Read Online The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by David Brion Davis - Free Book Online

slaves were “ ‘wise and intelligent men, constantly engaged in reflection, informed of all that was occurring, and having their attention fixed upon the Legislature.’ ” Grimké also cites evidence of slaves who “spent many a midnight hour in discussing the probable results of the abolition movements,” to say nothing of the fact that every Northern fugitive slave “who is carried back, bears to his unhappy countrymen an account of all that is doing.” 24
    But how can one reconcile the view that slavery transforms a human into “a thing, a chattel personal, a machine to be used … for the benefit of another” with the image of recaptured fugitives secretly conveying the latest news about Northern abolitionists to highly alert slaves who also converse about Nat Turner and the Virginia legislative debates? Of course we now know that the desires and goals of slaveholders were considerably limited by the slaves’ resistance, negotiation, subcultures, and by the realities of human nature. The slave community also included a broad spectrum, ranging from lowly field workers to a few highly privileged bondspeople who sometimes had extraordinary power and responsibilities. And we discussed earlier the historians’ debates inspired in part byStanley Elkins’s 1959“Sambo” stereotype, and examined the complexities of slavedehumanization, white psychological parasitism, and the effects of such racism on black self-esteem.
    For Grimké and the women abolitionists, however, the crucial and overriding premise came with their declaration that “the people of color are not in any respect inferior to the white man, and that under favorable circumstances they would rise again to
the rank they formerly held.
” If the minds of the American slaves, “who are writhing under the lash of worse thanEgyptian taskmasters … are beclouded by ignorance and enfeebled by suffering,” we are assured that they “need only to have the same advantages which Europeans and their descendants have enjoyed, [in order] triumphantly to refute the unfounded calumny that they are inferior in powers of intellect, and less susceptible of mental improvement.” 25
    Given these assumptions, one can imagine a “modern” reformer proposing a massiveFreedman’s Bureau rehabilitation program, working to convey equal “advantages,” to accompany slave emancipation. In very limited ways, the British plan of “apprenticeship,” inaugurated in 1834 with slave emancipation, was
advertised
as a step in this direction of “preparation” for freedom. But, given America’s tradition of mistrusting government power (and before the era of Social Security or even support for high-school education), any widespread agreement that slave emancipation
required
an expensive program of rehabilitation would have been seen as a fatal barrier to emancipation. As it happened, Congress had to override PresidentAndrew Johnson’s veto in order to permit the unpopular Freedman’s Bureau to continue its valuable work for three more years. It is true that after theCivil War the federal government spent over $4 million in launching a huge grassroots campaign to reinter the bodies of some 303,536 Union soldiers who were left in the South and vulnerable to vengeful former Confederates. However, historianDrew Gilpin Faust stresses that thisreburial program “would have been unimaginable before the war” and, significantly, that theU.S. Colored Troops were especially targeted and segregated in death as well as in life. 26
    Like FrederickDouglass, Sarah Grimké saw that the best answer to the dilemma of slave dehumanization and black capability lay in what Douglass termed “the presentation of an industrious, enterprising, thrifty, and intelligentfree black population,” though Grimké put far greater emphasis on religious values like piety and humility.Religion reinforced the women abolitionists’ faith that local and private efforts could be effective and that