An Abolitionist Abroad

Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe

Sirpa Salenius

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781613764824
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Sarah Parker Remond (1826–1894) left the free black community of Salem, Massachusetts, where she was born, to become one of the first women to travel on extensive lecture tours across the United Kingdom. Remond eventually moved to Florence, Italy, where she earned a degree at one of Europe's most prestigious medical schools. Her language skills enabled her to join elite salons in Florence and Rome, where she entertained high society with musical soirees even while maintaining connections to European emancipation movements.Remond's extensive travels and diverse acquaintances demonstrate that the nineteenth-century grand tour of Europe was not exclusively the privilege of white intellectuals but included African American travelers, among them women. This biography, based on international archival research, tells the fascinating story of how Remond forged a radical path, establishing relationships with fellow activists, artists, and intellectuals across Europe.

Chapter 1

Remond and Antebellum Free Black Communities

The African American Sarah Parker Remond was born free in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1826 into a relatively prosperous family of entrepreneurs and antislavery activists. She was fortunate to obtain an education in the humanities, and as an avid reader, she developed rhetorical skills that proved useful to her when she took the platform to speak against slavery. Remond was gifted, energetic, and ardent, and she possessed natural eloquence. She used her talents of persuasion to promote race and gender emancipation, becoming one of the most articulate and powerful antislavery orators of the century. The historians Ruth Bogin and Jean Fagan Yellin convincingly argue that “black female abolitionists developed new cultural forms out of their unique heritage and in response to the pressures of institutionalized racism and sexism both outside and inside the abolitionist movement.”1 Similarly, in addition to formal talks, Remond engaged in personal resistance to discrimination and segregation. By focusing on some of Remond’s experiences, this chapter addresses the complexities and anxieties embedded in nineteenth-century racial politics. Like many other black women in the antebellum United States, Remond contested sexist and racist stereotypes, exactly as she had been taught to do by her parents, thus becoming an example of black female progress.

Remond grew up in a home where racial justice and freedom for African Americans formed the fundamental ideological core of the family’s black protest. She was, as she wrote in her autobiographical essay, “the youngest but one of ten children of John and Nancy Remond.”2 Remond’s essay and Dorothy Burnett Porter’s “The Remonds of Salem, Massachusetts” are among the few published sources that refer to ten children; other sources mention eight: Nancy (b. 1809), Charles Lenox (b. 1810), John Lenox (b. 1812), Susan H. (b. 1814), Cecelia Remond (b. 1816), Caroline Remond Putnam (b. 1825), Sarah Parker (b. 1826), and Maritcha Juan (b. 1827).3

However, according to the records at Salem City Hall, Nancy Lenox and John Remond had not ten but eleven children; three of them died at an early age: Mary Remond passed away from lung fever on 30 April 1820 at the age of six months; one “son of John Remond” died on 26 October 1821 at the age of four of Cynanche Trachealis (an inflammation of the glottis, larynx, and upper trachea); and another “son of John Remond” died of “Pneumony after measles” on 2 November 1821 (his age is not indicated). All three children were buried in a cemetery referred to as “Hill,” most likely the Broad Tree Cemetery located on a small hill at the end of Cambridge Street in Salem. It was the early burial place of the city and close to the Remond residence. The city hall register indicates that the three deceased children’s place of residence was Cambridge Street, where the Remond family lived in a house called Hamilton Hall.4 Other Remond family members are buried at the Harmony Grove Cemetery.

The Remond family belonged to a Salem community that included many mixed-race Americans. The Remond siblings all had relatively light complexions, and Caroline Remond’s son Edmund (born 20 April 1847 in Salem) was registered in the 1855 Massachusetts census as “mulatto.” The same census indicates that his household included George Putnam, who at the time was fifty and Jane Putnam, forty-eight; they were his grandparents. Other members in the family unit were Caroline E. Putnam (age 29); Joseph H. Putnam (age 29); and Caroline’s sisters-in-law Georgiana F. Putnam (age 23), Jane W. Putnam (age 21), and Adelaide B. Putnam (age 18), all “mulattoes.” Hence, both of Edmund’s parents came from mixed-race families, resulting in his light complexion.5

The family Remond was born into had established itself in Salem, a town that she described as “one of the most healthy and pleasant of New England towns. It contains about 25,000 inhabitants who are characterised by general intelligence, industry, and enterprise, and few towns in the States can boast of more wealth and refinement than Salem.”6 Salem had a lively black community consisting of middle- and even upper-class educated professionals, such as the Remonds, who actively worked toward abolishing slavery and realizing racial equality.

Starting from the eighteenth century, as the historian Shirley J. Yee explains, “free black women and men had worked to build viable communities, in order to survive in a society that was growing increasingly hostile to non-whites.”7 In Massachusetts, black Americans had been emancipated from slavery in 1783, and in the eighteenth century, schools in Salem were integrated.8 However, being free was quite different from having access to the same rights and privileges as white Massachusetts residents. Starting from 1807, separate schools for white and black Salem students became the norm, a practice that persisted until 1843, and in church services black Salem residents worshiped in segregated sections.9 Indeed, segregation was the norm, as Ruth Bogin confirms: “The railroad linking Salem with Boston maintained a separate ‘colored people’s car’” and education was, for the most part, “dominated by Jim Crow.”10 In order to secure good education, employment, and social respect, black Americans had to confront discrimination that insisted on their racial inferiority.

The question of slavery and oppression of free black Americans were, then, linked to social and political privilege and power, and race theories served to sustain such power structures and ideologies. In the South, pseudoscientific theories served to justify slavery; in the North, Americans interpreted social status and national rights in terms of race so that they could restrict African American access to schools and professions, and to privileges in general. Hence, as the scholar Matthew Frye Jacobson has suggested, both regions used scientific explanations about race to justify notions of white supremacy.11 Likewise, Americans, whose society fundamentally was biracial, tended to think in dualistic terms.12 It was against such dualistic thinking that such activists as Remond fought. She wished to refute the white supremacy / black inferiority paradigm.

In the nineteenth century, scientific inquiry into racial categorization regarded visual markers of physical appearance as evidence of racial difference and hierarchy. The perceived difference was then linked to presumed moral, intellectual, and cultural characteristics. Important in such theories, as historians have observed, was “the set of rights and privileges that accompanied the classification.”13 The black “races” were placed at the bottom of racial structures, whereas white Americans represented racial superiority and, thus, assumed power. Since these pseudoscientific racial theories aimed to validate white supremacy, they were built on prejudices and racist generalizations.

As the nineteenth century progressed, the three racial classifications—“white,” “Indian,” and “Negro and mulatto”—developed into a more complex ranking of the world’s peoples.14 It was the mixed-race American, in particular, who complicated existing race classifications and generated fear of racial degeneration among white social authorities. As the historian Werner Sollors suggests, a pervasive theme in U.S. history is “the deep concern about, and the attempt to prohibit, contain, or deny, the presence of black-white interracial sexual relations, interracial marriage, interracial descent, and other family relations across the powerful black-white divide.”15 Since interracial sexual relations, however, did occur, often as sexual abuse by white masters of their female slaves, mixed-race children were an undeniable reality, especially in the antebellum South. As a consequence, Sollors notes, “a whole science of drawing the color line and of ‘reading race’ emerged,” and “many contradictory racial definitions coexisted.”16 Scientists used such “evidence” as skull size, and shape and size of nostrils, lips, or feet to determine a person’s race, especially that of mixed-race Americans. In this context, the invention of the one-drop rule, according to which a person was black if he or she had even a single drop of “African blood”—an abstract definition and a quantity that was impossible to measure—served to discriminate against Americans who were born to black parents.

The mixed-race American was positioned in the crossroads of conflicted versions of national identity, belonging, and citizenship, epitomizing the arbitrary nature of racial definitions as well as raising questions relating to social and national inclusion and exclusion.17 Later in the century, Nico Slate points out, “Jim Crow segregation held sway throughout the Southern United States, locking many Black Americans in a system of peonage all too similar to slavery. Blacks in the North and West faced equally insidious forms of racial segregation and inequality, enforced, as in the South, by the threat of violence.”18 Throughout the century (as well as before and beyond), then, these laws, pseudoscientific theories, and racist attitudes not only insisted on the inferiority of slaves but robbed even free black Americans of their rights to freedom, citizenship, and such civil liberties as education.

The majority of elite African Americans had social origins in the communities of free blacks, many of whom were racially mixed and had access to improved social and educational opportunities. In 1830, the number of free African Americans reached nearly 320,000; their presence was most numerous in northern cities.19 They challenged the Anglo-Saxon articulation of national identity as representing internal homogeneity.20 Many of the leading black figures involved in organized activism, including the Remonds, were, indeed, born free and they enjoyed relatively comfortable living in the rather large urban black districts of such cities as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, or smaller cities, such as Salem, that had vibrant and cultured African American communities. In general, free African Americans of the North were relatively well to do. Many religious and educational leaders came from such free communities, as did some abolitionist lecturers who departed on intensive lecture tours, risking verbal and physical harassment from hostile audiences as they spoke out against discrimination.21 Hence, had there not been an established binary construction of white versus black, they could have joined white social leaders, who formed a circle of financially and intellectually prosperous men and women in control of society.

The Remonds, who were cultured race leaders, originally came from cities, even countries, outside Salem. Remond’s mother, Nancy Lenox, was the daughter of a black Revolutionary War veteran, a free-born African American who assumed an active role in fighting against discrimination and working toward abolishing slavery. She came from Newton, Massachusetts, “seven miles from Boston,” as Remond wrote in her essay, “and her immediate ancestors were natives of that vicinity.” In her brief autobiographical narrative, Remond described her mother in the following way:

Nancy Remond is a woman possessing every characteristic which can adorn or ennoble womanhood, combined with the most indomitable energy. We were all trained to habits of industry, with a thorough knowledge of those domestic duties which particularly mark the genuine New England woman. With no private means, it was also most necessary. We were taught to knit and sew, and to cook every article of food placed upon the table. The most trifling affair was obliged to be well done. Her aim seemed to be to guard, and at the same time strengthen her children, not only for the trials and duties of life, but also to enable them to meet the terrible pressure which prejudice against colour would force upon them.22

Thus, Nancy Remond challenged black women’s exclusion from domesticity, womanhood, and motherhood.

As Hazel V. Carby points out, womanhood “was denied the black woman” because she relied on herself, unlike white women who, for the most part, depended on men. Consequently, in the case of black women, the concept of dependency failed as a link between “the material organization of the household, and the ideology of femininity” because black women at times were heads of households.23 “The image of the strong, nonsubmissive black female head of a household,” according to Carby, was not a positive one. Black women, she continues, “had to confront the dominant domestic ideologies and literary conventions of womanhood which excluded them from the definition of ‘woman.’”24 Sexism and racism charged such negative perceptions of black women who reconciled...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Sarah Remond and the Black American Grand Tour
• 1. Remond and Antebellum Free Black Communities
• 2. Early Activism in the United States
• 3. England, 1858–1866
• 4. Advocate for Racial and Gender Emancipation
• 5. Abolitionists for Italian Risorgimento
• 6. Firenze “La Bella”
• 7. Transatlantic Cosmopolitan in Italy
• Coda
• Notes
• Index