The American Prejudice Against Color

by Elbert, Sarah; Allen, William G.

• ISBN13: 9781555535452
• ISBN10: 1555535453
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-11-07
• Publisher: Northeastern Univ Pr

Summary

In 1853, William G. Allen, the "Coloured Professor" of Classics at New York Central College, became engaged to Mary King, a student at the coeducational, racially integrated school and daughter of a local white abolitionist minister. Rumors of their betrothal incited a mob of several hundred men armed with "tar, feathers, poles, and an empty barrel spiked with shingle nails." Allen and King narrowly escaped with their lives, married in New York City, and then fled as fugitives to England and Ireland. Their love story and brave resistance were recorded in engrossing detail by Allen in two pamphlets-The American Prejudice Against Color: An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily the Nation Got into An Uproar (1853) and A Short Personal Narrative (1860). Reproduced here in their entirety, Allen's forthright, eloquent, and ironic accounts, which include excerpts from abolitionist and anti-abolitionist newspaper reports about the incident, drew renewed threats against the exiled pair as well as support from the couple's circle of antislavery friends and allies, a diverse group including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Beriah Green, Gerrit Smith, Reverend Samuel J. May, and George Thompson. The experiences related by Allen vividly illustrate the rampant fears of "amalgamation" that sparked violent protests in antebellum America. He also reveals white abolitionists' contradictions regarding mixed-race relationships. Also contained in this volume is Louisa May Alcott's M.L., a fictional tale of interracial love based on her familiarity with the Allen-King episode through her abolitionist uncle, the Reverend Samuel J. May. Alcott's story was refused by The Atlantic magazine because, she said, it "might offend the dear South." An insightful introduction by editor Sarah Elbert places the writings within a historical and cultural context. She details William G. Allen's notable career as a graduate of the Oneida Institute and as an active abolitionist in the network reaching from New York's North Star Country through Boston, Canada, England, and Ireland. In exile, William and Mary King Allen, important members of the trans-Atlantic movement, continued their struggle for "free association" and supported their family by teaching poor children in London.

Author Biography

Sarah Elbert is Associate Professor of History and Women's Studies at Binghamton University, State University of New York. She is the editor of Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery, also published by Northeastern University Press. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(34)
The American Prejudice Against Color. An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily the Nation Got into an Uproar. By William G. Allen, a Refugee from American Despotism, 1853	35	(58)
A Short Personal Narrative, by William G. Allen (Colored American), 1860	93	(28)
M. L., Louisa May Alcott, 1863	121	(33)
Acknowledgments	154

Excerpts

No single event more deeply stirred black and white antislavery activists in the United States and the British Isles than the passage of the American Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. Northern citizens in particular were outraged by the new federal requirement that they aid in the return of escaped slaves to their southern masters or face fines and imprisonment. The question of who was a fugitive slave and who was a "legally" free person of color was left to bounty hunters and commissioners appointed to decide each case. The commissioners received ten dollars for each human being remanded to slavery and five dollars for each soul declared free. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (published first as a serial in the National Era in 1851 and then as a two-volume novel in 1852) was the most famous literary reaction to the law, and its public impact as both a literary and a political text cannot be overestimated. Fugitive slaves found their way to Britain for twenty years prior to 1850, and they were powerful advocates in an Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, being seasoned veterans ready to resist the American Fugitive Slave Law.

In the United States, in 1852, a young quadroon scholar and abolitionist reformer, William G. Allen, wrote an enthusiastic review of Uncle Tom's Cabin for the Frederick Douglass' Paper . He found the novel thrilling: "its descriptions stir the blood" and "indeed almost make it leap out of the heart." And Allen understood and appreciated the power of Cassy, a courageous woman whose resistance overleaps the boundaries of female moral persuasion; she dares to plot vengeance and murder for the fate of her daughters and the abuse she has suffered. Allen wrote of Cassy that her story was more than "anything I have ever read, in all that is soul searching and thrilling." (Allen was in his second year as professor of the "Greek and German languages, and of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres of New York Central College, situated in McGrawville, Cortland Country,-the only College in America that has ever called a colored man to a Professorship, and one of the very few that receive colored and white students on terms of perfect equality, if, indeed, they receive colored students at all.")

Allen rejected Stowe's colonization solution for the fictional quadroon couple, George and Eliza, and argued instead that George Harris was quite right to reject bondage but not right to desire instead "an African nationality." Allen insisted on first-class citizenship in the country of his own birth. He would not accept colonization in Liberia as a solution to his own oppression, nor would he accept colonization as African Americans' mission to civilize Africa. Stowe's hero, George Harris, said he would "cast in my lot" with the "oppressed enslaved African race." Allen proudly claimed the heritage of his own mulatta mother, but he also insisted that "the talk about African nationality ... is sheer nonsense." Historian Tavia Nyong'o recently uncovered the layered meanings in Allen's letters to the Frederick Douglass' Paper . Thanks to this sensitive, historicized reading of the racial and sexual debates, we can see Allen in his narratives working toward an even more cogent defense of "amalgamation," or social integration of the races in America. In the letters to Douglass's paper, Allen presented a spiritual universalism in which "nations, there must be, but merely as conveniences, not to abrogate the great law of equal brotherhood." It was his further belief that, in terms of the cultural and social evolution of human beings, "nations worthy of the name, are only produced by a fusion of races."

In other words, to William G. Allen amalgamation was natural because all humans are the children of God, made in his image; to think that one group of human beings is better or "higher" than another is, as Nyong'o correctly reads Allen, a "sinful prejudice." At the same time there remains an unresolved intellectual contradiction in Allen's speeches and writings that was present in the many serious debates about race and nationality and sex in the mid-nineteenth century. Abolitionists' and anti-abolitionists' debates often seemed confused and contradictory, arguing either that all races were one race in God's creation or that each race had developed unequally or perhaps even been created separately. "Nation," "race," and "the human race" were all used interchangeably, with the result that our confusion mirrors that of mid-nineteenth-century culture and society. Some argued that each nation or race had specific traits or gifts that must be kept intact through what the Spanish called "limpieza de sangre," purity of the blood. Since the "white" race (Europeans, for the most part) had the most advanced civilization, legal marriages between white men and women had to be protected in order to preserve that superiority. This racial superiority "naturally" brought with it what historian David Roediger has called "the wages of whiteness": presumed racial purity and superiority merited land, political power, preference in hiring and admittance to schools, and more. Reproducing their racial and class privileges was a serious concern of gentlemen of property and standing. Making sure that their lesser but still important "wages of whiteness" were secured concerned the white working class mobs who protested any form of "amalgamation," including integrated schooling and intermarriage. Being "white" could even trump class differences in politics and culture.

Some reformers argued that individuals and society at large were enhanced through "amalgamation" in all its forms. They were sure that freedom of association between men and women, blacks and whites, rich and poor fostered universal improvement of the human race. Free and open social association better controlled Passion, which was dangerous when it led to unbridled physicality and instinctual behavior. Secrets only made the presumed differences between the sexes and races all the more dangerously alluring. Positions on race were often-though not always-parallel to positions on the sexes; conservatives insisted that sexual differences included intellectual and emotional gifts as well as biological givens. Further, sexual differences, along with a sexual division of labor, must be preserved to guarantee a balanced, symmetrical society. Women entering the public sphere of male commerce and politics would quickly coarsen their tender sensibilities and become just like men. There would thence be no refuge for anyone from the cruel and heartless world of the marketplace and no domestic haven in which women (like Mrs. Senator Bird in Uncle Tom's Cabin ) could gently persuade men to "feel right" and do right by their fellow human beings, slave or free.

The proponents of woman's rights, on the other hand, argued that differences between men and women had reached such an unnatural state as to produce dangerously "separate spheres." Society needed woman to extend her sphere outward to create one great human family. The most radical abolitionists and woman's rights advocates favored full social amalgamation to create an integrated society of individuals perfected in female kindness, spirituality, and self-sacrifice in concert with male rationality, courage, and enterprise. These "amalgamated" bodies associated freely and formed institutions ranging from coeducational, integrated schools to marriages, same-sex friendships across racial lines, free churches, intentional communities, and, finally, new political parties. In the antebellum period any mixed-race public assembly, especially one with both men and women present, was denounced as a "promiscuous assembly." Abolitionist meetings were attacked by mobs, and the press reported promiscuous gatherings and amalgamation with savage derision. Schools that dared both coeducation and racial integration risked public censure at the very least and mob violence at the worst.

In 1853 William G. Allen was rather well known in the "North Star" abolitionist community as the "Colored Professor" of New York Central College, a few miles from Syracuse. Professor Allen was not a fugitive slave when he fled to England that year. Nevertheless, he and his white bride, Mary King Allen, were indeed fugitives, fleeing for their lives from "the American Prejudice Against Color," as he called his narrative of their ordeal. They met and fell in love at the college, where Mary King was a local student, the daughter of a Methodist minister in Fulton, New York, a small village near Syracuse. Her father and one of her brothers were active abolitionists, and William Allen was invited to their home when he lectured in Fulton. Mary King's family sanctioned their early friendship. Over a year later, after a discreet courtship, the couple was seriously considering marriage with, it then seemed, her family's acceptance. In his Narrative we read, 150 years later, Allen's crisp, ironic voice recounting the event that changed their lives: "The mob occurred on Sabbath (!) evening, January the 30th, 1853, in the village of Phillipsville, near Fulton, Oswego County, New York. The cause,-the intention, on my part, of marrying a white young lady of Fulton,-at least so the public surmised."

Allen's account was published in Dublin, Edinburgh, and London. Since Allen is a refugee, readers perfectly understand that there are many more such witnesses of systemic barbarism. Moreover, the Preface gives detailed extracts from a number of well-known British and American abolitionists who introduce Allen to what we may assume is an already sympathetic and knowledgeable audience. George Thompson, in particular, mentions that Allen is a free person of color and recommends not only Allen himself to the reader, but "still more your heroic and most estimable lady." The reasons that Mary King Allen justly merits such praise are clearly revealed in Allen's account of his wife's steadfast devotion in the face not only of mob violence and family betrayal, but also in the face of the white public's uproar over an interracial marriage as a particularly radical expression of amalgamation.

Only a few years later, in 1860, Allen repeats much of his story, but in a more personal and desperate tone. A Short Personal Narrative was published in Dublin (and "sold by the author"). Allen is writing his pamphlet not only to serve the cause but also and importantly to make a bit of money to support his family; things are not going so well after seven years abroad.

A free person of color, adopted by well-to-do colored parents, Allen overcame the barriers to education and commended "kind-hearted" slaveholders who aided him. Nevertheless, he never forgot the cry of the auctioneer in Norfolk, Virginia: "What will you give for this man?" "What for this woman?" "What for this child?" Allen describes the course of his education and his rise in enterprise in the northern "free" states, and his good fellowship with abolitionists both white and black. He becomes accustomed to open, free associations built on the recognizable merit of his character and accomplishments. He then returns to Virginia hoping to see his childhood home and friends again. Allen is met with the scorn of Norfolk whites and their threat of enslavement or worse now that his connections with Oneida Institute, an "abolition college," are known. Unquestionably, even before his courtship and marriage William Allen knew that he could not go home again. He was an outcast in both the North and South of the United States, and part of Mary King Allen's heroism lies in her joining her life and fortunes to him beside an outcast fire.

My own first reading of his pamphlets was in the Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection at Cornell University, a gift of the Reverend May, a Unitarian minister in Syracuse, and, incidentally, the brother of Abigail May Alcott and the favorite uncle of Louisa May Alcott, who visited her uncle and his family in Syracuse during the year of Willam Allen and Mary King's ordeal. These two carefully bound pamphlets are inscribed to Samuel J. May.

Several questions arose as I read these narratives. Within these pages William G. Allen never details his own impressive history as an abolitionist organizer, activist, and scholar. Does he presume that his readers already know his accomplishments? Or is Allen strategically presenting himself as a quadroon gentleman who is innocent of political agitation and guilty only of acquiring a distinguished education and developing a dignified friendship with an educated white woman, a friendship that slowly becomes true love and is then sanctified by marriage? Allen does not explain the meanings of the events and terms he graphically describes in the narratives. He does not tell readers what a "Mary Rescue" or a "Fulton Rescue" is (he refers to the famous "Jerry Rescue"-about which more later-which preceded Allen's trials in Syracuse). And why does he not explain what the Fugitive Slave Law meant for African Americans born enslaved or free who had to flee through western New York to Canada after 1850? Allen himself was active in aiding and educating fugitives in both New York and Canada. He does mention his study of law with Ellis Loring in Boston, but not a word appears about Loring's impressive abolitionist politics and practice, which surely informed Allen's legal education.

Finally, we are faced with the long-term exile of the Allen family in the United Kingdom. They did not, so far as we know, ever return to the United States, even after the Civil War. We must then fill in, as best we can, some details of their lives and the North Star abolitionist network, in which were powerful friendships that sustained the couple in their courtship, marriage, and exile. Some possible answers to their continued residence abroad may suggest themselves if we briefly consider trans-Atlantic abolitionists' battles with "the American prejudice against color" throughout the period.

Continue...

Excerpted from The American Prejudice against Color by William G. Allen Mary King Louisa May Alcott Copyright © 2002 by Sarah Elbert
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.