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Conclusion: Richard Allen and the Soul of Black Reform
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Conclusion Richard Allen and the Soul of Black Reform In the summer of 1853, the Pennsylvania Freemen reported a miraculous occurrence: the great Richard Allen was haunting the slave South. The abolitionist paper based its report on a Southern correspondent who worriedly watched as blacks in New Orleans founded educational groups and autonomous churches “in direct violation of the laws of the state.” “Bishop Allen, of Philadelphia, occasionally visits [here],” the Southern observer continued, “to look after the fortunes of his black flock, and no doubt infuses into them a spirit of hostility to the whites, and counsels them against holding any intercourse with the hated and despised race that has so long tyrannized over the descendants of Ham.” When understood in the context of radical abolition, the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and rising slave restiveness, Allen’s haunting could only be considered part of a broader “evil” that hovered over slavery and the American republic—the “evil” of black abolitionism and equality. After letting the white writer’s image of a resurrected Allen briefly take hold of readers’ imagination, the abolitionist editor commented on the black preacher’s earthly mission and legacy: Now, sir, it is well known in this and other communities, that Bishop Allen, of Philadelphia, has been deceased over twenty-two years. He never while living visited Louisiana, his business never calling him there, nor in the vicinity of this foul-mouthed slanderer of the dead. He was a man respected in all parts of the world, by all creeds and denominations —even by the slaveholder. When attending annually to his spiritual concerns in the South, he was, as I have frequently seen, and heard him say, respected as much as any man he met with. It appears that since the publication of Poor Tom’s Cabin, that the agents of the devil 291 don’t know whether to begin on earth or in heaven to get subjects for direction.1 The Pennsylvania Freeman then republished Allen’s 1794 antislavery appeal in its entirety, highlighting slavery—and not abolitionism—as the true evil haunting American society. Once again, Allen’s words rang out for their cogency and eloquence. “If you love your children, if you love your country, if you love the God of love,” he had originally intoned in the Age of Jefferson, and now again in the Age of Lincoln, “clear your hands from slaves, burthen not your children or your country with them.”2 For Allen and radical abolitionists alike, emancipation was saintly and utterly American. And embodied in a black founder like Allen, emancipation was as old as the nation itself. As this pre–Civil War exchange illustrates, Allen’s image could easily be called on at significant moments in the nation’s struggle with racial injustice. Nineteenth-century black abolitionists knew this better than anyone. In 1855, James McCune Smith, perhaps the leading black intellectual and scientist of the age—fluent in several languages, he was also the first African American physician (graduating from the University of Glasgow in Scotland)—hailed Allen as the very soul of black reform. Writing in Frederick Douglass’s Paper, a Rochester-based monthly magazine that supplanted the North Star, McCune Smith recognized the black founder as a representative figure of an ever-expanding spirit of “human freedom” in the Atlantic world. For anyone who doubted this notion, McCune Smith invited readers to visit “the corner of Lombard and sixth streets” in Philadelphia, where Bethel Church still stood. “It is,” he wrote, “on the site of a revolution or reform, which happened 70 years ago, a reform which, in grasp of free thought, determined energy , spiritual Majesty, holy zeal, and gospel of truthfulness, equaled, if it did not excel, any kindred event in the history of humankind.” “Like some Iona in the midst of the brutal barbarism of American Christianity ,” he grandly concluded, referring to the tiny Scottish island that became the cornerstone of Catholicism during the Dark Ages, Allen and his church forged new directions for both African American and American liberty.3 Famed black abolitionist and congressman John Mercer Langston made a similar claim at the end of Reconstruction. Asked to speak at an Allen memorial ceremony in 1876, the year that Philadelphia proudly hosted an exhibition celebrating the centennial of American indepen292 | Conclusion [44.200.145.114] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:45 GMT) dence, Langston hailed Allen as among America’s original “abolition worthies”—and a man...