November 2013 – Page 6 – U.S. to 1877

November 6, 2013

Abolition

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The abolition movement was a very important factor in the leading up to the civil war. Obviously, it was the main cause for the thoughts of secession by the south who felt like their lifestyle was being threatened. It is important to see the why the those in favor of abolition took that point of view. While some did it because they saw how wrong slavery was, others did for intrinsic reasons, fearing that this mistreatment of other human beings would make them appear unfavorably in the eyes of God. I think that the latter reason for calling for abolition is missing the point, although it still does get the job done. Since slavery was an accepted part of American society, most people didn’t have a problem with it until they saw it escalate to the severity and brutality of plantation enslavement. I think the second group were not opposed to the idea of owning people, but once they saw the mistreatment of enslaved people, particularly on plantations, they began to worry about how their society appeared to God. In the end though, all abolitionists had the same well-intentioned goal in mind.

The Second Great Awakening is linked to the abolitionist movements as SYSTRAUSS points out in their post. They make a good point in that maybe the abolitionists who used evangelist words did not exactly have the interest of the slaves in mind when they were speaking. This comes back to the point of how the majority of abolitionists had their own relationships with God in mind rather than the lives of the slaves. I would argue that this makes them appear worse to their God because they are valuing this relationship more than another human being’s life. I am not actually that religious so I cannot speak to this point with that much accuracy, that is just how I presume it would be. This group of evangelists abolitionists who fight against slavery may not be doing it for exactly the right reason, but they should still be recognized as being far ahead and far more honorable than a large population of the country.

November 5, 2013

November 5th Post

The Rise of American Democracy disappointed me again this week. Wilentz plowed through an analyzation of the struggle between Jackson and Biddle over the national bank that was bland and not easy to follow for a student without a background in finance. I could comprehend the gist of the battle and who was on each side but I was not familiar with the processes and tactics used by the politicians. I would suggest a more simple approach with language and/or explanations for readers without experience and knowledge in the field. I recognize however, I may just have a low understanding of the way the national bank works and need to increase this. Luckily, the economic jargon gave way eventually to a more historical account of the events dealing with abolition.

I found it shocking that the anti-abolitionists could get away with, if only for a time, censoring the post to disallow the circulation of anti-slavery publication. This is obviously an issue of the freedom of speech, explicitly given to citizens in the Constitution. Censorship of a minorities opinion is censorship all the same and should be against the law. I can only assume that the reason this infringement upon the rights of American citizens was allowed only because of how serious slave insurrections were. Southern planters and mostly all whites for that matter would be terrified of just the notion of rebellious, angry slaves roaming the country side, possibly armed with plenty reason to do harm to their oppressors. The fear implanted in the white citizenry, as discussed in class, definitely stemmed from rebellions like the ones lead by Cato, Nat Turner, and others. The literate slaves and sympathetic whites, capable of producing anti-slavery literature, were stopped by unconstitutional laws even the President had a part in proposing.

In janewton’s post, the political motivation of elites against abolitionists stands in stark contrast with the fearful motivation of the South. I find it interesting that the two geographical regions differ in their reasons to hate abolition but agree in standing against it. (Admittedly, elites in the South definitely had similar motivations to the Northern elites.)

One very interesting point I found in Inhumane Bondage was about the divisive splits experienced by anti-slavery groups. Davis states that, “…Antislavery groups could hardly have been more querulous and divisive”(261). One would, at face value, think that with all the political or literal fire aimed at them, these groups would bond together and work tirelessly towards their collective goal. The American Anti-Slavery Society apparently split in 1840 for differences in opinion about women’s rights. I think this shows that though major reform was being demanded and soon to come, the country had still a while to go in terms of human rights. After all, it would not be until 1920 that our nation’s leaders decided to ratify the amendment allowing women to vote.

November 5, 2013

Abolition and the Second Great Awakening

The abolition movement has roots in the Second Great Awakening and the ideas those religious revivals spurred. Davis discusses abolitionists from the 1830s, like Theodore Dwight Weld who did noble work in trying to eliminate the evils of slavery, but while also considering religious ideals. The problem with this connection to the Church, which Davis notes, is that “most abolitionists and other radical reformers yearned to merge themselves in a righteous crusade that they saw as a prerequisite to the liberty of both blacks and whites” (Davis 254). In connecting the religious ideal of redeeming sins to ending slavery makes it seem that these kinds of abolitionists were advocating abolition, not completely without the idea of helping the slaves, but still with the idea of helping themselves and other whites by looking more redeemable to God. As Caitlin said in her post (http://sites.davidson.edu/his141/the-second-great-awakening/) the Second Great Awakening, “formed a basis for the treatment of the enslaved rather than a protection for their freedom.” Those abolitionists who used the words of the evangelists in the Second Great Awakening did not always appear to have the best interests of the slaves in mind. This theory also connects to the American Colonization Society and their idea to liberate the slaves and then make them resettle outside of America. These white ACS members thought this would benefit the slaves, but they were also trying to rid the country of the African race. As the abolition movement advanced past the time of the Second Great Awakening, more white abolitionists begin to focus less on redeeming the sins of other whites and more on fully liberating blacks from enslavement. At this same time, free and escaped blacks became involved in the abolition movement and organized their own campaigns, because, with William Lloyd Garrison being the exception, “few white abolitionists could escape sounding patronizing to blacks” (Wilentz 213). The abolition movement that began to spread did help propel the idea of ending slavery in America to the forefront of everyone’s minds, but both Davis and Wilentz note the difference between those who truly believed in liberating the slaves so they could live equally among whites and those abolitionists who worked to free the slaves in the hopes that they could have a closer connection to God.

November 5, 2013

Northern Resistance to Abolitionists

Much of Chapter 13 in both The Rise of American Democracy and Inhuman Bondage focus on the gradual steps America took towards abolitionism during the mid 19^th century. The most interesting part of the reading, to me, was learning about the hardships that northern abolitionists faced from fellow northerners during the 1830’s. The fight for abolitionism in America is so often characterized as a North vs. South battle that it’s easy to forget that during the early stages of the battle, northern abolitionist faced extreme adversity from their northern neighbors. Sean Wilentz does a great job of describing the pattern of violence towards northern abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, a tremendously important player in the movement, who was forced to flee from a scheduled address in New York in 1833 (211). Wells King talks more about Garrison and abolitionism in America in this blog post (http://sites.davidson.edu/his141/american-abolition-liberation-or-genocide/). Garrison was not the only one who faced aggression either. Wilentz explains that havoc wreaking mobs that fought abolitionism sprouted up in Philadelphia, Hartford, Utica, Washington, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati in 1834 and 1835 (212). It was interesting to learn that most of these mobs were ran by political and social elites who “abhorred the abolitionists’ challenge to their own social authority” (213). To me, this suggests that the anti-abolitionists were less concerned with the issue of slavery and more concerned with having their political power threatened. Looking forward, it’ll be interesting to learn how in just two decades, the sentiment towards slavery in the north became so collectively negative that the country split and went to war.

The role of the President in this situation is also notable. Both authors touch on it in their respective chapters. Wilentz chides President Jackson for his inability or unwillingness to enforce the 1836 Post Office Law. In not enforcing the law, southern postmasters often did not deliver abolitionists tracts that argued the merits of ending slavery. Davis, the author of Inhuman Bondage argues that Jackson failed to enforce the law because he “greatly valued the South’s electoral advantage in counting three-fifths for purposes of representation” (261). These sections of each chapter emphasize the importance of the President in regards to the issue of slavery. It also shows how impactful having a President who leaned one way or another on the issue could be.

November 5, 2013

The “Sacrilization” of America

Throughout the nation’s history, America has emphasized Christian values as fundamental to our conception of ourselves as a nation. While this has questionable implications for the founding principle of separation of church as state, it also profoundly affects the way in which we, as a nation, actuate change. In the midst of the abolition movement, which, incidentally, was based very solidly upon religious ideals, many American Protestants were calling into question the way in which America lived up to its ideals. This certainly applied to slavery and its moral implications but also to society as a whole. Protestantism focused on the individual and the “power of the individual to achieve sanctification” but the movement also extended this concept to the larger redemption of American society and the ability “of the American nation to establish a new golden age” (Davis 251). Individual rights have always been a cornerstone of American identity. The Settler Colonialism: If Not Genocide, Then What? post touches on this in the connection it draws between Wolfe’s article and Turner’s Frontier Thesis. The individual’s ability to act how he wants and achieve his dreams on his own merit is a concept that has been idealized from the beginning of American history. These new evangelicals simply take this one step further in identifying “fatal discrepancies between American ideals and American practice” thus expanding notions of individual greatness and morality and applying them to all of American society (Davis 251). As religious leaders asked citizens to question the meaning of their own lives and to reassess the way they acted as individuals they also asked them to examine the way in which the country as a whole was living out the ideals laid down at the nation’s founding. Thus, individual action affected the morality of all of society. This adds an extra dimension to personal morality and increases the importance given to individual actions as they both affect and provide a model for a larger American culture.

November 4, 2013

American Abolition: Liberation or Genocide?

Our readings this week addressed a number of topics: Indian Removal, American Populism, and Abolition. And while each might seem entirely unrelated from the others, I think that we can draw a number of connections between them—from the rift in the Jacksonian Democrats and Abolitionists to the ostracization freedmen in the North and Native peoples in the West. For this blog, however, I would like to raise a question and explore it in light of our readings:

Could either of the popular proposals for abolition—colonization and “immediatism”—fall under the category of “structural genocide”?

First, let’s examine “structural genocide.” Patrick Wolfe approaches the topic of genocide under the umbrella of what he calls the “logic of elimination,” whereby he asserts that settler colonization—his primary topic of interest his essay—is “inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal” (387). Nevertheless, genocide, he asserts, did occur along the frontier via Indian removal. This genocide, however, was not the generally understood sense of the term, in which a powerful group (usually the state) carries out the systematic mass murder of another group (usually singled-out according to race, class, or religion), but rather a “structural genocide”—contrary to Wolfe’s opinion, one might also call it “cultural genocide”—in which individuals “relentless sought the breakdown of the tribe” either by physically removing a group or by socially dissolving a group into individuals (400). Thus, Wolfe urges that both Captain Richard Pratt, the founder of Indian boarding schools, and General Phil Sheridan, the bloodthirsty “scourge of the Plains,” were guilty of genocide (397; 398). Through this two-fold form genocide, the “progressive individualism” and property rights of White American society retained their permanence under the cloak of land grants and cultural assimilation(400).

Now, let’s consider the popular proposals for abolition in early 19th-century America: colonization and “immediatism.” I think that the former could certainly be categorized under the “logic of elimination.” As Davis describes, colonizationists called for the emancipation of enslaved Africans—most likely gradually—and the subsequent transportation of freedmen to then-prospering Liberia because “racial prejudice and racial difference were simply too strong . . . for whites and blacks to live together as equals” (256). Moreover, colonizationists in the predominantly white American Colonization Society (ACS) feared the disproportionate violent crime rate amog free blacks and, inspired by such racism, believed that the not only slavery but also the presence of the Africans, slave or free, were “detrimental to the nation’s long-term interest” (257). Considering their racist motives and pursuit of white solidarity, I think it would be difficult to claim that the notion of colonization did not imitate the Indian Removal in the West and the Wolfe’s “logic of elimination.”

But what about “immediatism?” Inspired both by black anti-colonizationists and their British contemporaries, immediatists—as their name would suggest—called for the immediate abolition of slavery. But even more, being led by notable abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, immediatists believed that the true abolition required the “equal coexistence . . . of blacks and whites and [combated] racial prejudice in the North” (258). In doing so, these abolitionists encouraged interracial marriage and equal rights for those liberated from centuries of oppression—not only blacks but women as well (260). It was, indeed, a direct response to the great hypocrisy of American democracy, a call for true egalitarianism. The movement, however, employed some rather demeaning tactics. In addition to antics which no doubt created a poor public image—think of Garrison burning a copy of the Constitution on the Boston Common—immediatists, as the abolitionist leader Gerrit Smith described, incited “whites to develop ‘a black heart,’ in the sense of seeing the world ‘through Negro eyes'” (263). Relying on notable black leaders, such as Frederick Douglass, abolitionists sought to undermine the widespread beliefs of black inferiority and promote the idea of “civilized Negroes” (260). Certainly, they were well-intentioned. However, the thought of appealing to literate, genteel freedmen to prove the possibility of the social integration calls to mind the words of the allegedly-genocidal Richard Pratt to “kill the Indian, save the man.” So, I would like to ask my colleagues this question: in the pursuit of equal rights and emancipation, were the American abolitionists guilty of “structural genocide” by insisting on the integration and cultural assimilation of freed blacks?

In his post this week entitled “You Can’t Take It With You,” Matthew Gilliland discussed the effects of Indian Removal in light of Patrick Wolfe’s article, stating that “[the] Native Americans that were removed from their land were not stripped of their heritage” (http://sites.davidson.edu/his141/you-cant-take-it-with-you/). And while I wish I could agree, I unfortunately cannot. Certainly,the removed Native peoples carried their culture and heritage with them, but they also lost their permanence (as described by Patrick Wolfe). Moreover, those who were allowed to retain their land, such as the Choctaw peoples in Mississippi, eventually lost their culture to their tribes’ assimilation to White society. Or, as Wolfe writes, “they had become ‘homesteaders and American citizens’ . . . . individuals” (397). The “logic of elimination” was two-fold, entailing both the removal of certain groups and the dissolution of others. So, while it might be easy to focus our attention on the removal of the Cherokee, we cannot forget the genocide of the Choctaw.

November 4, 2013

You Can’t Take It With You

I found Wolfe’s article intriguing but not entirely convincing. I did not necessarily agree with his assessment of native lands as their lives. While an integral part of where a person comes from is where they are from, this does not die with removal. Rather, when a person or group of people leaves their home, they take that with them. The Native Americans that were removed from their land were not stripped of their heritage. They were robbed of the land that they grew up on, the land that raised them, but not of the heritage that was their tribe. The natives, at this point in history, would not grow up, go off to college, and then go get a job. However, that is the twenty first century lens with which I glance at this. We, in today’s culture, move around a lot. From college to jobs to traveling, we are constantly on the move. While this was not the case for them, my perspective says that you are how you were raised and you take that with you no matter where you go.

NAKINDIG mentions in his blog post that Wolfe “explains how the views of the Europeans towards the American Indians included a nomadic, landless view of the native peoples.” My belief may stem from that belief. While it is true that some natives were nomadic, the vast majority was not and settled in specific locations based on their needs. While I do not agree with the Indian removals of years past, I do not see the argument for a cultural loss. Slaves were brought in from Africa, and while they did not necessarily flaunt their African culture to their owners, it was definitely present. Eastman Johnson’s painting, My Old Kentucky Home or Negro Life at the South, shows this African culture hidden behind the walls of the slave quarters. To that same end, the natives had a culture that whether enslaved or moved or not, should have been able to continue on.

While I disagree with Wolfe on movement, I appreciate his distinction between genocide and a disruption and thieving of lands. While a vast number of natives were killed as a direct product of Europeans weapons, diseases, etc. A good number were indirectly killed by a forced relocation of sorts. This was not an intentional annihilation, but rather an opening up of the frontier will consequences that went south. I am in no way defending the Indian removal, but I do see in a difference in genocide and an indirect annihilation.

November 4, 2013

Settler Colonialism: If Not Genocide, Then What?

The settlement of Western America was a long and harsh process in the history of the United States. During this time, settlers displaced thousands of native tribes while attempting to establish new civilizations in relatively unknown places. Although the frontiersman committed countless inhumane acts, Patrick Wolfe states in his essay that this process cannot be categorized as genocide. Instead, he makes the point that the actions performed during colonization were in fact “contests for land” and not the direct targeting for the extinction of a certain group (1).

Wolfe uses the Indian Removal Act in the early 1800s to exhibit his point. He explains that the fact that settlers first turned to removal policies shows a stress for the advancement of modernity within their nation and not a genocidal course of action. While reading this, I could not help to notice a correlation between both Wolfe’s and Willentz’s categorization of Jackson’s policies. Both sided with Jackson’s reform measures and strayed away from placing the blame of the cruel measures on the administration. Wolfe does state that the removal was “brutal” but that “it did not affect each member equally” in that many natives were able to find refuge within the United States (396). Similarly, Jacob Newton’s post on 10/30 quotes Willentz of saying Jackson was a “benevolent, if realistic paternalist” in his view of natives. Jacob goes on to refute Willentz’s description of Jackson. I agree with this claim, and in doing so, disagree with both Wolfe’s and Willentz’s account of Indian removal. Although it was probably the best option for citizens of the United States at the time as they attempted to modernize their civilization, settlers had no right to treat these people like mere objects. Although it may not be categorized as genocide in Wolfe’s dictionary, that does not take away from it as being as bad or worse than a genocidal procedure.

This essay also made me think of Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis (1893), which stated that the frontier was a defining feature of American democracy and identity and that American procedures would surely change with the closing of the frontier. When the frontier was still intact, settlers focused on the deportation of Indian tribes. But when the frontier was fully settled, “elimination turned inwards” (399). Cruel assimilation processes were put into place to make Indians’ lives harder until civil liberties were realized in the 1920s. But although the lack of a frontier changed the American processes like Turner predicted, both time frames still culminated an overall feeling of resentment and neglect for the Indian tribes in the United States.

November 4, 2013

Visualizing American political history

Here is another nice visualization of American politics in antebellum America – I especially like how this one shows increases in political participation through voting.

Enjoy!

November 4, 2013

Settler Colonialism vs Genocide

I definitely liked Patrick Wolfe’s topic on “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native”. He enters academic debate very well in his article, and I think I agree with him after reading the article. Although almost all of the native peoples ended up dying because of European colonization, they Europeans did not actively practice killing the race (in a loosely used form of the word), so they did not practice genocide. He brought in outside examples to explain the difference between genocide, and taking land.

I definitely liked his conjecture of land being life, and how the settlers were taking land, and the byproduct of taking land was taking the lives of the Natives. He even explains how the views of the Europeans towards the American Indians included a nomadic, landless view of the native peoples. Therefore, they did not have a homeland, and if they did not have a homeland, the land was not theirs to be taken from. Although the native peoples actually did have a homeland, the interpretation of the settlers was different from that which was actually accurate, so their mindset did not actually involve killing people in order to take their land; it involved moving people from one place to another (worst case scenario being by force), so that they could settle the land and start the process of modernity. The settlers were killing the natives so passively, that, in the minds of the settlers, they were only taking land that no one owned and not taking lives of the native peoples.