by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s viewing was all three episodes in a recent
PBS-TV mini-series, The Abolitionists,
three one-hour programs telling the story of the movement to abolish slavery
from its official beginnings in the 1830’s until the end of the Civil War.
Written, produced and directed by Rob Rapley, it alternated between actors
playing dramatized versions of real-life events and the Ken Burns approach with
photos of the real people involved and actors (the same ones who played them in
the fully dramatized sequences) reading their letters or published writings. It
focused on five particular people, three men and two women: William Lloyd
Garrison (Neal Huff), the white writer and editor who founded the first
anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, and helped pull together various abolitionist groups into the American
Anti-Slavery Society; Frederick Douglass (Richard Brooks, who of all the actors
looked the most like his real-life counterpart), the former slave who in 1845
published his famous autobiography (and though Rapley downplays this aspect in
his script, one of the most important aspects of Douglass’s book was that the
very phrase “Written by Himself” on the title page threw down the gantlet
against racism; how, the claim of authorship mutely but powerfully asked, can
you justify enslaving a race of people who are human and intelligent enough
that at least one of them has written a book? No wonder Douglass’ claims of
authorship were challenged at the time, with many opponents of abolition
claiming that Garrison had ghost-written it!); John Brown (T. Ryder Smith), who
ultimately became convinced that only revolutionary violence could take down
the slave system and the social order that supported it.
The two women were a
well-known name, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (who, according to this show, was roused to write
the book partly because she needed a project to occupy her after the tragic
death of her favorite son Charlie from typhoid fever and partly because the
loss of her own son made her appreciate the even greater tragedy of a slave
woman whose children were routinely taken away from her as soon as they were born
and frequently sold to other masters); and a little-known one, Angelina Grimké,
the daughter of a planter family in South Carolina whose religious convictions
led her to turn against slavery and turn away from the South altogether. In
1838 Grimké published a book called American Slavery As It Is, a meticulous document of all the horrors of the
“peculiar institution,” all the whippings and starvings and locking up
recalcitrant slaves, turning them over to “slave-breakers” (like Edward Cowan,
the man Douglass’s owner, Thomas Auld, turned him over to — Douglass physically
fought him back and said that from that day forward he realized he was a man)
and “selling them South” from the relatively easy work of the tobacco and rice
plantations of the Carolinas and Virginia to the tougher life in the cotton
fields of the Deep South. Though I can see why PBS cut this show up into three
parts, there’s a peculiar intensity about it that comes through most strongly
when you watch the parts consecutively as we did; and what comes through most
strongly is how the abolitionist movement has provided a template for virtually
every social-change movement that has followed it in America. Abolitionism
begat first-wave feminism — the movement for women’s suffrage was started by women
abolitionists who openly questioned why they were being made second-class
participants in a movement that was supposedly about human equality — and it
also set the pattern for the subsequent movement for African-American civil
rights that percolated throughout the 20th century after the
unrepentant Southern states (with the connivance of Northern business interests
who wanted cheap cotton and steel for the Industrial Revolution) reversed the
gains Blacks had made under Reconstruction and installed the system of
segregation. In much the same way the revived African-American civil rights
movement of the 1960’s begat the anti-Viet Nam war movement, the movements of
other people of color for their
equality, the second-wave feminist movement (started by women in the 1960’s who
wondered why they were being discriminated against inside the Left just as
their 1850’s predecessors had wondered why they were being discriminated against as women within the
abolitionist movement) and the Queer rights movement.
What’s more, The
Abolitionists reveals disagreements and
sectarian squabbles within the movement that have repeated themselves through
virtually the entire history of the American Left: the clash between religion
as an instrument of human liberation and religion as a justification of
oppression and tyranny (virtually all the early abolitionists — especially the
white ones — proclaimed their movement as a fulfillment of Christian beliefs
and values that all people were equal before God; and the defenders of slavery
were equally adamant that the Bible condoned it and therefore it was not only
wrong but blasphemous to claim that Christian values and slavery were
incompatible); the clash between nonviolent and violent means (Garrison was
essentially a Gandhian before Gandhi — he remained a pacifist until the Civil
War started and he realized that, even if the war hadn’t been started to defeat
slavery, that might well be the end result of a Union victory); the struggle
between whites leading a movement for Black liberation and the growing demand of Black people to take charge
of their own struggle (exemplified when Garrison and Douglass broke over
tactics and Garrison’s paper printed rumors of Douglass having an affair with a
white female houseguest to discredit him — which Douglass understandably
loathed as a blatant appeal to white racism); the endless sectarian battles and
the whole question of the movement’s attitude towards America’s past: celebrate
the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and say their guarantees
of equality could be truly fulfilled once the slave power was defeated (as
Radical Republican Congressmember Thaddeus Stevens did indeed say after the
war), or attack the Declaration and especially the Constitution as fundamentally unjust because
they had been built on a compromise with the slave power (as Garrison did when
he ceremonially burned the Constitution on what would today be called an
“alternative” Fourth of July celebration)? To say these are still live issues
in (what’s left of) the American Left is to state the obvious. So is the whole
question of how you relate to the electoral process — treat electoral
involvement and direct action as mutually exclusive (as Garrison did when he
urged abolitionists not to vote at all) or see them as reinforcing each other
despite the constraints on elected officials (including the powerful interests
on whom they depended then, as now, for the money to win office at all!) that
never allow them to be as uncompromising as the outside activists can afford to
be?
I think Rob Rapley was a bit hard on Abraham Lincoln — though given how
nearly deified he has been by several generations of American historians and
mythmakers it’s nice to be reminded that in his time he was reviled not only by
his enemies in the South (where Lincoln and the Republicans weren’t on the
ballot and did not pick up any
popular votes!) but by abolitionists in the North who saw him as too ready to
compromise with the slave power, too eager (at least in the first two years of
the war) to agree to amend the Constitution to fix slavery in place where it
existed in 1860 in order to preserve the Union. Rapley’s account of Lincoln’s
attitude towards what to do about slavery in late 1862 is of a confused man who
didn’t know whether he should free the slaves, keep them in bondage or try to
get rid of them altogether — he describes a meeting Lincoln had with five
African-American leaders in 1862 urging them to join the “colonization”
movement and relocate the entire U.S. Black population to Africa; then mentions
the famous letter Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley in August 1862 (which
Greeley, no doubt as Lincoln had intended him to, published) saying that his
purpose in waging the war was to preserve the Union and neither to preserve or
destroy slavery (“if I could preserve the Union by freeing all the slaves, I
would do that; if I could preserve the Union by keeping them in bondage, I
would do that; if I could preserve the Union by freeing some and leaving others
alone, I would do that,” Lincoln wrote — I’m quoting from memory here); then
talks about Lincoln drafting the Emancipation Proclamation but being unwilling
to sign it into effect; then mentions a last-ditch effort Lincoln made in terms
of a feeler to some Southern representatives who were meeting with him to agree
to yet another plan for a Constitutional amendment to freeze slavery in place
if that would end the Rebellion; then his decision to sign the Emancipation
Proclamation after all. Other historians have told these stories differently; my
own impression has long been that Lincoln’s letter to Greeley was a classic bit
of disinformation since at the time he wrote it he had the draft of the
Emancipation Proclamation in his desk drawer and was only waiting to sign it
until the Union armies had won a big enough victory on the battlefield that it
would have military as well as political credibility, which happened at
Antietam Creek in September 1862.
Be that as it may — and as limited a document
as the Emancipation Proclamation was (Lincoln restricted its application to the
Confederate states because he didn’t want to alienate the so-called “border
states” — slaveholding states that hadn’t seceded) — from the moment he signed
it, ending the slaveocracy basically became a Union war aim whether either
Lincoln or anyone else formally said so (and the Proclamation had its roots in
the similar one the first
Republican Presidential nominee, John C. Frémont, had issued in 1861 as
military governor of Union-occupied Missouri), and Congressional passage of the
Thirteenth Amendment (the actual subject of Steven Spielberg’s current film Lincoln), as well as the 14th and 15th
amendments that followed, were the formal adoption of the terms of peace. It
was fascinating to hear some of the abolitionists of the time calling for a new
Constitution — which was essentially what they got with the post-war
amendments, the 14th in particular — on the ground that the original
one of 1789 had been fatally compromised by the slave-state power, in light of
the fact that the 14th Amendment (which was essentially consigned to
the scrap heap as an instrument of racial equality and civil rights a decade
after Reconstruction and — to add to the plus ça change, plus ça meme
chose department — instead became a tool
used by corporations to raise themselves to the status of legal “persons” and
effectively put themselves above the law) has once again come under attack by
the Tea Party, whose most militant members regard the Constitution of 1789 as literally divinely inspired and the amendments of 1865-1870 as
a human-made error blotting the original vision of the Founding Fathers by
acknowledging the rights of immigrants (and their children!) as well as people
of color. “Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding,” said Clarence
Darrow in his opening statement in the Scopes trial. “Always it is feeding and
gloating for more.”
The real
lesson of the abolitionists is that things change, and even under long odds the
fight for social justice is not only an honorable calling but one which it’s
worth pursuing; at a time when I often despair of the sheer power of the
corporocracy not only in the U.S. but throughout the world, including the
weight of the media power by which it constantly molds people’s minds so they
accept it as not only the right but the only possible way society can be, it’s nice to be reminded that
the slave power seemed as overwhelming in the 1850’s as the corporate power
seemed today — indeed, the 1850’s consisted of one Southern victory after
another (the expansion of the Fugitive Slave Law, the battles over “Popular
Sovereignty” in Kansas and Nebraska, and the Dred Scott decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that was meant to
put the slave power as far beyond any effective challenge as Citizens
United was meant to put the corporate
power) until the Southern leaders overplayed their hand and decided that rather
than be governed by Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans, they would quit the
country entirely and found what would have been, if the South had won, essentially
a latifundismo republic dependent
for both its economic and military security on (ironically enough) Great
Britain, as the principal market for the Confederacy’s cotton exports. The fact
that abolition went from being a fringe movement to the law of the land in less
than 20 years is an inspiring story and gives us all hope that we, too, can
overcome the similarly entrenched economic oppression of our own time.
