implicitly called for a united front made up of Free Soilers (who opposed the expansion of slavery into the West), abolitionists, and former slaves. That feared alliance became a reality in 1859, when abolitionist John Brown and his nineteen-man interracial battalion captured the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, sixty miles northwest of Washington, DC. Marines, led by Gen. Robert E Lee, crushed the rebellion. Brown declared, before being hung that he was following his Christian duty, tending the Lords sheep, thereby making himself a martyr in the eyes of many Northerners, and generating more fear among enslavers regarding the breach in White unity.[xliv] (insert cross reference)

Enslavers knew that abolitionism—and the loss of federal power, threatened their ability to control the teeming slave resistance. South Carolina secessionists only had to utter one word to induce fear—Haiti—its meaning well known. In the final week of 1860, South Carolina enslavers took drastic steps to ensure their safety. Alluding to the Declaration of Independence, stating that abolitionists were inciting contented captives to servile insurrection, they declared their secession from the union. The rest of the Deep South seceded in January and February 1861. Florida’s secessionists issued a Declaration of Causes maintaining that Blacks must be enslaved because everywhere “their natural tendency” was toward “idleness, vagrancy and crime.”[xlv]

The Civil War Climaxes Emancipation

Financial investments in the institution of slavery and their dependence on its productivity, made Northern lenders and manufacturers crucial sponsors of slavery. And so, they pushed their congressmen for compromises to restore the Union.[xlvi] . But, On April 15, 1861, the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, and the war began. Lincoln raised a union force to put down the resurrection.

Lincoln for another year, kept offering convoluted compromises to slave states, avoiding the prospect of absolute emancipation, until military necessities demanded that he unconditionally free the enslaved. In the process of compromising, he gained the ire of abolitionists. Saving the union, not emancipation was his primary goal. Emancipation was proclaimed when there was no other way to avoid being defeated by the Confederate armies. Lincoln stated,

“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.”[xlvii]

In the New York Tribune, rising abolitionist, supporter of women’s suffrage and Native American rights, Wendell Phillips hammered Lincoln’s remarks as “the most disgraceful document that ever came from the head of a free people.”[xlviii]

Lincoln’s pathway forward, however, from compromising with slavery to subsequently putting on the mantle of “Great Emancipator,” was not simply hypocrisy, but rather a complex spiritual journey. More broadly scoped windows into Lincoln’s life have shown a man of integrity, caring and dedication to the freedom and justice potentials of the United States. In his political career, Lincoln was walking a mine field, endeavoring to maintain pluralities of support from Confederate states, abolitionists, colonizers (Blacks back to Africa) and Blacks hungry for freedom. What Lincoln lacked, as what most White Americans have lacked who have been subject to segregated life, was the privilege of Black friendships marked by respectful equality that would have fully sensitized him to racism.

[NARRATIVE TRANSITIONS BETWEEN BLACK AND NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY]

Post Civil War, through the 19th century, the histories of Native American Nations' and of Black Peoples' resilience from oppression, ran on separate but parallel tracks. The structure of this book, to maintain a relatively consistent chronology is now changing focus to Native American Nations. Subsequently, there will be a renewed focus on Black History from the time of the Civil War, through Reconstruction, to the Jim Crow era and then the movement for civil rights.

[i] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 53). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [ii] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 54). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [iii] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 60). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [iv] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 64). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [v] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 64). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [vi] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 68). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [vii] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 69). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [viii] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 97). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [ix] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 98). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. Okay [x] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 99). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xi] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 99). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xii] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 106). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xiii] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 123). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xiv] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 119). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xv] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (pp. 126-127). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xvi] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 132). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xvii] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 136). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xviii] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 140). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xix] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 141). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xx] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 141). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xxi] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 144). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xxii] Wilson, James. The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America (p. 160). Grove Atlantic. Kindle Edition. [xxiii] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 148). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xxiv] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 149). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xxv] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 153). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xxvi] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 154). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xxvii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lloyd_Garrison [xxviii] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 170). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xxix] Turner, Nat. The Confessions of Nat Turner The Leader of the Late Insurrections in Southampton, Va. As Fully and Voluntarily Made to Thomas R. Gray, in the Prison Where ... Account of the Whole Insurrection. Kindle Edition. [xxx] Ibid. [xxxi]International Labor Organization (ILO), 2016 Report [xxxii] Karl Ostrom, author, is responsible for the commentary on Turner's visions and references to Biblical passages. [xxxiii] Ibid. [xxxiv] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 173). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xxxv] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 176). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xxxvi] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 177). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xxxvii] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 182). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xxxviii] [xxxix] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 183). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xl] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (pp. 192-193). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. Ibid. [xli][xli] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 194). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xlii] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 202). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xliii] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 206). Public Affairs. Kindle Edition. [xliv] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 208). Public Affairs. Kindle Edition. [xlv] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 213). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xlvi] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 214). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xlvii] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 215). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. [xlviii] Kendi, Ibram X.. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (p. 219). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition.