Race and Citizenship. Reading 6

Transcription

1 Race and Citizenship Reading 6 By the middle of the 1800s, the idea that some races are superior to others had become the conventional wisdom. Respected scientists like Samuel Morton gave racism legitimacy. As a result, racist ideas were taught in universities, preached from pulpits, and reinforced in books, magazines, and newspapers. After surveying the leading publications of the day, historian Reginald Horsman notes, One did not have to read obscure books to know that the Caucasians were innately superior, and that they were responsible for civilization in the world, or to know that inferior races were destined to be overwhelmed or even to disappear. These ideas permeated the main American periodicals and in the second half of the century formed part of the accepted truth of America s schoolbooks. 1 They also shaped the way Americans defined citizenship. Immediately after the American Revolution, only three states Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia limited the right to vote to white men. Until 1800, no northern state limited suffrage on the basis of race. After 1800, however, every state that entered the Union with the exception of Maine placed restrictions on the right of African Americans to vote. States that permitted blacks to vote began to narrow or remove that right entirely. In 1837, a delegate to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention justified taking away voting rights from African American citizens by describing the United States as a political community of white persons. By the late 1850s, blacks could vote on the same basis as whites only in five states all of them in New England. In 1857, the language of exclusion reached the Supreme Court. In the Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that blacks had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. The American people, Taney argued, constituted a political family restricted to whites. Historian Eric Foner notes, It was a family of which blacks, descended from different ancestors and lacking a history of freedom, could never be a part. In effect, race had replaced class as the boundary separating which American men were entitled to enjoy political freedom and which were not. 2 As race increasingly defined citizenship, free blacks in the North and West as well as the South found themselves outside the nation s universe of obligation. When they looked for work on the docks of New York City, they were attacked by white workers. When young African Americans applied for the apprenticeships that would lead to good jobs in places like Cincinnati, Ohio, white mechanics blocked their every attempt. As one young black man complained, Why should I strive hard and acquire all the constituents of a man, if the prevailing genius of the land admit me not as such, or but in an inferior degree! Race and Membership in American History 55

2 Pardon me if I feel insignificant and weak.... What are my prospects? To what shall I turn my hand? Shall I be a mechanic? No one will employ me; white boys won t work with me.... Drudgery and servitude, then, are my prospective portion. 3 Even the most educated African Americans experienced hostility, prejudice, and discrimination at every turn. Historian Ronald Takaki relates the experiences of Martin Delany, the son of a slave father and free mother in Charles Town, Virginia (now Charleston, West Virginia), to suggest the breadth and depth of the shame and humiliation African Americans experienced in all parts of the nation in the early 1800s. As a child, Martin learned that his membership in the black race made him the object of white scorn. [His mother s] efforts to teach her children to read and write aroused angry opposition from white neighbors who were anxious to preserve their belief in black intellectual inferiority.... White resentment was so intense that she felt compelled to move her family across the border to Pennsylvania. But even north of slavery, racism was prevalent. As a young man studying in Pittsburgh during the 1830s, Delany experienced the brutality of anti-black riots led by mobs composed of white workers. As a journalist and as an antislavery lecturer during the 1840s, Delany traveled widely throughout the North and often encountered racial hostility and violence. On one occasion, a white mob in Marseilles, Ohio, threatened to tar and feather him and burn him alive. Delany found that white children, even while involved in play, were never too busy to notice a black passing by and scream nigger.... Delany found that the racial epithets were not only an abuse of the feelings, but also a blasting outrage on humanity. His bitterness toward northern society was sharpened by an admissions controversy at Harvard Medical School. In 1850, Delany along with two other blacks were admitted to the school. Their admission, however, was conditional: upon graduation, they would have to emigrate and practice medicine in Africa. Even so, their presence at Harvard provoked protests from white students. Demanding the dismissal of the blacks, they argued that integration would lower the reputation of Harvard and lessen the value of their diploma. The whites refused to attend classes with the blacks.... The faculty quickly capitulated, ignoring a student counter-petition favoring the admission of the blacks. Deeming it inexpedient to allow blacks to attend lectures, the faculty defended their decision based on their commitment to teaching and academic excellence Facing History and Ourselves

3 Two years after the incident at Harvard, Delany wrote a book that encouraged African Americans to return to Africa. He was convinced that even if slavery were abolished, blacks would not be accepted as equals in the United States. Yet even as he made plans to leave the country, he dedicated his book to the American people, North and South. By their most devout and patriotic fellowcitizen, the author. He also reminded his readers of the contributions that blacks had made to the nation. Among the highest claims that an individual has upon his country, he wrote, is that of serving in its cause, and assisting to fight its battles. In 1861, when the Civil War began, he abandoned his dreams of Africa and volunteered for the Union Army. He served as a major in the 104th Regiment of the United States Colored Troops. CONNECTIONS According to scholar Leon Higginbotham, Jr., race was increasingly entwined with the idea of citizenship in the years just after the American Revolution. Increasingly, he writes, a citizen was a man who could help his neighbors put down slave rebellions or fight Indians. How is the word citizen defined by the mid-1800s? How did notions about race shape that definition? A young African American quoted in this reading asks, What are my prospects? To what shall I turn my hand? How do you think Samuel Morton and other race scientists would answer his questions? How might Martin Delany answer them? How would you answer them? To what extent do Samuel Morton s rankings place that young man and other African Americans beyond the nation s universe of obligation? What does Martin Delany s story suggest about the consequences of being outside a nation s universe of obligation? How do you explain the change from a society that emphasizes equality to one that stresses differences? What role may education have played in that change? 1. Race and Manifest Destiny by Reginald Horsman. Harvard University Press, 1981, p The Story of American Freedom by Eric Foner. W.W. Norton & Company, 1998, pp Quoted in North from Slavery by Leon Litvak. Chicago, 1965, pp A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki. Copyright 1993 by Ronald Takaki. By permission of Little, Brown and Company, 1993, pp Race and Membership in American History 57

4 Challenging Racism Reading 7 When Thomas Jefferson questioned the intellectual capabilities of people of African descent in the late 1700s, his opponents reminded him of the words he wrote in the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By the mid-1800s, Governor James Hammond of South Carolina and a growing number of other white Americans viewed as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson that all men are born equal. Among the few Americans in the early 1800s to keep alive the language of the Declaration of Independence were abolitionists those who sought to end slavery in the nation. Although many of them did not believe that all men are born equal, their long struggle to abolish slavery gave new meaning to personal liberty and the rights attached to citizenship. In the 1830s, writes historian Eric Foner, politicians and ordinary citizens tried to silence those who were critical of slavery. In northern cities, mobs broke up the meetings of abolitionist societies and destroyed their printing presses. In 1836, the U.S. House of Representatives refused to consider any petition that called for the abolition of slavery. At about the same time, Postmaster General Amos Kendall allowed U.S. postal officials in southern states to remove from the mail any written material critical of slavery. Foner argues: The fight for the right to debate slavery openly and without reprisal led abolitionists to elevate free opinion freedom of speech and of the press and the right of petition to a central place in what [William Lloyd] Garrison called the gospel of freedom. The struggle for free speech also reinforced the contention that slavery threatened the liberties of white Americans as well as black. Free expression, abolitionists insisted, should be a national standard, not subject to limitation by those who held power within local communities. 1 The struggle against slavery also inspired two definitions of citizenship. One was based on race. The other was based on a civic understanding of nationhood. It was summarized by Lydia Maria Child in 1833 in a popular essay entitled An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans. Foner writes: Child s text insisted that blacks were compatriots, not foreigners; they were no more Africans than whites were Englishmen. At a time 58 Facing History and Ourselves

5 when the authority to define the rights of citizens lay almost entirely with the states, abolitionists maintained that birth place should determine who was an American. The idea of birthright citizenship, later enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, was a truly radical departure from the traditions of American life. 2 Black abolitionists were particularly adamant in their insistence on the equality of African Americans. In 1854, in a speech in Cleveland, Ohio, Frederick Douglass responded to an editorial in a Virginia newspaper that justified slavery by claiming that African Americans were less human than white Anglo Saxons the descendents of a mythical people who settled in England in the fifth century. Douglass told his audience: Man is distinguished from all other animals by the possession of certain definite faculties and powers, as well as by physical organization and proportions. He is the only two-handed animal on the earth the only one that laughs, and nearly the only one that weeps. Men intuitively distinguish between men and brutes. Common sense itself is scarcely needed to detect the absence of manhood in a monkey, or to recognize its presence in a Negro. His speech, his reason, his power to acquire and to retain knowledge, his heaven-erected face, his [inclinations], his hopes, his fears, his aspirations, his prophecies plant between him and the brute creation a distinction as eternal as it is palpable. Away, therefore, with all the scientific moonshine that would connect men and monkeys; that would have the world believe that humanity, instead of resting on its own characteristic pedestal gloriously independent is a sort of sliding scale, making one extreme brother to the orangutan, and the other to angels, and all the rest intermediates! Tried by all the usual, and all the unusual tests, whether mental, moral, physical, or psychological, the Negro is a MAN considering him as possessing knowledge, or needing knowledge, his elevation or his degradation, his virtues, or his vices whichever road you take, you reach the same conclusion, the Negro is a MAN. His good and his bad, his innocence and his guilt, his joys and his sorrows, proclaim his manhood in speech that all mankind practically and readily understand. A very [profound] author says that man is distinguished from all other animals, in that he resists as well as adapts himself to his circumstances. He does not take things as he finds them, but goes to work to improve them. Tried by this test, too, the Negro is a man. You may see him yoke the oxen, harness the horse and hold the plow. He Race and Membership in American History 59

6 can swim the river; but he prefers to fling over it a bridge. The horse bears him on his back admits his mastery and dominion. The barnyard fowl know his step, and flock around to receive their morning meal from his sable hand. The dog dances when he comes home, and whines piteously when he is absent. All these know that the Negro is a MAN. Now, presuming that what is evident to beast and to bird, cannot need elaborate argument to be made plain to men, I assume, with this brief statement, that the Negro is a man.... Indeed, ninety-nine out of every hundred of the advocates of a diverse origin of the human family [i.e., polygenesis, or multiple creations] in this country, are among those who hold it to be a privilege of the Anglo-Saxon to enslave and oppress the African and slaveholders, not a few, like the Richmond Examiner to which I have referred, have admitted, that the whole argument in defense of slavery, becomes utterly worthless the moment the African is proved to be equally a man with the Anglo-Saxon. The temptation therefore, to read the Negro out of the human family is exceeding strong, and may account somewhat for the repeated attempts on the part of Southern pretenders to science, to cast a doubt over the Scriptural account of the origin of mankind.... By making the enslaved a character fit only for slavery, [slaveholders] excuse themselves for refusing to make the slave a freeman. A wholesale method of accomplishing this result, is to overthrow the instinctive consciousness of the common brotherhood of man. For, let it be once granted that the human race are of multitudinous origin, naturally different in their moral, physical, and intellectual capacities, and at once you make plausible a demand for classes, grades, and conditions, for different methods of culture, different moral, political, and religious institutions, and a chance is left for slavery, as a necessary institution. 3 CONNECTIONS Nations, like individuals, have an identity. Make an identity chart for the United States in What values and beliefs were central to the nation s identity? What changes were Americans making in that chart in the early 1800s? In 1860? What might such a chart look like today? What motive does Douglass attribute to those who want to read the Negro out of the human family? What does he consider the logical result of a belief in polygenesis? 60 Facing History and Ourselves

7 Sociologist Orlando Patterson writes that the first men and women to struggle for freedom, the first to think of themselves as free in the only meaningful sense of the term were freedmen. What is the paradox, or seeming contradiction, Patterson describes? In 1861, the United States fought a civil war over the right of African Americans to be free to be part of the human family. When the Civil War ended in 1865, the nation added three amendments to the Constitution. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery. Research the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. What was the goal of each amendment? Why do many constitutional experts regard the Fourteenth as the more revolutionary of the two? People often think of a historical event in terms of a simple cause and an immediate effect. How does the long crusade against slavery complicate that view? To more fully appreciate its legacies, you may want to investigate the history of the Civil Rights Movement or of particular groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or the American Civil Liberties Union. The editorial to which Douglass responded appeared in a Virginia newspaper. If Douglass had expressed his ideas in a letter to the editor, it would not have been published. If he had given his speech in the state of Virginia rather than Ohio, he would have been arrested. By the mid-1800s, Virginia and almost every other southern state outlawed anti-slavery publications and speeches. What effect do you think such limitations on debate had on science and scientists? On democracy? What is the link between scientific inquiry and freedom of expression? Between democracy and freedom of expression? 1. The Story of American Freedom by Eric Foner. W.W. Norton & Company, 1998, pp Ibid., p The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered by Frederick Douglass. Excerpts from an address delivered at Western Reserve College, July 12, Race and Membership in American History 61