So there you have it, a little bit on the Grimkes sisters and a wonderful love letter if you ever needed a template for writing one. The Grimkess spoke to promiscuous audiences of men and women about the physical violence and the sexual abuse prevalent in slavery. Now this is really controversial.
Women aren't supposed to be speaking to groups of men, or especially men and women together, and they're certainly not supposed to be speaking about anything having to do with sex, even sexual abuse. It goes completely against that cult of domesticity, it violates the notions of purity, and of being out in the public when they're supposed to be domestic and submissive. So the Massachusetts General Assembly of Congregationalist Clergy, which is Puritan clergy, publicly reprimanded the Grimkess in its Pastoral Letter of 1836, writing, quote, We appreciate the unostentatious prayers and efforts of women in advancing the cause of religion at home and abroad. But when she assumes the place and tone of a man as a public reformer, her character becomes unnatural.
We especially deplore the intimate acquaintance and promiscuous conversation of females with regards to things which ought not to be named. Sarah Grimkes publicly replied, men and women were, all caps, created equal, and they are both moral and accountable beings, and whatever is right for man to do. right for woman. And of course that goes directly against that idea of separate spheres in this cult of true womanhood ideology.
So she's really speaking against kind of the cultural norm and the ethics of the day. In February of 1838 Angelina spoke before the Massachusetts State Legislature concluding a nine month speaking tour. Now this was the very first time an American woman spoke before a legislative body.
She said, quote, have women no country, no partnership in a nation's guilt and shame. And she presented abolitionist petitions signed by 20,000 people demanding that Massachusetts do something to limit the spread of slavery in the United States and especially assisting southern states in returning runaway slaves. Now, the press called Angelina devil-ina, not very inventive, but they came up with something.
And Angelina concluded, quote, we abolition women are turning the world upside down. But any abolitionist woman had to speak to this question of whether women belonged in public. Most Americans attacked abolitionists as rabble-rousers, as radicals who threatened the union, the very nation.
This controversy came to a head at Pennsylvania Hall. The Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society held a three-day anti-slavery convention of American women. So we've got women in public talking about a very controversial topic.
They dedicated the building, Pennsylvania Hall, in a ceremony on May 15, 1838, and they read letters of support from The Weld, who you just saw in that little clip, and John Quincy Adams. Now Adams, after he left the presidency, ended up in the Congress, and he became a vocal supporter of both women's rights and of abolitionism. He argued both against the 1836 gag rule tabling abolitionism, abolitionist petitions, which we'll talk a little bit more about in a minute, and he argued for women's political participation, saying, quote, everything which relates to peace and relates to war or to any of the great interests of society is a political subject. Are women to have no opinions or actions on subjects relating to the general welfare?
Now, for weeks prior to the opening of Pennsylvania Hall, people littered the city with flyers and pamphlets describing abolitionists as encouraging race mixing. and promoting race equality. They called for, quote, citizens who entertain a proper respect for the right of property to interfere forcibly if they must and prevent the violation of these pledges heretofore held sacred. So by pledges, they're talking about the Constitution, that it protects slavery and therefore these people shouldn't be allowed to speak. But of course, the First Amendment also protects their right to speak.
Pennsylvania was an industrializing city fed by southern cotton, so while they don't have slavery there, it's supported by slavery. That's how they're getting the cotton that they're turning into cloth in these textile mills. It's the heart of their economy.
On the third day, white outrage reached a frenzy, and a mob numbering in the thousands surrounded the building, throwing rocks, bottles, and broken glass. Inside, white women paired off with black women, hoping to protect them from the violence, hoping the crowd would be less likely to attack white women. So they're trying to spread out and stay with these black women to protect them. They exited as the mob hurled insults and rocks at them.
The next day, the mob arrived again along with the mayor, who forcibly took the keys of Pennsylvania Hall. He declared all of its meetings cancelled. This is a private group in a private building, privately owned, and the mayor has just showed up and taken the keys and cancelled all of their meetings for them, as the mob cheered.
After the mayor left, the mob then broke into Pennsylvania Hall, destroyed its interior, and set it on fire. Police arrived. and encouraged or helped the rioters.
The building was soon engulfed in flames. Firefighters arrived to protect the neighboring buildings, but they let Pennsylvania Hall burn. When one company tried to fight the Pennsylvania Hall fire, the other firefighters turned their hoses on them.
Pennsylvania Hall burned to the ground. Over the next few days, the mob set fire to a black orphanage and damaged a black church, basically attacking the black community, taking out their frustration at this threat of abolition. The city officials report blamed abolitionists for upsetting Philadelphia's citizenry by encouraging race mixing, which they weren't actually doing, and thereby inciting violence. Pennsylvania Hall should remind us how extraordinarily unpopular the immediatist abolitionist position was.
Most white Northerners couldn't care less about slavery where it existed. most white northerners were threatened by emancipation because it could flood the North with black labor and they feared lower their wages. What they cared about was slavery in the West. They cared about the expansion of slavery and plantation owners statching up all this good farmland in an economy that white yeoman farmers working their own land really couldn't compete against those abolitionists.
So this new abolitionist movement in the 1830s was not the only thing upsetting Southerners, though. Enslaved Southerners were aware of Northern events because of extensive communication networks. So they're aware that there's some black people living free in the North.
They're aware that slave allies existed somewhere and that their masters feared this. And they're aware of the Haitian Revolution. And they soon become aware of Nat Turner rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia in August of 1831. Nat Turner understood his rebellion as an act of God. He's heavily influenced by the Second Great Awakening. And many enslaved people practiced versions of Christianity that also incorporated aspects of African religions.
Turner believed he was a prophet and had been visited by spirits in his 20s. He had visions calling him to do the work of God. Turner was the largest armed mass slave revolt in American history.
So it began when Turner killed his owner with an axe blow to the head. Then he and six collaborators attempted to free all of Virginia's enslaved population. They're trying to end slavery in Virginia. By the end of the day, his ban had grown to over 50 men.
They killed 57 white men, women, and children on neighboring farms trying to free enslaved black people. The Virginia militia, which in the southern states, the state militia was also the slave patrol, captured or killed all of the rebelling slaves. So Nat Turner is eventually captured.
He confesses to his attorney and leaves a written record of his confession. So if you're interested in that, you can look at digitalhistory.uh.edu, which has that in their primary sources. And then after he made this confession, he was executed. Turner had been inspired by biblical rhetoric and by the success of the Haitian Revolution.
So he's kind of coming out of the Second Great Awakening and the Haitian Revolution. The South feared that Nat Turner rebellion was actually tied to the abolitionist movement in the North, so they increased the number and enforcement of anti-literacy laws to try to break that communication network between the North and South. There were violent consequences to any rebellion of slaves, but especially to Turner.
Fearful white reactionaries killed hundreds of enslaved people, most of whom had nothing to do with Turner rebellion. Generally speaking, enslaved life got even worse for about a year after Turner Rebellion, as both the state and slave owners themselves tried to crack down on any kind of movement or resistance in the slave community. Now, the reaction to Turner Rebellion transformed Southern Christianity, too. Southerners feared that slave churches had become hotbeds of rebellion.
So white Southerners broke up black-led churches, and they placed enslaved people under white ministers'supervision. So, they can have church, but they have to have church with a white minister who's going to tell them that the Bible says they are supposed to be enslaved and what God wants for them is to serve their masters. Shocked, Northerners begin to argue that slavery was fundamentally corrupting American rights, so they don't necessarily care so much about slavery.
But this looks like they're violating the rights of free speech and assembly, freedom of religion, both for free blacks and enslaved blacks in the South. So most northerners didn't pay attention to abolitionists. They thought they were crackpots, they're just crazy, they're radicals, they didn't pay attention to them. But southerners heard nothing but abolitionists because that was their greatest fear. So we have a case of the silent majority versus the shrill or really loud minority here.
For the major political parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, they paid no attention to abolitionists. Their constituency can't vote. Even free black people in the North, most of them can't vote. women certainly can't vote. And slavery issues fractured their intersectional alliances, so neither party was entirely dependent on just one section of the nation.
So they want to kind of maintain party support in both the North and South, and any kind of stance on slavery is going to break that coalition. Drowned out in all the abolitionist noise was the fact that most northerners were not abolitionists. and the South began to think otherwise.
So the South deployed a two-part defense of slavery as an institution. One was political and one was social. The political defense of slavery involves a couple of things.
They developed a strict states rights pro-slavery ideology to control the national debate regarding slavery. So they had learned from the bruising Missouri crisis that it was a mistake to debate slavery on the national level. Southern representatives in Congress, both Whig and Democrat in fact, enacted the 1836 Gag Rule.
The Gag Rule tabled all anti-slavery petitions without discussion in the House to try to stifle the national debate. But remember, it's a fundamental right of American citizens to petition their government. It's in the Constitution. So Northerners who, again, don't really care about slavery are wondering, is slavery somehow subverting the American Constitution? democratic norms and the constitution itself because southerners are willing to go to such great lengths to defend it.
Southerners also pursued censorship of the mail. Andrew Jackson gave approval through his postmaster general to censor and remove from the mail all abolitionist literature. Jackson, a slave owner and plantation owner himself, called abolitionists, quote, monsters who attempted to stir up Serville war.
So they're trying to enact a slave rebellion. Now, many in the North hated abolitionism, but the Southern political response troubles them and it began to look to some Northerners who couldn't care less about the enslaved that slavery led to authoritarian actions. So this notion begins to develop that a cabal or a conspiracy of slaveholders was potentially leading the country in an undemocratic or even anti-democratic direction. The South also deployed a social defense of slavery. Now previously, and especially in the founding generation, slave owners recognized slavery as a moral evil, but they argued it was a necessary evil.
We've seen this with Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence trying to blame King George for bringing slavery to the United States or what became the United States. We've seen this in his writings about having slavery in the United States is like having a wolf by the ears. It's not a good thing. It's not a position you want to be in, but you're also not going to let go of it because that would be even worse. which is his way of saying that a free black population is something he feared more than the moral evil that was slavery.
In the 1830s, the South stopped recognizing slavery as a bad thing. They began defending it as a positive good. So we went from necessary evil to positive good. They argued that it positively influenced the South, the nation, planters, and even enslaved people themselves. And this argument regarding slavery also became a war over biblical interpretation.
Southerners argued that the Bible sanctioned slavery and encouraged slaves to obey their masters. They also used racist arguments that people of African descent were inherently inferior, and so slavery was not only a way of controlling these people, but of civilizing so-called barbarous peoples. They argued slavery as history, that societies always organized into ranks.
And you're going to see this in George Fitzhugh's arguments in this week's perusal. They argued that the great republics and even democracies of Greece and Rome had thrived with slavery. And finally, they criticized capitalist development of wage labor and factories in the north.
So there's also a pro-slavery, anti-capitalist argument going on here. they said that slaves were allegedly protected by masters which wasn't true while free labor produced a permanently impoverished working class they argued that northern employers had no social obligation to care for their workers now fitzhugh who you're reading was a sociologist and slave owner who wrote sociology for the south or the failure of free society as well as cannibals all or slaves without masters And these were sharp criticisms of so-called wage slavery in the North, so free labor where you're working for wages in the North. He argued that slavery was better than free labor. It's kind of a non-Marxist but socialist argument against capitalism.
Fitzhugh argued that criticizing slavery was dangerous because abolitionists were planting ideas in the heads of slaves who were otherwise happy to be enslaved. So in Fitzhugh's view, Nat Turner was nothing more than the result of abolitionist agitation. He couldn't imagine that Turner was an adult black man with thoughts of his own who didn't want to be enslaved and was willing to put his life on the line to end slavery in Virginia. So by the mid-1830s, Northerners saw this Southern conspiracy against the North to stifle free speech and democratic government and to, in a sense, force slavery on more of the nation that then wanted it.
While Southerners saw a Northern conspiracy against the South trying to free slaves and provoke them to violence against their masters. So this is how Southerners wished to see themselves. as paternal protectors who offered shelter for allegedly inferior peoples and met their basic needs, where everyone in a slave owner's household was, in a way, part of the family. But of course, that's nonsense.
Slavery was an incredibly brutal, barbaric institution. And yet we still have to take these arguments seriously. We have to contend with the economic reality that slave property was the most expensive investment at the time and an enormously profitable one, too.
Even poor Southern whites, far too poor to own slaves, strived for the American dream, and to them that meant working hard enough to one day own slaves that would allow them to work more land and do better than they had done when they started off. But the moral argument in favor of slavery wasn't just a cynical mass. This often reflected a genuine belief among white Southerners that slavery was really the only but certainly the best way to organize a racially diverse society. That's their argument. The alternative to slavery, having a free black population, absolutely terrified Southerners who believed it would only end in race war or race mixing.
Now, this is a copy of a photograph, a very famous photograph, during the Civil War, August 4th, 1863. So this is an official report from a Union doctor, a U.S. military doctor. He says, I found a large number of the 400 contrabands, meaning enslaved people who've run to Union lines. examined by me to be as badly lacerated as the specimen represented in the enclosed photograph. So in the photograph is a man named Gordon, an escaped slave, who had reached a union camp in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and this photograph is taken to show the keloid scars that form after several whippings and were very, very common on the enslaved people in Louisiana and the rest of the South.
Now Gordon went on to serve in the U.S. Colored Troops. He joins the U.S. military. He's part of the U.S. Army.
He's later taken prisoner, beaten, and left for dead, but survived to rejoin Union lines. So there you have it, our abolitionist lecture. You should be able to define anti-slavery versus abolition. So all abolitionists were against slavery, but not everyone who was anti-slavery was an abolitionist. How did the Southern defense of slavery change in the 1830s?
And you should be able to sum that up in a very short phrase. What conspiracy did the North see in the South? And what conspiracy did the South see in the North by the time we hit the 1850s or so?
And finally, hit the next button at the bottom of the page and take the abolitionist assault on slavery lecture recap quiz.