American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with James Brewer Stewart, part 2 of 5

Okay, so we pick up again after Garrison's been released from jail, and he's traveling around trying to run up support for the liberator. Who is he pitching to and how has he been received? He's not being received at all. Garrison is not being received at all well by white people. Garrison is not being received at all well by white people in pitching the liberator. His problem is exactly what we've been talking about. It's tremendous hostility to the idea of a media emancipation in the part of white opinion. And the place where he can pitch his readership and succeed is with black people. The liberator is the first periodical in the history of the United States, or maybe in the Western world, that opens its pages to black writers in a white newspaper. There had been black newspapers that had appeared briefly prior to Garrison's liberator, that happened in the 1820s, but they were very, very episodic. And when Garrison opened the liberator, he started selling subscriptions almost immediately to black people.

And he developed a patron, a very important man by the name of James Forton, who was a Philadelphia sailmaker, the most dignified, aristocratic, wealthy black guy that you could ever possibly imagine. You can see a cut out silhouette of James Forton's portrait hanging in a museum in Philadelphia. He said, that's a man, you know? And Forton saw in Garrison something that he always wanted to see, which is a white person who would tell the truth. And so he began subventing or underwriting the newspaper to a certain extent, and beginning to recommend it to black churches. There is a big black network of churches in the north, the African Methodist Episcopal and Baptist churches are very, very active. And the early readership of the liberators is much more black people than white people. Garrison begins to pitch the liberator to white people through controversy by attacking people, and then by having them respond,

and then having them have to see their response published in his newspaper while he responds back to them. The other way that the operation worked was that all newspaper editors back then shared their newspapers with other editors. And there was a big network because thank you, U.S. Post Office, which is a very important agency, unlike today, in making the world happen. So his newspaper would go all over the country to other editors, and other editors would take out pieces of the liberator and put it in their newspaper someplace. And that way the newspaper got to be known all over the South because the most inflammatory things that Garrison said would show up in the Charleston Courier in South Carolina with a response there. And so Garrison's reputation as an editor could fire out strip his actual market for papers. And it was a standard journalistic way of being able to make your magazine work. But I should say that the way that Garrison worked the news network back then is very much for that time when something like Facebook

or something like Twitter would be today. It's the fastest form of communication possible. In an age when print is the new thing. When readership is the new thing. Where people are for the first time starting to read novels, having private experiences with big columns of type and having imaginative things go off in their head as a consequence of that. So in a sense Garrison was somebody who was on the leading edge of the technology of social organizing by publishing this newspaper and then merchandising it in the way that he did. Was the media didn't get to Garrison? Say again, I'm sorry I didn't hear. No, he did not come up with it. A woman in England named Elizabeth Heyrick came up with it in 1827. And there's a very well built and very important British anti-slay movement. We should always point out that it has been functioning ever since the 1780s. Agitating against the African slave trade.

This is where William Wilbur Forestown is Clarkson, Charles Bucston. Big British abolitionists have been working for a long time and were successful in having this slave trade blockaded in 1808 with agreement from the United States. That was the first step towards a much bigger emancipation struggle that was going on and coming really to a conclusion when Garrison's appearance hit the headlines. As Garrison was publishing the liberator, compensated emancipation was taking place all over the British Caribbean, Jamaica, Barbados, Permuda, all those big sugar alants that were big, big colonies based on slave labor and the production of this addictive sweet substance that you could pass around across the Atlantic world. That system was abolished replaced by an apprentice system for a little while and then simply didn't exist any longer. So Garrison had in front of him an example of a slavery system going out of business just as he was beginning to embrace the cause of immediateism.

The idea of demanding immediate emancipation by the woman that I mentioned Elizabeth Herrick is the last stage of abolitionist demand for West Indian emancipation. She set it in 1827. British abolitionists started saying it first. Garrison picked it up. I wonder if I could just one kind of real thing. If you can tell the story of the conversation between Garrison and Mae and Garrison in response, brother Mae had to be on fire because it's known so much. Oh God, I can't do that. I can't do that. I'm 71 years old, man, all I can do is bullshit. I can't memorize anything. Come on. It takes a younger mind to be retarded on that level. And you've kept on this before, you always want to get a more direct second version of it. How was Garrison's stature affected by naturalist rebellion? Oh, it's a very important point.

Nat Turner's rebellion is a tremendous point of departure for everything that happens about slavery in American history. Sense that. The rebellion was in the minds of the people who experienced it or heard about it, unprecedented, but predicted. There's always the problem of slave loyalty to masters who cannot really do what they claim to do, which is to substitute their will for the personality and character and choices of the people that they're dominating. So Nat Turner's rebellion was a tremendous disruption of everything that slaveholders have been telling themselves for quite some time about how their system was a positive. Good. How they were good to their slave people. Slaveholders had to get up in the morning and feel like good people, like anybody else. They roll out of bed, look at themselves in the mirror, say, I'm a good person, my enslaved people, like me because I treat them well.

You have to tell these self-deceiving but empowering stories in order to be able to believe yourself to be a good human being. There's a tremendous amount of self-deception in that, which is common to human nature, not exclusive to them. And the sudden explosion of black anger, black wrath, is so jarring to that whole sensibility that the ramifications of the rebellion go far beyond Virginia. It provokes a debate within Virginia about whether there should be compensated emancipation and whether Virginia should get rid of slavery. The answer to that question was no. But you can begin to see a post-turner world that comes after 1831 and Garrison is very much a part of it because, first of all, Garrison agrees that black people have complaints and motives and resentments and anger that makes their violence understandable, makes their violence understandable.

At the same time, throughout his entire time before the Civil War, Garrison practiced and breached pacifism, nonviolence. In fact, Leo Tolstoy, one of the great inventors of pacifism in Russia, came to pacifism by reading Garrison as one of the founding thinkers of what non-resistance should really be all about. So Garrison's attitude towards turners is very complicated. On the one hand, he claims to understand but he can't quite justify. There's always this tension between violence and nonviolence in Garrison. And one of the wonderful things about Garrison is that until the very end when the war came, he stuck with that. And I think created a tradition of nonviolence in American reform movements, which is really a standard against which all others that will pretend or profess nonviolence

have to be held. Great. Thank you. You're welcome. The notion is that it's something that the Great Volta can't do. The notion of a man of ending slavery by clearly being sent to a slavehold is a little barfetched to a minor lion. Yes. Did they think it would work? Yes. I think one of the most important things to understand about the early years of this movement is their expectation that they were going to win. They had seen through the religious culture of their own region, the conversion of people from the condition of being a center to being sanctified. The idea that there was, it was possible within oneself to elect, to undergo

and experience a moral revolution. As Paul used to write, the scales fall from your eyes. That was a very favorite kind of a piece of scripture for abolitionists to quote, the idea that you're blind, but now you see. I think the old hymn has it exactly right. And that all humans were designed by God to have this capacity. And so the original intention of the abolitionist was to tell the slaveholders to repent that they would. And you can read in abolitionist letters in the mid-1830s, slavery got to last another four years, another five years, another seven years, another ten years, what do you think? And to make the situation more complicated, there were slaveholders who did release their slaves and did become immediate abolitionists. There's one who ran for president as an abolitionist candidate in the elections of 1840 and 1844, named James G. Bernie, who came originally from Alabama, gave up his slaves, published an anti-slay renews paper

until he was run out of town in Kentucky, ended up in Cincinnati, and sure enough, he'd have the scales fall from his eyes. And the Grimkey sisters, who you'll be talking about, I'm sure, in many different places, are people who did precisely the same thing. So there was incidental evidence that this could actually happen. And the idea of the slaveholder having his enslaved person go out, let's just imagine, to the mailbox, and to grab the mail, to bring it in, to be carrying an incendiary pamphlet about immediate emancipation of the master and say, here you are, sir. Here's your mail. In retrospect, you can see just how naive that was. But at the same time, without that sense of immediate immediatism, the idea of expecting something really important to happen, a moral revolution taking place in all of the fabric of American society and in its moral imagination,

they never would have started doing it in the first place. There's no way that you can motivate yourself to take on anything as big as the second largest capital asset in the U.S. economy, slaves, unless you have this expectation of imminent success. It must have been at almost before it. Yes. And then to be confronted with mob violence, with the destruction of black communities, with the disruption of your meetings, with the burning of presses, finally with the murder of an abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy in 1837 in Illinois. The expectation meets the reality in such a way that the entire movement goes through an incredible crisis, Garrison among them. And in fact, Garrison's leader in having to adjust every expectation and every sense of what God's obvious design is supposed to be as a consequence of what's happened. So let's go right there. How was Garrison personally affected by this? Garrison was personally affected by the mob.

First of all, because he was in one, he was the object of one in Boston in 1834. And he experienced secondhand mobs that happened all over New England and the Midwest in 1835, 3637. There's a huge spike in mob violence that happens during this second half of the 1830s. And much of it is leveled against black communities. Much of it is leveled against abolitionists. Abolitions in Philadelphia put together a beautiful building called a free speech hall. And the free speech hall lasted for about a week and a half until it was burned to the ground by angry people in Philadelphia. So the question of free speech and how it's protected is pretty well symbolized by exactly what happened there. Garrison's response was absolute shock. And I'm paraphrasing because I can't remember things. I am stunned to understand that the people of Massachusetts can no more tolerate abolition

than the people of South Carolina. What he began to understand, which you couldn't have understood until you saw it, was the depth of white anger and resistance to the whole idea of a biracial democracy. And what he began to then ask is where does this really come from? Well, our churches are pro-slavery. The churches of the North and he thought ministers all over the North would just open their pulpits to abolitionists and witnessing Christians both North and South would take abolition as their new religious doctrine didn't happen. Instead, what happened was the big ministers in places like Andover Seminary Yale and so forth began denouncing abolitionists as fanatics. Congregations did not do that. They expelled abolitionists from their congregations. Congregations, expelling abolitionists made abolitionists have to worship elsewhere.

And so pretty quickly, Garrison starts saying there's something wrong with religious institutions in the United States, both North and South. Who is mobbing us? Well, politicians are mobbing us. Politicians, local politicians, are these gentlemen of property and standing and they run the political system. And the president of the United States is a slaveholder. And when you look at the Constitution, whoops! You see all these guarantees of slavery that are built into the middle of it. And so Garrison's response, which is not the response that all abolitionists have, by any stretch of the imagination, is to begin to suspect that every part of American society is infected by a deep moral disease. And to have an abolitionist movement, be effective and true to its moral center. You have to denounce all that. You have to denounce church. You have to denounce state. You have to begin to say that these are institutions

that are so corrupted and tainted, that to have these sacred relationships between people that God intended for us to have, we have to do it over here, instead of asking it to happen, in the places where we assumed it originally would. And therefore, it becomes far more radical, and far more anti-institutional, following the experience with the mobs, with the postal campaign, with the gag rule, where anti-slavery petitions were banished from debate in Congress, by agreement of both political parties, there's a way to be able to argue that Garrison's analysis of all, this was absolutely right, that the church is our pro-slavery, that the two political parties are set up to protect slavery, political historians and religious historians, looking back on those two institutions, pretty much will agree that that analysis was correct. The weakness in the analysis is that by moving way out, far away from the levers of American power, it's very hard to see how you influence public opinion,

because the kinds of things that you're talking about now are so radical, that ordinary people who may have deep suspicions of slavery may think, well, I can't really worry about my suspicions of slavery, because abolitionists are like these guys. So there's tremendous dangers and tremendous opportunities in all this, because all the abolitionists begin to rethink all their strategies and all their tactics, and the movement falls apart in the late 1830s and 1840s. When Garrison starts to say the churches or pro-slavery were coming out of all the churches, politics or pro-slavery, abolitionists should never vote. Families are pro-slavery because men dominate women. And if we are to think about the slavery of race, we also have to think about the slavery of sex. And he begins to develop a position on women's rights in conjunction with the emergence of powerful women

who start talking about not only slavery, but about their own condition, and the problem of females being people who are basically legally covered and cloistered by their husbands. So all of those become Garrison's positions by the middle of the 1840s pushed it one step further, further saying the more responsibility the North is to secede from the South. And before we get there, he would have naturally been a bit more confident because it seems that Angelina Grimke was the same journey that's right. Yes. And he becomes a major – Garrison meets Grimke is tremendously impressed with both of them. Sarah comes first to Philadelphia, Sarah Grimke, and then Angelina follows if I remember correctly. And he meets them both. He becomes much more attached to Angelina because Angelina is an order. She could really, really talk. And the whole idea of having a woman in the pulpit is, of course, exactly the kind of thing

that Garrison would see as a terrific way to be able to start expressing this hostility to unsanctioned, unchristian, coercive power. And so Angelina Grimke becomes really a favorite of Garrison and his closest friends. They collaborate all the time. She goes on tour with one of Garrison's closest friends, a guy named Henry C. Wright, who's even more out there being anti-Clarical and anti-State and anti-everything than Garrison himself is. And for a while, Angelina Grimke is both the superstar of Garrisonian abolition and the centerpiece of what everybody else in the United States that opposes abolitionism is the most hateful thing about it. Mr. Obama?

Oh, I'm sorry. I get carried away. I get carried away. It's just coming on the microphone. So at first glance, it would seem that the schism that this leads to with a terrible thing to the AS and the slash membership and income and all the rest of it. Why would Garrison... Garrison writes to Helen he's exolting about the right way to show us? Well, he's happy because he's in the spotlight as someone who can again take the moral high ground. His opponents, the people who do not believe that you ought to exit churches, not vote, and the support women's rights, have learned from the same experiences of mobs that they have a political opening to create their own political party. And the political opening comes because the mobs create a concern about civil liberties. Is it the case that the power of slaveholders can actually invade our own communities here in the North

to disrupt moral order, to create chaos, to make our lives fraught with danger? Why can't we petition the government? Why can't we send what we want to through the males? What is the censorship about? Apart from the question of slavery, but connected to the question of slavery, is this question that's been raised already about the extent of civil liberties and how they're violated? So Garrison's opponents begin to understand that there is a way to begin to address all this within the political system, and they start saying abolitionists have to vote. They can't just question candidates like they used to about, well, they like slavery or don't you like slavery, you have to be able to start to put anti-slavery candidates out in the public. Vote as you pray, pray as you vote. And of course Garrison saw all that as tremendous compromise, tainted, half-hearted, lily-livered, weak need. I'm trying to think of the various ways that you would put it.

And again, the moral high ground is his. The other point that I think is really important to make is that the whole fissure groups makes it possible for everybody to have a much more complicated conversation within the abolitionist movement about how do you really attack slavery? There becomes a view of the Constitution that turns it into an anti-slavery Constitution, the U.S. Constitution, a pro-slavery Constitution. Vote, don't vote. Create abolitionist churches. Don't go to church. Pray on your own. What really resulted from the split was a much more creative set of discourses. And much richer thinking about the problem of slavery because of the split than there had been when everybody was basically trying to sing off the same page. And the idea that Garrison could be involved in a more complicated controversy, one where his doctrines would have to be debated by everybody, including the people

who used to like him, but now don't, is all part of the deal. Right. What did, what did, what did he mean by the genius of the abolition movement as to happen? The genius of the abolitionist movement is to have no plan. Garrison said that because the idea of plan, he, first of all, he rejected the original plan, which was colonization. The idea that you have a step-by-step piece-by-piece, one-by-one way of emancipating slave, doesn't make any sense if you believe that the slaveholder has really committed the sin of Lucifer. That, remember, Lucifer tried to supplant God from the heavens and to take his place as the force that ordered human relations and he was banished to the lowest circle of hell. The slaveholder makes the same mistake. The slaveholder intervenes to defy God's will by substituting his

or her own will in the daily life of the enslaved person. And if that's the magnitude of the sin, you can't have gradual planning. You have to say that this is the original abomination that the whole question of God's power is really all about. Then the idea of denouncing it, simple denunciation, and exposure, rather than getting involved in well, how do we get it into the mechanics of changing this? Is what he's driven to believe. And therefore, the geniuses to have no plan. The geniuses to denounce. The geniuses to expose. The geniuses to critique. The geniuses is to provoke. The geniuses to try to figure out how many different ways you can begin to show how the power of slavery has infected all the institutions and all the human relations in the United States. So that, at least there's a clear moral vision of what's wrong. What did Garrison see in Frederick Douglass?

What did Garrison see in Frederick Douglass? Yeah. Frederick Douglass was a real challenge for William White Garrison. He meets, he meets, he meets, he meets, he meets, he meets, he meets, he meets, he meets, he meets Garrison, meets Douglass for the first time, soon after Douglass leaves Baltimore and shows up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He sees in Douglass a very powerful, very compelling, very useful documentation of the nobility of the dark skinned race. And that's why all abolitionists pretty much saw him. Abolitionists, White abolitionists are very, very accustomed to fraternizing, if that's the word that you wanted to use, are dealing in a variety of different ways with black activists.

Do it all time. Garrison's assistant in the liberator was a black end in William Nell. They worked together for 20 years. So Garrison knows a lot of things about black people, but what he doesn't know about Douglass is just how charismatic a figure this guy really is. He's not an ordinary person no matter what his race is. He's something different. He's something really, really special. And you can sense that in him from the very beginning. And his view, Garrison's view of Douglass is exactly that. That this is a way to really make the abolitionist cause incarnate. To bring it out in three-dimensional form. And that's the way they basically worked together for quite some time. As Douglass became a more understanding and cognizant of the opportunities open to him. And more cognizant of how he was being received by other people. Which began to give him messages that,

yes, I am a very special person. His idea of what his own destiny was became much more his and much less a derivative of the people that were originally sponsoring him. And he and Douglass, Garrison and Douglass stuck together for a good long time. They actually went on tour together of the Midwest. In 1840, I think I have the dates right, 1847. And it's at that point where Douglass is, by this time, a really mature abolitionist who's thinking about the whole problem of slavery, knowing about everything one needs to know about American political culture. Which he didn't know back when he was coming from Newbury Port. And he's traveling with Garrison. Their relationship starts to crumble, starts to become rockier and rockier. And the gossip about Douglass in Garrison's circle is very embarrassing if you read it nowadays

because, especially in the more privileged parlors of Beacon Hill abolitionism, all the more aristocratic abolitionists start talking about this, the black guy, who isn't really quite as useful as he used to be, who's gotten strange notions in his head, Boston Garrisonians have a problem with Frederick Douglass. And Douglass knows that they have this problem with him and the Garrison is a part of that. And you can imagine even apart from race, two people who are as strong-willed and charismatic as these two people are. And if you remember that one of them has the habit of turning on other people and denouncing them for their sins, the likelihood of this collision is pretty predictable. And so taking it all and putting it into race is not quite correct, although race has a lot to do with it. Just have to do with a couple of very strong people who mix it up with each other. Douglass decided, of course, that he wanted to own and run his own newspaper.

He decided that he would move. Okay. Yeah. Okay. All right. Can we change things? Yeah, down there. Yeah.