What does he suggest about the relationship among freedmen and former slaveowners in his painting?

Inhaltsverzeichnis Show Racial Stereotypes of the Civil War Era The Wartime Debate in the North: Four Questions about African-Americans One Source of Those Questions: Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia 19th Century Claims that Science Proved the Inferiority of African-Americans Comments by Craniometrists Which statement is true about the petition of committee in behalf of the freedmen to Andrew Johnson quizlet? What does it reveal about the realities of emancipation quizlet? Why did Congress bring articles of impeachment against Andrew Jackson quizlet? What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South?

Racial Stereotypes of the Civil War Era

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Dominating the wartime debate in the north about what should be done with slaves were three recurring questions:

• Could they learn?
• Would they work?
• Could they be civilized?

And a fourth was added as the war continued and the need for troops became more desperate: Can they and will they fight?

These questions reflected stereotypes about race that could be traced back at least as far asquestions raised by Thomas Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson had conjectured that blacks were inferior to whites with respect to their capacity for reason, imagination, and sentiment. By the 19th century, American "craniometrists" claimed to use science to prove that blacks and whites were from different species.

The popularity and persistence of these stereotypes in the North can be seen in articles and cartoons published in Northern newspapers that represented African-Americans as unwilling to work and incapable of learning and being civilized. Often represented as pathetic, comically or exotically picturesque, or hilariously or horrifyingly grotesque, African-Americans were seen as the "other." White Northerners liked to think of themselves as a hard-working, educated, and moral people, and African-Americans were typically stereotyped as lazy, ignorant, and uncivilized: an inverse image of what it meant to be an American.

This website explores the ways how these stereotypes were sometimes reinforced and sometimes rebutted by Northern newspapers and by the letters of freedmen and their teachers. It also suggests the ways these images helped shape Northern discussions about the war.

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The Wartime Debate in the North: Four Questions about African-Americans

During the 18th and 19th centuries, supporters of slavery in America argued that blacks were suited to servitude because they lacked the intelligence to learn, lacked the initiative to work independently, and lacked the qualities of morality and domesticity necessary for living in a democratic society.

In response, abolitionists had argued that it was the institution of slavery itself that kept African-Americans from demonstrating and developing intelligence, industry, and virtue since, for example, most slaves were forbidden to learn, forced to work for others, and separated from their spouses and children whenever it suited the economic interests of their masters.What advocates of slavery saw as a fact of nature, opponents explained as a consequence of nurture. And yet, the fact that both the proponents and opponents of slavery talked about the same three issues of learning, working, and civilization reflected a broader acceptance of racial stereotypes in popular culture.

The war only intensified the debate in the North over whether African-Americans were capable of being part of American society, since it meant that a series of decisions would need to be made about what to do with the slaves who would come under the control of Union forces. Should slaves freeing from their confederate masters be returned to their owners, even though the slaves were being used to support the Southern military effort? Should slaves captured by the Union army be forced to continue working on plantations for the benefit of the North? Should former slaves be sent to colonize a remote area of the West or to an island in the Carribbean? In each case, concerns about the ability and willingness of African-Americans to learn, earn, and live as civilized citizens, shaped the policies adopted by the federal government and the behavior of private individuals and groups.

Consider the ways in which the following primary resources below raise depict African-Americans in ways that raise or answer questions about their ability to learn, work, live civilized lives, and fight for freedom. Do they suggest that "nature" or "nurture" are the real issue? In other words, do they suggest that the experience of freedom would transform the former slaves into model Americans?

Is it not astonishing, that while we are ploughing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses and constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, and copper, siler vand gold; that while we are reading, writing, and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants, and secretaries, having among us layers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; that while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises commmon to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, breeding sheep and cattle on the hillside; living, moving, acting, thinking, planning; living in families as husbands, wives, and children; and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian's God, and looking hopefully for immortal life beyond the grave; -- is it not astonishing, I say, that we are called upon to prove that we are men?" --Frederick Douglass, "A Pertinent Question," The Freedmen's Book, Lydia Maria Child, ed. (Boston: Ticknor and Fields:, 1865): 93.

April, 1864, Civil War Cartoons Collection, American Antiquarian Society

Proclamation of Emancipation, [New York]: L.N. Rosenthal, 327 Walnut Street, 1865.

Click on individual sections of the poster above for larger versions,
or click here for a larger version of the whole..

The lithograph above offers the text of the Emancipation Proclamation, framed above by portraits of Founders (including Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington), bracketed above by the images of William Penn and John Wesley and to the sides by the faces of female abolitionists Lucretia Mott and Lydia Maria Child.Lincoln holds the central position at the bottom of the broadside, and he is surrounded by a variety of individuals, each of whom played some role in the process that had lead to the emancipation proclamation. Included are Wendell Phillips, Gerritt Smith, Salmon Chase, Henry Ward Beecher, and General Butler.

On one side of the proclamation are images of slavery, including classic scenes of slaves being whipped, a slave family on the auction block, a manacled slave, and a slave being hunted by bloodhounds. Presiding over that side of the lithograph is the image of a fallen angel bearing manacles; directly below her three faces peer from the shadows.

The other side features iconographic representations of life under liberty. An angel (probably representing fame) presides over sequence, which includes the image of a schoolroom with black students, a well-dressed and happy family in a room with pictures and books, a black farmer cultivating his fields, and a man (dressed exactly like the hunted fugitive slave on the opposite side) kneeling before Columbia and surrounded by the symbols of commerce, progress, and education.

 

One Source of Those Questions: Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia

While Thomas Jefferson proposed the elimination of slavery in his eary drafts of the Declaration of Independence and proposed a gradual system of emancipation in Query XIV of Notes on the State of Virginia, his comments on blacks in Notes suggest that he harbored questions about whether they were, in fact, human beings. Explaining why he believed that colonization was the only way of dealing with free blacks, Jefferson referred to the "deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained" and "the real distinctions which nature has made."

What were the so-called "real distinctions" that Jefferson thought separated blacks from whites? Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. The terms "memory, reason, and imagination" would have been particularly significant for Enlightenment thinkers who had been influenced by Bacon's belief that all human understanding could be classified into exactly those three categories.

Detail from William. K. Rhinehart, "Fourth of July celebration, or, Southern ideas of Liberty-- July 4, '40," , ca. 1840

IMAGINATION

In terms of imagination, Jefferson saw blacks as inferior not only to whites, but to Native Americans as well.

The Indians, with no advantages . . . will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation. They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry-.-Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.

REASON

By far the most important of the three types of understanding, however, was reason. While conceding that most slaves "indeed have been confined to tillage, to their own homes, and their own society" Jefferson went on to remark:

Yet many have been so situated, that they might have availed themselves of the conversation of their masters; many have been brought up to the handicraft arts, and from that circumstance have always been associated with the whites. Some have been liberally educated, and all have lived in countries where the arts and sciences are cultivated to a considerable degree, and have had before their eyes samples of the best works from abroad.

Jefferson even used his observation that slaves were disposed to sleep when not at work as evidence of their lack of a capacity for reason.

In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course.

The fact that Jefferson chose to describe the sleeping African-American as "an animal whose body is at rest" seems, in this context, more than coincidental. The belief that blacks performed poorly in two of these three categories would have weighed heavily in the mind of a man like Jefferson, who placed such a high value on these concepts that he had organized his own extensive library into sections based on "memory," "reason," and "imagination."

SENTIMENT

While it would be hard to overstate the importance of reason in 18th century thought in England and America, rationality did not rule alone The ability to feel and express sentiment was also regarded by Jefferson and other "enlightened" thinkers of that time as an important characteristic of civilized human beings .

In his book, Sentimental Democracy, Andrew Burstein argues that Jefferson and other Enlightenment thinkers believed that human beings were "at once sentient and rational" and thus "needed to maintain a proper balance between these two facets of their behavioral system in order to achieve happiness." According to Jefferson, blacks failed to live up to this standard as well. He observed: "They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation."

A creature of "sensation" rather than "sentiment" would not only be incapable of true love, but also of morality. As Burstein explains:

[Adam] Smith described the sensations of sentiment and passion as "affection of the heart from which any action proceeds," and he characterized virtue and propriety, the experiences of grief and joy, taste and judgment, concord and discord, opinions and moral standards. . . . The man of virtuous sentiment, cultivating a sense of duty, overcame the impulse of self-love through reason principle, and conscience--by reflecting on the precariousness of existence and discovering "the man within."

Jefferson might have wondered how slaves could learn "virtue and propriety" if, as he claimed: "Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them"? And since the man of sentiment learns virtue through the action of reason on emotion, how could an African-American ever live up to the 18th century conception of the man of sensibility?

19th Century Claims that Science Proved the Inferiority of African-Americans

Although Jefferson assumed that the perceived inferiority of blacks to whites might only indicate they were a separate "genus," there were other writers willing to argue African-Americans were a separate species and support for this view continued to be gathered by the advocates of slavery. As early as 1817, Edward D. Grifin, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in Newark, New Jersey opened a sermon preached to collect money for the benefit of The African School by stating:

I rise to plead the cause of a people who until lately have seldom had an advocate . . . They who have wished to find an apology for the slave-trade . . . have cast the Africans into another species, and sorted them with the ape and the orang-outang. In every plea for the improvement of the African race, this, or an approach to this, is the prejudice with which we have chiefly to contend.

--"A Plea for Africa: A Sermon Preached October 26, 1817, in the First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, Before the Synod of New York and New Jersey," (New York: Gould: 1817) 3.

In the 1830s, the field of "craniometry" purported to offer evidence collected from many populations that blacks had smaller brains than whites. The opponents of abolition argued that because blacks were unable to learn, they would never be able to vote intelligently, contribute to the market economy, or even read the Bible. 

Samuel Morton, Crania Americana, 1831

Which statement is true about the petition of committee in behalf of the freedmen to Andrew Johnson quizlet?

What does it reveal about the realities of emancipation quizlet?

Why did Congress bring articles of impeachment against Andrew Jackson quizlet?

What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South?