The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Read Online Free PDF

immediate emancipation with an unmitigated attack on colonization during the Baltimore years, from 1829 until his return to Boston in 1831 when he launched
The Liberator.
    While still in Boston, Garrison had expressed support for the ACS, while adding doubts about the efficiency of its plan, at a Fourth of July fund-raising ACS meeting. In his first edition as assistant editor ofLundy’s paper, he expressed similar sentiments, praising Liberia and hoping to see the funds for the ACS “as exhaustless as the number of applicants for removal,” while also stressing the shortcomings and inadequacies of a plan that should be viewed and supported as an “auxiliary,” not a “remedy.”
    Yet even in Boston, where he had had some personal contacts with blacks, Garrison had been impressed by black opposition to colonization and was influenced in 1829 by an outdoor black celebration of the British abolition of the slave trade. He had far more interaction with blacks in Baltimore, where he lived in a boardinghouse also occupied byWilliam Watkins, a black reformer with whom Garrison discussed colonization and abolition. Lundy also took Garrison to Philadelphia, where he met both black and white abolitionists. In addition, in Philadelphia Garrison witnessed for the first time some of the cruelties of slave markets and the physical punishment of slaves, while on a more abstract level, he absorbed the radical attacks on “moderation” in such works asGeorge Bourne’s 1816
The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable
and the English QuakerElizabeth Heyrick’s 1824
Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition.
The latter, reprinted by Lundy in
The Genius of Universal Emancipation,
called for “a holy war,—an attack upon the strong holds, the deep intrenchments [
sic
] of the very powers of darkness,” and eventually had a profound impact in both Britain and America. 66
    The phrase “immediate emancipation” has long evoked confusion and controversy. To the general public in the 1830s it meant simply the abolition of black slavery without delay or preparation. But the word “immediate” may denote something other than closeness in time; to many abolitionists it signified a rejection of intermediate agencies or conditions, a directness or forthrightness in action or decision. In this senseimmediatism suggested a repudiation of the various media, such as colonization orapprenticeship, that had been advocated as remedies for the evils of slavery. To many reformers the phrase mainly implied a direct, intuitive consciousness of the sinfulness of slavery and a sincere, “immediate” commitment to work for its abolition. In this subjective sense the word “immediate” was charged with religious overtones and referred more to the moral disposition of the reformer than to a particular plan for emancipation. Thus, some reformers confused immediate abolition with an immediate personal decision to abstain from consuming slave-grown produce; and a person might be considered animmediatist if he or she was genuinelyconvinced that slavery should be abolished absolutely and without compromise, though not necessarily without some preparation. Such a range of meanings led unavoidably to misunderstanding. The ambiguity, however, was something more than semantic confusion. The doctrine of immediatism, in the form it took in both Britain and America in the 1830s, was at once a logical culmination of the antislavery movement and a token of a major shift in intellectual history, as abolitionists reacted against continuing slaveholder recalcitrance as well as a generation of unsuccessful “gradualism.” 67
    Garrison’s conversion inBaltimore to immediatism was visceral and total and had more to do with his own unrestrained, uninhibited language and actions than with any specific program for emancipation. For example, he was jailed for libel because he published a list indicting local merchants and community leaders for sinful ties with slavery. The meaning of