Primary Source’s Making Freedom: African Americans in United States History, was originally published in 2004, and was composed of five teacher sourcebooks. The forward and context essays, written by scholars of that time, were designed to provide background information necessary to understanding the primary sources and activities in each unit. In the spirit of consistency, we have opted to include the original context essays, as additional “further resources” that educators may opt to review in order to deepen their context knowledge further. It is important to note however, that unless otherwise noted, these context essays are presented here in their original form and have not been edited since their original publication. As a result, these essays may no longer reflect the most up to date historical information and/or may not reflect the instructional, pedagogical or culturally responsive approaches and linguistic expectations of today.
A Singularly American Brew (of Attitudes and Beliefs), An introductory essay
Marilyn Richardson
Book 3: “Lift Ev’ry Voice”: Speaking For Freedom, Context Essay 2
2004
The social, political and historical forces shaping the debates over slavery and abolition gained prodigious momentum between 1830 and 1860. During those decades the specter of possible armed conflict grew on the national horizon. Those volatile forces were a singularly American brew of attitudes and beliefs shaped by competing African American and majority white responses and claims to turning points in the nation’s development.
Blacks and whites fought and died side by side in the Revolutionary War, yet the hard-won rights of citizens of a free nation were unilaterally denied all slaves in the southern states and only partially, grudgingly and inconsistently available to free blacks in the North and in the South. The 1830s saw the rise of emphatic claims by black writers and speakers to equality under the law. Through the antislavery press, through organizations of abolitionist speakers, and with increasing debate in civic and religious forums, as well as at antislavery conventions here and abroad, the abolitionist cause gained increasing recognition and support.
Even as the very act of teaching blacks to read and write became punishable under southern law, blacks north and south understood that literacy and education were second only to freedom in making a better future for themselves and their children. Starting in the 1830s higher education for blacks and women changed the nature of intellectual, academic and cultural life in America. While Oberlin College in Ohio became the first in the country to admit blacks and females on an equal basis with white males, change reached to the levels of primary and secondary education as well.
Five-year-old Sarah Roberts attended the handsome red-brick Abiel Smith School on Joy Street in Boston, Massachusetts; it was a school established in 1834 for Boston’s “colored” children. In order to get there each school day, Roberts had to pass five white schools. In 1849, her father, Benjamin Roberts, a printer, filed suit against the city. Charles Sumner was his attorney, assisted by the black activist attorney Robert Morris. On December 4, 1849, Sumner appeared before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to argue for the rights of Sarah Roberts and other African Americans in the Boston public schools. He claimed that segregated schools were unconstitutional and emotionally damaging to both black and white children. Further, he argued that separate schools could never be equal.
Although the court decided against Roberts in 1850, others, including the African American historian William Cooper Nell, and the crusading white editor William Lloyd Garrison, carried the cause forward. Many black parents boycotted the segregated school and petitioned for change. Finally, in 1855, the Governor of Massachusetts signed a law that stated that “[N] o distinction shall be made on account of the race, color or religious opinions of the applicant or scholar” in the state’s public schools. That September, students of both races began attending school together.
During those same decades the structure of the Underground Railroad evolved to such a level that it provided refuge to a constant and ever increasing stream of tens of thousands of fugitive men, women and children fleeing the South and settling in northern states, Canada, Mexico, the southwest and Europe. The Vigilance Committees organized by blacks and whites in major northern cities developed the administrative and fund-raising network necessary to assure money, food, clothing, shelter, transportation, legal assistance and employment for the escaped slaves.
The very concept of human beings as chattel, upheld by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, so repelled significant numbers of black and white Americans that resistance to the arrest of fugitives led otherwise law-abiding people of all backgrounds and from all levels of society to acts of civil disobedience, public demonstrations, and often violent conflict with law enforcement agents and government troops
Those years of struggle galvanized an unprecedented inter-racial collaboration of political and cultural activists whose influence was both national and international. Although their views and tactics covered a spectrum wide enough to produce approaches as different as those of Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass or those of John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison, they shared the common goal of ending slavery and ensuring all Americans human and civil rights under law.
African American writers often led the charge in shaping public sentiment. The first edition of David Walker’s Appeal . . . To the Colored Citizens of the World, appeared in 1829 followed by a second and expanded edition the next year. Hard on the heels of his mysterious and controversial death, one of his disciples, the African American Maria W. Stewart, became the first American-born woman of any race to lecture in public on political themes and leave extant copies of her texts. At the same time, Liberator editor William Lloyd Garrison published Stewart’s first essays on human rights, women’s rights, and possibility of armed black rebellion in the United States.
A few years later, in the early 1840s, escaped slave Frederick Douglass, a “Renaissance man” in the struggle for abolition and universal human rights, began his speaking and writing career. He was a brilliant orator, a prolific journalist, essayist and autobiographer. Douglass also worked, wrote and spoke on behalf of the temperance movement and was a vigorous supporter of women’s rights.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) came into her own as a writer and antislavery lecturer following the publication of her first of many collections of poetry and prose, Forest Leaves, in 1845. She worked as a teacher and was much in demand as a speaker who, according to Philadelphia abolitionist William Still, “[spoke] without notes, with gestures few and fitting. Her manner [was] marked by dignity and composure.”
Another writer, William Wells Brown, was born a slave near Lexington, Kentucky. Following his escape in 1834, he married and settled near Rochester, New York. His employment on a Lake Erie steamer enabled him to serve as an efficient conductor on the Underground Railroad. Later, as a speaker for the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, he moved to Boston where he was a close associate of Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Except for the years 1849-1854 spent in Great Britain, Brown lived and wrote in New England until his death. His interests and talents were wide and deep. Among his publications were the Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (1847); The Antislavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Antislavery Meetings (1849) and The Escape, or, A Leap for Freedom, A Drama in Five Acts (1858). The last is possibly the first play published by a black American.
In all, Brown was the author of more than a dozen books including Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter, one of the first novels by an African American author. Following the Civil War, Brown studied medicine privately and after serving an apprenticeship became a practicing physician.
It is important to recognize the international dimension of the antislavery movement. Northern black activists, male and female, were a small but highly influential and quite mobile community. International conferences, lecture tours, study abroad, even at times flight to avoid capture all took then across the Atlantic where they argued their cause, forged political alliances, and garnered support and funds. They returned shaped by residence in European and other capitals and by having been received with honor, dignity and a respect for their words and deeds rarely extended by whites at home.
Frederick Douglass spent most of 1845 and 1846 traveling and lecturing to great acclaim throughout Great Britain. In1848, William Craft played the role of slave to his wife Ellen who was disguised as a white man in order to escape from Georgia to Boston. When warrants for their arrest were issued by their former master as a result of the Fugitive Slave act of 1850, the Crafts fled first to Nova Scotia and then to England where they remained until after the Civil War. British abolitionists arranged several speaking tours for them, sometimes on the same platform with William Wells Brown. Brown often traveled with a huge painted diorama showing vivid scenes of the evils of slavery. He had commissioned the work to counter similar artistic depictions of the pleasures of the pastoral American south. Activist and speaker Sarah Parker Remond left America in 1858 for England to argue the cause of abolition, to “breathe free air,” and to further her education. These men and women, to mention just a handful, returned bearing evidence of the widest intellectual horizons which in turn influenced and encouraged young black men and women to trust and develop their own creative and intellectual energies and aspirations in the recognition that emancipation of the spirit must accompany emancipation of the body.
Although we can imagine that the bitter historical memory of the original trans-Atlantic journey of the Middle Passage echoed in their minds, historian James Brewer Stewart observes that black abolitionists lived their lives within “a panorama of international perspective,” he remarks further that “the friendships made abroad, the gossip shared by letter, the exchange of hospitality, the monies raised and gifts given . . . ” all made tangible this international experience. So too did the elaborate antislavery fairs put on annually by abolitionist women, black and white working together. Donations of items to offer for sale poured in from England, Ireland, Scotland and France. The single most widely disseminated and recognized antislavery image, the kneeling slave imploring “Am I Not A Man And A Brother?” originated in the famed British workshop of Josiah Wedgwood.
The Sourcebook “Lift Ev’ry Voice”: Speaking for Freedom 1830-1860 will introduce teachers and students to the lives and careers of these figures and many more. They, along with thousands of other brave, determined, creative and far-sighted abolitionists, North and South, shared a vision of America’s promise that led them to daily fight against brutality, corruption, and degradation even as they shaped our understanding of freedom, enlightenment, and personal fulfillment.