A House Divided: The Antebellum Slavery Debates in America, 1776-1865

by Mason I. Lowance Jr. (Editor)

Overview

This anthology brings together under one cover the most important abolitionist and--unique to this volume--proslavery documents written in the United States between the American Revolution and the Civil War. It makes accessible to students, scholars, and general readers the breadth of the slavery debate. Including many previously inaccessible documents, A House Divided is a critical and welcome contribution to a literature that includes only a few volumes of antislavery writings and no volumes of proslavery documents in print.


Mason Lowance's introduction is an excellent overview of the antebellum slavery debate and its key issues and participants. Lowance also introduces each selection, locating it historically, culturally, and thematically as well as linking it to other writings. The documents represent the full scope of the varied debates over slavery. They include examples of race theory, Bible-based arguments for and against slavery, constitutional analyses, writings by former slaves and women's rights activists, economic defenses and critiques of slavery, and writings on slavery by such major writers as William Lloyd Garrison, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Together they give readers a real sense of the complexity and heat of the vexed conversation that increasingly dominated American discourse as the country moved from early nationhood into its greatest trial.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691188867
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	06/05/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	568
File size:	115 MB
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About the Author

Mason I. Lowance, Jr., is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists and Increase Mather and the editor of Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader and The Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Read an Excerpt

A House Divided

The Antebellum Slavery Debates in America, 1776-1865

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By Mason I. Lowance, Jr.

Princeton

Copyright © 2003
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0691002274

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Chapter One

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND FOR THE ANTEBELLUM SLAVERY DEBATES, 1776-1865

The introduction to this volume has shown how the abolitionist crusade of 1830-65 grew out of an earlier antislavery movement that was largely religious in origin and character, and lacked the aggressive, demanding resolve of William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Maria Child, Frederick Douglass, and Wendell Phillips. The documents that follow include representative texts from this antislavery debate during the year 1700, when Judge Samuel Sewall penned The Selling of Joseph, an antislavery pamphlet that criticized American chattel slavery by invoking biblical precedents. The final documents included here are Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1776) and Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (1852), a critique of Jefferson's assertion that "all men are created equal" in the context of chattel slavery for African-Americans.

The antebellum slavery debates intensified early in the nineteenth century, particularly following the formation of the New England Antislavery Society in 1831 and the American Antislavery Society in 1833. The publication of David Walker's Appeal in 1830 and the commencement of William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator on January 1, 1831, marked a new era in abolitionist rhetoric and thought. The early antislavery advocates had generally argued for "gradualism," a deliberate evolutionary change in American society that would require the prohibition of the importation of slaves but would allow the gradual abolition of slavery through attrition and even colonization. In the eighteenth century, the religious and moral arguments that were mounted against slavery used scriptural texts to counter the biblical precedents of the Old Testament which proslavery advocates had used to support the institution. Garrisonians called for immediate and unconditional emancipation of the slaves, with no compensation for the slaveowners.

The moral and religious arguments were advanced well before the abolitionist crusade of the 1830s, but these pioneering voices were often, like John the Baptist's, "voices crying in the wilderness," speaking out in a society that was either opposed to any form of emancipation or simply indifferent to the moral ramifications of the issue. Prior to 1776, when Jefferson's Declaration of Independence argued the equality of mankind, a natural rights principle that grew out of Enlightenment doctrine, the eighteenth-century antislavery arguments were primarily developed out of scriptural texts or religious doctrine. The Enlightenment had effectively challenged the monarchies of Europe with a radically new view of humanity that disabled essentialist arguments concerning the nature of man, and these natural-rights views were fused with antislavery biblical reasoning to advance an early argument for emancipation. Ironically, it was this very biblical precedent, particularly the Old Testament practice of enslaving captured enemies and the polygamous practice of holding female slaves during the Age of the Patriarchs (Genesis), that gave nineteenth-century proslavery advocates examples from Scripture to use against the abolitionists who demanded an immediate end to chattel slavery in the United States. The charter documents of the new nation set individual freedoms and human rights as the highest priority; biblical precedent included not only Christ's humane teachings but also the Old Testament slavery precedents and St. Paul's letter to Philemon, in which certain forms of slavery are clearly condoned. Moreover, several prominent founding fathers who were architects of the new government and authors of these charter documents, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were themselves slaveholders, creating an inconsistency between theory and practice that plagued the nineteenth-century Congress as well as the framers of the Constitution.

For example, at the age of eleven, George Washington inherited ten slaves when his father died. Until the Revolutionary War, Washington really did not question slavery; there is no record of his having protested its existence or having written anything in opposition to it. He continued to hold slaves at Mount Vernon after his inauguration as president of the United States, and Martha Washington's dowry included slaves. Like most Southern plantation owners, Washington needed slave labor to develop his landholdings. When he was only nineteen years old, he already owned over fourteen hundred acres of Virginia farmland west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, having received much of this land in lieu of payment for his services as a land surveyor. Washington was paternalistic toward his slaves. He often referred to them as "my family" and considered Mount Vernon, his palatial Potomac estate, as their home. He even saw to their health maintenance and the care of their teeth, not because this was "good business" and would protect the investment in his property, but because he considered himself the patriarch of a large plantation family. It is significant that Washington did not participate in the selling of slaves, although he did purchase slaves for his estate. After the Revolution, Washington came to hate slavery and wrote, "it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by the Legislature by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees."

This "gradualist" approach to the termination of slavery was prominent in the tracts produced in the eighteenth century. The antislavery writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included here used moral suasion and the Bible in different ways, but primarily to establish a moral position against the inhumanity of slavery as a societal institution. For example, Samuel Sewall argues that "manstealing" is morally wrong, a violation of God's ordinances, and he cites Exodus 21.16, which reads, "He that Stealeth a man and Selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to Death."

Similarly, Cotton Mather argues the Christian value of the African, his capacity for salvation, and the urgency for slaveholders to redeem themselves by Christianizing their slaves. "Who can tell but that this Poor Creature may belong to the Election of God! Who can tell but that God may have sent this Poor Creature into my hands, so that one of the Elect may by my means be called; by my Instruction be made wise unto Salvation! The Glorious God will put an unspeakable glory upon me, if it may be so! The Consideration that would move you, to Teach your Negroes the Truths of the Glorious Gospel, as far as you can, and bring them, if it may be, to live according to those Truths, a Sober, and a Godly life . . . " The Mathers owned slaves in Massachusetts before the new state outlawed slavery in 1783; Cotton Mather here essentially argues that Christian slaves would make better slaves for their having been introduced to the principles of the Christian faith.

In 1754, the Quaker John Woolman returned to the religious argument for the humane treatment of Africans, and writing some fifty years after Sewall and Mather, he argued for the emancipation of slaves if not for the equality of blacks and whites. "Why should it seem right to honest Men to make Advantage by these People [Africans] more than by others? Others enjoy Freedom, receive wages, equal to their work, at, or near such Time as they have discharged these equitable Obligations they are under to those who educated them. These have made no Contract to serve; been more expensive in raising up than others, and many of them appear as likely to make a right use of freedom as other People; which Way then can an honest man withhold from them that Liberty, which is the free Gift of the Most High to His rational creatures?" Woolman argues the humanity of the African, a conventional eighteenth-century Enlightenment doctrine which was challenged in the early nineteenth century by scientific and pseudoscientific theories about the natural inferiority of the black race. Woolman concludes: "Negroes are our fellow creatures, and their present condition amongst us requires our serious Consideration. We know not the time when those Scales, in which Mountains are weighed, may turn. The Parent of Mankind is gracious; His Care is over the smallest Creatures; and Multitudes of Men escape not this."

Thomas Jefferson, like John Woolman, was troubled greatly by the obvious inhumanity of chattel slavery. However, Jefferson was also a product of his times, and, like George Washington, owned a large Virginia plantation which required labor to maintain. His Notes on the State of Virginia (1782) reveal that he was deeply divided over the slavery issue. On the one hand, he argued that slavery was wrong and that emancipation should be gradually adopted in the United States. Although he did not emancipate any of his own slaves until after his death, when some of his slaves were manumitted by the terms of his will, and although he is now known to have sired a child by a female slave, Sally Hemings, his argument in the Notes on the State of Virginia reflects an ambivalence toward the institution because of its inhuman practices. Still, Jefferson also outlines the racial differences between blacks and whites in Notes, and he concludes that these differences are immutable and eternal. Jefferson's recapitulation of contemporary race theory arguments is not unusual. Henri Grégoire, . . . a French scientist, countered Jefferson's essentialist position in 1808, in his On the Cultural Achievement of Negroes. The British anthropologist James Cowles Pritchard (1788-1848) articulated widely influential views on race classification, by which a hierarchy of races was established, and in Germany, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1742-1840) argued that there were five basic racial types, placing the Anglo-Saxon at the pinnacle of the polygenic chain, and the African at the bottom.

This development was, in retrospect, extremely important in establishing the European conception of the African. The eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment had embraced theories of race that stressed the unity of humanity, while recognizing that there were vast differences between specific persons, including racial differences, but it considered these differences to be variations or mutations on a common origin, and all humans were regarded to be developing progressively. Until the late eighteenth century, it was not difficult to establish the "humanity" of the African, even if it was problematic to establish his equality with the European. But with the rise of scientific reasoning and "race classification," and the methodology of nineteenth-century researchers like Samuel Morton, J. B. Turner, Josiah Nott, George R. Gliddon, J. H. Van Evrie, and O. S. Fowler, serious challenges to the notion that "all men are created equal" were authoritatively advanced. A hierarchy of races was established not only in the scientific literature, but also in the popular cultural assumptions about race. Politically and socially, these perceived differences stripped the African of his freedom in chattel slavery, and among free blacks, of his right to vote and, in some instances, to own property, which was a precondition for enjoying the franchise. The historical debates about the "rightness" and "wrongness" of slavery would continue until the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery forever. However, the debates concerning the biological, social, and political equality of the African in America continued during Reconstruction and into the late nineteenth century, in such literary works as Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and into the twentieth century in such studies as Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve (1993).

Several information sources follow this introduction. First, there is a summary of the "Civil Condition of the Enslaved," found in Stroud's Compendium. Second, United States Census figures from 1790 to 1860, slave and free, are provided. Third, from the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute of Harvard University, Atlantic Slave Trade Project, is a summary of the number of slave voyages taken to the Americas between 1595 and 1867, a time frame in which there were a total of 26,807 known voyages. These data were compiled as of April 23, 1997. Readers should note that census statistics even today are inexact and, in some densely populated areas, rely heavily on estimates and projections. The census, taken every decade since the first United States Census was established in 1790, provides reliable but inexact data concerning the slave population. More exact data was obtained by the Atlantic Slave Trade Project concerning the number of transatlantic slavery voyages and the number of chattel slaves transported on each voyage, because the "cargo" was considered chattel or property of owners and investors, so that "bills of lading" and "inventory records" were meticulously kept to account for the sale of the cargo at the end of the voyage. Commercial accountability, in short, inadvertently provides the modern reader with more than rough estimates about the extent and brutality of the transatlantic slave trade and its infamous "Middle Passage." These are a few of the many statistical information sources now available, both in libraries and on-line, concerning the almost three centuries of slavery in North America. Readers are urged to make an on-line "Google" search using the keywords "slavery" and "middle passage" to obtain further information about this important phase of the history of slavery in the United States. Also, the Library of Congress web page provides sources for population data concerning slavery (loc.gov). The three sources contained here provide an overview of the three centuries of slavery in the Americas, with a focus on the United States, 1621-1865.

Stroud's Compendium of the Laws of Slavery

Number of Americans Enslaved

The increase of the slave population in these United States, for the fifty years ending in 1830, has been as follows:

Hence, it appears that, according to the ratio of increase between 1820 and 1830, there must have been in 1835, not less than 2,245,144 slaves in these United States.

Civil Condition of the Enslaved
 
    1. The master may determine the kind, and degree, and time of labor, to which the slave shall be subjected.
    2. The master may supply the slave with such food and clothing only, both as to quantity and quality, as he may think proper.
    3. The master may, at his discretion, inflict any punishment upon the person of his slave.
    4. Slaves have no legal right to any property in things real or personal; but whatever they may acquire, belongs in point of law to their masters.
    5.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	xiii
	Prologue	xv
	Preface	xxi
	Introduction	xxvii
	Notes on Contributors	lxi
	Suggestions for Further Reading	lxiii
Chapter 1	The Historical Background for the Antebellum Slavery Debates, 1776-1865	1
	Stroud's Compendium of the Laws of Slavery	5
	Population Statistics from the U.S. Census for 1790-1860	6
	Summary from The Atlantic Slave Trade Project	7
	The European Origins of American Slavery	7
	Samuel Sewall (1632-1730) and John Saffin (1632-1710)	10
	The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial	12
	A Brief, Candid Answer to a Late Printed Sheet, Entitled, The Selling of Joseph	14
	John Woolman (1720-1772)	15
	Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes	16
Chapter 2	Acts of Congress Relating to Slavery	20
	The Declaration of Independence	21
	The Ordinance of 1787	23
	The Fugitive Slave Law of 1793	23
	The Missouri Compromise of 1820	25
	The Wilmot Proviso, 1847	25
	The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850	26
	The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution	30
	Slavery and the 1787 Constitution	31
	Frederick Douglass (c. 1818-1895)	33
	What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?	38
	Justice Joseph Story (1779-1845)	43
	A Charge Delivered to the Grand Jury of the Circuit Court of the United States	45
Chapter 3	Biblical Proslavery Arguments	51
	Thornton stringfellow (1788-1869)	61
	A Brief Examination of the Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery	63
	Slavery, Its Origin, Nature, and History Considered in the Light of Bible Teachings, Moral Justice, and Political Wisdom	67
	Alexander Mccaine (1768-1856)	81
	Slavery Defended from Scripture against the Attacks of the Abolitionists	82
Chapter 4	Biblical Antislavery Arguments	88
	Theodore Dwight Weld (1803-1895)	91
	The Bible against Slavery	92
	James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888)	97
	Slavery in the United States	99
	Alexander Mcleod (1774-1833)	104
	Negro Slavery Unjustifiable	104
	Robert Dale Owen (1801-1877)	112
	The Wrong of Slavery, the Right of Emancipation and the Future of the African Race in the United States	113
Chapter 5	The Economic Arguments Concerning Slavery	116
	Edmund Ruffin (1794-1865)	121
	The Political Economy of Slavery; or, The Institution Considered in Regard to Its Influence on Public Wealth and the General Welfare	123
	George Fitzhugh (1806-1881)	126
	George Fitzhugh and the Economic Analysis of Slavery	128
	Sociology for the South; or, the Failure of Free Society	132
	Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters	136
	David Christy (1802-N.D.) and E. N. Elliott (N.D.)	141
	Introduction to Cotton Is King, and Proslavery Arguments	142
	Cotton Is King	143
	Hinton Rowan Helper (1829-1909)	146
	The Impending Crisis of the South and How to Meet It	148
	Impending Crisis Dissected	152
Chapter 6	Writers and Essayists in Conflict over Slavery	156
	Color, Caste, Denomination	162
	Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), "On Being Brought from Africa to America"	162
	John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)	164
	The Slave Ships	165
	Massachusetts to Virginia	169
	Our Political Responsibility	171
	Justice and Expediency; or, Slavery Considered with a View to Its Rightful and Effectual Remedy, Abolition	173
	James Kirke Paulding (1778-1860)	177
	Slavery in the United States	179
	James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)	186
	The Abolitionists and Emancipation	189
	Politics and the Pulpit	190
	The Church and the Clergy	191
	The Church and the Clergy Again	192
	The Moral Argument against Slavery	192
	Daniel Webster	193
	Walt Whitman (1819-1892)	195
	Slavery and the Slave Trade	196
	New States: Shall They Be Slave or Free?	198
	American Workingmen, Versus Slavery	199
	Prohibition of Colored Persons	201
	The House of Friends	202
	Emerson, Thoreau, and Antislavery	203
	Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)	215
	Slavery in Massachusetts	217
	Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)	225
	Lecture on Slavery	227
	Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) and mary Eastman (1818-1880)	234
	Uncle Tom's Cabin	239
	Black Stereotypes in Uncle Tom's Cabin	241
	Aunt Phillis's Cabin; or, Southern Life As It Is	244
Chapter 7	Science in Antebellum America	249
	Notes on Stephen Jay Gould's Critique of George Morton's Race Theories	266
	White Supremacy and Negro Subordination	268
	Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)	268
	Notes on the State of Virginia	270
	Henri Gregoire (1750-1831)	273
	On the Cultural Achievements of Negroes	273
	The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered	279
	O. S. Fowler (1809-1887)	283
	O. S. Fowler and Hereditary Descent	284
	Hereditary Descent	291
	Ethnology	297
	Theodore Parker (1810-1860) vs. John S. Rock (1825-1866) on the Anglo-Saxon and the African	299
	Some Thoughts on the Progress of America, and the Influence of Her Diverse Institutions	302
	The Present Aspect of Slavery in America	304
	Speech to the Boston Massacre Commemorative Festival	305
	Remarks to the Boston Massacre Commemorative Festival	308
	Josian Nott and the American School of Ethnology	310
	Josiah Clark Nott (1804-1873)	311
	Types of Mankind; or, Ethnological Researches Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races and upon Their Natural Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History	314
	Indigenous Races of the Earth; or, New Chapters of Ethnological Inquiry	317
	The Negro Race: Its Ethnology and History	320
Chapter 8	The Abolitionist Crusade	327
	William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolitionist Crusade	327
	William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879)	335
	An Address to the American Colonization Society, July 4, 1829	338
	Truisms	343
	The Constitution and the Union	345
	American Colorphobia	346
	Speech to the Fourth Annual National Woman's Rights Convention	347
	Editorial, The Liberator	348
	No Compromise with Slavery	349
	David Walker (1785-1830)	352
	Appeal	356
	Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880)	363
	An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans	368
	William Ellery Channing (1780-1842)	379
	Slavery	380
	James Mccune Smith (1813-1865)	391
	The Destiny of a People of Color	392
	Angelina Emily Grimke (1805-1879) and Sarah Moore Grimke (1792-1873)	395
	An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South	397
	An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States	401
	Catharine E. Beecher (1804-1878)	404
	An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females	405
	Letters to Catharine E. Beecher, in Reply to an Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism	415
	American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses	417
	Cat-hawling	420
	Gerrit Smith (1797-1874), Arthur Tappan (1786-1865), and Lewis Tappan (1788-1873)	420
	The New York Abolitionists	422
	Speech in the Meeting of the New-York Anti-Slavery Society, Held in Peterboro, October 22, 1835	430
	Letter to Rev. James Smylie, of the State of Mississippi, 1837	434
	Address of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society	435
	Speech on the Nebraska Bill, April 6, 1854	437
	Wendell Phillips (1811-1884)	441
	The Constitution, a Pro-Slavery Compact	443
	Lysander Spooner (1808-1887)	446
	The Unconstitutionality of Slavery	447
	Horace Mann (1796-1859)	449
	Speech Delivered in the U.S. House of Representatives on the Subject of Slavery in the Territories, and the Consequences of Dissolution of the Union	451
	Alexander Crummell (1819-1898)	455
	An Address to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society	457
	Roger Brooke Taney (1777-1864)	458
	Opinion of the Court in Dred Scott, Plaintiff in Error, v John F. A. Sandford	459
	Horace Bushnell (1802-1876)	462
	A Discourse on the Slavery Question, Delivered in the North Church, Hartford	464
	Charles Sumner (1811-1874)	467
	The Barbarism of Slavery	468
Chapter 9	Concluding Remarks and Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)	474
	Democracy in America	478
	Index	485

What People are Saying About This

Reynolds

The anthology makes available a large body of primary documents, many of them hitherto rare or inaccessible. The texts are expertly chosen and excerpted. Of remarkable variety and scope, they investigate slavery from all angles—pro and con, religious and secular, male and female, scientific and exhortatory, and so on. Their publication is timely and most welcome. The volume also provides an illuminating, superbly comprehensive, insightful, and concise history of the slavery debate.
— David S. Reynolds, City University of New York

From the Publisher

"The anthology makes available a large body of primary documents, many of them hitherto rare or inaccessible. The texts are expertly chosen and excerpted. Of remarkable variety and scope, they investigate slavery from all angles—pro and con, religious and secular, male and female, scientific and exhortatory, and so on. Their publication is timely and most welcome. The volume also provides an illuminating, superbly comprehensive, insightful, and concise history of the slavery debate."—David S. Reynolds, City University of New York

Editorial Reviews

"The anthology makes available a large body of primary documents, many of them hitherto rare or inaccessible. The texts are expertly chosen and excerpted. Of remarkable variety and scope, they investigate slavery from all angles—pro and con, religious and secular, male and female, scientific and exhortatory, and so on. Their publication is timely and most welcome. The volume also provides an illuminating, superbly comprehensive, insightful, and concise history of the slavery debate."—David S. Reynolds, City University of New York

From the Publisher