The Color Of Abolition

How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation

Linda Hirshman

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781328900357
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The story of the fascinating, fraught alliance among Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Maria Weston Chapman—and how its breakup led to thesuccess of America's most important social movement.

" Fresh, provocative and engrossing."— New York Times

In the crucial early years of the Abolition movement, the Boston branch of the cause seized upon the star power of the eloquent ex-slave Frederick Douglass to make its case for slaves' freedom. Journalist William Lloyd Garrisonpromoted emancipation while Garrison loyalist Maria Weston Chapman, known as "the Contessa, " raised money and managed Douglass's speaking tour from her Boston townhouse.

Conventional histories have seen Douglass's departure for the New York wing of the Abolition party as a result of a rift between Douglass and Garrison. But, as acclaimed historian Linda Hirshman reveals, this completely misses the woman in power. Weston Chapman wrote cutting letters to Douglass, doubting his loyalty; the Bostonian abolitionists were shot through with racist prejudice, even aiming the N-word at Douglass among themselves. Through incisive, original analysis, Hirshman convinces that the inevitablebreakup was in facta successful failure. Eventually, as the most sought-after Black activist in America, Douglass was able to dangle the prize of his endorsement over the Republican Party's candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln. Two years later the abolition of slavery—if not the abolition of racism—became immutable law.

Part I

Allies Arise

1

(1805–1828)

Printer Garrison Learns His Trade

Orphaned by Poverty

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON TURNED THREE IN 1808, the year his father, Abijah, left. At the time, Newburyport, Massachusetts, where Abijah had moved the family from Nova Scotia, was in an economic depression caused by the American boycott of European trade during the Napoleonic Wars. Abijah, who had worked his way up to sailing master before the embargo, could find no employment in the struggling sea trade. His four children were so hungry his little daughter ate a spring shrub that turned out to be poisonous and died in agony. The remaining three were all still under seven, and the Garrison family was living in a few rooms in a boardinghouse of exemplary piety. Abijah turned to drink and then, in a cloud of alcohol fumes, disappeared.

The embargo also ruined Massachusetts sea captain Warren Weston, living in Weymouth with his wife and oldest child, William Lloyd Garrison’s contemporary Maria, then two. Unlike Abijah Garrison, Weston, also a drinker, stuck around.

It is hard to know which woman was worse off. On the one hand, Maria Weston’s mother, Ann Bates Weston, with her husband still around, kept having babies. Frances Maria Lloyd Garrison (most often called Maria), on the other hand, was left alone and nearly destitute. The Garrison family lived off the charity of church and soup kitchens, of Maria Garrison’s occasional employers, and of the maritime associations in that stricken shipping town.

The female-headed Garrison family was lucky in one way: years before, Maria had converted to become a Baptist. Their landlady in Newburyport, Martha Farnham, was one of the most important Baptists in the little town, and she extended to her unlucky boarders charitable Baptist principles.

The nameless itinerant Baptist preacher who, sometime in the 1790s, had attracted the passionate attention of young Frances Maria Lloyd in her childhood home in maritime Canada could not have known the effect he would have on American history. He was part of a wave of ministers outside formal church buildings who brought a renewed Christian message to North Americans hungry for some Good News. Standing in a tent on the Canadian ’Quoddy Islands, young Maria heard that she could make a conscious choice to repent and embrace Christ. She felt that her soul was transformed. The new religion taught her that she was free to change her life, to embark on a new life, to transform the world into a better place fit for the Second Coming.

Maria Lloyd had certainly never had a similar religious experience at her parents’ Anglican church in the area, where establishment religions preached that people had little say about their own salvation or the state of the world. But the new religions made the converted the lead actor in the drama of his or her own redemption and the redemption of the world. Maria converted, defying her parents, who then sent her away to live with her grandparents. But Maria Lloyd was born again—a Baptist for life. When she met co-religionist Abijah Garrison a couple of years later, she was speaking in the meeting tents and teaching Sunday school. In 1798 she married him.

The Second Great Awakening, White and Black

Maria Lloyd was in good company. As Sidney Ahlstrom lays out in his magisterial Religious History of the American People, from approximately 1790 to 1830, millions of Americans living all across New England, into the mid-Atlantic states, upstate New York, the new territories of the Western Reserve, later Ohio, and most of all in Kentucky, experienced the religious revival that came to be known as the Second Great Awakening. Baptists joined Methodists, the other burgeoning denomination, to reinvent Christianity in America.

It was time for reinvention. The population was growing and moving. Baptists and Methodists had a long tradition of traveling preachers with no established building, often meeting in tents. The tradition worked to their advantage when it came to converting the West, where there were no established church buildings. Baptists and Methodists also shared a creed of individual responsibility, disputing the old Calvinist idea that you were predestined for heaven or hell no matter what you did. Soon, denominational lines stopped mattering in the tents. People, like Maria Lloyd, came from all religions—or no religion—and gathered by the tens of thousands in the Baptist and Methodist tents. They heard inspired preachers who roused them to a moment of truth so potent they fainted, they shouted, they felt redeemed. They promised in turn to redeem the world. In the years from 1800 to 1820, the number of Baptist churches in Kentucky grew from 106 to 491.

Preachers rose to meet the needs. The denominations most threatened by the uncontrollable and ecstatic new forms of worship were mainstream Protestants, like the Calvinist Congregationalists and Presbyterians. Although, at the height of the tent revival fashion, many of the most prominent mainline clergymen were not particularly happy about the changes in their world, a remarkable number of them adapted to the new order. Congregationalists, Presbyterians, even the upper-crust Episcopalians modified their dogma. They incorporated Great Awakening belief in human perfectibility and in the role of a benevolent concern for others as part of their message.

Congregationalist superstar Reverend Lyman Beecher, famed for his defense of Calvinism at his prestigious Hanover Church pulpit in Boston, changed his mind and dragged his conventional church into the new world of values. The alternative, he saw clearly, was a massive bleed-out to the competitive Methodists and Baptists. In the 1820s and 1830s, Beecher’s rival, former Presbyterian minister Charles Grandison Finney, widely acknowledged to be one of the most charismatic preachers in America, reached his height of popularity in upstate New York, attracting huge crowds to his revival meetings. Unlike the wavering Beecher, Finney was firmly antislavery.

Although Finney was explicit about the wrong of slavery, slavery was only one among many causes—temperance, Bible reading, missions to the heathens—for the newly awakened. As men of means joined their more modest brethren in the new awakening, the ministers and the merchants established a network of philanthropic institutions to carry out their new responsibilities, a movement so powerful it came to be known as an empire: the Benevolent Empire. The outreach from the pulpit to the laypeople, which drove the new societies, was unquestionably a response to the destabilizing effect of the evangelical Second Great Awakening.

The benevolent societies, an alliance of the newly thriving Baptists and Methodists, as well as of the Presbyterian and Congregationalist ministers whose flocks often consisted of the relatively wealthy, were inspired by similar initiatives in England. The early successes followed the British societies organized to distribute copies of the Bible. The American movement took off when, during the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain, a privateer seized a British ship carrying a load of Bibles to Canada and auctioned them off with the rest of the captured cargo. The nascent Bible Society of Massachusetts indignantly bought the contraband books and sent them to their planned destination. Free to will their futures, responsible for the fate of the world, and backed by an empire, the revivalists were on a collision course with the sin of slavery.

The revival that would ultimately give birth to slavery’s demise found fertile ground even in the slave South. In 1801, a camp meeting in Cane Ridge, Kentucky—a slave state—turned into a cultural moment defining a movement. Tens of thousands of people—Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist—gathered for a week of preaching and communion. Preachers were sermonizing all over the campground, often at the same time. Some estimate the attendance was ten percent of Kentucky’s population.

Through preachers riding circuit in the new lands, the breakout religions also reached the people whose oppression meant they needed good news most—African Americans, particularly the enslaved. Eighteenth-century British Methodist founder John Wesley had been an early and influential opponent of slavery, and his Methodist Church licensed Black preachers. Even in the South, Methodism had spread during the colonial period. Black laymen became effective preachers, called “exhorters.” For many years in the early Great Awakening, around 1800, the meetings included Black worshippers along with the Black preachers and “exhorters.” White Methodist and Baptist preachers addressed meetings including “colored” people, as they called them. Although the clergy never directly assaulted the institution of slavery, the enthusiastic and informal new religions, with their moral messages and straightforward style, penetrated the South, including its enslaved population.

Cane Ridge revival meeting, 1801. Watercolor by J. Maze Burbank, ca. 1839. Courtesy of Old Dartmouth Historical Society–New Bedford Whaling Museum. Gift of William F. Havemeyer.

In some places the new religions even involved the mixing of Black and white worshippers in the pews. But integration was not the norm. The great Kentucky revival meetings, for instance, included a main gathering with rows of plank pews for whites and separate tents at the rear for the participants of color. The legendary 1801 populist meeting at Cane Ridge put the worshippers of color in gatherings 150 yards from the whites. Circuit-riding preachers found separate Black churches and religious schools in the communities they visited.

The born-again white worshippers in the slave states were right to intuit the disruptive potential of the new awakening. Methodism temporarily made peace with its slaveholding followers by agreeing to say nothing about the issue of slavery, but it could not entirely shed its ties to John Wesley, whose 1774 antislavery tract “Thoughts upon Slavery” is often considered the beginning of Western abolitionism. Only the Quakers had an older claim in acknowledging the wrongness of slavery. The pressure of abolitionism pulled the American Methodist Church apart, and, in 1844, it divided along sectional lines.

Even while evading the issue, Methodism was disruptive. In a 1777 Delaware clearing, an enslaved field hand, later named Richard Allen, heard an itinerant Methodist preach the gospel and brought the pastor home to shame his master into eventually allowing Allen to buy his freedom. Now a newly free Black man, Allen became a Methodist minister himself. He moved to Philadelphia in 1786 and preached to largely Black gatherings, while raising himself up economically by founding a successful business as a chimney sweep. When Allen arrived in Philadelphia, the town, with its long Quaker heritage, was the rare haven for free Blacks in America. They flocked there, escaping their enslavers and seeking refuge with the abolitionists concentrated in that place. With fellow Methodist Absalom Jones, Allen started the first Black benevolent society, the nonsectarian Free African Society.

Once in Philadelphia, newly arrived Black Methodists gathered around St. George’s United Methodist Church. As Black members joined, the white worshippers at St. George’s squirmed. First they segregated the benches in the church proper. Then they built a balcony and announced that their Black brethren would be confined there. When the segregated balcony was ready, the Black worshippers started praying in the usual place, and the angry white Methodists interrupted their worship to shoo the Black members up to the balcony. The Black worshippers walked out to start their own church. Richard Allen founded the Bethel Church for Negro Methodists in 1793; two years later he was ordained as the first Black deacon in the Methodist denomination.

Thus was born the original formal Black church in America, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, thereafter Mother Bethel Church. The first building appeared at Sixth and Lombard Streets in Philadelphia in 1794, more than a decade before white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was born. In 1814 a separate Black Methodist Conference was organized, and in 1816 it made Allen its bishop. With the Black church and Black African society, the foundation for the Black Benevolent Empire was laid. Although it governed no territory, the “Empire” of Black churches and societies laid a critical foundation for resistance to slavery.

Original Bethel A.M.E. Building. Stipple engraving by John Boyd, after the oil painting by Rembrandt Peale, ca. 1823. Courtesy of the Library Compan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Introduction: Meeting on Nantucket
• Part I: Allies Arise
• Part II: Abolition Takes Root
• Part III: The Grand Alliance at Work
• Part IV: Douglass to the Political Side
• Part V: Douglass and Garrison Divide
• Epilogue: Three Meetings and a Funeral
• Acknowledgments
• A Note On Sources
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher