The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865

Chapter 8: The War for Emancipation and Beyond

301 8 The War for Emancipation and Beyond  If there was much in the 1850s to encourage thinking about conflict and violence among abolitionists, the end of the decade saw a series of events that made such thought seem more pressing still. To some extent such thought was born of a pessimism brought on by such events as the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott Decision, which in effect institutionalized racial prejudice as the basis for all of American law and practice. That same pessimism underlay, for example, the widespread interest in emigration by about 1859 and 1860. For many abolitionists, there was an increasing sense that Garrisonian moral suasion was not going to be enough to bring slavery to an end, a sense that something more was needed. That something more had been anticipated, during the 1850s, by violent confrontations over slavery. The war in Kansas was one such episode, as pro- and antislavery settlers came to violence over whether the territory should ultimately be slave or free. Still more important was John Brown’s 1859 raid on the Harper’s Ferry federal arsenal in Virginia and his later martyrdom. A veteran of the Kansas war, Brown led a raiding party of twenty-one men, including five African Americans, in an attack that he hoped would incite slave insurrections and inspire an all-out armed assault on slavery itself. Ten of his men, including two of the black recruits, were killed in the action, and seven, including Brown himself, along with the black volunteers John A. Copeland and Shields Green, a fugitive, were captured. Brown was executed on 2 December 1859, and Copeland and Green, two weeks thereafter.1 Bruce REV.PAGE 08 (301-314) 9/26/01 7:49 AM Page 301 The Brown raid, and black participation in it, was part of the discussion that had been framed by ideas of romantic racialism, notably in the controversy over Stowe’s Uncle Tom, and by such works as Martin Delany ’s Blake and Douglass’s “Heroic Slave,” among others. As Jeffrey Rossbach has noted, a few white abolitionists even questioned whether slaves would fight for their own freedom. Black participation in Brown’s raid was crucial, and Copeland’s martyrdom was widely noted in the abolitionist press. Letters that Copeland wrote from his cell shortly before his execution were widely reprinted in the Liberator and elsewhere. In those letters Copeland spoke as a martyr, and in the tradition that equated black revolutionaries with the heroes of America’s own Revolutionary past, commenting, as they did, on America’s own dedication to that past. “Could I die in a more noble cause?” Copeland asked. His courage was exemplary, and those who celebrated his martyrdom knew that it was representative as well.2 In the context of the sectional crisis such a black voice with revolutionary potential became an increasingly important element in abolitionist literature and in the evocation of an African American presence. The heightened tensions between North and South during the 1860 presidential campaign and following Lincoln’s election were reflected, in part, by a growing interest in black insurrectionist heroism. In early 1860 Frederick Douglass’ Paper published a story written for the paper about a group of “Liberators” conspiring to create an insurrection in Virginia . Such fictional accounts were supplemented by those based on fact, especially with the outbreak of war in 1861. Antebellum heroes whose very actions testified to the slaves’ willingness to fight and die for freedom enjoyed new visibility. The abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had been involved with Brown, paid tribute to Nat Turner in the June 1861 issue of the Atlantic Monthly and wrote a sketch of Denmark Vesey the following month, both of which were reprinted in Douglass’ Monthly; the following year, he celebrated Gabriel’s 1800 plot in Richmond . William Wells Brown drew on Higginson’s work for his own tribute to Turner, which appeared as a column in James Redpath’s Pine and Palm; Brown provided a brief sketch of Madison Washington for the paper as well.3 Such accounts provided a framework for more contemporary representations of black heroism. Osborne Anderson, who had been with The Origins of African American Literature 302 Bruce REV.PAGE 08 (301-314) 9/26/01 7:49 AM Page 302 Brown at Harper’s Ferry, the only black raider to escape, published a firsthand account of his experiences and about...