Abolition in CT and How John Brown Fits In

A Scholar on Abolition Joins the Tiny Abolitionist Film Festival to describe John Brown’s place in the history of abolition

My name is Manisha Sinha, and I teach at the University of Connecticut, and I'm happy to be here to talk about the history of abolition in the U.S. and in Connecticut in particular and to relate it to the films that you're going to be seeing. Because you will see how the enslaved resisted their conditions in several ways, and music and song were one of the most important ways and remain one of the most important contributions of people of African descent to the United States and the world.

But in my talk today, I just want to emphasize this issue of slave resistance and how slave resistance systems must be seen as essential to the history of abolition, and a lot of it comes from my book, "The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition." Where we look at poetry, song, and other artwork, but it is really more of trying to reimagine the history of abolition as a history of an interracial radical social movement in which African Americans played a central part.

Abolitionitionism was an inter-racial movement—THAT’s why it was “radical”

So, we normally think of abolition, we think of it as this kind of Bourgeois northern middle-class white movement, and yes, there were many white abolitionists who, inspired by either religion or other ideologies, came to abolition. And we know that many of them joined various reform movements like Temperance or even Bible societies. But abolition and the women's rights movement, which came out of abolition, were radical movements; and they tended to challenge far more than other religious and moral reform movements; the status quo; and two disfranchised groups played a very important part in the histories of abolition and women's rights.

Black abolitionists played a central role

One was African Americans, and the other was, of course, women—Black and White women. But what I argue in the book is not just that African Americans or Black abolitionists just played a central part in the movement, but that the enslaved did. That slave resistance, rather than Bourgeois liberalism, is central to understanding the history of abolition. And once we get that basic simple point, we will be able to understand John Brown much better because, for many Americans, John Brown just comes out of nowhere, and they're like, "Oh, he's this crazy radical abolitionist."

But actually, John Brown comes very much from the traditions of the abolition movement. In my book, I go back to the Revolutionary era right up to the Civil War, and I show how slave resistance, whether in the form of rebellions or fugitivity—simply running away for freedom, voting with your feet—played a central role in the making of abolition.

You can see that this is true in Connecticut. We often forget that Connecticut, of course, was a slave state, especially in the colonial era before it got rid of slavery very gradually through gradual emancipation laws. One can see Colonial slave runaway advertisements in the Hartford Courant. You could just simply go and get copies of these runaway slave advertisements showing that New England and Connecticut, in particular, were very much involved in the history of slavery and the slave trade at that time.

Now, of course, the Revolution does make a difference. The northern states, starting with Vermont and ending with New Jersey, started getting rid of slavery either through judicial proclamations—but mostly through gradual emancipation laws, which freed children of industry rather than enslaved themselves.

And there were interested people in Connecticut, like Venture Smith, who, of course, wrote his narrative. We often forget that there were enslaved people in Connecticut who wrote slave narratives the way Southern slaves did much later on in the 19th century. And this is my argument that these people, like Venture Smith, were the original abolitionists. Enslaved people resisting their own enslavement were the original abolitionists.

They wrote narratives that not only detail their own experiences but also highlight the cruelties and arbitrary nature of slavery. Venture Smith's narrative, along with many other slave narratives like Frederick Douglass's, can be seen as the original literature of the abolition movement.

In Connecticut, African-Americans protested against slavery in the late 18th century. Figures such as Phyllis Wheatley in Massachusetts and Lemuel Haynes, a famous congregational minister, preached against the unchristian and unrepublican nature of slavery.

Lemuel Haynes, who was born in Hartford, Connecticut, wrote pamphlets and poetry emphasizing the anomaly of slavery in the new American Republic. He highlighted the hypocrisy of Southern slaveholders in their professed Christianity. Haynes was influenced by New Divinity scholars in Connecticut, and many abolitionists, both Black and white, in the state were influenced by the theology of disinterested benevolence. Samuel Hopkins, a white preacher, preached to enslaved people in Rhode Island, while Lemuel Haynes preached to White people in Vermont. The interracialism of the abolition movement was radical during a time of widespread enslavement and rigid racial segregation.

Other notable figures who wrote narratives and emerged from slavery in Connecticut include James Mars. Mars, a fugitive slave, belonged to an important Black abolitionist church in Hartford and served on the executive committee of the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society. He escaped from his enslavers and was protected by friends, including white anti-slavery advocates in Connecticut.

Connecticut had one of the earlier abolition societies, the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Held in Bondage (CSPFRPUHB, for short—🤦🏻). This society played a significant role in implementing gradual emancipation laws and preventing the sale of individuals like Mars to the South. Connecticut's process of abolishing slavery was gradual, continuing until 1848, despite the law being passed in 1784. These figures should be recognized as important contributors to the abolition movement.

Some antislavery people were racists; abolitionists were egalitarians

The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, took a different approach. Some prominent statesmen, including senators and presidents, aimed to rid the country of slavery by colonizing Black people back to Africa. African-Americans and abolitionists strongly opposed this program because they believed in the equal citizenship rights and racial equality of African Americans. Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and David Walker distinguished themselves from those who were simply anti-slavery by their commitment to full equality.

Connecticut took a step backward in the 1880s when its state constitution disenfranchised all Black men. Even before that, the Connecticut state legislature had already disfranchised Black men, making Connecticut the only state in New England that both enfranchised and later disfranchised Black men. This became a model for other northern states that also took away the right to vote from Black men. Despite the progress made during the early republic, on the eve of the Civil War, Blacks could only vote in the New England states except for Connecticut.

Black abolitionists led the charge against second-class status

Of course, African Americans protested against these conditions. They protested against second-class citizenship, and one of the most important churches, the Fifth Congregational Church—also known as the Talcott Street Church because it was located on Talcott Street at that time—is still alive, that church and congregation. Many of its pastors protested against the increasing rise of racism, the disfranchisement of Black men, and the spread of Southern slavery. Slavery was not dying out; it was spreading, and African Americans were leading the charge against both slavery and the disfranchisement of Black people.

You can see this in one of the pastors. A Methodist Minister by the name of Hosea Easton actually wrote one of the first intellectual arguments against the pseudoscience of race that had become very popular—which was used by slaveholders to justify slavery but also to justify the second-class citizenship, the denial of rights, and public segregation of Black people in the North.

Reverend James WC Pennington also did the same. He is finally being recognized by Yale University. He was not allowed to enroll in classes there; he could mainly sit in and audit classes. He was eventually given a doctorate by the University of Heidelberg in 1849, the first Black man to receive one. He continued this tradition. He was a pastor at the Talcott Street Church. He taught in schools and also wrote one of the first histories of Black people, where he tried to refute racism on an intellectual and moral basis. So he's an important abolitionist to remember.

Now, of course, you have heard of the Amistad rebellion and how that rebellion was begun by many Africans in 1839 on the internal slave trade of Cuba. Eventually, this slaver was steered to Long Island, and the case was tried in Connecticut. This really galvanized Black and white abolitionists in Connecticut, but it introduced, in the 1830s and 1840s, these slave rebellions beginning with Nat Turner's Rebellion. Also, the Amistad shipboard rebellions like Amistad and the Creole, which came a little later than the Amistad, made abolitionists defend the right of the enslaved to rebel.

Now, this is important because a lot of these abolitionists are pacifists. The evangelicals, the Garrisonians, they're all pacifists. They do not believe in violence. But when it comes to slave resistance, they defend it. Garrison is a prime example; he defends Nat Turner's Rebellion. He is one of two American editors to defend that rebellion, which is seen as very Black and violent. But this idea that the enslaved people have the right to self-defense, that they have the right to rise up against their own enslavement is an important thread in the abolition movement.

John Brown was an Old School Abolitionist

So when John Brown decides to go to Harpers Ferry and either smuggle enslaved people through what he called his Subterranean passageway into the mountains or even begin a rebellion, this is nothing new. There's an old tradition within the Abolitionist Movement of this. Some of them began these missionary societies. This has been begun by Pennington. It was an all-Black society when they wanted to take the Mende Africans back to Africa, as they demanded, and actually begin a mission in Africa.

But they were very clear that they were not going to be confused with colonialism or imperialism. They wanted to have a mission in Africa, as the Mendi Amistad Mission came to be known, and it involved a lot of natives. Some of them came back to the United States after the Civil War and preached to freed people, showing their interconnections, very different from what we normally understand as the missionary project associated with European colonialism.

Pennington was also very important in refuting what he called laws that went against God's law. He quoted this in one of his sermons, in his critique of the Fugitive Slave Clause of the U.S. Constitution. He said, 'Covenants involving more wrong are not obligatory upon man.' He even said these were covenants with hell, agreements of death. This is all from the Bible, and Garrison picks it up to condemn the Constitution for having the Fugitive Slave Clause. So there's a lot of rhetoric of resistance coming in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law.

And, of course, we know John Brown himself was involved with this in Springfield, where he formed an all-Black militia called The League of Gileadites. They tried to oppose the implementation of the Fugitive Slave Law in Springfield, Massachusetts. This became quite common in the 1850s when you had fugitive slave rebellions all over the country, all over the North.

We often forget that the fugitive slave controversies involved Black and white abolitionists and enslaved people, pictured here like Anthony Burns in Massachusetts or Joshua Glover in Wisconsin, which led the state of Wisconsin to nullify the federal Fugitive Slave Law or the Oberlin-Wellington rescue. Some of these men ended up joining John Brown on his raid of Harpers Ferry.

So again, showing you that when we look at John Brown ultimately and his war against slavery, it very much comes from this long history of abolition, this long history of centering African Americans within abolition. He's inspired by the Haitian Revolution, which is the first and only instance of a successful slave rebellion in world history. He's inspired by the slave conspiracies and revolts that are taking place by the Jamaican Maroons, who are fighting against the colonial administration in Jamaica.

So his war against slavery comes out of these traditions from abolition. He's not some crazy person. He had his own family. His grandfather was a Revolutionary War soldier. He knows he connects this rather with the fight for liberty for Black liberty with this older revolutionary tradition. And he is very much involved in the abolition movement. He's not a lone wolf, as he is commonly portrayed. He's funded by some abolitionists. He gives speeches to Black and white abolitionists.

A lot of Black abolitionists, including Pennington, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, met with him. So he's not some sort of outlier, which is how we normally see him. I make an extensive case for this in my book.

And I'm going to end with this because I know I have only 10 minutes (😀), so I don't want to take up too much of my time. And I'm sure you will be seeing some more inspirational films and hearing some more inspirational talk about John Brown himself and his birth in Torrington, his move to Kansas, and this war that he starts waging against slavery throughout the 1850s, ending with the raid on Harpers Ferry. It's not a mystery why Union Army soldiers would march during the Civil War to the tune of 'John Brown's Body.' Because, in a way, they were carrying his fight down South, as he said, 'I'll take the fight to Africa.' So they're carrying on that fight. They see themselves as carrying on that fight; at least some of them do.

And certainly, that marching tune tells us that they do.

I'm going to end with this slide because this is a statue of John Brown from his last home in North Elba, New York. And I like it because a lot of activists associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, and this is even before the murder of George Floyd; this is when the Black Lives Matter movement started with the murder of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, and a whole lot of other unarmed Black men and women, many of them; they saw themselves as continuing the legacy of John Brown, which I find really interesting.

This abolitionist struggle for Black equality and Black rights is not something that dies with the abolition movement or dies with John Brown's execution. He's widely viewed as a model, and his words seem timeless, that many present-day activists should call themselves modern-day abolitionists or modern-day abolitionists, continuing the legacy of John Brown's fight.

And for me as a historian of abolition, I find that interesting.