Advocates of the Sword

Brutal reality often transformed the most determined ideology. Having for five years endorsed William Lloyd Garrison’s principles of nonviolence and moral suasion, in 1843 Frederick Douglass was confronted by a white mob in Indiana. Roughly sixty armed men attacked the antislavery speakers and tore down the outdoor stage. When Douglass tried to fight his way through the rioters with only a branch as a weapon, the mob knocked him to the ground, beat him until he was unconscious, and broke his hand. “I was Non-Resistant til I got to fighting with a mob in Pendleton,” Douglass later admitted. “I fell never to rise again, and yet I cannot feel I did wrong” (p. 41). Not long afterwards, Douglass openly became an “advocate of the sword” who welcomed the gathering storm of civil war (p. 43).

Until recently, the historiography of antislavery action focused primarily on the white evangelical followers of Boston’s Garrison. When this reviewer began graduate school in 1980, studies of abolition invariably framed their topic as running from 1831 to 1861, with Garrison’s Liberator opening their sagas. Since then, thankfully, scholars have examined the dazzling variety of antislavery crusades, from early national stirrings under the Reverend Richard Allen to later activity in Washington City, from the contested southern borderlands to the Ohio Valley, and from politicized Liberty Party advocates to southern-born black activists and enslaved rebels. Although Manisha Sinha’s magisterial The Slave’s Cause (2016) is, as her subtitle suggests, a comprehensive History of Abolition, Sinha situates African American engagement and slave rebelliousness at the center of her study.¹ Kellie Carter Jackson follows that path as well, arguing that black abolitionists not only embraced the politics of violence early on and so paved the way for the coming of the Civil War, but prepared the nation for black equality in the years immediately after the conflict.

As have a number of recent scholars, Jackson observes that early national black militants grounded their crusade in the lessons of the American and Haitian Revolutions. While white Americans preferred to memorialize the speeches and words of the Founders, black men and women emerging out of slavery chose instead to remember how revolutionaries in the last two decades of the eighteenth century had employed violence to liberate their nations, and their people.² Even the failures of Gabriel and Denmark Vesey to free bondpersons in Richmond and Charleston, Jackson notes, were unable to cripple the optimism of those who “saw violence as a legitimate response to the institution of slavery and as a pathway to liberation” (p. 25). Earlier scholars such as Benjamin Quarles argued that black militancy emerged only as a response to the creation of the American Colonization Society, but Jackson persuasively suggests that Quarles had it exactly backward and that the ACS was founded in answer to a rising tide of black resistance after it became clear that New Jersey would be the last state to embrace gradual emancipation.

As black militancy increased, Jackson sensibly argues, white reformers embraced moral suasion as much in response to the fiery words of David Walker as to the rising tide of southern proslavery thought. At least initially, black activists refused to see Garrisonian principles and the defense of slave violence as mutually exclusive. Brooklyn shoemaker Joseph Holly, who spoke at antislavery conventions and assisted runaways passing through New York, thought it prudent to endorse both offensive and defensive tactics against slavery, insisting that while violence and self-defense should not be a first resort for the enslaved, sometimes they were a necessary option. But especially after Nat Turner’s 1831 revolt, the question of physical force began to divide the antislavery community, usually along racial lines. The Reverend Samuel May was typical of those who preached that the precepts of Jesus condemned those who sought liberation through bloodshed, and on the few occasions when that view met with dissent from whites in the audience, Garrison was pleased...