Chronicles of the Crusaders
As a child in Cuba, Martí had witnessed the savagery of a flogging and had seen a slave’s body swinging from a tree. Years later he vividly described the impact of these scenes in poem XXX of Versos sencillos. In Martí’s verses the life of a slave is a tempest. Lightning streaks the sky like a bloody lash, just as the whip draws blood on a slave’s back. Numbed bodies unloaded from the holds of ships march along in chains to the fetid and crowded slave quarters. And the end of the journey is an untimely death—a man hung from a ceibo tree. The child recoils from the scene and swears to avenge the crime. This is the essential bond between Martí and U.S. abolitionists and is the passionate quest for justice that Martí appreciated when he referred in an 1885 essay to “the most noble crusade mankind has ever witnessed” (13: 90). His allusion was to the abolition campaign launched in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century by leaders such as William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Wendell Phillips, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, opponents of slavery in whom Martí discovered the willingness to sacrifice for a cause, like his own willingness to sacrifice for Cuba. He noted that many of them were drawn to their mission by having witnessed scenes of suffering such as he had experienced as a boy in the Cuban countryside, and he saw in their crusade a redeeming aspect of U.S. life.
Accounts of U.S. slavery and descriptions of the crusading spirit of the American abolitionists fill many pages of Martí’s chronicles. He offered praise for poets who put antislavery sentiments in their verses, placed famous abolitionist orators on pedestals of justice, and hailed Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the “voice of tears.” His essays sent to newspapers in Mexico and South America between 1881 and 1892 brought the topic of U.S. abolitionism to the attention of Latin American readers and provided an early transnational perspective on slavery.
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, freeing the slaves in the South, was recounted by Martí as a dramatic event, slavery terminated by the stroke of a pen (9: 368). He did not note that in the United States definitive abolition came two years later by a Constitutional amendment. Even though Martí, in the journal Patria, proclaimed that Cuban slaves were freed in 1869, when the island’s patriots declared independence (5: 325), in fact neither goal was achieved until much later. The struggle for the island’s independence suffered setbacks and interventions, and in colonial Cuba slavery limped to an end with no dramatic closure. The Moret law of 1870 gave freedom to newborns; a second step called the patronato provided a period of apprenticeship for liberated slaves in 1880; and in 1886 slavery in Cuba was finally over.
In a chronicle sent to a Buenos Aires newspaper in 1883, Martí made a point of describing what life was like for slaves before Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation. In it he offered a sobering depiction of a slave sale in the United States: “‘¡Aquí, aquí: a la plataforma! ¡500 me dan por este buen negrazo! Come poco y trabaja mucho, y ya sabe lo que es mordida de perro’: ¡y a esto seguía,—como para prueba de los méritos del esclavo que se remataba,—un latigazo! ‘Aquí, aquí: ¡a la plataforma! ¡ésta es la linda Adelina, que se ve que es muy linda y tiene 18 años: le vendimos el hijo y está sola! ¿Quién me da 900 por la linda Adelina?’” (9: 368). This example is significant because Martí never gave a parallel description of a slave sale in Cuba. The source is an account or accounts in the U.S. press. A February 17, 1883, article in the New York Times about abolitionist John Swinton’s lecture on slavery at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church covered Swinton’s recollection of days spent among slaveholders in South Carolina and his presence at a slave auction in Columbia:
There was keen competition for the stalwart “likely nigger,” slow bidding and a small price for the old worn-out slave whose furrowed face and crippled form told the story of his hard life, but the last of the slaves sold was “Adeline,” a comely mulatto of 18 years who clasped in her arms a pale-faced blue-eyed babe. She was recommended as a good house maid and an excellent seamstress, but her sex and youthful attractiveness were subjects for the auctioneer’s chief consideration in terms too vile and brutal for repetition.1
Reporting on slavery and its demise as a part of the North American experience allowed Martí a safe distance from which to rail against inequality. He could ignore the reality that Cuban slaves had not actually won their freedom in 1869 and that racial tensions continued in the homeland, all the while using U.S. experiences to expose the evils of slavery. It allowed him to show that slaves were treated as property while keeping at bay the accounts of slave sales in the Havana of his childhood and youth. One wonders if he ever read or saw the notices of sale that were published in Cuba. Martí’s detailed depictions of U.S. abolitionist activities permitted a reckoning with the evils of slavery that did not point directly at Cuba and yet linked the noble cause to Martí’s visions of a free homeland where blacks and whites would live in harmony.
Finally, a comparison of the New York Times article and Martí’s version in Spanish reveals his reluctance to divulge the sexual abuses inherent in master and slave relations. There is no mention in Martí’s account of the blue-eyed baby fathered by a white man, only the suggestion that the young slave woman’s good looks might hasten the sale.
In Martí’s panorama of abolitionists, martyrs, pastors, orators, ex-slaves, and authors, all had a role to play. In some instances just a few lines of biography sufficed; at other times the Cuban chronicler dedicated an entire article or section to one of the champions. What held true throughout was that Martí added his own voice to the reporting, joining in righteous indignation over abuses and rejoicing in the triumphs of justice and moral victories. Twelve important figures in the abolition movement appeared in Marti’s writings: Henry Ward Beecher, Elijah Lovejoy, John Brown, William Ellery Channing, John Swinton, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Henry Garnet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Greenleaf Whittier, and William Cullen Bryant.2
In Cuba emancipation overlapped with struggles for political independence, whereas in the United States, as in England, Protestant churches drove the clamor for abolition. Martí underscored the role of these churches and their preachers in American abolitionism in many ways. He named and described churches where assemblies took place, noted sermons delivered on behalf of freedom for slaves, and briefly referenced Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing, who, in 1837, had orchestrated an event in Boston to condemn the murder of abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy. Foremost among the religious profiles were two members of the Beecher family, Henry Ward and Harriet Beecher Stowe, both known for their ardent antislavery stance. Martí cited Henry Ward Beecher as an acclaimed clergyman in Brooklyn and described Harriet, called “la Beecher Stowe,” as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.3
Protestant Protests
When Henry Ward Beecher died on March 8, 1887, New York newspapers devoted many columns to his life and work, and magazines recalled his intensity and his fervor. These print accounts provided much of the material for Martí’s admiring sketch of the famous abolitionist preacher (13: 31–43). Although the nine-page Beecher profile was not published in Martí’s lifetime, it clearly held importance for the author since he included it in the works he wished to be preserved for posterity as part of his “literary testament.” He listed the Beecher profile under the category of notable North Americans (13: 150).
In “Henry Ward Beecher—His life and oratory,” Martí gave an account of the pastor’s religious career, his close identification with nature, and his family life. He mentioned Beecher’s defense of the Union cause in England, aimed at countering British sympathies with the South; touched on the scandal Beecher suffered when he was accused of adultery with one of his parishioners; and described the triumphal end of the clergyman’s career (13: 31–42). Martí summed up Beecher’s contributions with words that clearly approved of the abolitionist’s righteous stance and linked slavery’s demise to an armed struggle: “He was great because he fearlessly chastened those he deemed evil or cowardly and because he made his tongue a hymn, his church a barracks, and his son a soldier in order to end slavery” (13: 43).
Harriet Beecher Stowe appeared primarily in Martí’s narrative as the author of a landmark antislavery novel, a work he labeled “the voice of tears” (10: 321). Very likely, Martí knew of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from boyhood days in Cuba, when he followed the events of the U.S. Civil War. He made reference to the novel’s fame and the performances of the story in American theaters in his early chronicles about North American life.
Martí never gave an analysis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin but insisted that it was one of the most important books of its time and declared that its popularity had helped to accelerate the abolition of slavery (23: 125). According to the Cuban reporter, Harriet Beecher Stowe used neither exaggeration nor forced description and was capable of restraining her anger while presenting the very real sufferings of her characters, all of which gave the novel greater merit (23: 125). Martí proclaimed that the book’s heroes were alive in the memory of English and American readers but did not elaborate further (23: 125). There was no mention of Simon Legree, the ferocious master, or of Eliza fleeing the slave catchers over a frozen river with babe in arms, or of the docile nature of Uncle Tom. Nonetheless, in writing of abolitionist texts, the Cuban clearly counted Stowe as a significant voice, calling her book “the unforgettable novel that shed light on the dark heart of slavery” (10: 94).
A distinctive note in the characterizations of Stowe was her association, in Martí’s writing, with Helen Hunt Jackson, who championed the cause of American Indians. Martí was absorbed by Jackson’s novel Ramona and translated it into Spanish at his own expense. He consistently linked Ramona and Uncle Tom’s Cabin as works of conscience produced by women authors with fervent humanitarian aims.
Another abolitionist who came to life in Martí’s pages within a religious context was John Swinton, a Scottish-born orator lauded for his righteous ire, his prophet’s tongue, and his moral stance in regard to slavery. Martí’s Swinton was a man nourished by Biblical traditions who delivered his denunciations of slavery and slaveholders in a strong and robust voice. Swinton’s speech to an assembly of blacks gathered in a beautiful Protestant church in New York presented the orator’s recounting of pre-emancipation days: of tribulations and triumphs, an era of both slave catchers and defenders of liberty. In his summation, Martí labeled Swinton a forthright and sincere person of good conscience (9: 368–69).
Although his name is not widely recognized today, Elijah Parish Lovejoy figured prominently in U.S. abolitionism. The Presbyterian pastor joined the antislavery ranks after seeing the remains of a slave burned to death in Missouri in 1836. The revulsion produced by the sight of a blackened and mutilated body stirred Lovejoy to vigorously campaign against slavery and the accompanying mob violence that targeted blacks. After settling in Illinois, where he published strident abolitionist editorials, Lovejoy endured both threats and physical attacks. Finally, on November 7, 1837, he was murdered by an unruly mob incensed by his abolitionist press and the ideals it espoused. His sacrifice on behalf of freedom of the press and freedom for slaves made Lovejoy a martyr, motivated his followers, and drew dramatic attention to abolitionism.
After Lovejoy’s death, sympathizers in Boston held a public event to denounce the pastor’s assassins, and Wendell Phillips gave the impassioned speech that launched his career as an abolitionist orator. Martí’s brief comment on Lovejoy appeared in the context of articles dedicated to Wendell Phillips for La América of New York and La Nación of Buenos Aires (13: 57 and 13: 64), and although it was concise, just a few lines, the tribute to Lovejoy included Martí’s defining endorsement of his impact: “he died at the foot of his printing press. Who said that our era cannot create a poem?” (13: 64).
Martí’s readers also learned about John Brown, who, like Lovejoy, lost his life to the antislavery cause. The execution of John Brown in December 1859, and the dramatic events that led to his seizure and sentencing, became part of the national consciousness, remembered in poems, songs, and films. The bold attack on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry was covered extensively during the time that Martí lived in the United States. To give just one example: in 1883 the Century Magazine published two lengthy articles about the raid.
John Brown was raised in a religious family with strong abolitionist beliefs, and he opposed slavery because of his upbringing. But he was also moved to action because as a twelve-year-old he witnessed the brutal beating of a slave boy. In 1847 he met former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and by 1855 Brown, along with his sons, had begun a fight against slave-owners in the state of Kansas. When Brown returned east to organize an antislavery army, his goal at Harpers Ferry was to capture the arsenal’s munitions and distribute them to slaves in the South. The daring raid failed, many of Brown’s men were killed in the fight with federal troops, and Brown himself was captured and hanged.
Public reaction to Brown’s militancy varied greatly in the aftermath of his arrest. While many of the Northern press accounts were negative, the 1860 biography of Brown by James Redpath was supportive and included in its dedication the testimonies of both Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson on behalf of Brown.4 Although Martí made no obvious allusion to the crucial role of the Transcendentalists, especially Thoreau and Emerson’s defense of Brown, their endorsements were in accord with the Cuban writer’s own sympathies. Martí’s descriptions of the furor in the North over fugitive slaves were emphatic: “The fire of martyrs and apostles is reborn. The ardor of generous souls spreads to the apathetic. John Brown offers himself in sacrifice and converts words into deeds. From the gallows on which he died … bursts forth an army …” (13: 91). Martí’s words resonate with the sentiments expressed in Emerson’s influential defense of Brown in November 1859. According to Emerson, Brown was: “That new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death,—the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross” (Reynolds 366).
In Martí’s eyes, John Brown was right, and his sacrifice was laudable (11: 207). The Cuban drew a sharp contrast between the abolitionist’s noble instincts and the base interests that the fiery crusader had opposed (11: 30). He linked Brown’s efforts to the triumph of the North (10: 190–91) and labeled Brown “a madman made of stars” (10: 446). This was a distinctly favorable designation since Martí, throughout his writing, associated those he most esteemed with the word star.
Later, Martí placed Brown in the context of the Haymarket trials, when the falsely accused anarchist workers were sentenced to be hanged. After informing his readers about the deaths of the Chicago anarchists on the gallows, the chronicler added: “Not since the days of the War of Secession and the tragic days when John Brown was executed as a criminal for attempting at Harpers Ferry what the nation, spurred by his bravery, later undertook in triumph, has the United States taken such interest in a scaffold” (11: 334). Finally, Martí included in his dispatches a dramatic incident recounted by orator and abolitionist John Swinton: “the moment in which, on his way to be hanged, John Brown stopped to embrace a Negro child” (9: 368–69). The account, based on a New York Tribune piece from 1859 about John Brown’s trial, is apocryphal but was retold in a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier in the same year and portrayed in an 1884 painting by Thomas Hovenden. Martí passed along the popular but fictitious description to his readers with the declaration that remembering such events made one yearn to undertake great deeds (9: 368–69).
FIGURE 5. The Last Moments of John Brown. By Thomas Hovenden. By permission of the West Virginia State Archives, Boyd D. Stutler Collection.
Martí, who had suffered hard labor as a young man in Cuba and who made many personal sacrifices for his ideals, identified with Lovejoy and John Brown. Like them he had experienced a visceral reaction to the brutality of slavery, and like them he believed that the abolition movement required strong words, a call to arms, and a willingness to sacrifice. Through his choice of words, with Brown linked to star and Lovejoy’s martyrdom described as a poem, Martí bestowed signal praise on these two abolitionists who died for their beliefs.
Wendell Phillips: The Soul of Abolitionism
Wendell Phillips occupied a privileged place among Martí’s profiles of prominent Americans. When Martí dictated the disposition of his writings in what is known as his literary testament, the sketch of Phillips (along with Emerson, Beecher, [Peter] Cooper, Grant, Sheridan, and Whitman) was one of the few included in the list of Americans (1: 26). Additionally Martí had a portrait of Phillips in his New York City office and decreed that the portrait should be given to Tomás Estrada Palma, an exiled Cuban who ran a school in upstate New York and who later became Cuba’s first president (1: 27). A picture of Phillips was published as a part of Martí’s tribute to the abolitionist in his February 1884 article for La América.
When Phillips died in 1884, Martí took up the topic with trembling hand: “Earth gives forth craters; the human species creates orators. They are born of great agony, great danger or great infamy” (13: 57). With these words Martí introduced Wendell Phillips to his readers, emphasizing the power of righteous indignation and the forces that produce it. Perhaps consciously or unconsciously, he identified with Phillips and the great infamy that had led the abolitionist to take up the cause.
FIGURE 6. Wendell Phillips in La América. By permission of the Centro de Estudios Martianos, Havana.
Acclaimed critic Cintio Vitier, in his analysis of form in Martí’s writing, makes a clear connection between Martí and Phillips. Vitier, in his book Vida y Obra del Apóstol José Martí, says of Martí: “His speeches, a mixture of immense spaces and aphoristic sentences, have the free form of a flame” (82). And, Vitier continues, “this ardor, of course, is not an end in itself but seeks to set men ablaze with apostolic fire, because it bursts forth from the volcanic source of a historic tremor and from the affront to human dignity …” (83). The critic follows these comments on Martí’s style with the opening line of the essay on Wendell Phillips (83).
In Martí’s presentation of the antislavery campaign in the United States, Phillips is nothing less than a cornerstone; he is connected to the stirrings of a national consciousness about race in the years following independence as well as to the labor struggles of the 1880s. In an 1884 article for La Nación of Buenos Aires about the origins of the Republican Party, Martí quoted in translation the famous opening words of the Declaration of Independence: “Consideramos como la evidencia misma que todos los hombres son iguales” (10: 93), and then explained why abolitionists like Phillips saw a contradiction between the Declaration of Independence and the constitution. The former said that all men were equal, while the latter made provisions for slavery and was thus a “pact with hell” (10: 93). Martí explained that this is why Phillips had renounced the U.S. Constitution. Martí also invoked Phillips in his account of the trial and sentencing of the Chicago anarchists in 1886, depicting him as a symbol of national righteousness in support of a cause—abolitionism—in contrast to the absence of public outcry on behalf of the Haymarket workers (11: 57).
When Phillips died at the beginning of 1884, the nation heard a notable eulogy to the antislavery crusader offered by distinguished orator George William Curtis. Martí felt called to a similar task and in February 1884 composed two lofty appraisals of Phillips for the readers of La América and La Nación, declaring that the abolitionist orator fully merited the acclaim he had received because “if his words were golden his deeds shone even more brightly” (13: 55). Martí’s tributes to Phillips encompassed the beginnings of his antislavery campaign, the history of his tireless struggle, and comments on his public speaking and style. The essay for La América gave salient points about the famous antislavery champion: he was an essential voice in U.S. abolitionism; his career as crusader shared historical moments with John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison; he was bound to his ideals; his message always hit the mark; he portrayed slavery as a monster; and he suffered insults and injury but never surrendered. The essay described Phillips as an eagle harassed by sparrows, declared that his character embraced those most in need, and praised the fact that “he walked alongside the humble” (13: 53–62).
The sketch sent to the Buenos Aires newspaper was vintage Martí, and he praised in the abolitionist qualities that he aspired to himself. Phillips was called “an illustrious spokesman for the poor,” “a knight of justice,” “a hero,” and “an apostle” (13: 63). Martí, always keen to recognize and applaud sacrifices, listed those endured by Phillips in his three decades of antislavery campaigning: He had been mocked and jeered, insulted in the street, labeled a traitor, and attacked by slaveholders (13: 65). Martí recounted that after Phillips saw William Lloyd Garrison bound and pulled through the streets of Boston by an angry proslavery mob, he had cast his lot with the abolitionists (13: 66). The essay commends Phillips’s “heroic campaign” and “prophetic voice” and praises how in his impatience with evil he brandished a “whip of fire” (13: 67). The chronicles conferred honor and esteem on an orator who, like Martí himself, fought principally with an arsenal of words (13: 69).5
Martí’s description of a New York labor parade in September 1884 provided an example of Phillips’s legacy among African Americans, when black workingmen, freed of the chains of servitude, honored one who had been a champion on their behalf. Martí painted the scene with these words: “Three hundred blacks as beautiful as a blessing … it stirs the soul to see them, and they are likewise filled with emotion…. These three hundred make up the ‘Wendell Phillips’ Association and march underneath a banner that proclaims: ‘No more caste systems’” (10: 86). He adds, “So many hurrahs are shouted out as the marchers go by that if hurrahs were doves it would be impossible to see the sky” (10: 86).6
William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolitionist Press
William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) emerged in Martí’s writing as a leading figure in the U.S. antislavery campaigns of the first third of the nineteenth century, a man who founded the abolitionist tract Liberator in 1831 and who denounced any and all who tolerated or gave support to slaveholding (13: 90). Martí recorded that Garrison had fiercely advocated for the precepts of freedom and nourished the creation of a new political entity, the Liberty Party, to counter slavery. In his expansive essay on Ulysses S. Grant, the admiring Cuban praised those who had elected Lincoln and carried out the abolitionist crusade. He contrasted their aims with those of crusaders of other eras whose principal motivations were a desire to gain heaven or to indulge a love of adventure. The Americans, said Martí, had sacrificed the tranquility of their homes in a period of peace and prosperity in order to free the most unfortunate race on earth (13: 90).
Martí’s articles narrated an incident that became an indispensable part of the history of American abolitionism and that drew men like Wendell Phillips to the cause, the 1835 attack upon William Lloyd Garrison, by antiabolitionists in Boston (10: 94). Martí also offered in translation an oft-repeated declaration by Garrison. The abolitionist, quoting the prophet Isaiah, had complained that the North (the Union), in sharing the U.S. Constitution with the South, had made a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell” (13: 90).7
Black Abolitionists
Frederick Douglass, son of a slave woman and a white man whom he never met, spent his early years in rural Maryland, where the brutality of life as a slave left vivid memories. At age eight he was sent to live with a family in Baltimore, where he received the rudiments of education, got a glimpse of freedom, and taught himself to read. As a young man he was returned to country life and fell into the hands of a cruel master who beat him daily. Douglass managed to escape and in 1838 reached New York. From there he fled to Massachusetts to begin life as a free man. Martí alluded briefly to Douglass’s youth in describing him as the slave orator who had once toiled in the fields of a Southern plantation (10: 270).
In 1882 Martí penned a review of the Frederick Douglass Autobiography that had appeared in a new edition in 1881.8 In this concise commentary, the chronicler labeled the ex-slave an extraordinary man, worthy of praise for his merits and his perseverance, and as “a man of color, a famous and eloquent orator, a perfect gentleman and an embellishment to the North American Senate” (23: 212). A few lines later Martí stated that Douglass had been “elected to the Senate by white men” (23: 212). In fact, although Douglass held various government posts, he was never a senator. He is reputed to have claimed as a young man that one day he would be a U.S. senator, and this is the likely source for Martí’s mistake. Martí listed what Douglass had endured: he never knew his father and seldom saw his mother; he experienced destitution; he suffered hunger and cold; and he was subject to repeated whippings. His precocious ingeniousness prompted wrath from his masters. Once he escaped from slavery, however, his soul took flight, and his words gained wings. According to Martí, the autobiography was a “spiritual anatomy” that required deep reading and insight, and he stated that some might fail to appreciate a spirit they did not know how to interpret (23: 212).
In other chronicles Martí used the word mulatto as a descriptor for Douglass. There was the mulatto Douglass who supported Cleveland’s government (10: 238), the mulatto who represented advances for people of color because he was the United States envoy in Haiti (12: 293), and the eloquent mulatto who had roused abolitionist assemblies (12: 336). Employing the word mulatto was an implicit acknowledgment of the fact that white masters had routinely taken advantage of female slaves, but Martí did not make this point in his writing. With his repeated use of mulatto in regard to Douglass, he was simply following the common usage in the U.S. press.
In the late 1880s, when the United States was seeking an influential role in Haiti and Santo Domingo, a far less flattering portrait of Douglass emerged in Martí’s pages. The Cuban patriot, ever fearful of the expansionist tendencies of the Colossus, strongly disapproved of the support of the mulatto for plans to exploit the two countries neighboring Cuba. In 1889 Douglass was named by President Harrison to diplomatic posts in Haiti and Santo Domingo, and Martí was quick to note the danger in Douglass’s mission. The chronicler also reported that on the wartime ship on which Douglass traveled to the Caribbean, white officials refused to share a dinner table with the envoy (12: 351). Nonetheless, said Martí, Douglass, who had sold out in his old age, defended them (12: 352). Nothing suggests that Martí was aware of the interracial aspects of the incident, the fact that Douglass’s second wife was white, or that the matter was resolved by the Douglasses eating in the chief officer’s dining room while the captain took meals in his quarters. Douglass had insisted that he be treated the way a white diplomat would be treated.9
Martí’s fiercest criticism of Douglass, however, appears in the context of an article about the 1889 Pan-American Conference in Washington, D.C., organized by U.S. Secretary of State James G. Blaine, and on which Martí issued a series of reports. In his letter for La Nación Martí struck a cautionary tone and gave a list of filibusterers and others who served U.S. interests: “Walker went to Nicaragua for the United States; López went on behalf of the United States to Cuba. And now when slavery no longer provides an excuse [to covet the islands] an Annexation League is in vogue; Allen talks of helping the one in Cuba [and] Douglass is on his way to procure the one in Haiti and Santo Domingo …” (6: 62). The names Walker and López are notorious in Martí’s writing and linked consistently to enterprises he deplored. Narciso López was a Venezuelan military man who worked on behalf of Americans desiring the annexation of Cuba, and who was captured and put to death in Havana in 1851. William Walker was a U.S. adventurer who sought to create his own country in Central America and was executed in Honduras in 1860. Even more telling in regard to Martí’s comment is the fact that Walker decreed slavery in Nicaragua and hoped to link the country to Southern slave states. In connecting Douglass with Walker and López, Martí signaled a dramatic change of perspective about the famous abolitionist.
FIGURE 7. Frederick Douglass. From Harper’s Weekly, n.d. By permission of Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Arts, Prints, and Photographs, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (1223754).
Henry Highland Garnet, the son of runaway slaves, became a Presbyterian minister in New York and was noted for his activism and oratorical skills. Martí called him an “acclaimed black orator” (13: 233) and in 1882 submitted a brief sketch about Garnet to a Venezuelan newspaper. The description informed Caracas readers that Garnet was the first person of his race to speak before an audience of whites in the Capitol in Washington, and that he had delivered a vehement yet cultured address before the Antislavery Society of New York. It also reported that his house was a refuge for blacks fleeing from the South, and he had been named U.S. minister to Liberia (13: 235–36). Martí’s sketch lauded Garnet’s public-speaking prowess and his polished language. He mentioned Garnet’s loss of a leg and recounted a dramatic incident that took place at an academy founded by abolitionists in Canaan, New Hampshire, that enrolled both blacks and whites. Garnet and fellow classmates from New York were studying at the school when angry segregationists from Canaan and nearby towns hitched ninety-some oxen to the schoolhouse to pull it down. Shots were fired in the aftermath of the attack, but Garnet escaped unharmed.
Martí’s sketch said nothing of Garnet’s inciting slaves to rebellion and mentioned a connection with Cuba only in passing. At age thirteen, Garnet served as a cabin boy on two voyages to Cuba. The profile gave only a hint of the pastor’s militancy and no mention of the fact that Garnet, like Douglass, had supported independence for Cuba in the 1870s (13: 235–36, EC 9: 285–86). Notable in the Garnet sketch are the closing lines. According to Martí, the pastor “with his right arm blocked any blow that a black man might unjustly direct toward the white man who had helped free him, and with the left arm turned back any blow to a black man’s head that whites with unfair disdain might seek to deliver …” (13: 236). Martí concluded that Garnet “Hated hatred. Loved both blacks and whites keenly. Died a beloved man” (13: 236). Such sentiments are closely attuned to the ideals espoused in Martí’s famous essay “My Race” and other pieces published in Patria with the aim of uniting Cubans across racial lines.
Poets as Abolitionists
Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier was admired by the American public for his beautiful and touching scenes of rural life, and he was featured in Martí’s writing for his fame and the honors he received on his eightieth birthday in 1887. While the Cuban did not favor the Quaker’s “mother of pearl” verses, he appreciated Whittier’s opposition to slavery, participation in abolitionist efforts (11: 368), and poetry that contributed to the antislavery movement (10: 94). After meeting William Lloyd Garrison, Whittier wrote more than one hundred antislavery poems (Axelrod 260). Martí applauded Whittier for the “righteous fury” of Voices of Freedom, a work that condemned both cruel slave masters and political cowards who opposed an end to slavery (13: 403).
William Cullen Bryant, a faithful defender of emancipation, composed a beautiful elegy following the death of Abraham Lincoln. In Bryant’s poem the broken chains of former slaves represent the most fitting monument to the slain president (Foerster 358). Martí’s comment on the poet’s abolitionism was scant; he simply alluded to Bryant’s “majestic song” as an apt expression of indignation over the stain of slavery (10: 94).
Conclusions
American abolitionism as portrayed by Martí reflects the era in which he lived in the United States and the preoccupations of his host country. The lives of the abolitionists Martí profiled spanned much of the nineteenth century, and many of them—including Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887), John Swinton (1829–1901), Wendell Phillips (1811–1884), Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), Henry Garnet (1815–1882), Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), and John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)—were still alive during his years in the United States. The decades following the Civil War presented a panorama of celebrations and commemorations, such as the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Biographies of major figures in the struggle over slavery, commentary on the conflicts between North and South, and descriptions of the political contests between Republicans and Democrats all formed part of the framework for Martí’s U.S. experience. His writing covered the free state versus slave state controversies and confirmed the role of Protestant preachers and churches in the antislavery campaigns.
Since Martí used the newspapers and magazines of his era for many of the chronicles, one cannot expect that the names mentioned, the topics covered, and the emphasis he gave to U.S. antislavery efforts correspond to twenty-first-century analyses of the same time. A name like Harriet Tubman, for example, is salient today, but she was not widely heralded in the 1850s, when she helped rescue slaves through the Underground Railroad, was not prominently featured in Martí’s lifetime, and does not appear in his narrative. Nonetheless, the vivid portrayals of crusaders like Wendell Phillips and the numerous references to diverse aspects of American abolitionism offer an informed overview of a decisive era in U.S. history. Martí’s description of struggles over emancipation reached Argentine and Venezuelan readers who did not have an extensive experience with African slaves and who learned much about Africans in the Americas thanks to his chronicles.
As stated at the beginning of this chapter, Martí’s insistence that the Ten Years’ War had freed the slaves of his homeland allowed him to imagine that slavery had ended in Cuba when, in fact, the declaration was an illusion. This hopeful perspective also meant that he did not return with frequency to the abuses of slavery in Cuba. He let the neighbor to the north tell the story. America’s abolitionist annals provided a racially charged history with many dramatic incidents and examples of conflicts, and this allowed Martí to focus on slavery without putting a spotlight on Cuba.
The actions Martí praised in the history of U.S. abolitionism also tell us about his own opinions and ideas on how to redress racial abuse. They signal his acceptance of violence as a remedy, of words as effective weapons, and of sacrifice as a badge of righteousness. His chronicles about figures and events in the abolitionist annals resonate today as an affirmation of his constant preoccupation with themes of justice, and the burning shame awakened by memories of slavery in Cuba was a natural bridge to the antislavery crusaders of the United States. He championed combatants who gave their lives, preachers who needled their parishioners, orators whose eloquence roused the public to action, and former slaves who offered testimony from their own experience. He did not fail to praise authors who, like himself, put their energy and their writing skills to work for a noble cause.
