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try, he echoed the rhetorical stance newly adopted
by Tench Coxe nearly twenty years before. In the early
stages of the cotton revolution, which would soon
160
RACE AND CI TI ZENSHI P I N THE EARLY REPUBLI C
turn Philadelphia and other northern cities into tex-
tile processing centers, Coxe the herald of capitalist
development simultaneously became a herald of
white supremacy.45
Beyond the broader current of industrial change
that was carrying men like Coxe toward an alliance
with southern slaveholding interests, the controversy
over the Missouri Compromise provides a more spe-
cific context for his turnabout on black citizenship.
The Missouri agitation, wrote Elias Boudinot, the
grizzled New Jersey revolutionary leader now in his
eighties, seems to have run alike a flaming fire thro
our middle states and causes great anxiety. Pennsyl-
vania was of critical importance to proslavery south-
ern Congressmen working for the admission of Mis-
souri as a slave state, and Philadelphia was the center
of the manufacturers, bankers, and merchants with
close southern ties. Coxe plunged into the Missouri
controversy, after observing the founding of the Phil-
adelphia antislavery newspaper National Gazette in
1819, the strident attack on slavery by its editor Rob-
ert Walsh, and the heightened antislavery rhetoric of
James Duane, editor of Philadelphia s Aurora in late
1820. Even more disturbing to Coxe was the unani-
mous resolution of Pennsylvania legislature late in
1819 urging the state s Congressmen in Washington
161
THE FOR GOTTEN FI FTH
to vote against admitting Missouri to the Union if
slavery was sanctioned there. The whole will depend
on Pennsylvania, wrote Jefferson to Albert Gallatin,
Coxe s close friend, on December 26, 1820.46
By this time, Coxe was already composing his es-
says on the Helots of America, which, as his bio-
grapher maintains, were precipitated by the Missouri
controversy. Viewed as an extended counter-attack on
Pennsylvanians and other northerners opposed to
the extension of slavery to Missouri, they became an
important cog in what New Jersey s Elias Boudinot
believed was a wheel within a wheel . . . some bar-
gaining taking place between the East and Southern
interests. Written in the pivotal state of Pennsylva-
nia, Coxe s essays were meant to tilt Pennsylvanians
and other northerners toward accepting the exten-
sion of slavery into Missouri and pacify proslavery
southerners.47
No one can measure the exact effect of Coxe s es-
says on The Helots of the United States. But surely
they fed the tide of anti-black sentiment coursing
through James Forten s Philadelphia and through-
out the North.48 One year after Coxe s essays ap-
peared, New York s legislature imposed a race-specific
property qualification that disenfranchised most free
black men.49 Within a few more years white maraud-
162
RACE AND CI TI ZENSHI P I N THE EARLY REPUBLI C
ers in Boston, New Haven, and Pittsburgh attacked
the most tangible markers of free black accomplish-
ment and respectability African American churches
and the homes of successful black urban dwellers.
In 1829, whites attacked black churches and neigh-
borhoods in Philadelphia and Cincinnati. Two years
later, Philadelphia s leading Quaker reformer, Rob-
erts Vaux, wrote discouragingly that the policy, and
power of the national and state government, are
against [free black people]. The popular feeling is
against them the interests of our citizens are against
them. The small degree of compassion once cher-
ished toward them in the commonwealths which got
rid of slavery, or which never were disfigured by it, ap-
pears to be exhausted. Their prospects either as free,
or bond men, are dreary, and comfortless. 50 The way
was paved for Pennsylvania s Constitutional Conven-
tion in 1837 38, which, as in most northern states,
conferred universal white manhood suffrage for the
first time while stripping black men of their vote. It
was under this new definition of color-coded citizen-
ship that thousands of black Pennsylvanians fought
for the Union a quarter century later.
Though Coxe s essays fed the virulent proslavery,
white supremacist campaign and contributed indi-
rectly to southern slaveowning power in Congress,
163
THE FOR GOTTEN FI FTH
his literary productions became part of the pro-
slavery stridency that spurred black organization,
self-expression, and militancy. If it was not already
clear before their publication, his essays showed free
black Americans after 1820 that they faced a cruel
double paradox. With the growing free black popula-
tion demonstrating that slavery and blackness were
no longer synonymous, white northerners placed a
premium on racial demarcation to the disadvantage
of blacks. At the same time, the more free black peo-
ple achieved in building churches, schools, and mu-
tual aid societies, the more white people resented
them.51 No black American in the North could es-
cape this paradox. But resolving paradoxes is often
the work of those who suffer its inequities and
wounds. With civic-mindedness and moral rectitude,
the earnests of good citizenship, no longer count-
ing for much, black Americans had reached a water-
shed. Not given to despair and capitulation, they
channeled anger, frustration, and disappointment
into mobilization, where improvisation had to re-
place reliance on sweeping, clear-cut principles de-
rived from the nation s founding documents. Before,
the black preacher was to use the words of W. E. B.
Du Bois the most unique personality developed by
the Negro on American soil. But after 1820, while
164
RACE AND CI TI ZENSHI P I N THE EARLY REPUBLI C
black clergymen still stood as pillars of the black
community, it was the secular leader, defiant rather
than moderate, politically more than religiously at-
tuned, who stepped toward center stage as a race-
proud and uncompromising man. And as for black
clergymen, they turned steadily from explanations of
slavery and the slave trade as the mysterious work-
ings of God s will to free-will evangelicalism that
placed the blame for slavery squarely on ungodly hu-
man actors.52
Within a few years of Coxe s death in 1824, the
first black newspaper in the United States, Freedom s
Journal, launched a new era of black political con-
sciousness and inter-city organization, all fueled by a
growing stream of published sermons, speeches, and
proceedings from inter-city black conventions. This
showed that the Missouri Compromise, often said
to take the question of slavery off the table for wea-
ried Americans, did not quiet the controversy at all.
Though white Americans reluctantly admitted it, or
pretended it wasn t happening, a river of struggle,
as Vincent Harding has put it, slowly, steadily devel-
oped its black power beneath the rough surfaces of
the new nation. James Forten, now in his sixties,
stands as an apt example. Becoming evermore active,
as if to finish his life with a flourish that would coun-
165
THE FOR GOTTEN FI FTH
teract the effects of his neighbor Tench Coxe s cor-
rosive formulations about race and citizenship, he
penned an early contribution in 1827 to Freedom s
Journal, indicting Henry Clay s dishonesty in pretend- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]