Race and Society

Sources

Racial Theories. White America inherited a view of racial classification from eighteenth-century scientists who considered humans a species that was broken down into racial subsets, each of which possessed distinct intellectual, moral, and physical capacities. The basic assumption of these scientists was that Caucasians, or white people, were the superior race while Native Americans and Africans were the most inferior races. Harvard professor Louis Agassiz represented the view of many when he wrote that black people were so different from white people that he considered them almost an entirely separate species. When one observes “their black faces with their thick lips and grimacing teeth,” he wrote, it is difficult “to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us.” The effect of these theories was to legitimize what many white Americans already felt: that Native Americans and African Americans were not only different from them but somehow not fully human. Both popular opinion and governmental policy were influenced by these views, justifying slavery and the removal of Indians and free blacks to reservations or African colonies on the grounds that these “inferior” races could never fit into mainstream American society.

Indian Removal. The desire to remove Native Americans from their lands in order to open up space for white settlement was not new, but Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 led to some of the most bitter resistance and tragic consequences. When Jackson entered office in 1829, 125, 000 Native Americans still lived east of the Mississippi River, with 60, 000 inhabiting the fertile land that would become the Cotton Kingdom. Many of them, particularly the Five Civilized Tribes (Seminole, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Choctaw) had made extensive efforts to adopt agriculture and “civilized” customs, but Jackson believed that Indians could not be integrated into American society and had to be removed. Jackson’s “benevolent policy,” as he described it, convinced some of the Five Civilized Tribes to make treaties with the government, but they soon found out that the land in present-day Oklahoma and Arkansas to which they were being sent was barren. When the Seminole, Creek, and Cherokee resisted, they were removed by force, and thousands of Indians died of starvation and exposure on the eight-hundred-mile journey referred to as the Trail of Tears. In the North, the government battled with the Sauk and Fox Indians, who had been removed from their land but decided to return after near starvation in 1832. Chief Black Hawk led the resistance, known as the Black Hawk War, which lasted only four and one-half months and left the Indians in defeat. All in all, one hundred million acres of land (purchased for about $68 million) were cleared of Native Americans for white settlement.

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

Beginning about 1830 a loosely organized system of escape routes for slaves became Known to Americans although it had long-been in operation. Later called the Underground Railroad because it was illegal, it was run by white abolitionists and African Americans, many of whom were fugitives or former slaves themselves. Some conductors housed, fed, and clothed fugitive slaves, and others made runs into the South to lead slaves along escape routes to havens in the North or across the border to Canada. The unofficial president of the Underground Railroad, Levi Coffin, a Quaker who ran a mill in Newport, Indiana, is said to have helped three thousand slaves escape. The fugitive slave Harriet Tubman, known as “Moses,” was the most famous of the Underground Railroad conductors due to her bravery in making nineteen trips into the South during the 1850s and leading out approximately three hundred slaves. John P. Parker, another Underground Railroad conductor who made trips into the South, described how frightening it was for slaves to make the dangerous trip north, even when promised the help of others on the Northern side of the Mason-Dixon line. One group of slaves he was helping to escape was “so badly demoralized some of them wanted to give themselves up, rather than face the unknown,” he wrote.

Source: John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (New York: Knopf, 1947);

John P. Parker, His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P. Parker, Former Slave and Conductor on the Underground Railroad (New York: Norton, 1986).

Freedmen in the South. About 55 percent of the nation’s free African American population lived in the South, where most were impoverished tenant farmers or small-farm owners. Some earned a decent living at trades such as blacksmithing and carpentry, and a small minority became successful planters and bought slaves to work their land. William Ellison, who had been a slave in his youth, learned to make cotton gins and saved enough money to buy his freedom at the age of twenty-six, then went on to build an empire that at his death included sixty-three slaves and was worth one hundred thousand dollars. Ellison was an exception; most of the few free African American slave owners were not entrepreneurs but had purchased members of their own families to rescue them and then were forbidden by law from manumitting them. Generally, free blacks were afforded greater economic opportunity in the South than in the North; North Carolina and Tennessee allowed some of them to vote until the 1830s, and Louisiana even longer. But many of the restrictions placed on slaves extended to freedmen as well, limiting their civil rights. All over the South (except in Louisiana) black people were considered slaves unless they could prove otherwise, forcing free African Americans to carry papers proving their freedom to prevent being jailed and sold into bondage. In addition they were subject to curfews, prohibited from assembling, and denied the right to bear arms. They also could not testify in court against whites or obtain a trial by jury.

African Americans in the North. Conditions in the North were not much better. Other than a small minority of abolitionists, most white Northerners feared the economic competition that an influx of black people into the North would bring, and they thus systematically excluded African Americans from lucrative professions and forced them into menial jobs. Interracial marriages and black suffrage were also prohibited in most states, and African Americans were relegated to separate schools, jails, and even cemeteries. They usually lived in segregated ghettos, often in the most appalling conditions. Many who had escaped slavery only to be confronted with racism in the North deemed segregation to be as great a threat to the future of racial equality as slavery in the South. As antislavery agitation increased in the 1830s, so did the dangers that faced African Americans, who became the targets (along with white abolitionists) of mob violence in Philadelphia, New York City, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and other cities. Nevertheless, African Americans in the North did possess some legal recourse and were able, with the help of prominent whites, to agitate for improved conditions, a right not afforded those in the South.

Colonization. Some Americans, both black and white, believed that a just multiracial society was impossible. Accordingly, they proposed that black people leave the country altogether. Some suggested that they move to Africa to live in colonies established by organizations such as the American Colonization Society, founded in 1817. Most supporters of colonization shared the racial assumptions that underlay the Indian removal policies of the Jackson administration: that black people (or Indians) were inferior morally and mentally and thus could never live in peace in a civilized country such as America. Colonization was popular among Southerners who hoped to rid themselves of troublesome free blacks, whose self-sufficiency undermined by example the paternalistic underpinnings of slavery. It was also popular with some Northern antislavery advocates, who believed it might make slaveholders more willing to free their slaves. Some African Americans also endorsed the idea, accepting the premise that there was no place for them in American society. In 1831 John Russwurm, a prominent black supporter of the American Colonization Society, stated, “Our rightful place is in Africa,” and moved to Liberia, where a colony had been established by the society. But more typical was the response of James Forten, who agreed that African Americans would “never become a people until they came out from amongst the white people” but argued that colonization would only strengthen

slavery by removing those most likely to agitate against it. The point was moot since most slaves had been born in America, considered themselves to be Americans first and foremost, and were unwilling to give up hope of achieving the rights that Jefferson had claimed to be the province of “all men.” The American Colonization Society had sent only fourteen hundred African Americans to live in Liberia by 1830, when support for the plan began to diminish.

Sources

Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974);

Philip S. Foner, History of Black Americans: From the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983);

Russel B. Nye, Society and Culture in America, 1830–1860 (New York: Harper & Row, 1974);

Robert V. Remini, The Jacksonian Era (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1989).