An African American and Latinx History of the United States Page 6

  EMANCIPATORY INTERNATIONALISM VS. THE BLOODY BANNER OF SLAVERY

  Mexicans, African Americans, and their abolitionist allies conceived of a hemispheric liberation movement that would not be tied to nationality nor constrained by borders. They also knew that slavery’s relentless cycle of growth would destroy democracy. If “additional territory had been denied to the slavery of the old slave States,” noted the abolitionist paper National Era, “it would have been at least in process of abolition. But it was allowed to propagate itself, and, in so doing, it gathered new life. Not only were the new States, formed out of the territory originally possessed by the Union, given up to its ravages, but Florida, and the immense territory of Louisiana, were opened to it.”29 National Era grieved, “Why deceive ourselves? The establishment of slavery in California, in New Mexico, or a part of it, and throughout Texas, will invest the slave-holding class with a power, from which there can be no escape.”30

  African Americans linked Black struggles with anticolonial movements in the Caribbean and South America.31 Freedom’s Journal argued that the liberation armies of Latin America were multiracial: “What is the complexion of the common soldiery of these states? Has not the independence of their country from the vassalage and bondage of Old Spain, been accomplished by troops composed of negroes, mulattoes and indians?”32 Celebrating emancipation in the British West Indies, Frederick Douglass presented the brief for emancipatory internationalism: “Neither geographical boundaries, nor national restrictions, ought, or shall prevent me from rejoicing over the triumphs of freedom, no matter where or by whom achieved.”33 Douglass challenged the notion that it was possible to confine the idea of freedom within the boundaries of one nation: “On this question, we are strangers to nationality. Our platform is as broad as humanity. We repudiate, with unutterable loathing and disgust, that narrow spirit which would confine our duties to one quarter of the globe, to the exclusion of another.”34

  Internationalist visions of emancipation thrived in the early antebellum era. The abolition of slavery in Mexico, timed to coincide with the anniversary of Mexican independence in 1829, was a shattering blow against the United States. The antislavery spirit stoked by José Morelos, Vicente Guerrero, and the Mexican War of Independence persisted, and made Mexico a sanctuary for African Americans fleeing from the burgeoning slave labor camps of the Southwest. Sensing the possibility of finding freedom in Mexico, enslaved African Americans as far away as Florida escaped to the Republic of Mexico. This newest trunk line of the Underground Railroad was so successful that it provoked congressional action even before Mexico’s formal abolition of slavery. In 1826, Congressman William Brent of Louisiana spearheaded a successful resolution before the House of Representatives demanding

  that the President of the United States be requested to inform this House whether any measures have been taken to obtain the runaway negro slaves from Louisiana and elsewhere, which have taken refuge in the territories of that Government [of Mexico]; and also whether any measures have been taken with the Government of Mexico to enable citizens of the United States to recover debts from those who have fled from the United States to the territories of Mexico.35

  The United States attempted to negotiate a treaty with Mexico for the “surrender of such fugitive slaves as might seek refuge on the soil of that Republic. But the treaty was rejected by the Mexican Congress, which denounced slavery as a ‘palpable violation of the first principles of a free republic.’”36

  Even as Mexico was shutting down slavery, the United States was expanding it. The National Anti-Slavery Standard described how imperial slavery worked during the Mississippi land boom of the 1830s. As cotton prices rose, “Immediately a clamor was raised in Georgia and Mississippi for the Indian lands. Georgia has a surplus slave population, which she must send out of the State, or find employment for by opening new lands.” As long as Native Americans lived in their ancestral homelands, however, white settler-colonists could not make money. “To this end, as well as to reap the benefit of the high price of cotton, [Georgia] must oust the Cherokees. Mississippi, influenced more especially by the cotton fever, and a desire to increase the population of the state by the emigration of planters and others [from the East], must oust the Choctaws.” Slavery’s advocates also pointed to alliances between Indigenous people and slaves as another reason for pursuing the path of genocidal removal. The historian William Loren Katz argues that “I believe that one of the reasons the Native American nations were moved out in the removal that began in the 1830s . . . is because these nations had become a harbor—a safe haven—for slaves that were escaping.”37

  The National Anti-Slavery Standard noted that Yankee entrepreneurs promoted the expansion of slavery in the Mississippi Valley:

  Northern merchants and capitalists, some in person, and some by their agents, rushed to the spot. Some Bostonians went, authorized to buy up lands, on northern paper, to be sure, to the extent of half a million of dollars. . . . That was the beginning of the land speculation mania. It went from Mississippi to other states. . . . But the new lands were valueless, and could yield no fortunes, unless they were cultivated. The cultivators were not there. They must be had.38

  This was where slave traders in the Upper South entered the scene: “So, in came the cultivators, in the shape of 90,000 slaves, valued at $90,000,000[,] imported in the space of three years or so, from Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, and other slave-breeding states.”

  Slavery’s financiers built the economy by convincing the nation to wage war and to clear out new areas for exploitation.39 The Sacramento Daily Union explained how racial capitalism worked: “The slave owner being a capitalist, must also have the best land, or the labor of his slave cannot be made as profitable as to loan out the $1,200 paid for him.”40 “What does the past teach?” asked another abolitionist newspaper, and answered the question:

  That slavery lives by expansion. Slave labor cannot, on the whole, be profitably used in manufactures, commerce, or farming. In the growth of sugar, cotton, tobacco—that is, in planting—it may be turned to pecuniary account; but planting is an exhausting process, and, to be conducted with permanent advantage to the planter, requires constant accessions of territory. Deny it these, and see the results. The soil is impoverished; the free population of moderate means is forced out of the State.41

  “The native inhabitants of Mexico, are, almost to a man, opposed to slavery,” wrote the abolitionist editor Benjamin Lundy shortly after Mexican emancipation. “The system has been totally abolished in every section of the Republic, except in Texas.”42 In 1832, an ex-slave named Richard Moran praised Mexico as offering an “asylum” from slavery and told William Lloyd Garrison, “That republic, we know, is as extensive as our own, and although at a greater distance than Canada, yet it is near enough. I have long wondered why it is that my colored brethren do not turn their attention to that republic. There is no distinction of color in politics or law. It seems to me that the Province of Texas, in that republic, must attract the attention of my colored brethren in these States.” This former slave informed Garrison, “Nothing keeps me from that country [Mexico] but a total loss of health for many years, and consequently abject poverty. I have seen persons who have travelled pretty extensively in it, and from their report it is certainly a desirable part of the world to live in.”43

  These visions of freedom in the Southwest received a tremendous boon with emancipation in the British West Indies in 1833. Drawing strength from British abolition, antislavery partisans built a new line of the Underground Railroad to the Bahamas.44 Freedom fighters struck with force all across the empire’s expanding borders. An alliance of formerly enslaved African Americans and Indigenous people in Florida kept the United States pinned down in the Second Seminole War (1835–42), which has been compared by some historians to the American War in Vietnam.45 “The Seminole made a desperate stand for his Florida home,” one historian wrote in the nineteenth century. “He was exacting from the whites a terrible
price for the acres they coveted. And even more desperately than the Indian, fought the negro fugitive. Defeat for him was not the loss of land, but of liberty; to yield meant not exile, but bondage.46 General Thomas Jessup, commander of the US military forces, wrote, “This . . . is a negro, not an Indian war,” and echoed Andrew Jackson’s assessment decades earlier that if the army was unable to put down the resistance, then slavery in the Deep South was imperiled. At the outset of the Second Seminole War, nearly one thousand enslaved African Americans rose in a concerted effort to join Seminole allies in fighting the United States.47

  The epic battle for freedom being waged in the borderlands drew John Quincy Adams, now a US congressman representing Massachusetts, into the fight. Adams rose in the House of Representatives in 1836 to give one of the landmark speeches in the history of that body.48 The erstwhile supporter of the slave republic delivered an hours-long stinging repudiation of the coming war with Mexico as well as a brief against the aggression of Anglo settler colonists against Mexicans, Seminoles, and African Americans. The former president of the United States spoke without notes and ignored his colleagues’ jeers and angry cries to sit down and to be quiet. Congressman Adams quickly established the issue at the heart of the conflict stoked by US imperialism: “Do not you, an Anglo-Saxon, slave-holding exterminator of Indians, from the bottom of your soul, hate the Mexican-Spaniard-Indian, emancipator of slaves, and abolisher of slavery? And do you think that your hatred is not with equal cordiality returned?”49

  Barely two decades earlier, Secretary Adams had been a servant of empire, and he had belittled Mexicans for striking against their colonial masters. Now, Adams, called the “madman of Massachusetts” by his enemies, declared that he had joined the resistance.50 Adams paid tribute to the resolute antislavery feeling among the Mexican people, and he beseeched his fellow citizens to consider the moral bankruptcy and depravity of their motives in attacking Mexico: “And again, I ask, what will be your cause in such a war? Aggression, conquest, and the re-establishment of slavery where it has been abolished. In that war, Sir, the banners of freedom will be the banners of Mexico; and your banners, I blush to speak the word, will be the banners of slavery.”51 Adams warned, “Your Seminole war is already spreading to the Creeks, and in their march of desolation, they sweep along with them your negro slaves, and put arms in their hands, to make common cause with them against you; and how far will it spread?” Adams urged his countrymen to retreat from their disastrous path. “Go to the city of Mexico—ask any of your fellow-citizens who have been there for the last three or four years whether they scarcely dare show their faces, as Anglo-Americans in the streets? Be assured, Sir, that however heartily you detest the Mexican, his bosom burns with an equally deep-seated detestation of you.”52 The widely translated Manifesto of the Mexican Congress, published in July 1836 in response to the uprising of proslavery Anglo settlers in the Texas Revolution, confirmed John Quincy Adams’s thesis that Mexicans understood exactly why their neighbors to the north coveted their lands.53

  An essayist writing in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, an abolitionist journal, observed, “We began by robbing the Indians, then the Texans, then the Californians, N. Mexicans, and Utahs, and then we provoked the thunders that now roll over the relics of Mexico, and send their echo from Darien to Magellan.” The exasperated essayist noted, “One more Presidential term, with a Scots or Pierce at the helm, in pursuit of these platforms and this policy, and . . . there will not be a spot visible where the black and bloody banner of slavery and the fugitive slave law does not wave.”54 The abolitionist press referred to the Seminole Wars as “bloodhound wars” for the vicious attack dogs used by Anglo soldiers to hunt Native Americans. The Colored American wrote: “The conduct of General Jessup in decoying the Indians within his power by means of ‘the flag of truce,’ and then sending them to a dungeon is in the highest degree abominable.”55

  African Americans kept Mexico at the forefront of their hopes for future liberation.56 The Colored American was outraged when, during the so-called Pastry War of 1838–39, the United States assisted France in the blockade and invasion of Veracruz. The newspaper criticized King Louis-Philippe’s aggression and urged the Mexican people to resist the latest European invaders:

  The present position of Mexico is one of intense interest to the lover of liberty. All the dissension so industriously created and fomented in her by foreign emissaries, are [sic] giving way to a spirit of union in the defense of Mexican rights against French aggression. The sentiment ‘you are a Mexican’ is the call which unites the most opposite parties in that republic, to oppose the unprovoked and gratuitous attacks of the bullying Louis Philippe.57

  At the National Negro Convention, held in Buffalo in 1843, the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet came forward with an audacious plan to stoke the flames of anti-imperial rebellion. The twenty-seven-year-old minister had already lived an eventful life. His family had barely escaped being recaptured in New York and returned to their owner when he was fourteen. His biographer noted, “Such onslaughts on colored families were not infrequent at the time: no colored man’s home was secure against them.”58 In 1835, young Garnet attended Noyes Academy in New Hampshire, an integrated institution of higher learning founded by abolitionists. When the enterprising student discovered that area whites were gathering to destroy the school, Henry “spent most of the day in casting bullets in anticipation of the attack, and when the whites finally came he replied to their fire with a double-barreled shot-gun, blazing from his window, and soon drove the cowards away.” Garnet’s covering fire forced the whites to retreat and allowed his fellow students to escape. However, the mob later returned and destroyed the school.59

  Before his audience in Buffalo, Garnet adamantly stated: “If you would be free in this generation, here is your only hope. However much you and all of us may desire it, there is not much hope of redemption without the shedding of blood. If you must bleed, let it all come at once—rather die freemen, than live to be slaves.” The young man moved the delegates to tears with his relentless eloquence; however, many of those present—including Frederick Douglass—believed his “Call to Rebellion” proposal of a mass slave uprising would alienate supporters of the abolitionist cause and lead to immense bloodshed. Garnet, however, argued that there was no escaping the fact that the United States had an imperial plan to spread slavery everywhere it went: “The Pharaohs are on both sides of the blood red waters!” Garnet exclaimed. “You cannot move en masse, to the dominions of the British Queen—nor can you pass through Florida and overrun Texas, and at last find peace in Mexico. The propagators of American slavery are spending their blood and treasure, that they may plant the black flag in the heart of Mexico and riot in the halls of the Montezumas.”60

  Frederick Douglass spoke in Belfast, Ireland, in 1845 on the causes of US aggression against Mexico. Along with Morelos, Guerrero, and his countrywoman Harriet Tubman, Douglass arrived at the understanding that the enslaved themselves would have to deliver the decisive blows against slavery. Douglass was one of the greatest proponents of emancipatory internationalism. Now, for his Irish audience, the Lion of Anacostia proceeded to tear down decades of lies and distortions in the telling of American history. He began by paying homage to the Mexican War of Independence, discussing the 1845 US annexation of Texas and revealing how the government of Mexico had tried to compromise with Anglo-American settlers in Texas in order to institute a gradual emancipation. Douglass’s Irish audience punctuated his lecture with great applause: “We do not hear of much confusion in Texas, until 1828 or 1829, when Mexico after having erected herself into a separate government and declared herself free, with a consistency which puts to the blush the boasted ‘land of freedom,’ proclaimed the deliverance of every captive on her soil.”61

  Back on American soil, Douglass connected the US invasion of Mexico with the oppression of labor, the extension of slavery, and the evils of militarism:

  You know as well as I do, that Faneui
l Hall has resounded with echoing applause of a denunciation of the Mexican war, as a murderous war—as a war against the free states—as a war against freedom, against the Negro, and against the interests of workingmen of this country—and as a means of extending that great evil and damning curse, negro slavery. Why may not the oppressed say, when an oppressor is dead, either by disease or by the hand of the foeman on the battlefield, that there is one the less of his oppressors left on earth? For my part, I would not care if, to-morrow, I should hear of the death of every man who engaged in that bloody war in Mexico, and that every man had met the fate he went there to perpetrate upon unoffending Mexicans.62

  When the US invasion of Mexico commenced in 1846, Black newspapers and abolitionist journals printed devastating critiques of President James Polk and the war; they denounced the idea that the assault on Mexico was about anything other than preserving and extending slavery. Martin Delany, speaking to members of the Sixth Congregational Church in Cincinnati, excoriated the United States for imperialism and “affirmed that the war was instigated for the acquisition of slave territory, at the behest of Southern slaveholders.”63

  In a letter published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Douglass wrote,

  The real character of our Government is being exposed. . . . The present administration is justly regarded as a combination of land-pirates and free-booters. Our gallant army in Mexico is looked upon as a band of legalized murderers and plunderers. Our psalm-singing, praying, pro-slavery priesthood are stamped with hypocrisy; and all their pretensions to a love for God, while they hate and neglect their fellow-man, is branded as impudent blasphemy.64