Writing and Rewriting the Antislavery Struggle, from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement
p. 247-264
Texte intégral
In 2006, in their introduction to Prophets of Protest. Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer provided the following assessment of the changing reputation of abolitionists:
Few groups in American history have experienced as complete a reassessment of their life and legacy as the abolitionists. Reviled by their contemporaries, and so often maligned or misunderstood by historians, the abolitionists have only in the last generation or so begun to receive a fair hearing among scholars of nineteenth-century America.1
1The changing reputation of abolitionists, whether black or white, has much to do with the situation of African Americans in American society at a given time. Thus, abolitionists were praised in the years that immediately followed the Civil War and emancipation, and were reviled roughly from the end of Reconstruction—the late 1870s—to the Civil Rights Movement (McCarthy and Stauffer 2006: xiv–xv).2 This essay will explore the ways the antislavery struggle was represented in the recollections of former abolitionists and in works of history by African American authors, between Reconstruction and the 1960s.
2Eric Foner describes Reconstruction as that brief moment when ‘the country experimented with genuine interracial democracy. Then Reconstruction was overturned by a violent racist reaction.’3 In the last decades of the nineteenth century, as David Blight and others have documented, slavery was rewritten as a benign system. The nation was undergoing fast changes, in particular industrialization, urbanization, and massive waves of ‘new’ immigrants. Simultaneously, and partly in reaction to these changes, a feeling of nostalgia for the Antebellum days emerged. This nostalgia is reflected in the early 1870s in the nation’s periodicals, which highlighted the attachment slaves had for their benevolent masters. What Blight has called a ‘literature of reunion’ (i.e. aiming at reconciling North and South)4 celebrated the old plantation South. Books by Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page, among others, are cases in point.5 Postbellum minstrel shows presented audiences with representations of happy slaves who sang and danced on stage.6 By the late 1880s, Memorial Day celebrations emphasized the heroism of both sides in the Civil War, and the cause itself was subsumed under the valor of its defenders.7 Attempts at sectional reconciliation underplayed slavery as a cause of the war, and this was particularly evident in the Peace Jubilees that followed the Spanish-American war of 1898. On this occasion, President McKinley declared that the great object of the Civil War had been reunion.8 This narrative of national reconciliation—which was never unchallenged—was achieved at the expense of African Americans, and the role black soldiers had played in the war was largely erased in what Lorini calls ‘collective amnesia’ (Lorini 1999: 31).9 The situation would gradually grow worse for African Americans, especially in the South, with mounting racial violence and a peak in the number of lynchings in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The year 1892 was the worst in a particularly bad decade, with a total of 230 lynchings, 161 of which targeted African Americans.10 African Americans had gained a number of rights during Reconstruction, through amendments (especially the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, which granted African Americans the right to vote), and legislation. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, they gradually lost those rights. Thus in 1883, the Supreme Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and made racial segregation legal with Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Southern States adopted various measures to disenfranchise African Americans. This is the period that historian Rayford Logan termed the ‘nadir’ of race relations.11
3The post-Reconstruction era is also the period when many abolitionists wrote their memoirs. According to Julie Roy Jeffrey, as the history of the Civil War was rewritten as a conflict to preserve the Union rather than to put an end to slavery, ‘the abolitionists lost any claim to historical importance.’ The accounts of the movement penned by white and black abolitionists ‘challenged every important point of the reconciliation narrative, trying to salvage the nobility of their work for emancipation and African Americans and defending their own participation in the great events of their day.’12 In addition to setting the record straight, many of the abolitionists’ memoirs also pointed to the current situation and the problems African Americans were facing in the South, hoping to encourage younger readers to take up the fight for black rights at a time when these rights were being taken away.13 Julie Roy Jeffrey’s Abolitionists Remember (2008) and Manisha Sinha’s article ‘The Civil War at 150. Memory and Meaning,’ in Common-Place (2014) offer an in-depth analysis of these recollections, authored by men and women (more men than women), Blacks and Whites (more Whites than Blacks). This essay will draw upon Jeffrey’s and Sinha’s work to highlight the salient features of these narratives.
4Unsurprisingly, all the authors of memoirs—whether black or white—insist on the heroic aspect of the enterprise: the abolitionists were brave men (more rarely women, though women are mentioned in most memoirs), ready to face the dangers of fighting for a just but unpopular cause, in the South of course, but also in the North. Memoirs thus systematically remind readers that abolitionists were a minority, that they were denounced as dangerous fanatics, often imprisoned, and that antislavery lecturers were frequently the targets of mob violence.
5Depending on the author, the divisions in the antislavery movement are more or less glossed over. In Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict (1869), Samuel J. May, a Unitarian minister who was one of the original members of the American Anti-Slavery Society and a lecturer on the antislavery circuit, only made brief references to the internal quarrels.14 In the pages he devotes to William Lloyd Garrison, described as the leader of the antislavery movement (May 1869: 5), May recalls that in the early 1830s, many antislavery men, including himself, thought Garrison too extreme: ‘Many of those who were interested in Mr. Garrison’s holy purpose, and wished him success, thought him too severe; many more thought him indiscreet. He was remonstrated with often earnestly’ (May 1869: 35). Yet there is nothing in his Recollections, in the portraits of Lewis Tappan, of Frederick Douglass, that hints at the profound divisions between abolitionists. May cannot have been unaware of these quarrels; he therefore deliberately chose to emphasize ‘abolitionism as a unified movement’ (Jeffrey 2008: 27). In his preface, the Unitarian minister had warned readers that they were not to expect a complete account of the anti-slavery movement, but rather ‘brief sketches,’ based on his memories (May 1869: iv-v).
6In his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, published in 1881,15 Douglass explains his break with Garrison in detail: his decision to start a paper of his own met with a lot of opposition:
My friends in Boston had been informed of what I was intending, and I expected to find them favorably disposed toward my cherished enterprise. In this I was mistaken. They had many reasons against it. First, no such paper was needed; secondly, it would interfere with my usefulness as a lecturer; thirdly, I was better fitted to speak than to write; fourthly, the paper could not succeed. (Douglass 1881: 264)
7Douglass’ change of opinion in regard to the Constitution (which Garrison saw as a pro-slavery document) and to political abolition (Garrison opposed it) made him an ‘apostate’ (Douglass 1881: 266). Yet Douglass becomes more critical of Garrison when he refers to the latter’s influence in essentially disbanding the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1865. Douglass reminds readers that for himself and other abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips, the fight was not over until black men had the right to vote. Abolitionists were divided on this point:’Mr. Garrison himself, though foremost for the abolition of slavery, was not yet quite ready to join this advanced movement. In this respect he was in the rear of Mr. Phillips’ (Douglass 1881: 387).
8In addition to autobiographies and memoirs written by abolitionists, the first biographies of major figures of the movement appeared in the decades that followed the Civil War. Often the work of children and friends of abolitionists, these texts are also sites of contests over the memory of the abolitionist movement and more specifically over who should be considered its real leader or leaders. At the heart of the dispute was the issue of moral suasion versus political abolitionism. Garrison’s preferred tactic was persuasion, i.e. convincing Americans that slavery was wrong, while political abolitionists sought to achieve the same aim, namely the abolition of slavery, by engaging in politics. This was one of the reasons that led to the 1840 split in the anti-slavery movement, with Garrisonians remaining in the American Anti-Slavery Society and their opponents going on to create a new organization, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. The division over tactics is reflected in a number of biographies of anti-slavery men. Thus, for instance, George Julian and Henry Stanton, two men who had been active in abolition politics, defended political abolitionists and described moral abolitionism of the Garrisonian kind as irrelevant and ineffective.16
9The Garrisonians disagreed and worked hard to preserve the image of Garrison as the movement’s founder and leader: a few examples are Oliver Johnson’s eloquently titled William Lloyd Garrison and His Times: or, Sketches of the Anti-Slavery Movement in America, and of the Man who was its Founder and Moral Leader (1879), or Parker Pillsbury’s Acts of The Anti-Slavery Apostles (1883). The same can be said of the 4-volume biography of Garrison by two of his sons, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children (1885, 1889), and of Archibald Grimké’s William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist (1891).17 Garrison’s biography by his children was meant to preserve the memory of the movement, but also the image of their father as the founder and leader of American abolitionism, most notably against the claims of Wendell Phillips, whom many abolitionists considered as equal in importance to Garrison himself.18 Archibald H. Grimké was born in slavery and was half-brother to the famous Grimké sisters. In his biography, Garrison is always the ‘pioneer,’ even if Grimké acknowledges some flaws in his hero: ‘Garrison was the most dogmatic, as he was the most earnest of men. It was almost next to impossible for him to understand that his way was not the only way to attain a given end’ (Grimké 1891: 319). Grimké adds that Garrison could not bear opposition and details the falling out between Phillips and Garrison at the end of the war.
10This contest between the various trends of abolitionism and between the leaders of each trend, explains why in 1892, Douglass lamented that ‘the time has not come when a true and impartial history of the Anti-slavery movement can be written or reasonably be expected. The preferences for modes of action and partialities’ had descended from fathers to sons and ‘made the task of writing a true history hard if not impossible.’19
11The influence of abolitionists’ memoirs was rather limited; they had few reviews and sold poorly. Even the one that was the most likely to succeed both critically and commercially, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, sold less than 2500 copies in the first few months after publication.20 Part of the reason for the lack of interest was the fact that many of these works possessed little literary merit and failed to meet the evolving criteria for autobiographical excellence (Jeffrey 2008: 7; 9). Moreover, as emancipation grew more remote, slavery was increasingly portrayed as a benign system, and the nation at large did not want a reminder of an unpleasant past. The memoirs seemed increasingly irrelevant at a time when a writer such as James Lane Allen underlined ‘the kind, even affectionate, relations of the races under the old régime,’ and described slavery as a system in which ‘well-treated negroes cared not a snap for liberty’.21
12One work that had strong sales while offering a different kind of memory of the antislavery movement is William Still’s The Underground Railroad, first published in 1872.22 William Still, a black man from Philadelphia who was very active on the Underground Railroad, recounts the stories of fugitives, partly based on the records he kept. As Jeffrey notes, the work suggests that ‘there was a racial divide in the construction of the past’ (Jeffrey 2008: 62). Indeed, the memoirs of white abolitionists tended to present them as ‘the central actors of the story,’ as Eric Foner has argued.23 Unsurprisingly, the recollections of black abolitionists had a different focus. According to David Blight, Douglass’s latest biographer, Douglass’s Life and Times was meant to forge ‘an abolitionist memory of the Civil War,’ but also to make Douglass’s life ‘a kind of monument,’ a story of ‘increasing fame and achievement.’24 William Still’s book, on the other hand, builds a collective memory which emphasizes the heroism of the many African Americans who appear in his work. In his Underground Railroad, white abolitionists ‘were marginalized. Blacks became the engine of their own liberation’ (Jeffrey 2008: 62). Still’s characters are ready to die rather than be re-enslaved, they can be seen fighting slave catchers in both text and image, and this runs against the watered-down version of slavery which was starting to take hold, in articles, illustrations, and history books produced by Whites. To gain a fuller picture of the efforts of abolitionists and their children and friends to commemorate the movement, one should also look at abolitionist reunions after the war, at commemorations, at monuments (Garrison died in 1879 and his sculpture was dedicated in Boston in 1886).
13The watered-down version of slavery went hand in hand with a redefinition of the causes of the Civil War, which was now no longer about slavery but about the right of states to secede; in this rewriting of history, abolitionists were misguided fanatics who had enormous responsibility in causing the war (slavery itself would have disappeared in time); the role of black soldiers in their own liberation was increasingly forgotten. African American historians attempted to correct this mainstream narrative, as appears in the way they handled slavery, abolitionists and slave rebellions.
14William Wells Brown, a fugitive slave and Garrisonian abolitionist, vigorously denounced slavery as a ‘curse’ to both the enslaved and slave owners, in The Rising Son (1874, c. 1873). Brown offers portraits of white heroes (Garrison, the ‘pioneer’ of the movement, Wendell Phillips, ‘America’s ablest orator’) and black heroes: those fighting against slavery and for equal rights in the North, slaves fleeing slavery in the South and demonstrating both courage and ingenuity.25 If Garrison is the ‘acknowledged leader of the movement’ (394), Frederick Douglass is ‘the most wonderful man America has ever produced, white or black’ (436). While Brown does not dwell on the quarrels that divided abolitionists and praises Garrisonians and non-Garrisonians alike, his portraits of black abolitionists reflect the very real animosities among the latter: thus, the antislavery lecturer Charles Remond was a much overrated man while Charles W.C. Pennington was a drunkard (403–4; 463).
15In 1883, in his monumental History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, George Washington Williams depicts Garrison as the hero of the antislavery struggle, while also including black abolitionists in his story, and noting that the influence of Douglass (‘destined by nature and God to be a giant in the great moral agitation for the extinction of slavery and the redemption of his race’) was ‘second only to that of Mr. Garrison.26 Unlike Brown, Williams both praises and criticizes Douglass, saying for instance that he ‘was rarely eloquent except when denouncing slavery,’ that ‘His attempts at wit usually missed fire [sic]. He could not be funny’ (Williams 1883: 437). Williams describes the break between Garrison and Douglass and sides with Garrison, showing old quarrels were not yet settled in the early 1880s. Altogether Williams builds a case for Blacks as activists and rebels, and justifies slave rebellions by the cruelty of the peculiar institution. Nat Turner is both a religious fanatic and a ‘black John Brown’ (Williams 1883: 91). This is no small compliment since for Williams, John Brown ‘ranks among the world’s greatest heroes,’ (Williams 1883: 214). According to Williams, John Brown, who was originally seen as a fanatic, was at long last getting his proper place in history, that of a saint (William 1883).27
16In his 1887 Men of Mark, a collective biography, a kind of Who’s Who among African Americans, William J. Simmons downplays the divisions in the movement, wrongly claiming that Douglass and Garrison always had ‘cordial and pleasant’ relations. Simmons still presents Garrison as ‘the great pioneer,’ with other Whites leading the movement. However, Simmons only provides sketches of Blacks so that, as in Still’s book, Whites are (logically) marginalized. Douglass is described as the greatest African American that ever lived. And it is the heroism of fugitive slaves that encouraged ‘the grand little army of Abolitionists.’28 As to slavery itself, Simmons unambiguously states that it was wrong, and his treatment of rebels is revealing: Denmark Vesey, the leader of a failed attempt at rebellion in 1822 South Carolina, is a hero and a martyr, Nat Turner is a ‘black John Brown,’ the ‘Spartacus of the Negro race,’ as well as ‘one of the greatest emancipators of the nineteenth century.’ According to Simmons, Turner’s rebellion, in which over 50 Whites were killed, can be fully justified by the violence of the system of slavery (1887: 1036; 1039). This praise of violent rebellion is all the more remarkable on the part of Simmons as he was a minister, and did not hesitate to point at flaws in some of the subjects of his sketches: thus Denmark Vesey got the money to buy his freedom by drawing a prize at a lottery, which was wrong even if he made good use of the money (231), and Pennington’s example should only be followed to a point: ‘shun the vice which at the last clouded his brilliant intellect’ (915).
17The same year Men of Mark came out (1887), Theodore Roosevelt published a biography of Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, in which he was very critical of abolitionists who he thought had received ‘absurdly exaggerated praise.’ Yes, they were brave and they were sincere, but in fact they did very little to bring about emancipation. On the contrary, ‘much of what they did was positively harmful to the cause for which they were fighting.’29
18In Progress of a Race, first published in 1897, thus during the decade that saw a peak in the number of lynchings, there are both white and black heroes; while the authors underline the role of Garrison (‘there never was a more intrepid leader against slavery than William Lloyd Garrison’), they single out Douglass as ‘the most remarkable man of Negro blood yet produced in the United States’ and fail to mention any disagreements between the two men. They devote considerable space to the heroism of fugitives, and to William Still’s book on the Underground Railroad.30 They also clearly state that the real cause of the war was slavery. The authors’ views on rebels are more ambiguous. John Brown is praised, ‘his immortal name will be pronounced with blessings in all lands and by all people till the end of time.’ However, only two slave rebellions are mentioned: the ‘supposed Negro plot’ in New York in 1741, and Nat Turner’s rebellion about which they say little, save that it showed that enslaved people wanted freedom and were not as docile as slaveholders claimed.31 This may have been due to the general context of the 1890s. At a time when racial violence targeting blacks was at its highest, when the press made much of black criminality and presented the death of African Americans as a comic subject, perhaps the authors had chosen to tread carefully on the topic of black antebellum violence.32
19A few years later, Booker T. Washington published The Story of the Negro (1909). His message is somewhat confusing as he first asserts that, ‘as a rule, the Negro was not an anti-slavery agitator,’ then proceeds to demonstrate the very opposite, by looking at early black abolitionists, late eighteenth century petitions to end slavery, the role of black lecturers on the antislavery circuit, colored conventions, fugitives and the Underground Railroad. For Washington, fugitive slaves did more to bring about abolition than any other agency, because they told the North what slavery really was, showed that Blacks were human beings and that they were unsurprisingly discontented in slavery. Altogether then, black abolitionists are the real heroes of the story (but after all the book is titled The Story of the Negro and Washington did not set out to write a book about white abolitionists). As for rebellions, Washington lists a number of slave ‘insurrections,’ and claims that ‘the slave learned from his master the desire to be free.’ Yet Washington also contends that insurrections brought little good (Nat Turner is described as a ‘fanatic’) and that no black uprising is to be feared in the South at the time he writes the book. This is similar to the line of thought defended in Progress of a Race and likely obeys the same motives, i.e. appeasement at a time of great racial violence.33
20Rewritings of slavery in harmony with the plantation school of literature continued in the first half of the twentieth century. They found their best scholarly expression in the works of white historian Ulrich B. Phillips, most notably his 1918 American Negro Slavery. Phillips saw the plantation as a kind of school in which slaves were ‘pupils and working wards’ and planters ‘teachers and guardians as well as masters and owners’ (342); he insisted that ‘severity was clearly the exception, and kindliness the rule’ on the plantation (306).34 Unsurprisingly, Phillips paid very little attention to the antislavery movement. In his preface, he had warned the reader that he had deliberately left aside ‘polemic writings’ as well as the ‘asseverations of politicians, pamphleteers and aged survivors’ which he considered unreliable (vii–viii). In popular culture, the plantation myth endured, as can be seen in the success of books like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) and of movies like The Littlest Rebel, directed by David Butler and released in 1935, or the 1939 movie adaptation of Mitchell’s novel.
21This myth is what W.E.B. Du Bois denounced as ‘the propaganda of history’ in Black Reconstruction.35 Du Bois rejected the ‘fairy tale of a beautiful Southern slave civilization’ (715) and invited readers to read slave narratives in order to know the truth. By the time Black Reconstruction was published, in 1935, little had changed in the generally negative assessment of abolitionists. Du Bois was an exception when he praised the abolitionists and reminded his readers that ‘Abolitionists attacked slavery because it was wrong and their moral battle cannot be truthfully minimized or forgotten’ (716). He also insisted that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. Most of his white counterparts held a quite different position. In 1940, addressing the Southern Historical Association, its president, Frank L. Owsley, compared the discourse of abolitionists in the South to the propaganda spread by Goebbels and Stalin:
One has to seek in the unrestrained and furious invective of the present totalitarians to find a near parallel to the language that the abolitionists and their political fellow travelers used in denouncing the South and its way of life. Indeed, as far as I have been able to ascertain, neither Dr. Goebbels [. . .] nor Stalin’s propaganda agents have as yet been able to plumb the depths of vulgarity and obscenity reached and maintained by George Bourne, Stephen Foster, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, and other abolitionists of note.36
22While this is extreme, to say the least, other white historians of the 1940s and 1950s variously depicted abolitionists as fanatics, or at best as men suffering from sundry types of neurosis. Manisha Sinha notes that David Donald portrayed them as ‘social misfits and psychological basket cases.’37
23In his 1947 From Slavery to Freedom, black historian John Hope Franklin described the antislavery movement as a powerful religious crusade, part of a larger humanitarian movement in Europe and North America, one connected with other reform movements such as the temperance, peace and women’s rights movement. Franklin placed Blacks at the center of this story: black abolitionists preached abolition long before the birth of Garrison (Williams had made the same claim) and were even more determined than white abolitionists; Garrison appeared as the theorist of the movement, while the description Franklin provides of Douglass turns the latter into a legendary figure.
24In spite of works like those of Franklin and a few others, such as Carter G. Woodson and Benjamin Quarles,38 the reassessment of abolitionists really started in the late 1950s and 1960s in the context of the Civil Rights Movement. One major landmark is The Antislavery Vanguard. New Essays on the Abolitionists, edited by Martin Duberman and published in 1965; in his introduction to the book, Duberman clearly linked the tendency to a more positive appraisal of the movement to the ongoing civil rights struggle. He explained that many historians were committed to the struggle and looked kindly on the earlier movement (ix).39 Another landmark work is Antislavery Reconsidered. New Perspectives on the Abolitionists edited by Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman (1979).40 By then, the antislavery movement had largely been rehabilitated.41 However, the role of black abolitionists remained little studied and most historians viewed abolitionism as a white and middle-class movement; this changed when Benjamin Quarles’s put black abolitionists at the center of the story in his landmark book Black Abolitionists (1969).
25Over the last decades, a lot of work has been done on abolitionism so that, as Manisha Sinha notes in her detailed essay on the historiography of the question in Prophets of Protest (2006), there is now ‘an embarrassment of riches’ (37). Sinha’s latest work, The Slave’s Cause, attempts a new synthesis by looking at the antislavery movement in the long term and in an international context. Sinha places African Americans at the heart of a movement which she describes as radical and interracial, a movement ‘which addressed the entrenched problems of exploitation and disfranchisement in a liberal democracy and anticipated debates over race, labor, and empire.’42
Bibliographie
Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.
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Notes de bas de page
1 McCarthy, Timothy Patrick & John Stauffer, eds. Prophets of Protest. Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism. New York: The New Press, 2006; xiii.
2 McCarthy and Stauffer note that their reputation improved during the Great Depression, then declined again in the 1950s, a time of conservatism.
3 Foner, Eric and Joshua Brown. Forever Free. The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005; xx. The Jim Crow system, racial violence and economic oppression led W.E.B. Du Bois to declare in 1903 that ‘despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free.’ Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Dover publications, Dover Thrift editions, 1994; 24.
4 Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001; 216–7.
5 Harris’s Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (1881) and more so Page’s In Ole Virginia (1887), are representative of the plantation tradition.
6 See Prince K. Stephen. Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014; chapter 5.
7 Lorini, Alessandra. Rituals of Race. American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999; 29.
8 Hilfrich, Fabian. ‘Creating and Instrumentalizing Nationalism. The Celebration of National reunion in the Peace Jubilees of 1898,’ in Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation: American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early Twentieth Century, Geneviève Fabre, Jürgen Heideking and Kai Dreisbach, eds. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001: 228–256; 236.
9 For an example of the way black historians attempted to address this collective amnesia, see Claire Parfait, ‘“The grandest book ever written”: Advertising Joseph T. Wilson’s Black Phalanx (1888),’ in Writing History from the Margins: African Americans and the Quest for Freedom. Claire Parfait, Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry et Claire Bourhis-Mariotti, eds. New York: Routledge, 2016; 13–25.
10 These are figures taken from the Archives of the Tuskegee Institute, which started recording the number of lynchings in 1882: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html. Accessed on May13 2020. Figures may differ but a recent study demonstrates that the 1890s were indeed the worst decade in terms of lynching: Charles Seguin and David Rigby, ‘National Crimes: A New National Data Set of Lynchings in the United States, 1883 to 1941.’ Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World vol. 5 (2019): 1–9: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2378023119841780 Accessed on May 13, 2020.
11 Logan, Rayford. The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901. New York: Dial Press, 1954.
12 Jeffrey, Julie Roy. Abolitionists Remember. Antislavery Autobiographies & the Unfinished Work of Emancipation. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008; 3.
13 Sinha, Manisha. ‘The Civil War at 150. Memory and Meaning.’ Common-Place vol. 14, no. 2, Winter 2014: http://www.common-place-archives.org/vol-14/no-02/sinha/#.XBuw_i17Tq0 Sinha notes that for a long time, these recollections were disregarded, seen as ‘self-aggrandizing’ and unreliable.
14 May, Samuel J. Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict. Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co., 1869.
15 Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Hartford, CT: Park Publishing Company, 1881.
16 Julian, George W. Political Recollections, 1840 to 1872. Chicago: Jansen, McClurg & Co., 1884; Stanton, Henry B. Random Recollections. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1887 (Stanton was the husband of women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton). On these two works, see Jeffrey 2008: 183–192.
17 Jeffrey 2008: 192–198; Johnson, Oliver. William Lloyd Garrison and His Times: or, Sketches of the Anti-Slavery Movement in America, and of the Man who was its Founder and Moral Leader. Boston: B.B. Russell, 1879; Pillsbury, Parker. Acts of The Anti-Slavery Apostles. Concord, NH: Clague, Wegman, Schlicht & Co., printers, Rochester, NY, 1883; Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Francis Jackson Garrison. William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children. New York: Century Company, 1885–1889; Grimké, Archibald H. William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist, New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1891.
18 Quanquin, Hélène. ‘William Lloyd Garrison par ses enfants. Une correspondance familiale politique.’ Epistolaire, Revue de l’A.I.R.E, no. 40, Paris : Librairie Honoré Champion, 2014: 185–193. During the discussion that followed the delivery of this paper on January 25, 2019, at the one-day symposium ‘From Antislavery to Abolitionism’ held at University Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, France, Hélène Quanquin noted that while Garrison and Phillips were long seen as equally important in the antislavery struggle, Garrison eventually displaced Phillips, partly because Garrison’s children were very active in promoting their father’s memory, while Phillips was childless.
19 Frederick Douglass to Marshall Pierce, February 12, 1892, quoted in Larry Gara, ‘Who Was an Abolitionist?’ in The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists, Martin Duberman, ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965; 32–51, quote p. 34.
20 Yet the publisher, a subscription house of Hartford, CT, had expended a tremendous amount of time, money and energy, to promote the book and employed an impressive number of agents to sell it. While Douglass himself declared that he was satisfied with the sales figures, the Park Publishing Company was disappointed (Jeffrey 2008: 166–173). In 1965, Larry Gara had argued that ‘. . . after the struggle many tried to make their support of the abolitionist crusade retroactive. The heroism which authentic antislavery veterans flaunted in their memoirs met a sympathetic response from thousands of readers. Men with even a remote connection with the crusade or one of its leaders became legendary figures in countless northern communities’ (Gara 1965: 49). A book history approach such as Jeffrey’s reveals that Gara overstated the response of readers to these works.
21 Allen, James Lane. ‘Mrs. Stowe’s “Uncle Tom” at Home in Kentucky.’ The Century Magazine, vol. 34, October 1887: 852–67; 867; 866. As Du Bois would argue in his 1935 Black Reconstruction in America, the facts of history were changed so that the story would ‘make pleasant reading for Americans.’ Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935; 713.
22 Still, William. The Underground Railroad. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872. On the publishing history of the work, see Stephen G. Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009; 137–150.
23 Foner, Eric. Gateway to Freedom. The Hidden History of America’s Fugitive Slaves. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015; 11.
24 Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass Prophet of Freedom. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018; 620.
25 Brown, William Wells. The Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race. Boston: A.G. Brown, 1874, c.1873: 291; 393; 395.
26 Williams, George Washington. History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens. Vol. 2: New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883; 425–426.
27 On the bad blood between Williams and Douglass and the reactions of the contemporary press, see Blight 2008: 640–642. At the same time, in the periodical press, John Brown was described as a fanatic, a man who was warped and whose actions had disastrous results. Abolitionists had been wrong to admire him (Jeffrey 2008: 156).
28 Simmons, William J. Men of Mark. Eminent, Progressive and Rising. Cleveland, Ohio: Geo. M. Rewell, 1887: 74; 154; 156; the phrase ‘the grand little army of Abolitionists’ is borrowed from William Still’s 1878 preface to an undated revised edition of The Underground Railroad (see https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15263/15263-h/15263-h.htm).
29 Roosevelt, Theodore. Thomas Hart Benton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, American Statesmen Series, 1887; 158; 292. Roosevelt acknowledges that slavery was the main cause of the war but contends that it wasn’t the only one: the ‘separatist spirit’ was another, as was the ambition of men such as Jefferson Davis (295). Thomas Hart Benton (1782–1858) was a Senator from Missouri and a vigorous proponent of western expansion.
30 At about the same time, Wilbur Siebert’s The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (1898) ‘established a long-term tradition that tended to glorify white abolitionists by collecting their personal accounts of slave rescues (black involvement was not denied but it was not a primary concern)’: Ferré-Rode, Sandrine. ‘Competing Narratives. The Underground Railroad to Canada in Historiographical Perspective,’ in Undoing Slavery. American Abolitionism in Transnational Perspective. Michaël Roy, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol and Claire Parfait, eds. Paris : Éditions Rue d’Ulm/Presses de l’ENS, 2018; 57–74, quote p. 64.
31 Kletzing, Henry F. and William Crogman. Progress of a Race or The Remarkable Advancement of the Afro-American Negro from the Bondage of Slavery, Ignorance and Poverty, to the Freedom of Citizenship, Intelligence, Affluence, Honor and Trust. Naperville, Illinois: J. L. Nichols, 1897; 86; 447; 98; 62; 56–57. Crogman was African American, Kletzing was White and seems to have had little do to with the writing of the book; see Claire Parfait, ‘Collective Biographies and African American History: Men of Mark (1887) and Progress of a Race (1897),’ in Race in American Literature and Culture. John Ernest, ed. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
32 Parfait, Claire. ‘From Heroic to Comic Death: Representations of African-American Dead in the American Press from the Civil War to the Early Twentieth Century,’ in Racial, Ethnic and Homophobic Violence: Killing in the Name of Otherness. Michel Prum, Bénédicte Deschamps and Marie-Claude Barbier, eds. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007; 43–55. One example is the caricature of a black child being threatened by an alligator; see ‘Great Expectations,’ Scribner’s Monthly September 1878; 758; similar representations became more widespread at the turn of the century, when they appeared on greeting cards, cigar box labels as well as in early movies like The ‘Gator and the Pickaninny, 1900.
33 Washington, Booker T. The Story of the Negro. The Rise of the Race from Slavery. 1909. New York: Peter Smith, 1940; 281; 231; 184.
34 Phillips, Ulrich B. American Negro Slavery. New York: D. Appleton, 1918; 342; 306. Phillips’ version of slavery embodied the prevailing view of the times, and it held sway until the 1950s, when works like Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution: Negro Slavery in the American South (1956) rewrote slavery as a brutal institution.
35 Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935; 711.
36 Quoted in Roy, Michaël. De l’antiesclavagisme à l’abolition de l’esclavage. États-Unis 1776–1865. Neuilly: Atlande, Collection Clefs concours, 2018; 20–21.
37 Sinha, Manisha. ‘Coming of Age: The Historiography of Black Abolitionism,’ in Prophets of Protest. Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer, eds. New York: The New Press, 2006; 31.
38 See for example chapter 6 of Woodson’s Story of the Negro Retold. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1935, and Benjamin Quarles’ Frederick Douglass. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1948.
39 Duberman, Martin, ed. The Antislavery Vanguard. New Essays on the Abolitionists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965; ix.
40 Perry, Lewis and Michael Fellman, eds. Antislavery Reconsidered. New Perspectives on the Abolitionists. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.
41 See Friedman, Lawrence J. ‘Abolitionist Historiography 1965-1979: An Assessment.’ Reviews in American History, vol. 8 no. 2 (June 1980): 200–205.
42 Sinha, Manisha. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016; 1.
Auteur
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Claire Parfait
Claire Parfait is Professor Emerita of American studies and book history at Université Sorbonne Paris Nord. She was the principal investigator of a Sorbonne Paris Cité project (2013–2016) entitled ‘Writing History from the Margins: The Case of African Americans,’ and co-edited Writing History from the Margins: African Americans and the Quest for Freedom (New York, Routledge, 2016), and an online anthology, Une anthologie d’historiens africains américains, 1855–1965 (SHS/TERRA-HN-éditions, 2018): http://www.shs.terra-hn-editions.org/Collection/?-Historiens-africains-americains-She is the editor (with Marie-Jeanne Rossignol) of the ‘Récits d’esclaves’ series published by the Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre: http://purh.univ-rouen.fr/taxonomy/term/37
She is currently working on a monograph on African American historians from the 1830s to the 1930s, from a dual perspective of historiography and book history.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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