AS ENSLAVERS CALMLY discussed profits, losses, colonization, torture techniques, and the duties of Christian masters, they felt the spring drizzle of abolitionist tracts. By the summer of 1835, it had become a downpour—there were some 20,000 tracts in July alone, and over 1 million by the year’s end. Presenting slaveholders as evil, the literature challenged some racist ideas, such as the Black incapacity for freedom, yet at the same time produced other racist ideas, such as Africans being naturally religious and forgiving people, who always responded to whippings with loving compassion. The movement’s ubiquitous logo pictured a chained African, kneeling, raising his weak arms up in prayer to an unseen heavenly God or hovering White savior. Enslaved Africans were to wait for enslavers to sustain them, colonizationists to evacuate them, and abolitionists to free them.1
Enraged enslavers viewed the American Anti-Slavery Society’s postal campaign as an act of war. Raging to defend “our sister states” against abolitionists, White male thugs roamed northern Black neighborhoods in the summer and fall of 1835, looting and destroying homes, schools, and churches. They shouted about their mission to protect White women from the hypersexual Black-faced animals that, if freed, would ravage the exemplars of human purity and beauty. In fact, after 1830, young, single, and White working-class women earning wages outside the home were growing less dependent on men financially and becoming more sexually free. White male gang rapes of White women began to appear around the same time as the gang assaults by White men on Black people. Both were desperate attempts to maintain White male supremacy.2
The most fearless and astute defender of slavery to emerge in the wake of abolitionist pressures was Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the son of rich planters who had served as vice president under two presidents, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Even those who hated him could not deny his brilliance as a strategist and communicator. Calhoun shared his latest and greatest proslavery strategy on the Senate floor on February 6, 1837. Agitated by a Virginia senator’s earlier reference to slavery as a “lesser evil,” Calhoun rose to “take higher ground.” Once and for all, Calhoun wanted to bury that old antislavery Jeffersonian concept. “I hold that . . . the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two [races], is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good,” he said. Calhoun went on to explain that it was both a positive good for society and a positive good for subordinate Black people. Slavery, Calhoun suggested, was racial progress.3
In a way, William Lloyd Garrison respected Calhoun, preferring him and his bold proslavery candor over politicians like the timid Henry Clay, who still believed in gradual abolitionism and colonization. Nevertheless, he said Calhoun was “the champion of hell-born slavery”: “His conscience is seared with a hot iron, his heart is a piece of adamant.” For advocates of gradual emancipation, Garrison was a radical because of his belief in immediate emancipation, whereas Calhoun was a radical for his support of perpetual slavery. Both Garrison and Calhoun regarded the other as the fanatical Devil Incarnate, the destroyer of America, the decimator of all that was good in the world and the keeper of all that was evil. Garrison needed more courage than Calhoun. While Calhoun was the loudest voice in a national choir of public figures shouting down Garrison, Garrison was nearly alone among White public figures shouting down Calhoun.4
But neither Calhoun’s claims about slavery as a positive good nor the threat of roving White mobs could stop the growing appeal of abolitionism. Garrison had responded to a Boston mob in October 1835 with majestic nonviolent resistance, and his conduct had pushed thousands of northerners toward his personage and the cause of antislavery. As many as 300,000 had joined the movement by the decade’s end.
As new converts rushed into the movement in the late 1830s, abolitionist splits widened. There were the Garrisonians, who refused to participate in the “corrupt” political parties and churches, and the abolitionists, trying to bring the cause into these parties and churches. Splits had grown apparent among Black abolitionists as well. No longer would antiracists calmly listen to people call Black behavior a source of White prejudice. Peter Paul Simons, known for criticizing the Colored American editor for believing that biracial people had “the most talent,” became one of the first African Americans to publicly attack the idea of uplift suasion. Before the African Clarkson Society in New York City on April 23, 1839, Simons said the strategy reeked of a conspiracy that put “white men at the head of even our private affairs.” The “foolish thought of moral elevation” was “a conspicuous scarecrow.” Blacks were already a moral people, the antiracist said. “Show up to the world an African and you will show in truth morality.” Simon demanded protest, calling for “ACTION! ACTION! ACTION!”5
But antiracists had to contend against both powerful antislavery assimilationists and the even more powerful proslavery segregationists. Whig evangelist Calvin Colton demanded action against antislavery in Abolition a Sedition and A Voice from America to England in 1839. “There is no such thing as equality among men, nor can there be,” Colton wrote. “Neither God nor man ever instituted equality.” Science affirmed Colton’s view. There was a virtual consensus among scholars—from Cambridge in Massachusetts to Cambridge in England—that racial equality did not exist. The debate in 1839 still swirled around the origin of the races: monogenesis versus polygenesis.6
THE FOUNDER OF anthropology in the United States, Dr. Samuel Morton, jumped into the origins debate on September 1, 1839, when he published Crania Americana. He had made use of his famous “American Golgotha” at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, the world’s largest collection of human skulls. Morton wanted to give scholars an objective tool for distinguishing the races: mathematical comparative anatomy. He had made painstaking measurements of the “mean internal capacity” of nearly one hundred skulls in cubic inches. Finding that the skulls from the “Caucasian Race” measured out the largest in that tiny sample, Morton concluded that Whites had “the highest intellectual endowments” of all the races. He relied on an incorrect assumption, however: the bigger the skull, the bigger the intellect of the person.7
Loving reviews from distinguished medical journals and scientists came pouring into Philadelphia about Morton’s “immense body of facts.” Not from everyone, though. German Friedrich Tiedemann’s skull measurements did not match Morton’s hierarchy. So Tiedemann concluded there was racial equality. Like the Germantown petitioners in the 1600s, and John Woolman in the 1700s, Tiedemann showed that racists were never simply products of their time. Although most scholars made the easy, popular, professionally rewarding choice of racism, some did not. Some made the hard, unpopular choice of antiracism.8
One of the first major scientific controversies in the United States began with what seemed like a simple observation. Harvard-trained, antislavery psychiatrist Edward Jarvis reviewed data from the 1840 US Census and found that northern free Blacks were about ten times more likely to have been classified as insane than enslaved southern Blacks. On September 21, 1842, he published his findings in the New England Journal of Medicine, which was and remains the nation’s leading medical journal. Slavery must have had “a wonderful influence upon the development of the moral faculties and the intellectual powers” of Black people, Jarvis ascertained.9
A month later, in the same journal, someone anonymously published another purportedly scientific study, “Vital Statistics of Negroes and Mulattoes.” Biracial people had shorter life spans than Whites and “pure Africans,” the census apparently also showed. The writer called for an investigation into “the cause of such momentous effects.” Dr. Josiah C. Nott of Mobile, Alabama, came to the rescue in the American Journal of Medical Science in 1843. In “The Mulatto—A Hybrid,” the distinguished surgeon contended that biracial women were “bad breeders,” because they were the product of “two distinct species,” the same way the mule was “from the horse and the ass.” Nott’s contention was as outrageous as the insanity figures, but scientists reproduced it.10
When Jarvis looked more closely at the 1840 census data, he found errors everywhere. Some northern towns reported more Black lunatics than Black residents. Jarvis and the American Statistical Association asked the US government to correct the census. On February 26, 1844, the House of Representatives asked Secretary of State Abel Upshur to investigate. He never had the opportunity. Two days later, Upshur was among the six people killed on the warship USS Princeton. President John Tyler named none other than John C. Calhoun as Upshur’s replacement. Calhoun saw two matters on Upshur’s desk: the census issue and an antislavery letter from the British foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen. The Brit expressed hope for universal emancipation and a free and independent Texas.11
Slaveholders’ pursuit of Texas’s annexation as a slave state was guiding the 1844 election. Tennessee slaveholder James K. Polk, a Democrat, narrowly defeated Whig Henry Clay, who lost swing votes to James Birney of the new antislavery Liberty Party. Refusing to vote, Garrison leaned on the American Anti-Slavery Society to adopt a new slogan: “NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS!” He was trying—and failing—to stop the drift of the movement toward politics. Antislavery voting blocs had arisen in the 1840s. They were sending antislavery congressmen to Washington—from John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts to Joshua Reed Giddings of Ohio, and soon Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Owen Lovejoy of Ohio, and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. These congressmen were openly debating slavery and emancipation after 1840, to the horror of John C. Calhoun.12
In April 1844, months after withdrawing his own presidential candidacy, Secretary Calhoun informed the British foreign secretary that the treaty of annexation was a done deal. Slavery in Texas was a concern of neither England nor the US government. The United States must not emancipate its slaves because, as the census had proved, “the condition of the African” was worse in freedom than in slavery.
Needing more data to defend US slavery before Western Europe, Calhoun sought out the latest scientific information on the races. He summoned pioneering Egyptologist George R. Gliddon, who had just arrived in Washington as part of his national speaking tour on the wonders of ancient “White” Egypt. Gliddon sent Calhoun copies of Morton’s Crania Americana and Morton’s newest, acclaimed bombshell, Crania Aegyptiaca, which depicted ancient Egypt as a land of Caucasian rulers, Hebrews, and Black slaves. Morton’s research, Gliddon added in a letter to Calhoun, proved that “Negro-Races” had always “been Servants and Slaves, always distinct from, and subject to, the Caucasian, in the remotest times.” Bolstered by Gliddon’s “facts,” Calhoun defended American domestic policy before antislavery Europe. The “facts” of the 1840 census were never corrected—and slavery’s apologists never stopped wielding its “unquestionable” proof of slavery’s positive good. They continued to assert that slavery brought racial progress—almost certainly knowing that this proof was untrue. “It is too good a thing for our politicians to give [up],” a Georgia congressman reportedly confessed. On the eve of the Civil War, a Unitarian clergyman said it best: “It was the census that was insane, and not the colored people.”13
THE FIRM POLITICAL and scientific support for slavery made it all the more difficult for the abolitionists to change the minds of the consumers of slavery’s “positive good.” Would the voice of a runaway, expressing his or her own horrific experience, be more convincing? In 1841, William Lloyd Garrison spent three joyous days with abolitionists on the nearby island of Nantucket. As the August 11 session came to a close, a tall twenty-three-year-old runaway mustered the courage to request the floor. This was the first time many White abolitionists had ever heard a runaway share his experience of the grueling trek from slavery to freedom. Impressed, the Massachusetts Antislavery Society (MAS) offered Frederick Douglass a job as a traveling speaker. Douglass then emerged as America’s newest Black exhibit. He was introduced to audiences as a “chattel,” a “thing,” a “piece of southern property,” before he shared the brutality of slavery. Though he understood the strategy of shocking White Americans into antislavery, Douglass grew to dislike the regular dehumanization. Whether enslaved or free, Black people were people. Although their enslavers tried, they had never been reduced to things. Their humanity had never been eliminated—a humanity that made them equal to people the world over, even in their chains. Douglass was and always had been a man, and he wanted to be introduced as such.
Douglass also grew tired of merely telling his story over and over again. He had honed his speaking ability and developed his own ideas. Whenever he veered off script into his philosophy, he heard a whisper: “Tell your story, Frederick.” Afterward, White abolitionists would say to him, “Give us the facts, we will take care of the philosophy.” And do not sound like that when you give the facts: “Have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not; ’tis not best that you seem too learned.” Douglass knew exactly why they said that. Usually, minutes into his speeches, Douglass could hear the crowd grumbling, “He’s never been a slave.” And that reaction made sense. Racist abolitionists spoke endlessly about how slavery had made people into brutes. Douglass was clearly no brute.14
When Douglass was finally able to tell his story and philosophy in full in his own words, it offered perhaps the most compelling counterweight yet to the 1840 census and the positive good theory. In June 1845, Garrison’s printing office published The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. In five months, 4,500 copies were sold, and in the next five years, 30,000. The gripping best seller garnered Douglass international prestige and forced thousands of readers to come to grips with the brutality of slavery and the human desire of Black people to be free. No other piece of antislavery literature had such a profound effect. Douglass’s Narrative opened the door to a series of slave narratives. For anyone who had the courage to look, they showed the absolute falsity of the notion that enslavement was good for Black people.
William Lloyd Garrison penned the preface to Douglass’s 1845 Narrative. Enslavement had “degraded” Black people “in the scale of humanity,” Garrison claimed. “Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind.” Though starting at different places and taking different conceptual routes, Garrison kept arriving in the same racist place as his enslaving enemies—subhuman Black inferiority. But if you let Garrison tell it in Douglass’s preface, antislavery had “wholly confounded complexional differences.” Garrison chose not to highlight the chilling physical battle with a slave-breaker that thrust Douglass on his freedom course. Garrison enjoyed presenting two types of Black people: degraded or excelling. He hoped the narrative elicited White “sympathy” and “untiring” efforts “to break every yoke.” The narrative did do that, and the many slave narratives that followed it attracted White antislavery sympathy, too, especially in New England and Old England. But these narratives did not attract nearly as much White antiracist sympathy. After all, Garrison had packaged the book in his assimilationist idea of the enslaved or free African as actually subpar, someone “capable of high attainments as an intellectual and moral being—needing nothing but a comparatively small amount of cultivation to make him an ornament to society and a blessing to his race.”15
Garrison’s own preface—though powerfully persuasive, as his readers expected—was a compellingly racist counterweight to Douglass’s Narrative. Another compelling counterweight was Alabama surgeon Josiah Nott’s Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races in 1845. He had moved from racist biracial theory to polygenesis, once again using the faulty census data as evidence. As a separate species, “nature has endowed” Black people “with an inferior organization, and all the powers of earth cannot elevate them above their destiny.” Nott’s polygenesis had become “not only the science of the age,” declared one observer, but also “an America science.” Popular northern children’s books were speaking of the “capacity of the cranium.” Best-selling New England author Samuel Goodrich wrote, in The World and Its Inhabitants, that “Ethiopians” ranked “decidedly lowest in the intellectual scale.”16
Douglass’s Narrative had to contend with the rapidly changing news media as well. In early 1846, the newly formed Associated Press used the newly invented telegraph to become the nation’s principal filter and supplier of news. The rapid speed of transmission and monopoly pricing encouraged shorter and simpler stories that told and did not explain—that sensationalized and did not nuance, that recycled and did not trash stereotypes or the status quo. News dispatches reinforcing racist ideas met these demands. In January 1846, New Orleans resident James D. B. De Bow met the demand for a powerful homegrown southern voice, launching De Bow’s Review. It struggled early on, but by the 1850s it had become the preeminent page of southern thought—the proslavery, segregationist counterpoint to the antislavery, assimilationist The Liberator.17
Regular contributors drove the expansion of De Bow’s Review, writers like Louisiana physician Samuel A. Cartwright, a former student of Benjamin Rush. Cartwright wrote about healthy Black captives laboring productively and loving enslavement. Whenever they resisted on the plantation, Cartwright wrote in 1851, they were suffering from what he called dysesthesia. “Nearly all” free Blacks were suffering from this disease, because they did not have “some white person” to “take care of them.” When enslaved Blacks ran away, they were suffering from insanity, from what he called drapetomania. “They have only to be . . . treated like children,” Cartwright told slaveholders, “to prevent and cure them” of this insane desire to run away.18
Southern medical experiments found an airing in De Bow’s Review. Researchers routinely used Black subjects. In 1845, Alabama’s J. Marion Sims horrifically started experimenting on the vaginas of eleven enslaved women for a procedure to heal a complication of childbirth called vesicovaginal fistula. The procedures were “not painful enough to justify the trouble” of anesthesia, he said. It was a racist idea to justify his cruelty, not something Sims truly knew from his experiments. “Lucy’s agony was extreme,” Sims later noted in his memoir. After a marathon of surgeries into the early 1850s—one woman, Anarcha, suffered under his knife thirty times—Sims perfected the procedure for curing the fistula. Anesthesia in hand, Sims started healing White victims, moved to New York, built the first woman’s hospital, and fathered American gynecology. A massive bronze and granite monument dedicated to him—the first US statue depicting a physician—now sits at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street, across from the Academy of Medicine.19
VULNERABLE NOW TO recapture by his former master as a publicly known runaway, Frederick Douglass embarked in 1845 on an extended lecture tour in Great Britain. John O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, was irate that the “black vagabond Douglass” was spending “his time in England propagating his filthy lies against the United States.” Douglass sent a crushing reply. Like other followers of national politics in America, Douglass probably knew O’Sullivan as a rabid fan of the annexation of Texas (and all points west). Texas had been admitted as a slave state on December 29, 1845. Expansionists—and especially slavery’s expansionists—were clamoring for more: for California, for New Mexico, for Oregon. As the first copies of the Narrative went out, O’Sullivan wrote of White Americans’ “manifest destiny . . . to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us.”20
In May 1846, President James K. Polk ordered troops over the disputed Texas boundary. When Mexican troops defended themselves, Polk painted Mexicans as the aggressors and publicized his war cause. The ploy worked. The fight against Mexico helped rally North and South alike to the cause of national expansion. But the question of whether the expansion of the nation would mean an expansion of slavery divided northerners and southerners. In August 1846, Democratic representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania stapled onto an appropriations bill a clause barring slavery in any territory Polk obtained from the Mexican-American War. Wilmot represented the newest political force in the United States: the antislavery, anti-Black Free-Soil movement. What Polk called “foolish,” what historians call the Wilmot Proviso, what Wilmot called the “white man’s proviso,” never passed.21
Over the years, William Lloyd Garrison and John C. Calhoun had done their best to polarize the United States into rival camps: those favoring immediate emancipation versus those insisting on permanent slavery. The colonizationists’ middle ground of gradual emancipation had capsized by the late 1830s. In 1846, the new Free Soilers rebuilt that middle ground, primarily, but not exclusively, in the North. When Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works placed enslaved Blacks in skilled positions to cut labor costs, White workers protested. In the only protracted urban industrial strike in the pre–Civil War South, they demanded pay raises and the removal of “the negroes” from skilled work. If the striking ironworkers thought enslavers really cared more about racism than profit, or that they would not abandon, out of self-interest, their promotions of a unified White masculinity, then they were in for a long and tortured lesson about power and profit and propaganda. Richmond elites banded together. They viewed the anti-Black strikers as being equivalent to abolitionists because they were trying to prevent them “from making use of slave labor,” as the local newspaper cried. In the end, the White strikers were fired.22
THE “SLAVE POWER” had declined in the past ten years, leading to a “gradual abatement of the prejudice which we have been deploring,” William Lloyd Garrison wrote in The Liberator in the summer of 1847. But it remained a “disgusting fact, that they who cannot tolerate the company or presence of educated and refined colored men, are quite willing to be surrounded by ignorant and imbruted slaves, and never think of objecting to the closest contact with them, on account of their complexion! The more of such the better!” Though Garrison was constrained by the bigoted idea of “ignorant and imbruted slaves,” and was completely wrong that the western-marching slave power had declined, he had a point. “It is only as they are free, educated, enlightened, that they become a nuisance,” he wrote. He realized why uplift suasion was unworkable, but nothing would shake his faith in the strategy.23
When General Zachary Taylor began his tenure as the twelfth US president in 1849, Free Soilers were demanding slavery’s restriction; abolitionists were demanding the closure of the slave market in Washington, DC; and enslavers were demanding the expansion of slavery and a stricter fugitive slave law to derail the Underground Railroad and its courageous conductors, such as Harriet “Moses” Tubman. Henry Clay, the old architect of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, came out of the gloom of his failed presidential runs to engineer a “reunion of the Union.” In January 1850, he proposed satisfying enslavers by denying Congress jurisdiction over the domestic slave trade and instituting a stronger Fugitive Slave Act. To satisfy antislavery or Free Soil northerners, slave trading would be banned in the nation’s capital, and California would be admitted to the Union as a free state. Admitting California as a free state gave the balance of power to the North. And with that power, the North could eradicate slavery. Calhoun and teeming numbers of southerners balked at submitting, or even at compromising for a second. Calhoun fumed, and he mustered the forces of secession.24
In March 1850, a horde of northern scientists trotted onto Calhoun’s turf to attend the third meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Charleston. Samuel Morton, Josiah C. Nott, and Harvard polygenesist Louis Agassiz were some of the association’s first members. Charleston prided itself on its nationally lauded scientists, its natural history museum, and a medical school that boasted plenty of available cadavers and “interesting cases.” Weeks before the conference, Charleston’s own John Bachman, the undisputed king of southern Lutherans, issued The Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race and an article in the highly respectable Charleston Medical Journal. Noah’s son Shem was the “parent of the Caucasian race—the progenitor of . . . our Savior.” Ham was the parent of Africans, whose “whole history” displayed an inability to self-govern. Bachman’s monogenesis made a controversial splash at the meeting. But northern and southern minds were made up for polygenesis in 1850.25
Louis Agassiz and Josiah Nott came and gave their papers on polygenesis on March 15, 1850. Philadelphian Peter A. Browne, who helped found the science-oriented Franklin Institute in honor of Benjamin Franklin, presented his comparative study of human hair. Not far from the world’s largest collections of skulls, Browne showed off the world’s largest collection of hair, a collection he studied to pen The Classification of Mankind, By the Hair and Wool of Their Heads in 1850. Since Whites had “hair” and Blacks “wool,” Browne had “no hesitancy in pronouncing that they “belong[ed] to two distinct species.” As for the hair properties, Browne declared that “the hair of the white man is more perfect than that of the negro.” According to Browne’s study, in which he deemed Blacks a separate and inferior animal-like species, straight hair was “good hair” and the “matted” hair of African people was bad. But he was hardly saying something new. So many Black people, let alone White people, had consumed this assimilationist idea that in 1859 an Anglo-African Magazine writer complained of Black parents teaching their children “that he or she is pretty, just in proportion as the features approximate to the Anglo-Saxon standard.” Black parents must, the writer pleaded, stop characterizing straight hair as “good hair” or Anglo-Saxon features as “good features.”26
Proud of its scientists, the city of Charleston picked up the tab for the AAAS meeting and the publication of the proceedings. Entire families in all of their gentility attended the sessions. The meeting diverted them from rapid-fire telegraphic news reports on the frenzied debate over the Compromise of 1850. The AAAS conference in the home of proslavery thought demonstrated the crossroads of American science and politics. As enslavers angrily followed northern political developments, Charleston’s scientists eagerly followed northern scientific developments, especially the development of polygenesis as the mainstream of racial science.
Days after the AAAS conference ended in Charleston, South Carolina’s “town bell” toiled “with sad news.” After a long battle with tuberculosis, John C. Calhoun died on March 31, 1850. The hard-lined anti-secessionist President Taylor died months later. Millard Fillmore, an intuitive compromiser, took the presidential office in the aftershock of the deaths of these two rigid giants. By September, Henry Clay’s Compromise of 1850 had passed. “There is . . . peace,” Clay happily announced. “I believe it is permanent.”27
The compromise’s signature measure, the Fugitive Slave Act, handed enslavers octopus powers, allowing their tentacles to extend to the North. The Act criminalized abettors of fugitives, provided northerners incentives to capture them, and denied captured Blacks a jury trial, opening the door to mass kidnappings. To William Lloyd Garrison, the act was “so coldblooded, so inhuman and so atrocious, that Satan himself would blush to claim paternity to it.”28