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| "Rachel Weeping for Her Children":
Black Women and the Abolition of Slavery
by Margaret Washington
Professor of History, Cornell University
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Photograph
of Sojourner Truth, 1864 (GLC 06391.20)
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During the period leading up to the Civil War, black women
all over the North comprised a stalwart but now largely
forgotten abolitionist army. In myriad ways, these race-conscious
women worked to bring immediate emancipation to the South.
Antislavery Northern black women felt the sting of oppression
personally. Like the slaves, they too were victims of
color prejudice; some had been born in Northern bondage;
others had family members still enslaved; and many interacted
daily with self-emancipated people who constantly feared
being returned South.
Antislavery women such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet
Tubman were only the most famous of the abolitionists.
Before either of these heroines came on the scene and
before antislavery was an organized movement, black women
in local Northern communities had quietly turned to activism
through their church work, literary societies, and benevolent
organizations. These women found time for political activism
in between managing households, raising children, and
working.
In the late1820s, Zion’s African Methodist Episcopal
Church in New York City, Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church
in Philadelphia, and the African Meetinghouse in Boston
were centers of female antislavery activity. Black women
proclaimed that their cause was “let the oppressed
go free.” They organized bazaars to promote the
purchase of goods from free labor, met in sewing circles
to make clothing for those fleeing bondage, and raised
money for Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s
first black newspaper. In 1830, when Boston editor William
Lloyd Garrison proposed his idea of publishing a newspaper
devoted solely to immediate emancipation, a committee
of black women began raising funds for it. The first copy
of The Liberator appeared on January 1, 1831
with strong financial backing from black women. At their
literary-society meetings, black women switched from reading
European classics to discussing The Liberator
and antislavery pamphlets, and inviting male speakers
to expound on the evils of slavery.
Throughout the 1830s, black women engaged heavily in activism.
They vowed to, “heed the enslaved mothers’
cry for children torn away,” and designated their
dwellings as “free homes” for those fleeing
bondage. For example, Hester Lane of New York City, a
successful black entrepreneur, used her home as an Underground
Railroad station. Lane also traveled South to purchase
enslaved children whom she freed and educated. Mary Marshall’s
Colored Sailors’ Boarding Home was another busy
sanctuary. Marshall kept a vigilant eye out for refugees
from bondage, and was determined that “No one who
had the courage to start should fail to reach the goal.”
Other black women organized petition drives, wrote antislavery
poetry, hosted traveling abolitionists, and organized
fairs. By 1832, black women had formed the first female
antislavery society in Salem, Massachusetts. They also
held executive offices in biracial female antislavery
societies in Philadelphia, Boston, and elsewhere.
Antislavery black men insisted that black women work only
behind the scenes, but women sometimes refused to do so.
In New York City, a group of black women confronted white
authorities in a courtroom where several self-emancipated
women were about to be returned to bondage. Black men
accused the female protesters of bringing “everlasting
shame and remorse” upon the black community and
upon themselves. In 1831, black women in Boston organized
the African American Female Intelligence Society. This
organization became a forum for Maria Stewart, the first
woman to speak publicly against slavery. Stewart proclaimed
that she was called by God to address the issues of black
emancipation and the rights of black women. “We
claim our rights,” she asserted, “as women
and men,” and “we are not afraid of them that
kill the body.” Stewart also published a pamphlet
in The Liberator on behalf of black women and
the enslaved, but Boston’s black male community
censored Stewart for her public expressions and forced
her into silence. She soon left the city. Although she
never again spoke publicly, she remained active through
women’s organizations and conventions. She joined
other black women who held office, served as delegates,
and otherwise participated in the biracial women’s
antislavery conventions in 1837, 1838, and 1839.
The antislavery movement took a more progressive turn
in the 1840s, when the American Anti-Slavery Society (Garrisonians)
welcomed women as officeholders and speakers. Most black
women continued their quiet antislavery work, but some
were outspoken. The first black woman to take the public
stage for the American Anti-Slavery Society was Sojourner
Truth. Born into slavery in 1797 among the Hudson Valley
Dutch and emancipated in adulthood, Truth was already
known as a preacher when she joined the Garrisonians in
1844. She made antislavery speeches throughout New England,
and in 1845, gave her first address at the American Anti-Slavery
Society’s annual convention. Sojourner Truth became
known from Maine to Michigan as a popular and featured
antislavery speaker. Truth published a Narrative
of her life, and used the proceeds to purchase a home
and finance her abolitionist work.
Another surge of radicalism occurred in 1850 with the
passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. It decreed that any
citizen could be enlisted in the service of a slaveholder
to capture an enslaved person, and it nullified the individual
civil rights that a state guaranteed its citizens, including
those formerly enslaved. That same year, Harriet Tubman,
a thirty-year-old self-emancipated Marylander, began defying
the Fugitive Slave Law by leading enslaved men, women,
and children out of the South. With slave catchers lurking
everywhere and a price on her head, Tubman safely conducted
her charges through the Northern states and on to Canada.
Mary Ann Shadd (Cary) was a twenty-five-year-old freeborn
schoolteacher when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed.
Inspired by her father, whom she described as a “chief
breakman” on the Delaware Underground Railroad,
Shadd soon moved to Canada and established herself as
a militant abolitionist, influential emigrationist, and
the first black woman newspaper editor (the Provincial
Freeman).
In 1854, twenty-eight-year-old Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper)
joined Sojourner Truth on the Garrisonian lecture circuit.
Born into a well-connected Baltimore family, Watkins was
a poet and teacher. She was drawn into the abolitionist
struggle by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which rescinded the
restrictions on slavery in the remaining territories acquired
under the Louisiana Purchase. Watkins traveled throughout
the Midwest, sometimes with Sojourner Truth, and spoke
eloquently of the wrongs inflicted upon her people, selling
her books of poetry at antislavery lectures and using
the proceeds to support the Underground Railroad. In 1858,
Watkins joined black male leaders in Detroit and led a
large group of angry citizens in storming the jailhouse.
The group attempted to remove from protective custody
a black “traitor” to their cause, who had
intended to expose the operations of the Underground Railroad.
Despite the Fugitive Slave Law, the Underground Railroad
remained the “heart’s blood” of black
resistance. Black women abolitionists played a vital role
in this work. They were often the ones who intercepted
refugees; who provided them with food, clothing, shelter,
health care, and spiritual and psychological comfort;
and who directed them to the next station. Women sometimes
confronted slave catchers and kidnappers, who were often
right on the heels of the fugitives. Caroline Loguen,
the wife of Syracuse, New York abolitionist Reverend Jermain
Loguen, answered many a midnight knock during her husband’s
frequent absences. Once she and her sister successfully
fought off slave catchers attempting to enter her home
in pursuit of “fugitives.”
In 1858, Anna Murray Douglass, wife of black leader Frederick
Douglass, hosted John Brown, the famous white abolitionist,
for a month. Brown was in hiding after having been charged
with murdering pro-slavery farmers in Missouri. In the
Douglass home, Brown perfected his plans for the raid
on Harpers Ferry. In an 1859 meeting with Brown in Maryland
just before the assault on Harpers Ferry, Douglass gave
him ten dollars from the wife of a Brooklyn couple, the
J.N. Gloucesters, who like Douglass himself were close
to Brown. Along with the money, Mrs. Gloucester “sent
her best wishes.” When Brown was captured, tried,
and sentenced to death, black women abolitionists sent
money to his wife Mary, and wrote letters expressing their
deep regard for her husband. Frances Ellen Watkins also
sent gifts as well as one of her poems, “Bury Me
in a Free Land,” to Brown’s condemned men.
During the antebellum era, black women abolitionists moved,
in keeping with the urgency of the times, from quiet activism
to militancy. By 1858, even Sojourner Truth, the archpacifist,
recognized that war with the South was inevitable if black
people were to obtain their freedom. Black women furthered
the goal of emancipation during the Civil War by continuing
their abolition work. Harriet Tubman offered her services
to the Union Army. Sojourner Truth lectured throughout
the Midwest, where she confronted threatening pro-slavery
( so-called “Copperhead”) mobs. Black women
organized petition campaigns to Congress and the president;
they sent food and clothing to the Union front lines for
destitute blacks; and they went into Union-occupied areas
to provide education for black refugees. After the Emancipation
Proclamation was signed on January 1, 1863, black women
abolitionists immediately began working on the next phase
of their mission -- the task of uplifting their race as
a free people.
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