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Abstract
In August 1843 Presbyterian minister Henry Highland Garnet delivered his “Address to the Slaves of the United States of America” to the National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo, NY. While often read (and almost as often dismissed) as either an unqualified call for a violent slave rebellion or, at the least, a celebration of prior acts of militant resistance which suggested that such methods deserved further consideration than they were currently receiving, the “Address” might profitably be approached within the context of an identity–action dialectic. Garnet's discussion of resistance and violence is more complicated than many scholars have recognized; one way in which we might recuperate these contested ideas and recognize their implications for African American identity and agency is to examine the way Garnet engaged and negotiated some of the antebellum African American community's dominant discursive traditions. The image and the accompanying idiom of a frequently submissive, emasculated “suffering servant” as well as the image/idiom of a violent, potentially brutish “avenging messiah” have long occupied prominent positions in the African American cultural imagination. Garnet's “Address” negotiated the disjunctive logics of submission/resistance, emasculation/brutish violence, and “suffering servant”/“avenging messiah” by drawing on and exploiting the resources of these and other performative traditions in order to fashion a tertium quid, a middle course of action capable of constituting a new mode of African American agency and an alternative form of civic identity.
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Eighth Biennial Public Address Conference hosted by the University of Georgia, October 2002.
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Eighth Biennial Public Address Conference hosted by the University of Georgia, October 2002.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the conference organizers for their invitation. He also thanks Sue Zaeske for her helpful response at the conference and for numerous subsequent conversations regarding the project.
Notes
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Eighth Biennial Public Address Conference hosted by the University of Georgia, October 2002.
1. Samuel Cornish, “Our Brethren in the Free States,” Colored American, April 22, 1837, n.p.
2. George A. Levesque, “Interpreting Early Black Ideology: A Reappraisal of Historical Consensus,” Journal of the Early Republic 1 (1981): 281.
3. See especially Tunde Adelke, “Afro-Americans and Moral Suasion: The Debate in the 1830s,” Journal of Negro History 83 (1998): 127–42; Jacqueline Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition (Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 2002); Jacqueline Bacon and Glen McClish, “Descendents of Africa, Sons of '76: Exploring Early African-American Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 36 (2006): 1–29; Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Dexter B. Gordon, Black Identity: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003); Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); R. J. Young, Antebellum Black Activists: Race, Gender, and Self (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996). These seven studies extend earlier explorations of the antebellum African American community in the north. Among these earlier works, see especially Howard Holman Bell, A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement 1830–1861 (1953; rpt., New York: Arno Press, 1969); Frederick Cooper, “Elevating the Race: The Social Thought of Black Leaders, 1827–1850,” American Quarterly 24 (1972): 604–25; Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, “Negro Conventions and the Problem of Black Leadership,” Journal of Black Studies 2 (1971): 29–44; Harry Reed, Platform for Change: The Foundations of the Northern Free Black Community, 1775–1865 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), esp. Chapters 1–4.
4. Stanley Harrold describes the pervasive
racialism in [antebellum] American culture that affected both the North and South. Americans commonly assumed that black men were more feminine than white men, more sedentary, more inclined to forgive their oppressors than confront them, more inclined to the Christian virtues. Yet Americans also assumed that a capacity for violent action resided not far beneath black men's peaceful demeanor.
Harrold, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 36. Other scholars who have observed this tendency in American culture include: Nancy Bentley, “White Slaves: The Mulatto Hero in Antebellum Fiction,” in Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender From OROONOKO to Anita Hill, ed. Michael Moon and Cathy N. Davidson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 195–216; Christopher B. Booker, “I Will Wear No Chains!” A Social History of African American Males (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2000), esp. 1–65; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (1971; rpt., Middleton, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), esp. 1–129; Ronald Takaki, “The Black Child-Savage in Ante-Bellum America,” in The Great Fear: Race in the Mind of America, ed. Gary B. Nash and Richard Weiss (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 27–44. On the specific issue of northern abolitionists, see also Lewis Perry's observation that these reformers “sometimes attributed submissive ‘feminine’ qualities to Negroes” in Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (1973; rpt., Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1995), 233.
5. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, “The Affirmation of Manhood: Black Garrisonians in Antebellum Boston,” in Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston, ed. Daniel M. Jacobs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 143, 133, 137. See also Horton and Horton, “Violence, Protest, and Identity: Black Manhood in Antebellum,” in James Oliver Horton, Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1993), 80–96, and James Oliver Horton, “Freedom's Yoke: Gender Conventions Among Antebellum Free Blacks,” Feminist Studies 12 (1986): 51–76.
6. Following Eddie Glaude's idea that northern African Americans adopted “an outside-and-inside approach” to political struggle in the 1830s (see Exodus!, 114–15), I understand “moral suasion” to be an “outside” strategy through which African Americans engaged external (non-African American and non-abolitionist) audiences while “moral reform” was the “internal” strategy that shaped and guided African American self-development (including the self-development of southern slaves).
7. C. Peter Ripley, “Introduction to the American Series: Black Abolitionists in the United States, 1830–1865,” in The Black Abolitionist Papers, ed. C. Peter Ripley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), III, 16. On moral reform and “the politics of respectability,” see Glaude, Exodus!, 114–42. For a discussion of African Americans and “benevolent agency,” see Susan M. Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 7, 163–86. On “moral reform” and the American Moral Reform Society (an organization that evolved out of the early 1830s Conventions of People of Color), see Adelke, “Afro-Americans and Moral Suasion,” and Howard H. Bell, “The American Moral Reform Society, 1836–1841,” Journal of Negro Education 27 (1958): 34–40. On William Whipper, see Richard P. McCormick, “William Whipper: Moral Reformer,” Pennsylvania History 43 (1976): 23–46. On the importance of the “suffering servant” archetype to African Americans, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (1982; rev. ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), esp. 49–66, and Theophus H. Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. 183–95.
8. For example, see Fredrickson's discussion of white abolitionist “romantic racialism” in Black Image, 97–129.
9. Simons delivered the speech on April 23, 1839, but Cornish refused to print it in the Colored American. The speech appeared in the June 1, 1839 edition when Simons published it as a paid advertisement. See Black Abolitionist Papers, III, 288–93, emphasis in original. For another example of a northern African American urging aggressive action, see an open letter addressed to “Colored Americans” by David Ruggles published in the August 13, 1841 issue of The Liberator. Ruggles concluded the letter by exhorting his readers:
Rise, brethern, rise! Strike for freedom, or die slaves! … In our cause, mere words are nothing—action is everything. Buckle on your armor … remembering that our cause demands of us union and agitation—agitation and action, from the east to the west, from the north to the south.
See also Bacon, Humblest, 59.
10. See Moses, Black Messiahs, esp. 54–55.
11. National meetings of “People of Color” had been held from 1830 to 1835. At the 1835 meeting held in Philadelphia, William Whipper orchestrated the creation of the American Moral Reform Society, which held conventions from 1836 to 1841 when the organization dissolved. The 1843 national convention was the first meeting with that scope since the collapse of the AMRS, although African Americans had organized a number of state meetings in the early 1840s (perhaps most notably the August 1840 New York state convention of Colored Citizens in which Garnet was an active participant). See Howard H. Bell, A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement 1830–1861 (New York: Arno Press, 1969), esp. 10–99. See also Howard H. Bell, ed., Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions 1830–1864 (New York: Arno Press, 1969) and Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, eds, Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), I, 2–26. Among other places, Garnet's “Address” is available in Black Abolitionist Papers, III, 403–12. Subsequent references to the “Address” will come from this version and be made parenthetically in the text.
12. Scholars reading the “Address” as an unqualified call for a violent slave rebellion or revolt include (in rhetorical studies) Arthur L. Smith, “Henry Highland Garnet: Black Revolutionary in Sheep's Vestments,” Central States Speech Journal 21 (1970): 93–98 and Steven H. Shiffrin, “The Rhetoric of Black Violence in the Antebellum Period: Henry Highland Garnet,” Journal of Black Studies 2 (1971): 45–56. More recent rhetorical scholarship continues this interpretive trajectory; Dexter Gordon (see Black Identity, 128) argues that Garnet “advanced an appeal to violence as a viable option for emancipation.” A number of Garnet's biographers promote this interpretation; see, for example, Earl Ofari [Hutchinson], “Let Your Motto Be Resistance”: The Life and Thought of Henry Highland Garnet (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), esp. 38–39, and Martin B. Pasternak, Rise Now and Fly to Arms: The Life of Henry Highland Garnet (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), esp. 46, 54. Theophus Smith (in Conjuring Culture, 61) maintains that Garnet's “Address” “explicitly incited slaves to revolt and violently overthrow their masters,” while Eddie Glaude, Jr. (in what is probably the best available reading of the text) concludes that Garnet “attempted to articulate a national politics that violently challenged the nation-state. In other words, he interpreted the call for an immanent conversation as a call for general slave insurrection in the South” (Exodus!, 158).
Another interpretive tradition recognizes Garnet's ambivalence regarding violence, but still concludes that the “Address” sought to reappraise violent means. In rhetorical studies, Kenneth Mann acknowledges that Garnet's “suggested course for the slaves was not violence” (17). Nevertheless, at the end of his essay, Mann concludes that “Garnet urged the rising up of slaves in mass, the throwing off of bonds of servitude, and the murdering of masters, if necessary, to terminate slavery in America” (20). Kenneth Eugene Mann, “Nineteenth Century Black Militant: Henry Highland Garnet's Address to the Slaves,” Southern Speech Journal 36 (1970): 11–21. Among biographers, Joel Schor advances a more qualified reading of the “Address” when he discusses Garnet's “greater acceptance of violence” (53, 58); he nevertheless suggests that Garnet's concluding exhortation was “an encouragement of violence” (55). See Schor, Henry Highland Garnet: A Voice of Black Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1977). Historian Sterling Stuckey evinces a similar ambivalence about Garnet's purpose. In a 1988 essay he reads the “Address” as a “plea for a slave revolt”; see “A Last Stern Struggle: Henry Highland Garnet and Liberation Theory” in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, ed. L. Litwack and A. Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 138. In his book Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), Stuckey qualifies that claim when he acknowledges that Garnet's “Address” was not “calling exclusively for a massive insurrection across the whole South” (157).Finally, a handful of scholars take seriously Garnet's expedience and morality arguments against violence, and construe his admonition that slaves should “cease to toil” (408) as a literal appeal for a general strike. See Stanley Harrold, Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism, and Harry Reed, “Henry Highland Garnet's ‘Address to the Slaves of the United States of America’ Reconsidered,” Western Journal of Black Studies 6 (1982): 186–92.
13. According to J. Albert Harrill, the archetypal images of the “suffering servant” and an “avenging messiah” (what Harrill terms “an abolitionist warrior Jesus”) are variations on a Biblical “hermeneutics of typology” common among African Americans. See Harrill, “The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 10 (2000): 149–86, esp. 162–63.
14. See Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 218–19. For Walker's account of episode, see Peter Hinks, ed., David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829; rpt., University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 25–28.
15. Jupiter Hammon, “An Address to the Negroes of the State of New York,” reprinted in Dorothy Porter, ed., Early Negro Writing, 1760–1837 (1971; rpt., Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 1995), 315.
16. Theophus Smith (Conjuring Culture, 192) argues that African Americans in the nineteenth century sought “to discern the difference between obedience as a theological virtue and obedience due to psychosocial conditioning” (Walker's sense of “servile deceit”). Hammon would appear to exemplify the former.
17. See, for example, Herbert Aptheker's discussion in American Negro Slave Revolts (1943; rpt., New York: International Publishers, 1993), esp. 140–49. William Cheek reproduces slave testimony on the subject of local resistance. See Cheek, Black Resistance before the Civil War (Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe Press, 1970).
18. Hammon, 316–17. Hinks discusses Hammon's “Address” in his study of Walker's Appeal (155, 173), but focuses exclusively on Hammon's “moral reform” message (the need for literacy), neglecting his endorsement of nonresistance.
19. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought Volume Two: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 15.
20. Kimberly K. Smith, The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in Antebellum Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 16–20.
21. See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 119.
22. Walker lamented in Article II of the Appeal: “Oh! Coloured people of these United States, I ask you, in the name of that God who made us, have we, in consequence of oppression, nearly lost the spirit of man, and, in no very trifling degree, adopted that of brutes” (28). He later urged his readers “to prove to the Americans and the world, that we are MEN, and not brutes, as we have been represented” (32). The mode of representation to which Walker refers at this point of the Appeal does not equate “brute” with violence, but instead articulates “brute” with an emasculated “groveling submission” (30).
23. Nathan Irvin Huggins, Black Odyssey: The Afro-American Ordeal in Slavery (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 234–36. On this idea, see also Albert Raboteau's discussion of the way Christianity provided slaves with a resource for “inner resistance.” Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 302.
There is a strong family resemblance between Huggins’ description of slave stoicism and Raboteau's sense of “inner resistance” and Jane Tomkins’ reconstruction of “sentimental power” in antebellum women's fiction. As is the case with slave stoicism, women's sentimental fiction features “an ethic of submission.” But, Tomkins argues, submission “is never submission to the will of a husband or father … [it is] a self-willed act of conquest of one's own passions.” Female submission in these novels should be understood, Tompkins insists, as “the mastery of herself, and therefore, paradoxically, an assertion of autonomy.” See Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 161–62. Noticing this connection between stoical slaves and self-willed submissive women does not lead to the conclusion reached by advocates such as Walker (stoical nonresistance emasculates or feminizes African Americans). Walker evidently understood emasculation or feminization as conditions of abjection and powerlessness, whereas Huggins, Tompkins, and other scholars urge us to recognize a differently modality of power at work among some women and African Americans in antebellum America.
24. Theophus Smith, 184–90; quote on p. 188.
25. In the final chapter of Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin wrote:
[I]f we are inhumanly harassed by a cruel prince; if we are rapaciously plundered by an avaricious or luxurious one; if we are neglected by an indolent one; or if we are persecuted on account of piety, by an impious and sacrilegious one,—let us first call to mind our transgressions against God. … Let us, in the next place … implore the aid of the Lord, in whose hands are the hearts of kings and the revolutions of kingdoms. … [Here] is displayed his wonderful goodness … for sometimes he raises up some of his servants as public avengers, and arms them with his commission to punish unrighteous domination, and to deliver from their distressing calamities a people who have been unjustly oppressed.
Institutes (1559; rpt., Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1928), II, 660–61. Similarly, in 1554 John Knox sent epistles to Protestants in England and Scotland suffering under the yoke of the Catholic Queen Mary Tudor. In these epistles Knox counseled patient suffering, alluding to the Old Testament when he promised his readers that God would “raise up a Jehu” who would deliver them from their suffering. See, for example, John Knox, “Faithful Admonition,” in The Works of John Knox, ed. David Laing (1855; rpt., New York: AMS Press, 1966), III, 309.
26. Young's Manifesto is reprinted in Sterling Stuckey, The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 30–38 (quotations on 37–38).
27. Whipper's address was reprinted in the Colored American in the September 9, 16, 23, and 30, 1837, issues, and has been reprinted in Black Abolitionist Papers, III, 238–51. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text. Few contemporary analyses of American nonresistance recognize the degree to which African Americans engaged this issue; see, for example, Dan McKanan, Identifying the Image of God: Radical Christians and Nonviolent Power in the Antebellum United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). A subordinate objective of this essay is to situate both Whipper and Garnet within the antebellum nonresistance tradition.
28. See Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 245.
29. Samuel Cornish's decision to reprint Whipper's 1837 AMRS speech provided Garnet and other New Yorkers with access to it. Whipper's decision to reprint one of Garnet's orations in the October 1839 edition of the National Reformer further suggests some familiarity between the two men. Finally, Sterling Stuckey suggests that it very well may have been Garnet who, under the pseudonym “Sidney,” responded to Whipper's early 1841 critique of the August 1840 Convention of the Colored Inhabitants of the State of New York which Garnet helped organize; see Stuckey, Slave Culture, 212.
30. Originally reprinted in both the Liberator and the Emancipator and Free American in February 1842, the “Address” can be found in Harrold, Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism, 153–61. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text.
31. Garrison's “Address” was initially published in the Liberator on June 2, 1843, and reissued as a pamphlet in Boston by O. Johnson. It can be found in Harrold, Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism, 169–78. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text.
32. As scholars such as Wilson Moses and Theophus Smith have noted, the paradigmatic manifestation of the nonresistant slave “suffering servant” was in all likelihood Harriet Beecher Stowe's character “Uncle Tom.” I will discuss Stowe's literary character in relation to Garnet's call to action later in the essay.
33. A. E. Marsh, “The Colored Convention,” Liberator, September 8, 1843, n.p.
34. Rod Hart uses this expression to refer to all of the messages which impinge on a speaker or writer's audience, and by extension on speakers and writers. See Modern Rhetorical Criticism, 2nd ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997), 51–52. See also Kirt Wilson's sense of “discursive field” developed in his “Interpreting the Discursive Field of the Montgomery Bus Boycott: Martin Luther King's Holt Street Address,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8 (2005): 299–326.
35. Horton and Horton, “Violence, Protest, and Identity,” 89; see also “Affirmation of Manhood,” 135, 144.
36. On “emotive language,” see Cynthia King, “Henry Highland Garnet” in African American Orators: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, ed. Richard W. Leeman (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1996), 147. While Stanley Harrold argues that Garnet called on slaves to undertake a general strike, he nevertheless focuses on his “violent imagery” (Rise, 35, 57).
37. Glaude, Exodus!, esp. 146, 156, and 158. Glaude's analysis echoes Shiffrin's (1971) discussion of the way “Garnet's argument had transformed physical violence from cardinal sin to divinely ordained responsibility. The values of a religious movement were suddenly turned upside down. … Garnet had again turned the arguments of abolitionists such as William Whipper upside down” (50–51). Shiffrin appears to be the first scholar to perceive a connection between Whipper's 1837 AMRS address and Garnet's 1843 “Address to the Slaves.”
38. See Schor, Henry Highland Garnet, 10; Black Abolitionist Papers, III, 187–88.
39. Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black and Presbyterian: The Heritage and the Hope (Philadelphia: The Geneva Press, 1983), 54; Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of Afro-American People, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983), 90. See also Andrew E. Murray, Presbyterians and the Negro—A History (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Historical Society, 1966).
40. In his study of Walker's Appeal, Peter Hinks devotes a few pages to comparing Walker's text with Garnet's “Address” (see To Awaken, 234–35). He argues that Garnet “fell far short of Walker's impressive effort to speak directly to the slaves through simple and concrete language, powerful emotional liaisons, and emphatic cadences yoked to religious yearning. Garnet often sounded formal, distant, and even admonishing of the slaves.” Garnet sounds, Hinks concludes, “like an admonishing schoolmaster” or, following Wilmore's observations, we might modify Hinks’ conclusion and conclude that Garnet sounded like what he was: a Presbyterian minister. In his brief discussion of Garnet, Hinks seems unable either to appreciate or to recognize how an individual could advocate radical action without relying on the very emotional, enthusiastic cadences of evangelical revivalism, but that is precisely what we need to do if we are to understand the texture of Garnet's “Address.” While Walker transformed Christianity into “a radical egalitarian evangelicalism” through which he could urge resistance, and Harriet Beecher Stowe and many other sentimental evangelicals of the period sought to combat, in George Fredrickson's terms, the “doubting intellect” with the emotional, evangelical piety (or “religion of the heart”) which energized the nonresistant Negro, Henry Highland Garnet fashioned an alternative to both appropriations of Christianity by drawing upon his Presbyterian/reformed Protestant heritage and educational training. See Fredrickson, 111–12.
41. Milton C. Sernett, Abolition's Axe: Beriah Green, Oneida Institute, and the Black Freedom Struggle (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 125, 73. Given the leanings of Garnet's Presbyterian mentor, Theodore Wright, he was probably a member of the more enthusiastic “new school” Presbyterians which emerged in the 1830s. But on the rational/enthusiastic spectrum employed by historians of American religion such as Alan Heimert, new school Presbyterians such as Garnet are much more rational than the highly enthusiastic Methodists and Baptists (denominations which had a large following among nineteenth-century African Americans). See Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).
42. Sernett, 44.
43. As numerous scholars have demonstrated, by the early 1800s most American Protestants, including such enormously influential Presbyterians as Charles Finney, had abandoned a strict Calvinist confession (e.g. human depravity, absolute dependence on God's grace, etc.) in favor of a much more liberal, “Arminian” theology (which acknowledged humanity's capacity to achieve salvation through human agency). My analysis leads me to propose a slight modification to this accepted interpretation. On the interlaced topics of resistance and nonresistance, American Protestants remained in an argumentative trajectory established in the writings of sixteenth-century radical Calvinists such as Knox and Christopher Goodman. Part of Garnet's conceptual and rhetorical innovation resides in the way he imbricated the tradition of Protestant resistance with an Arminian emphasis on human, and specifically African American, agency.
44. My analysis of this passage parallels Glaude's discussion of how Garnet “turned religious benevolence on its head … [by focusing] on the duties of black Christian slaves to forsake the obstacles to obtaining the grace of God.” Garnet, Glaude continues, shifted the focus “from the sinful character of slavery … to the sinful aspect of the slave's submission” (152–54).
45. Cynthia King also notes the deductive texture of this passage in her entry on Garnet in African-American Orators: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, ed. Richard W. Leeman (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1996), 145.
46. Skinner, 17. Goodman's most influential tract, How Superior Powers Oght to be Obeyed of their Subiects: And Wherin they may Lawfully by Gods Worde be Disobeyed and Resisted [sic] originated as a 1557 sermon on Acts and, according to Jane E. A. Dawson, “completely redefined the doctrine of obedience as a Christian duty.” See Dawson, “Trumpeting Resistance: Christopher Goodman and John Knox,” in John Knox and the British Reformations, ed. Roger A. Mason (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1998), esp. 146–53 (quote on 147).
47. Idolatry was the pre-eminent evil against which Reformation figures such as John Knox did battle. Nineteenth-century African Americans did not judge pro-slavery theology to be idolatrous. David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet did not argue that Southern slaveholders worshipped false gods (although they repeatedly castigated southern “avarice”); they insisted, in Walker's words, that slaveholders did not acknowledge “that God made man to serve Him alone, and that man should have no other Lord or Lords but Himself—that God Almighty is the sole proprietor or master of the WHOLE human family” (Appeal, 7, emphasis and typography in original). Walker went further than Garnet in suggesting, “If it were possible, would they [slaveholders] not dethrone Jehovah and seat themselves upon his throne?” (19).
48. Early Protestant reformers in England and Scotland such as John Knox continually engaged the question of who might be required or have a duty to resist evil. For example, see Knox's 1558 “Letter Addressed to the Commonality of Scotland” in which he argued that the people's degraded condition did not remove their obligation to act. See David Laing, ed., The Works of John Knox (1855; rpt., New York: AMS Press, 1966), IV, esp. 526–27. Scott Dolff argues that Knox employed a principle of “divine pragmatism” to supplement an appeal to covenant theology in order to argue that, contra English nobility, Scottish nobles and the Scottish people were not required “to overthrow the reigning national government.” Garnet, I argue, also exploited the resources of covenant theology to assert that slaves had a duty to resist, but—like Knox—he pragmatically advised against “a revolution with the sword” (410). See Dolff, “The Two John Knoxes and the Justification of Non-Revolution: A Response to Dawson's Argument from Covenant,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 55 (2004): 71–73.
49. Skinner, 236–37.
50. Regarding Knox's “reversal” or reformulation of Christian obedience, Richard Greaves writes: “There is nothing in Knox's theology itself—or in Reformed or Protestant theology in general—that made such a reversal inevitable, although his conception of covenant responsibilities made the reversal extremely likely.” Similarly, we cannot fully understand Garnet's reconstruction of Christian duty if we only treat it, as Glaude does, as an ironic reversal of antebellum moral reform rhetoric; the force of Garnet's “Address” emerged in part from its reanimation of covenant theology. See Greaves, Theology and Revolution in the Scottish Reformation: Studies in the Thought of John Knox (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian University Press, 1980), 127.
51. While the maxim did not appear in the “Address,” A. E. Marsh reported that Garnet introduced this and other “axioms” into the ensuing debate. See Marsh, “The Colored Convention,” Liberator, September 8, 1843, n.p. Patrick Rael notes the connection between Garnet and the radical tradition of English Protestantism from which the maxim emerged. He writes:
[Garnet] transformed the problem from one of justifying resistance in the face of a Christian commandment to obey to one that posed a tension between obedience to God and obedience to masters. Now, by heeding the words of English radicals who insisted that ‘rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,’ the oppressed had a duty to resist, openly and actively.
See Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 273.
52. Dean Hammer, The Puritan Tradition in Revolutionary, Federalist, and Whig Political Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 93. Julian Boyd, editor of Thomas Jefferson's papers, reviews Jefferson's fascination with the motto. In the original manuscript in which Jefferson discussed his first encounter with the motto, it isn't clear if Jefferson attributed the motto to Benjamin Franklin's “hand” (handwriting, suggesting that Franklin was the author) or his “hands” (suggesting that he passed it along to Jefferson). Julian Boyd, “‘Bradshaw's Epitaph’: The Source of ‘Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God,’” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, I, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 677–79. The Library of America's volume Benjamin Franklin, Writings includes the complete “epitaph” as it appeared in the Pennsylvania Evening Post on December 15, 1775, and attributes it to Franklin. (New York: Library Classics of the United States, Inc., 1987), 743–44.
53. Jonathan Mayhew, “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers,” in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, ed. Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 231–32.
54. Heimert argues that Mayhew's reputation as a “fiery liberal” is without foundation (274). His critical evaluation of Mayhew's style resembles Hinks’ negative evaluation of Garnet
55. According to Alan Heimert,
“Arminianism,” a name derived from that of the Dutch theologian, Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), had originally referred to the belief that grace is not irresistible, as Calvin had argued, but conditional [it could be refused]. By the eighteenth century, however, the term was used less rigorously … to refer to any of a number of vague ideas expressive of impatience with the “rigid” and “harsh” doctrines of Calvinism. (4)
In short, Arminianism maintained that on the question of salvation, humanity possessed considerably more agency than traditional Calvinism taught. On Mayhew's Arminianism, see Charles W. Akers, Called Unto Liberty: A Life of Jonathan Mayhew, 1720–1766 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 61ff.
56. Reed, “Henry Highland,”esp. 190–91. On the Althusserian concept of interpellation, see Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 133–50. Dexter Gordon, in Black Identity, also notes the “Address”'s interpellative potential, but he argues that it is a consequence of Garnet's incipient “black nationalist narrative” which “posits a transhistorical subject” (144–45). Following Glaude's advice to approach the text “in Christian terms” and comparing it to Smith and Garrison's precursor texts reveals additional interpellative possibilities.
57. John Calvin certainly did not invent the middle ground argument strategy, but he employed it regularly in the context of secular matters. For example, he began the final chapter of his Institutes by distinguishing between the “infatuated and barbarous men [who] madly endeavor to subvert this ordinance [civil government] established by God” and the “flatterers of princes, extolling their power beyond all just bounds, [who] hesitate not to oppose it to the authority of God himself” (633). Skinner (Foundations) reads the first passage (translated as “insane and barbarous men”) as a reference to the radical Anabaptist movement of the 1520s and 1530s which rejected all secular authority as part of its quest for religious purity (193). But if Calvin sought to distance himself from the radical Anabaptists, he also sought to distance himself from the apparently Catholic “flatterers of princes” who sought to wield “the authority of God himself.” Seeking a tertium quid, I suggest, is an element of reformed Protestant teaching on secular authority.
58. On the compatibility of religious and liberal defenses of a people's right to revolution, see Alex Tuckness, “Discourses of Resistance in the American Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 547–63.
59. Ichabod Spencer, Fugitive Slave Law: The Religious Duty of Obedience to Law (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1850), 14–15.
60. Daniel Webster, “Second Reply to Hayne,” January 26–27, 1830, in The Papers of Daniel Webster Speeches and Formal Writings, ed. Charles Wiltse (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1974), I, 329, 337.
61. Abraham Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address,” in Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, ed. Roy P. Basler (1946; rpt., New York: Da Capo Press, n.d.), 585.
62. Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (1972; rpt, New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 28.
63. Maier, 51–76; Smith, 33–39. On Dickinson's quest for a middle course, see James Jasinski, “Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies: Revolution, Constitution, and Slavery,” in Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice, ed. Robert Hariman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), esp. 150–53.
64. Kimberly Smith notes the way gender constructions functioned in the quest for a middle course: “Colonists were to be neither riotous nor submissive; rather, they were to behave in a manner befitting freemen—and the gendered term is appropriate here. Attempts to legitimate resistance typically relied heavily on … masculine … virtues” (36). Richard Yarborough discusses the centrality of masculinity in African American advocates such as David Walker, Henry Garnet, and—especially—Frederick Douglass in “Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass's ‘The Heroic Slave,’” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 166–87.
65. He reiterated this point in the “Address”'s final paragraph.
66. Glaude, Exodus!, 156. See also Harrold, Rise, 34.
67. Knox, “Letter to the Commonality,” in Works, IV, 534.
68. I part company with Harry Reed on this point. I agree with Reed's claim that “Garnet's plan entailed militant but nonviolent civil disobedience,” but I think Reed mistaken when he emphatically claims that Garnet “advocated militant self-defense” in paragraphs fourteen and fifteen.
69. It may seem odd to introduce Uncle Tom's Cabin into a discussion of Garnet's “Address” since the first serial installment of the novel did not appear until June 1851—almost eight years after Garnet addressed the delegates in Buffalo. And it might seem odd to juxtapose Garnet's logic with that represented by a fictional character. But Uncle Tom's Cabin was an unusual work of fiction; second in popularity in the free states to the Bible, it represented the attitudes and sentiments of the North's evangelical culture with considerable clarity. Late twentieth-century scholars have recognized the novel and character's cultural significance. Wilson Moses notes the way Uncle Tom represented “the model of the submissive Christ” (52, 65). Richard Yarborough describes the way Stowe's character “approaches the Christlike in his passivity, piety, and resigned refusal to challenge the apparent will of God.” See Yarborough, “Strategies of Characterization in Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel,” in New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 54. According to George Fredrickson, Uncle Tom “is not simply a Negro but a spokesman for the evangelical ‘religion of the heart’ which Harriet Beecher Stowe was recommending as the only path to salvation.” Stowe, Fredrickson concludes, advocated “evangelical piety and Uncle Tom served as a weapon in her war against the doubting intellect” (111–12).
70. Moses, 56. George Fredrickson makes a similar observation; see 117.
71. Abednego Seller prepared the earliest conceptual history; see The History of Passive Obedience since the Reformation (Amsterdam: Theodore Johnson, 1689). Many well-known British intellectuals including George Berkeley and Samuel Johnson discussed the concept in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. During the Revolutionary period, loyalists such as Jonathan Boucher advocated the doctrine (see especially his 1775 sermon “On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience, and Nonresistance”) while radical Whigs typically denied passive obedience the status of a middle course by equating it with abject submission. Some nonresisters in the 1840s, recognizing the concept's pejorative connotations, sought to distinguish more clearly “passive obedience” and nonresistance. See, for example, Adin Ballou, Christian Non-Resistance in All Its Important Bearings (1846; rpt., New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), esp. 2.
72. Martin Luther, Temporal Authority: To What Extent it Should be Obeyed in Luther's Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, Conrad Bergendoff and Eric W. Gritsch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1958), XL, 125.
73. In the June 15, 1839, issue of the Non-Resistant, Chapman wrote: “Passive non-resistance is one thing; active non-resistance another. We mean to apply our principles. We mean to be bold for God. Action! Action!—thus shall we overcome the violent.” Quoted in Perry, Radical Abolitionism, 247. There is, of course, some irony in suggesting that Chapman's 1839 “active non-resistance” might resemble Garnet's 1843 call for resistance, given the former's negative reaction to the latter's “Address” in the September 22, 1843, edition of The Liberator (Chapman was serving as editor that fall in Garrison's absence).
74. See also Harrold's discussion of the way Garnet embodied “an assertive black masculinity” (Rise, 96) in both the “Address” and his subsequent response to Chapman's editorial.
75. See Bell, Survey, 38–68.
76. Anonymous, “A Thought on Emancipation,” in Liberty Chimes (Providence, RI: Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society/R. W. Potter, 1845), 80.
77. Micajah T. Johnson, “Non-Resistance,” The Liberator, July 23, 1852, n.p.
78. Charles K. Whipple, The Non-Resistance Principle: With Particular Application to the Help of Slaves by Abolitionists (Boston, MA: R. F. Wallcut, 1860), 18, 21–22.
79. Harry Reed argues that Garnet “anticipated” Henry David Thoreau's call for passive resistance in 1848 and was, therefore, a domestic precursor to Martin Luther King's militant nonviolent civil disobedience. See Reed, “Garnet's ‘Address’ Reconsidered,”190.