The African, brought here as slave against his will, played a decisive role in the shaping of American Civilization.
Some6 there are who feel it is wrong to begin the Negro's history in America with his arrival here as a slave in 1619 since he had reached these shores long before then - with the discovery of the new world, in fact, mainly as servants or, in some cases, in the entourage of the explorers themselves. It is certainly true that in the first quarter of the 17th century there were as many as 10,000 free Negroes in the United States. This is not the point however. The point is that in slave revolts, first and foremost, in appeals of free Negroes, in the runaway slave being "conducted" North via the Underground Railway by fugitive ex-slaves, the Negro, free or slave, but especially slave, was decisive in the course American development followed.
It was the Negro's will to be free, not his alleged docility, that inspired the first draft of the Declaration of Independence in which Thomas Jefferson lashed out against King George III for conducting a "cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere . . ."
Upon the insistence of the Southern delegation at the Continental Congress, this paragraph was stricken from the Declaration. In this first burial of full freedom's call lies embedded the social conflicts of today.
Though the section which specifically aimed, at the abolition of slavery was expunged from the Declaration of Independence so that the abstractions of freedom could fit the context of a slave society, so overpowering were its implications that it "sounded the tocsin"7 for the European revolutions that followed. From the very birth of the nation there was a great divide between the leaders in government and the rank and file masses. It wasn't limited to the slave revolts in the South. It showed itself in unrest and repression of the free farmers in Massachusetts in the Shay's Rebellion, and of the workmen in Philadelphia and New York in their first strikes and formation of workingmen's parties.
1793, the year Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin that transformed cotton into a lush cash crop, was the year in which the House of Representatives refused to pass a law abolishing slavery. It was the year the first Fugitive Slave Act was passed against the runaways. A short five years later, the Alien and Sedition Law that was passed was aimed at all opposition to the ruling Federalists. The so-called Jefferson revolution which put an end to the odious Alien and Sedition Law did not, however, do anything to reverse the first Fugitive Slave Act which was soon to be followed by others more repressive.
The cotton gin had signalled not only the continuance of slavery in the 1790's, but the grafting upon it, at the turn of the 19th century, of all the added evils of commercial capitalism. The decade of 1820-1830 marked the birth of industrial capitalism so that Cotton was now King not only in the plantation economy, and in trade, but in New England textile and industry and politics in general. Cotton as King made and unmade presidents and induced so great a national conspiracy of silence that it poisoned the young democracy. The stream of runaways played a key role in impelling civil war. Ross Barnett's predecessor in office 100 years back, Governor Quitmar, complained that between 1800-1860 the South had lost more than 100,000 slaves, valued at 30 million dollars.
Yet, by sharpening antagonisms and social conflicts, "the cotton fibre" produced the most glorious page in American history, that written by the Abolitionists.
Negro Slave Revolts had reached a certain stage with Denmark Vesey in 1824 which led to a new approach to the attempts to gain freedom. An Underground Railway, which was neither underground nor a railway, was organized in 1825 to conduct runaway slaves to freedom in the North and in Canada. The following year the free Negroes organized the Massachusetts General Colored Peoples Association. Its paper, appropriately called FREEDOM'S JOURNAL, appeared in 1827, with its first editorial announcing, "Too long have others spoken for us."
The most sensational response, however, was achieved by a single Negro named David Walker, who, in 1829, published: Walker's Appeal in Four Articles: Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very expressly to those of the United States of America.
David Walker was a free Negro from North Carolina who had settled in Boston where he earned a living by collecting rags. His APPEAL was addressed to the free Negroes. He took them to task for their meekness. He urged them to make: the cause of the slave their own because the wretchedness of the free Negroes' conditions was due to the existence of slavery. Walker urged them to make freedom their business. He pointed to the superiority of Negroes, in numbers and in bravery, over the whites. He took the great to task as well. In response to Thomas Jefferson, who had referred to the Negro's color as "unfortunate," David Walker shouted "My Colour will yet root some of you out of the very face of the earth ! ! ! America is more our country, than it is the whites - we have enriched it with our blood and tears."
So extraordinary was the impact of this pamphlet that legislatures in the South were called into special session to enact laws against free Negroes as against slaves for reading it. They put a price of $3,000 on the head of its author. Nevertheless, 50,000 copies of this 76-page pamphlet were sold and circulated from hand to hand. Those who could not read had others read it to them. The South trembled at the simple words of an obscure Negro.
The vanguard role of the Negro in the struggle for freedom helped bring onto the historic stage the most extraordinary of all phenomena of American Civilization: New England Abolitionism. The year that William Lloyd Garrison8 founded the LIBERATOR, 1831, was the year also of the last and greatest of Negro slave revolts - that of Nat Turner. The Cambridge Modern History tells us.:
"The insurrection was at once attributed to Negro preachers and 'incendiary publications' such as Walker's pamphlet and the Liberator . . . To attack the Liberator now became habitual in all Slave-holding States. The corporation of one city forbade any free Negro to take a copy of it from the post-office. A vigilance committee in another offered $1500 for the detection and conviction of any white person found circulating copies. The governors of Georgia and Virginia called on the mayor of Boston to suppress it; and the legislature of Georgia offered $5,000 to any person who should secure the arrest and conviction of Garrison under the laws of the State.
"Undeterred by these attacks, Garrison gathered about him a little band of Abolitionists, and towards the close of 1831 founded at Boston the New England Anti-slavery Society, and in 1833, at Philadelphia, the American Anti-slavery Society."
Nothing since has superceded this merger of white intellectual with the Negro mass with the same intense devotion to principle, the same intimacy of relations of white and black, the same unflinching propaganda in face of mob persecution - and even death - the same greatness of character which never bent during three long decades of struggle until the irrepressible conflict occurred, and even then did not give up the fight but sought to transform it - and succeeded - from a war of mere supremacy of Northern industry over Southern cotton culture to one of emancipation of slaves.
The movement renounced all traditional politics, considering all political parties of the day as "corrupt." They were inter-racial and in a slave society preached and practiced Negro equality. They were distinguished as well for inspiring, aligning with and fighting for equality of women in an age when the women had neither the right to the ballot nor to property nor to divorce. They were internationalist, covering Europe with their message, and bringing back to this country the message of the Irish Freedom Fighters.
They sought no rewards of any kind, fighting for the pure idea, though that meant facing the hostility of the national government, the state, the local police, and the best citizens who became the most unruly mobs. They were beaten, mobbed and stoned.
These New England Abolitionists added a new dimension to the word, intellectual, for these were intellectuals, whose intellectual, social and political creativity was the expression of precise social forces. They gloried in being "the means" by which a direct social movement expressed itself, the movement of slaves and free Negroes for total freedom.
Pacifist though they were in philosophy, they lined up with John Brown. Perhaps that explains why, despite the great native tradition of Abolitionism some of today's Negro leaders have travelled instead to India in search of a philosophy of non-violence.
Wendell Phillips eloquently explains why the pacifists of that day "came to the defense of the great martyr: "Harper's Ferry is the Lexington of today . . . Suppose he did fail . . . There are two kinds of defeat. Whether in chains or in laurels, Liberty knows nothing but victories. Soldiers call Bunker Hill a defeat; but Liberty dates from it . . ."9
On January 11, 1860, Marx wrote to Engels: "In my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the world today are, on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and, on the other, the movement of the serfs in Russia . . . I have just seen in the Tribune that there has been a fresh rising of slaves in Missouri, naturally suppressed. But the signal has now been given."10
When the young Marx first broke from bourgeois society and elaborated his philosophy of Humanism in 1844, he paid little attention to the remains of chattel slavery. Now, however, Marx kept his eyes glued on the movement of the Negro slaves. When the Civil War broke out, and "the Great Emancipator" did all in his power to limit it to a white man's war for Union, Marx began to popularize the speeches and analyses of the Abolitionists, especially those Wendell Phillips wrote against the Northern conduct of the war: "The President has not put the Confiscation Act into operation... He has neither insight nor foresight . . ."
Because Lincoln's main strategic concern was to conciliate the so-called "moderate" border slave states that remained in the Union, he wanted neither to free the slaves nor allow them to participate in the war as soldiers. Lincoln nullified the few attempts by generals on the spot (John C. Fremont in Missouri, David Hunter in Georgia, Florida and South Carolina, and Ben Butler in Virginia) to issue their own emancipation proclamations. As late as 1862, when Horace Greeley as editor of the Tribune published "A Prayer of 20 Millions" for the abolition of slavery, Lincoln replied: "My paramount objective is to save the union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery."
This denotes the first phase of the long Civil War which lasted four years and cost the lives of a million men. Phillips maintained that if it had been fought as a war of liberation - and the Negroes were pounding at all the doors, North and South, to let them fight - it could be easily won in a few months. When military expediency, however, dictated a change in course, Phillips maintained that "In this war mere victory on a battlefield amounts to nothing, contributes little or nothing toward ending the war . . . Such an aimless war I call wasteful and murderous."
When Engels too feared that things were going so badly for the North, that it would lose the war, Marx wrote: "A single Negro regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves . . . A war of this kind must be conducted on revolutionary lines while the Yankees have thus far been trying to conduct it constitutionally."11
Finally, on January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. It was no ringing declaration; his compromisist words moved gingerly to free only those slaves in the rebellious states. As one historian recently put it, it was "as emotional as a bill of sale."12
Nevertheless it is the turning point. This second stage of the war altogether transformed its character. The passing of this year in the Civil War outlines the contrast of centuries. Negroes flocked into the Army, battles began being won. Wendell Phillips declared: "I want the blacks as the very basis of the effort to regenerate the South!"
On the other side of the Atlantic, English workers, whose livelihood as textile workers depended on Southern cotton, held mass demonstrations to prevent their ruling class from intervening on the side of the Bourbon South, whose cotton kingdom supplied Britain's textile barons the raw materials for their world-dominating industry.
A new decade had indeed dawned in the world with the outbreak of the Civil War in the United States, the insurrection in Poland, the strikes in Paris, and the mass meetings of English workers who chose to starve rather than perpetuate slavery on the other side of the Atlantic. The actions culminated in the establishment of the International Workingmen's Association, headed by Karl Marx.
From the first, Marx took the side of the North, though, naturally as we saw, he was with Phillips' criticism of the conduct of the war, rather than with the President, of whom he had written to Engels: "All Lincoln's acts appear like the mean pettifogging conditions which one lawyer puts to his opposing lawyer. But this does not alter their world upheaval."13
He therefore separated himself from some14 self-styled Marxists in the United States who evaded the whole issue of the Civil War by saying they were opposed to "all slavery, wage and chattel." In the name of the International, Marx wrote Lincoln, "While the workingmen, the true political power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic; while before the Negro mastered and sold without his concurrence they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master; they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation, but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war."
As Marx later expressed it in CAPITAL, "In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the agitation for the eight-hour-day that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California. The General Congress of Labor at Baltimore (August 16, 1866) declared: 'The first and great necessity of the present, to free the labor of this country from capitalistic slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working-day in all states of the American Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is attained'."
Soon after the war and the abolition of slavery, Abolitionism as a movement vanished from the scene. Of all its leaders, Wendell Phillips alone made the transition to the labor movement. The four million freedmen remained tied to cotton culture and therein lies embedded the roots of the Negro Question.
6 See The Negro Revolt, by Louis L. Lomox.
7 Preface to Capital by Karl Marx.
8 For a modern biography of William Lloyd Garrison, see the one by John J. Chapman in The Selected Writings of John Joy Chapman; Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy, New York. For a more detailed biography, see William Lloyd Garrison - The Story of His Life, written by his children.
9 For a modern biography of Wendell Phillips see The Prophet of Liberty by Oscar Sherwin. Otherwise, see his own Speeches and Writings. These also illuminate the role of women in the Abolitionist movement and its connection with the start of the suffragette movement.
10 Selected Correspondence of Marx and Engels. Most of the other quotations from Marx's correspondence can be found easily in his writings from the dates given.
11 Ibid. Aug. 7, 1862.
12 "Lincoln and the Proclamation," an article in The Progressive, Dec. 1962, by Richard N. Current author of many works on Lincoln.
13 The Civil War in the United States, by Marx and Engels.
14 Just as Marx in his day separated himself, so Engels after Marx's death wrote: "The Social-Democratic Federation here shares with your German-American Socialists, the distinction of being the only parties that have managed to reduce the Marxian theory of development to a rigid orthodoxy, which the workers are not to reach themselves by their own class feelings, but which they have to gulp down as an article of faith at once and without development. That is why both of them remain mere sects and come, as Hegel says, from nothing through nothing to nothing." (Letters to Americans by Marx and Engels, p. 263.)