Women in the Antislavery Movement

For those interested in a view of the abolition movement from the bottom up, Julie Roy Jeffrey’s, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) focuses our attention on the hundreds of “silent” women who worked tirelessly in deceptively ordinary ways, to promote abolition in rural communities and churches. According to Jeffrey, their continuous efforts on behalf of abolition evolved over time and helped sustain the movement. Although most did not become the radical feminists we associate with abolition, Jeffrey argues their activities on behalf of abolition did cause them to stretch themselves and to question traditional ideas about gender.

Dr. Sara Brooks Sundberg

John Brown

The Abolitionists film segment we watched, which is part of the first episode, mentioned John Brown's conversion experience and his determination to fight slavery in America.  Episode three of the film series addresses this topic in much more detail, talking at length about John Brown's actions in Kansas and at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in 1856 and 1859 respectively.

John Brown has been a controversial figure in both public memory and historical accounts since the 1850s.  Some see his violent actions to bring about an immediate end to slavery as unjustified, while others argue that the nation needed some sort of 'shock' to recognize the realities of the institution of slavery that was itself violent and abusive.  When is moral suasion not enough and more determined action to end slavery is necessary?

The Smithsonian's Museum of American History has an interesting video on their YouTube channel (about 7 minutes long) which asks us to consider exactly that moral dilemma--as a member of John Brown's "jury" in 1859, how would you respond to his actions and his motives?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcoIkUIUS6s&feature=plcp

As we approach the anniversary of Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, October 16-18, it seems appropriate to examine this question here.

Web Resources for Slavery and Emancipation in the United States

Here are a few additional websites with primary sources and secondary interpretive essays covering the topics of slavery and emancipation in the United States.

The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record
http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/index.php

The Abolition of the Slave Trade
http://abolition.nypl.org/home/

Freedmen and Southern Society Project
http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/sampdocs.htm

Slavery in the Spanish World

This is a post by guest author Dr. Dan Crews, Professor in the Department of History and Anthropology at UCM. 



          The discussion following the film and panel on “The Abolitionists” brought out connections of slavery in the US to the “Atlantic World,” or “Atlantic Worlds.” As a Professor of Spanish and Latin American History, I will comment briefly on the significance of what is usually referred to as the “Tannenbaum Thesis,” or the “Freyre-Tannenbaum Thesis,” or the “Tannenbaum-Elkins Thesis.” Obviously Tannenbaum’s 1948 classic, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas is the crucial work.

          In 1922 Gilberto Freyre, a Brazilian graduate student at Columbia, published an article in the Hispanic American Historical Review that drew contrasts between the culture of slavery in Brazil and the U.S. To my knowledge, this is the origin of modern studies of comparative slavery, i.e. that Black slavery is not the same everywhere. In 1946 Freyre fleshed his argument out in his masterpiece The Masters and the Slave. The next year Tannenbaum published his classic focusing more narrowly on legal and religious institutions. Spanish laws on slavery derived from Roman law, the Justinian Code, adopted into Spanish law in 1215. In Roman law slaves, who could be from any race, had the right to earn property and purchase their freedom. Indeed, grandchildren of slaves could hold any public office in the Empire. The second-century emperor Pertinax was in fact the grandson of a slave. The Catholic Church forbade requiring work on feast days, prohibited the break up of families and encouraged church attendance meaning limited access to education. Since North American slave laws derived from British Common Law, they assumed, according to Tannenbaum, that being a slave meant being Black, the legal precedents were established in this context. Put simply, the “Freyre-Tannenbaum Thesis” holds that the humanity of Black slaves was not ignored in Latin America to the degree that it was in North America. The strongest support for the thesis has and continues to be the degree of inter-racial marriage, and the general lack of racial conflict between Blacks and Whites in post-emancipation Latin America. There were no Jim Crow segregation laws in Latin America.

          Stanley Elkins adopted Tannenbaum’s thesis, but also went into the psychology of slavery in North and South America. According to Elkins the Manichean division of Black and White led to the creation of a “Sambo psychology” in North America. The first edition of Elkins’ Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life appeared in 1959, and the third addition in 1976. Several scholars have taken issue with some of Elkins’ psychological arguments, especially Eugene Genovese, but the “Elkins-Tannenbaum Thesis” continued to find supporters as in Nell Irvin Painter’s Southern History Across the Color Line, 2002. Meanwhile the core of the “Freyre-Tannenbaum Thesis” continues to be very strong in Colonial Spanish and Latin American studies as demonstrated in Jane Landers’ Black Society in Florida, 1999, and Herbert Klein and Ben Vinson, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2007.

          While Latin America definitely has its problems, racial tensions between White and Black have not been much of a cause for social unrest. Indeed, the idea of a Latin American “cosmic race” has been the root of much of twentieth-century Latin American nationalism, from José Marti in the 1890s to the “Bolivarian Revolution” of Hugo Chavez.

          For a good introduction to the scholarly debates surrounding the Tannenbaum thesis, see Laura Foner and Eugene Genovese, eds., Slavery in the New World, 1970.


 Editor's Note:
While slave violence in the Spanish colonies of the southern U.S., Central, and South America centered primarily around the Indian-Spaniard-Creole ethnic dynamic, blacks enslaved by the Spanish did, on occasion, revolt--for example, see Sir Walter Raleigh's alliance with the Cimarrons (black escaped slaves) in Panama against the Spanish in the 1570s.  Stanley Elkin's conclusions about the differences between Brazilian and American slavery may still apply in Latin American studies, but his conclusions about the passivity of American slaves have been subsequently overturned by numerous studies over the last forty years.  Slaves in America resisted their masters in many ways, from milder examples of destroying property and theft of foodstuffs to full rebellion in the case of Nat Turner's Revolt.  Moreover, as slaves were taught trades or sent to cities to work, they further undermined the institution of slavery by creating space for lives outside the control of whites.  In some cases, they even earned enough to purchase their freedom.  As Eugene Genovese wrote in From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (1979):

"Accordingly, the legend of black docility in slavery appears the more ironic

as well as the more ludicrous, for, so far as the evidence allows generalization,

no enslaved people in world history rose in revolt so often or in such numbers 

or with so large a measure of success [as in the Americas].  The slaves of the Old South
rose much less frequently, in fewer numbers, and less successfully than those of
the Caribbean region and South America, but they too made vital contributions
to the history of revolt." (xxii)

Two books that provide an excellent overview of the scholarship on slavery in the last three decades of the twentieth century are: John B. Boles, Black Southerners 1619-1869 (1984) and Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619-1877 (2003).  For additional readings on this topic, see:

John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community (1972).
John Hope Franklin and Lauren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (2000).
Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (1992).
Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll (1974).
Patrick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History through Culture (2010).
David Northrup, Crosscurrents in the Black Atlantic 1770-1965 (2007).
Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, Slavery, Freedom and the Law in the Atlantic World (2007).
Robert Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (1971).
Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities (1967).

Abolitionists Event Resources

We are looking forward to our panel discussion tomorrow and we hope to see you there.  And if you are visiting this site after attending the event, thank you for coming!

To further the discussion, we would like to post some additional resources for our audience and students.

Here is a basic overview of the full three-episode series produced by PBS:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/introduction/abolitionists-introduction/

In addition, you can read the inspiring words of Garrison, Douglass, and many of the other participants for yourself at these websites:

"I Will Be Heard!" Abolitionism in America (primary sources and background information presented by Cornell University):

http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/abolitionism/abolitionists.htm

Documenting the American South (a collection of antebellum and Civil Rights resources hosted by the University of North Carolina:

http://docsouth.unc.edu/browse/collections.html

And the Expansion and Reform (1800-1860) category of online resources at the Gilder Lehrman Institute:

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/collections/groupings/expansion-reform-1800-1860

You may also want to check out these books to read more about this era of history:

Cain Hope Felder, ed., The Original African Heritage Study Bible (James C. Winston Pub. Company, Nashville, TN, 1993).
 
Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (St. Martin's Press, 1998).

W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Louisiana State University Press, 2013).

Deidre Mullane, ed., Crossing the Danger Water- 300 years of African-American Writing (Doubleday, 1993).

Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

Merrill D. Peterson, John Brown: The Legend Revisited (University of Virginia Press, 2002).

Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2009).

Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade- the Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 (Simon & Schuster, 1997.

John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860, Revised edition (Hill and Wang, 1997).